Who We Are: Reflections on the 2018 Election

Since we're in the post-election season of "what did it all mean?", I might as well throw my thoughts into the arena. Finding meaning in events is one of the most important things we do, because the meanings we construct become the world we inhabit.

I would start with an observation. We think of elections as tools, as moments when we can change who we are as a society. While this is true to some degree, I think it is more the case that elections are mirrors that who reveal who we were already but perhaps failed to recognize.

Lot of folks want to characterize elections as a referendum on either people or policies. Both can be true to a point - there are some single-issue voters (though not many), and there are some voters who become particularly attached to (or repulsed by) a particular political figure. Political parties know this, and spend a lot of time trying to make these the salient points, because these are things they can try to control.

Elections, it should be noted, are also about a ton of local things. Trying to look across a landscape of 435 House races, ~33 Senate races, and a number of state governorships to find some common theme is a bit of a fool's errand. Tip O'Neill was largely right - a lot of politics is indeed local.

Nevertheless, this set of midterms more than most had a national flavor to it. Much of that was driven by a White House far more active not only in campaigning, but in trying to drive the agenda and the conversation. Much of that agenda, especially in the final weeks of the campaign, turned on issues of immigration, which are really issues about Identity - who is Us and who is Them.

This surprises no one, because the Us/Them theme has been central to the current President since the moment he started campaigning (and, likely, for many years before that). Donald Trump has never been accused of being a "big tent" sort of person, and I don't know that he's ever given a speech, the primary theme of which was what unites Americans. That's a significant departure - every past President, Republican and Democrat, has given some version of that speech, usually many times. Think of Ronald Reagan's "City on a Hill" or Bill Clinton's "Bridge to the 21st Century" or Barack Obama's "there is no 'Red America' and 'Blue America'", or George W's impromptu bullhorn speech after 9/11.

So with the Who We Are question on the ballot this year, what do the election results tell us?

The results should surprise no one: they revealed a divided country. Many millions of Americans still believe in America as the land of equal opportunity, the "nation of immigrants" that embraces people from all around the world in tolerance and community, the America of "bring me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses". Particularly in the cities but increasingly in the suburbs as well, this America has reacted very negatively to the President's approach and to a message of division and exclusion.

Yet many other millions of Americans believe in a different America - one that in which people like them are (or should be) the dominant group, where their particular race or culture sets the standard, where people who do not fit that mold are to be feared, or subjugated, or driven away. Their America, they believe, is under threat from Them. They believe that the central challenge of this time is to drive back that threat, already far advanced, so that things will be Great Again. There is some of this view everywhere, of course, but it is more concentrated in rural areas and smaller communities, often themselves very homogeneous.

The latter group has known about the former for a long time. Folks in rural areas have always been subjected to the cultural pressures of the city, especially over the last century as mass communication (radio, television) has driven much of our national communication and entertainment. This group didn't particularly like the changes it saw, coming from the more urbanized, wealthy, and liberal America, but they were always aware of them.

The former group, however, has been quite surprised in recent years by the size, even the existence, of the latter. Many well-educated urban and suburbanites have been convinced, between their own daily existence and their presence in mass media, that their cosmopolitan view of the world was the dominant one, and that other views were dwindling if not mostly dead. The tendency of urban centers to view less-populated areas as "flyover country" didn't help much.

When elections were contested on policies and well-known personalities, this divide didn't matter a lot. Politicians could selectively play on it, but tended to stick to other alignments more in keeping with their vision of political parties as aggregations of policy preferences (tax cuts vs. gov't spending, more or less regulation, guns vs. butter, that sort of thing).

To the extent that the parties are realigning around identity politics, we're starting to see where people stand on the Who We Are question much more clearly - because now it matters. Whatever else may be, Donald Trump has managed to bring this question front and center of the American political debate.

The divide of identity was already and always there. It will not go away if Trump loses the election two years from now, or even if he is impeached and thrown out of office by Feb. 15. None of this is about who the President is. It's about who we are.

In response to a number of recent events - the synagogue shooting in my old neighborhood being only the latest - many people have proclaimed, "we're better than this". They have wanted to believe that we as a nation are not violently racist, that we really do believe in the "nation of immigrants", in tolerance and acceptance and equality of opportunity. They want to believe this because they themselves believe it and had thought that this was a settled question.

Unfortunately, the statement "we're better than this" is only true for a limited definition of "we". Some of us are clearly not "better", if by "better" we mean tolerant of difference and embracing of diversity. For a host of reasons, "we" - all Americans together - don't fit that description. We are not, as a people, all at that table.

This really shouldn't surprise us, except for the power of wishful thinking. All of us want to believe that everyone else thinks the way we do, because that's a far more comfortable world to live in. Folks in the "America First" camp never had that luxury - they knew, through their televisions and movies and whatnot, that theirs was not the only view in the world. They persisted anyway, invisible to everyone else until recently.

So where do we go from here? That depends, as always, on the end goal. If we want to work towards a nation with a shared understanding of Who We Are, then we need to start listening to each other - on both sides. That will be hard, and it will take a long time, and we will have to ignore screeching politicians who want to use our different views for their own factious purposes. And it will take commitment on both sides - a genuine desire to forge a common view of America that doesn't just involve imposing our views on the other side.

An alternative is to negotiate a workable detente. In some sense, this is already happening - people are increasingly moving to areas where their view of Who We Are is better represented, separating themselves from people who think differently. To the extent that different areas have different views, and they can agree to leave each other alone, that can work.

But we all live under one government and one set of laws. Our federalist structure means that we can finesse that to a point, as long as we're willing to let other areas be different. But on some larger questions, we can't just agree to disagree and call it a day. Equality under the law means that we share the same law.

The third possibility is that the conflict itself comes to define us. Short of a genocidal civil war, identity conflicts like this aren't solvable by force (and usually, not even then). There is no "winning" in this "fight". Indeed, "fight" is really the wrong analogy entirely. No one ever succeeded in getting someone else to agree with them via a Twitter war.

So it may be that Who We Are for the foreseeable future is this: two nations, sharing space and laws, that cannot agree. I wrote back on the eve of the 2016 election that America is Dying. Looking back on that post through the lens of this election, I am afraid I was right, and that we have gone farther down that road in the years since. Our third possibility is to recognize that America, as one nation at peace with itself, is gravely ill, and to wait and hope for healing.

When we are in conflict, elections are the last thing we need. Elections do not heal, they exacerbate conflict. They can, sometimes, clarify the situation in much the same way that a biopsy can tell you if you have cancer or not. But at best they are diagnostic. They don't make things better, and they may well make things worse.

So this, then, is the real choice of our time. Not Democrats or Republicans. Not Trump or anti-Trump. Not Red or Blue. We must decide what we want to be: One Nation, or Two. The question is not whether we want to Make America Great Again. The question is, Who is America?

Immigration & the Rationalization of Deterrent Effects

Much is currently being made of the Trump Administration's new policy separating children from parents at the US border. This is an appallingly indefensible policy on moral and ethical grounds, and it's not even very sound legally. Under US law, asylum-seekers have every right to approach the US border and ask for asylum. Some of this is about taking children away from parents who didn't try to sneak across the Rio Grande, but those who tried to stay within the framework of US law. Even for those who did enter the US illegally, this is unspeakably bad.

Side note: there is no way to square this policy with any version of a Christian worldview. Those who support this policy and who claim nevertheless to be Christians are in thrall to false gods. Franklin Graham must read a very different set of Gospels than I do. But that's a topic for a different day.

One of the interesting aspects to the debate over this new policy is its supporters' claim that separating children from their parents will have a deterrent effect. Attorney General Jeff Sessions claimed as much when he said, "if you don't like that, don't smuggle children across our border."

Supporters of the policy tout this claim, believing (or claiming to believe) that by being harsher than previous administrations we will dissuade people from trying to cross the border. This displays an appalling ignorance of how deterrence actually works.

Deterrence works if and only if the consequences threatened are both credible and are worse than the available alternative. A minor punishment - a slap on the wrist - isn't enough to deter, because it is assumed that the punishment is less bad than the perceived benefits of doing whatever you don't want the other person to do. Increase the punishment, the thinking goes, and people will rethink their calculus and be deterred.

There are several problems with this logic. First, let's assume that people fleeing to the US are actually rational actors (probably not true, but let's assume). Central American migrants fleeing from violence-ridden societies controlled by gangs weigh their options: do I stay at home and watch my children die, or do I go to the US and save their lives, even if they're taken away from me? Most parents choose the latter every time. Separation and a chance at asylum is better than certain death.

The second problem is information flow. You can change the policy, but that message won't spread consistently across the entire population of Central and South America. Some will find out about it, others will hear different stories - stories of people who made it, who either snuck by the border guards or who successfully got asylum. Given the population, there's no way to credibly get the message out to everyone who might consider trying to migrate. Without a clear signal, deterrence will fail.

The third issue is that this is a (cruel) solution in search of a problem. We don't, in the aggregate, have an illegal immigration problem. Net flow across the southern US border has been outward for years - that is, more people flow across the border going south than come north into the US. And that's before Trump got elected and the racists all came out of the closet. The President's rants about hordes of M13 gang members crossing into the US are paranoid delusions, untethered from facts. The fact that the number of those seeking to get in is down suggests that it is only the most desperate making the attempt today - many "economic migrants" have already decided not to come. Meaning that the remainder are particularly difficult to deter, because the consequences of their not coming are much worse.

If you're really interested in what happens when you put up a serious border wall, we have an excellent example to study. For nearly 30 years the Berlin Wall divided East from West Berlin, rendering the latter an island in the middle of communist East Germany. The Berlin Wall was tall, built of concrete and steel and barbed wire and guard towers and spotlights. It was watched constantly, night and day. Get caught trying to cross it, and you were shot on sight. The East German regime was far more severe than anything that Donald Trump has dreamed up.

Moreover East Germany, while no worker's paradise, wasn't as difficult a place to live as parts of Central America today. There was precious little societal violence. If you kept your head down and didn't criticize the regime, your children would not be killed or kidnapped by gangs. The chances of you being caught in a drive-by shooting were essentially zero. You were spied on by the regime all the time, and dissenters were made to disappear. But everyone had jobs, of a sort, and homes, and while society was repressive it was not deadly. It sucked, but not in a fear-for-your-life-every-day sort of way.

And yet, even under these circumstances thousands of people tried to cross the Berlin Wall between 1961 and 1988. At least 138 were killed in the attempt. Many others were arrested and hauled off, undoubtedly to detention far more cruel than anything in the US.

If ever there were a test of a fortified border's ability to deter, it was in Berlin. And it failed. No matter how harsh the East German regime was, people tried to cross it anyway.

In the face of that evidence, does anybody really believe that separating children from parents is going to deter the desperate from seeking asylum in the US? This is a fantasy, cooked up to justify a cruel policy grounded simply in fear and hatred. It is of a piece with much of what this administration does - ignorant, rooted in fear, pandering to our worst instincts. I hope this quickly becomes a bad footnote in US history and not a permanent fixture.

Denouncing Nazis is easy. Living together is hard.

Facebook reminded me that a year ago I posted a piece titled There Are No Enemies.

It's not the most popular piece I've ever published, not by a long shot. It did pretty well - a little over 200 hits - but nothing special.

Re-reading it today, I think it may be one of the most important and difficult things I've ever written. And it helped me codify something that's been bugging me ever since the violence in Charleston and the political fallout that ensued.

In the aftermath of the Charleston violence, nearly everybody took to the airwaves and social media to condemn the assortment of white supremacists, Nazis, and KKK types who instigated the violence. This was easy to do: their brandishing of hateful symbols, their chants against Jews, blacks, and others outside their tribe, their obvious anger and aggression - all these put them squarely against core American values.

President Trump, of course, took tremendous political flak for his response. He tried to lay blame for the violence on "many sides" and seemed to go out of his way to serve as an apologist for the white supremacy movement. They themselves clearly saw it that way, judging by their reactions, especially after his Tuesday press conference. For this, Trump was roundly criticized by pretty much everyone across the political spectrum. The few people in his own White House who didn't distance themselves from this view now no longer work there.

That's all a pretty pat and easy story: Nazis and white supremacists are bad, we're the good guys, etc. Trump aside, almost everyone else will jump on this bandwagon.

But then I come back to my piece from last year: there are no enemies. And I also recall a lesson learned from decades of studying conflicts: conflict only ends when the different sides learn to live with each other.

Yes, white supremacy is morally wrong, and yes, Nazism is a horrible set of ideas. But because we say these things, however forcefully we may say them and however many of us "stand up" to do so, we are stuck with two unavoidable realities:

1) Some people will continue to hold to these ideas, despite (or even because of) our efforts to shout them down.

2) Those people are still our fellow Americans. And, if you hold to the Gospel of Christ, they are still Children of God.

We sort of know these things, deep down, though we don't know what to do with them. These are the reason why so many supporters of Hillary Clinton cringed when she made her famous "basket of deplorables" gaffe. She said in public what we wanted emotionally to say but know is morally wrong: that there are groups of people who are bad people.

In the language of revivalist Christianity, we failed to separate the sin from the sinner.

The problem with that logic, of course, is the conclusion to which it leads. If there are people who are irreducibly bad, then they must be either eliminated from society, driven out, or contained. It is, in fact, exactly the same logic that white supremacists operate under. They're just more open about it.

Lots of political movements - from the Nazis to the Khmer Rouge to the Interahamwe to the founders of Republika Srpska - have taken this idea that those people need to be gotten rid of and tried to put it into action. Every single of one of them failed. Genocide, ethnic cleansing, "purifying" the nation - it never works. It creates a lot of pain and a lot of dead bodies, but in the end you still end up living in a diverse society, and you tend to end up poor and miserable to boot.

That's an easy argument to make when confronting Nazis. But we need to think beyond confrontation, because confrontation itself isn't going to resolve anything.

We thought we had gotten rid of Creationism, until we discovered in the 1990s that it never went away. Most of us read Inherit the Wind in high school and saw it as an historical tale about the last gasp of Young Earth Creationism. Creationists read it and saw it as inspiration. We didn't notice until they started to take over school boards again.

White supremacy isn't going to go away simply because we shout at it, and it isn't going to go away because it's wrong. People are quite capable of holding morally abhorrent beliefs for generations, as our own history with black slavery shows. That some of those beliefs are still in circulation should surprise no one.

So while I applaud people who stand up against Nazis, who show up in Boston to demonstrate that there are far more of us who believe in diversity than there are in them who don't, that's just a band-aid. If the rest of us are vociferous enough, or if we elect a President less inclined to say supportive things about white supremacy the next time around, they may go back into the shadows. But they'll still be there, living among us as fellow citizens.

If we really want to move beyond endless demonstrations - if we really want to seek peace - demonstrations and taking down statues won't get us there. At some point, we're going to have to talk to the people we think of as our enemies. That can't happen in large groups, it certainly can't happen while people are carrying torches and clubs and shields, and it probably can't happen in public with TV cameras rolling. But in the end, it's the only way.

Years ago in graduate school, I wanted to start an article with what I thought was a clever observation: "everyone wants peace, they just want it on their own terms." My advisor stopped me and argued that I should get rid of that sentence. Not everyone wants peace, he pointed out. And he was right.

It's easy to look at those who march with Nazi flags and say, they don't want peace. But do we? We are comfortable in our knowledge that we're right and they're wrong and there are more of us anyway - just as they are comfortable in their understanding that they are right and we are wrong, even though there are fewer of them. Moral righteousness is addictive.

None of this means that we have to "meet them halfway" or adjust our beliefs in a racist direction. That's a red herring. But it does mean that we have to take the time to listen to our fellow human beings, and hope that they in turn will listen to us.

I don't know how to go about that, because all sides prefer the conflict we have to an uncertain peace in the future. But I know that, for myself, we are missing a piece of the moral puzzle: the piece that recognizes the common humanity of our "enemies" and seeks the seemingly impossible task of reconciliation. We have to live with "those people", like it or not. We might as well try to live together well.

Why "Fear for your Life" Isn't a Reasonable Standard

There's a lot of reaction this week to the verdict in the case of Philando Castile's shooting last year. Naturally, a lot of it has centered on race and the officer's defense that he was "afraid for his life".

As part of this conversation, a friend of mine posted a video to Facebook along with a request for thoughts. The video showed a white man resisting arrest by two police officers (both also white). The man, who is a pretty big guy, puts up quite a struggle, at one point seeming to reach for one of the officer's guns (though he does not obtain it). Eventually the police wrestle him to the ground and pin him. At no time did either officer reach for any of the weapons on his belt. While he was on the ground, they did not continue to strike him in punishment; they simply held him still.

Commentary attached to the video by the original poster suggested that this was evidence of white privilege, if not white dominance: that whites who struggle against police don't need to fear for their lives, while blacks who are compliant with police do. It was this contrast which my friend was seeking comment on.

In response, I wrote the following, more less as a stream of consciousness:

"Fear for your life" is a subjective state of mind. My fear is mine - it is based on the judgments and expectations I have in my own head about is going on around me. 

Juridical standards of "reasonable fear" assume that we can take an average of what "most people" would fear given a certain set of circumstances. In some cases, this is in fact "reasonable" - most people will fear if suddenly confronted with a rattlesnake, for example. Most people will also experience fear if a gun is pointed at them.

To believe that we can do this kind of "reasonable averaging" without taking race into account is folly. If I get pulled over, it would not be reasonable for me to fear that the police officer is going to shoot me. Were I black, it would be very reasonable to fear that outcome.

This isn't "White Supremacy", at least not in the sense that there is a conscious, guiding ideology that drives these differences. Rather, there are unconscious and semi-conscious biases that exist in people's heads. We tried to call these biases "racism", but that falters because most people think racism is a conscious thing, a set of beliefs I consciously hold.

We all make judgments in the face of ambiguous evidence. Those judgments are driven by our beliefs, our expectations, and our emotional responses to things around us. This is why negative media portrayals of black men, for example, are so problematic. TV shows don't turn people into conscious racists. But they build up in our mind unexamined expectations about how other people are likely to behave.

Our laws and judicial procedures were developed with an underlying assumption that all people are equal. And so we wish ourselves to be. But in our minds, we are NOT all equal to each other. To pretend otherwise is to deny reality.

The simple answer to this particular problem is rigorous, continuous, serious police training. You can train officers to respond the same to everyone, regardless of color. But you have to recognize that such training has to overcome the differences already existing in their own heads. It takes a lot of work, and a lot of practice, to overcome those mental differences. Some - I suspect many - police officers already have, and many have probably never been seriously tested on the street. I am surprised, in the light of these continuing tragedies, that no one is talking about how we support, train, and discipline our police forces, and what expectations we have for the way they do their jobs.

It seems to me that the legal question we keep asking in these cases - would a "reasonable person" be afraid for their life under a certain set of circumstances - is the wrong question, because there is no singular "reasonable" viewpoint. Our experiences, especially around race, are so vastly disparate that most of us cannot understand what "reasonable" looks like to someone who has a different race, a different background, a different set of experiences than we do.

We will never make progress in our national conversations until we recognize this basic truth: that "reasonable" is not an objective standard, and that fear is based on many things including prejudices. Just because someone is sincerely afraid does not make their actions in response to that fear reasonable.

Ideological Purity and the Loss of Tolerance

I've written before (here and here) about the dangers of trying to create an ideologically "pure" environment. Our politics are problematic in part because there are some folks on both the Left and the Right who refuse to have anything to do with anything that smacks of the other side. These people are doomed to live frustrated lives, since they will never achieve what they seek.

In academia, the forces pulling in this same direction can be even stronger. There is something about academic training, about dedicating a large portion of your life to seeking truth in a particular area, that seems to engender in us the need to Be Right and to vanquish all of the Wrong Thinking in the world. Academics are not much known for humility.

In this context, the latest wave of opposition to campus speakers has become particularly fertile ground for this sort of quixotic quest for purity. In the minds of some, to host an outside speaker on campus is to allow anything and everything that person has ever said to taint you. The institution itself becomes unclean by their presence, requiring rituals of purification. You could write these sorts of strictures up in Leviticus and they would fit right in.

One of the latest of these incidents involves a kerfuffle surrounding an invitation extended to James Watson, the Nobel Prize-winning geneticist who, along with Francis Crick and Rosalind Franklin, discovered and articulated the structure of DNA. He had a hand on one of the signature scientific achievements of the 20th century, on which a vast amount of biological and medical knowledge has been built. He is, as the saying goes, one of the giants in the field.

He has also, at various points, expressed some outdated views about race, gender, and other social issues. He has expressed concern that people in Africa are less intelligent than people in other parts of the world. He has said various things about women, about body types, and about homosexuality which most people these days don't agree with. He has also apparently been a supporter of eugenics, at least at the individual level. He is, from many points of view, on the wrong side of history on a number of social issues.

So here we have a man who has led a stellar scientific career, contributing to some of the most impactful scientific advances of the modern age, who also apparently holds some retrograde views on issues of race, gender, and sexuality - views not that uncommon, it should be noted, for white men born in the 1920s.

In other words, James Watson is a human. He has done things that are laudable, and he has done things that are condemnable. He has said things we wish he hasn't said, and he has done things we are extremely grateful for.

So when he is invited to give a talk about science - about the thing for which he clearly deserves praise - and then is disinvited because of things he has said unrelated to his scientific research, I not sure what the standard is. Can we only invite speakers who have led exemplary lives and have been saints since birth? Can we only host speakers who have never said anything that might offend someone's point of view? If so, our list of campus speakers will be very short indeed.

From a Christian point of view, this kind of intellectual purifying of the academy is nonsense. We are all sinners, and there is no coherent theological justification to suggest that some sins (racism, for example) are more egregious in the eyes of God than others (pride, or lust, or greed). People love to read the Beatitudes, but the rest of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5 makes us profoundly uneasy (Cut off your hand! Tear out your eye!)

I am therefore a little perplexed when people write "I am ashamed to be faculty at Illinois" because some part of the university - which is a large, complex organization with many parts, not a unified whole - has decided to host Watson for a talk about his research. Such a person must be perpetually ashamed of many things, because we are all connected to institutions and social structures that do things that we find objectionable.

None of this is to defend racism, or sexism, or homophobia. When Watson argues that one "race" of people is inherently less intelligent than another, he is doing so on the basis of prejudice rather than careful scientific study. The bases of intelligence are complex and multifaceted, and it is entirely likely that his own intelligence is a result of the nurture of his upbringing and circumstances (of having "won the ovarian lottery", as Warren Buffet puts it) rather than what's in his genetic code. As we seek the roots of intelligence we find a very complex web indeed. We would also do well to carefully untangle judgments about intelligence from judgments about moral value, lest we fall into the trap of moral elitism - "smart" people do not have a greater inherent moral value than "dumb" ones.

But it is one thing to disagree with an argument or a point of view. It is another thing entirely to assert that, by inviting a speaker to talk on one topic, you are in some sense endorsing his views on others - an assertion that, when brought to light, is clearly silly. It is still another thing to claim that, by that person's presence on campus in some kind of invited capacity, the institution as a whole is morally tainted - a modern version of the Levitical code of purity.

Ultimately, I think our problem is that we are confused. We see ourselves as individual moral agents - as responsible for our own moral choices. Yet we also imbue our institutions - which are, after all, simply collections of individuals - with a sort of moral status of their own. In itself, this can be useful,  because we want to feel that we belong to and contribute to something greater than ourselves. But we are unclear about the moral rules surrounding our institutions. We seek to hold our institutions to the same standards as ourselves - forgetting that we are not alone, and that others may have different ideas about what is appropriate or inappropriate.

All of this, of course, is just a description of what it means to live in society. My concern is that we are forgetting this - we forget that one of the chief qualities that enables us to get along with each other and improve our individual and collective lives is tolerance for difference and ambiguity. The quest for purity is really just the reduction of the moral world to a zero-sum game: either I win, or you do. Either we are not racist, or we are. We are either a conservative place or a liberal place. Throughout the history of humanity, this approach has always led to suffering, and never to the victory that its adherents sought. Maybe we should step back and look for a better way to listen to each other without so much throwing of stones and slurs and signs.

Political Conflict on Campus Today

I write a fair amount about academia and higher education. I also write a lot about conflict. Sometimes, I get to cross my realms of expertise and write about both.

It was in that conjunction that this article from this week's Chronicle struck me:

From Video of Campus Forum, Virtual Venom Flows

The Reader's Digest version of the story is this: some folks at Northern Arizona University decided to have a public campus form titled "The Specters of Fascism?" It's the kind of thing that universities do - bring their expertise to bear on questions of public interest and hold open discussions about them.

In this case, the forum was mostly about Fascism in Europe, with the added question of whether there were lessons from those historical experiences that might be applicable to the United States today. It's the sort of question that historians, political scientists, sociologists, and others have discussed for decades - interesting, relevant in a high-level sort of way, and amenable to scholarly inquiry. In today's highly polarized political and tribal environment, however, it attracted a different sort of attention than one might expect when academics hold a scholarly forum.

A NAU student affiliated with a group called Campus Reform filmed the event and shared that video with the organization, which posted a segment of it on their website. Campus Reform, which bills itself as "America's leading site for college news", is a conservative project that "exposes bias and abuse on the nation's college campuses". It is an offshoot of the Leadership Institute, an avowedly conservative organization whose mission is "to increase the number and effectiveness of conservative activists and leaders in the public policy process".

Needless to say, university professors speculating about whether European fascism has any parallels in American politics today proved to be red meat to conservatives, who boiled the whole thing down to "liberals equating Trump with Hitler". Abusive and threatening emails started flying almost immediately, aimed at faculty members associated with the event (often for things that they didn't say, as the video was apparently unclearly labelled).

Interestingly, the student who took and posted the video also came in for a fair amount of online abuse and some pushback from people on her campus, some of whom accused her of being a racist and of belonging to the "alt-right". She characterized her treatment (perhaps a bit hyperbolically) as "full-on bullying from the university".

The usual frame by which these kinds of stories are viewed is the "academic freedom/freedom of speech" frame. In this view, everyone has the right to say what they like and to express the views that they like. The forum was an exercise of free speech, as was the taping of the forum and posting it online. The subsequent abuse and death threats are merely an unfortunate byproduct of our exercise of our free speech rights.

While correct in itself, this frame is largely useless for understanding what's going on here. What this episode shows is one manifestation of a much larger conflict taking place across society, on campuses as well as in other ways. Once we place this in a conflict frame, we have the chance to make progress towards both understanding and mitigating if not resolving these issues.

Like all conflicts, this one has at least two sides, each of which is a coalition of actors and entities that agree with each other to varying degrees. What holds the sides together is not agreement about facts or ideas, but a sense of common identity - "us" versus "them". The student who posted the video may not like being lumped in with the alt-right, but she's planted her flag on that side and so, in the eyes of her adversaries, she's one of "them".

Like all tribal conflicts, the dynamics are pretty predictable. Each side defines the other as both monolithic and defined by its own worst actors. Each side is reduced to simplistic, usually dehumanizing, epithets by the other ("libtard", "redneck", etc.) Each side has only a vague notion of its goals and objectives - though individual actors may have specific plans - but in broad terms, the conflict is seen as zero-sum - either "we" win or "they" win.

It is this last point that gives rise to the deplorable kinds of behavior that we see - the online bullying, dehumanization, and threats. Because people the conflict is perceived as zero-sum, each side focuses on "winning". There is no notion of compromise or accommodation - such thoughts are heresy, and those who entertain them usually branded as heretics and forced to recant or tossed out of the tribe. In the terms of my own research, each side is pursuing a Unilateral strategy.

Sometimes in international conflict, Unilateral strategies make sense. One thing my research has turned up is that Unilateralism is contagious - if one side gets it, the other side pretty much has to follow suit. It's very difficult for me to try to reach accommodation with you while you're trying to kill me. This is why Zartman has spent so much time researching the notion of "hurting stalemates", because once you're locked into Unilateralism on both sides, it's very difficult to get out.

Some of the rhetoric within our domestic political conflict has taken on this sort of flavor. Dig around a little bit and you can find conservatives (often of the alt-right variety) talking about a "genocide" of liberals, while on the Left you have liberals talking openly about secession (Calexit?) from the rest of the country. Both of these assume a universe in which members of both tribes cannot coexist, at least not in the same political space, giving rise for the need for one or another kind of "final solution".

All of this, of course, is ridiculous. My partner-in-crime on secession research Steve Saideman recently pointed out that Blue State secessionism is nuts and anti-democratic. And the idea that "conservatives" can somehow identify and remove (via death or forced migration) all "liberals" is both wildly unrealistic and horrifying.

The reality is that within the United States, Unilateral strategies are a waste of time. They will never succeed. The only thing they are good for - and this goes a long way to explaining their popularity - is helping some politicians get into power and stay here. The side effect of this political strategy, of course, is that the body politic as a whole suffers. And so a college professor and a college student are both made to suffer so that demagogues who have no interest in resolving conflicts can go to Washington.

The Atlantic recently ran an article covering research that suggests that one side effect of Americans drifting away from organized religion (in particular, the many branches of the Christian church) is that they are become less tolerant of each other. While Christianity is often associated in the public mind with intolerance (towards gays, Muslims, single mothers, and others, mostly because of particularly vocal denominations), it turns out that the universalism within Christian theology (a universalism reflected in most major theological systems around the world) does tend to make adherents less rigid than we usually think. You can only sing "In Christ there is no East or West" so many times on a Sunday before it starts to occur to you that maybe God really does love everybody, even the people you disagree with.

The flight from religion is particularly pronounced on college campuses, both among academics and faculty (who tend to share a culture of cosmopolitan secularism) and among students (who tend to share the young adults' gravitational pull away from the religion of their parents, who increasingly don't have one anyway). So it's not surprising that when the broader conflict surfaces on campus, its manifestation tends to be particularly intolerant. Each side, of course, uses this to accuse the other of hypocrisy, thus making the whole thing worse.

The thing about viewing this as a conflict is that it helps us think about the important questions. What would a "resolution" look like? What is the conflict about, and what kinds of solutions to those problems are possible? Because we tend to think that the conflict is about "ideas" ("liberal" ideas versus "conservative" ideas), we then erroneously think that the solution is for our ideas to "win". That is not, of course, how the "marketplace of ideas" works. Change tends to come evolutionarily. Nothing "wins" or "loses" in whole, but the interaction changes all sides and produces new (and hopefully better) ideas. Hegel was right - the conflict between Thesis and Antithesis produces, at its best, Synthesis.

As long as people are sending death threats to each other, of course, this kind of progress is going to be very slow. And as long as students (of whichever tribe) think that they need to help their side "win" - whether by posting videos of views they don't like to like-minded websites or by shouting down speakers they don't like at public events - not much is going to change.

When you're in a conflict, you should be thinking about how to end it - about what realistic conclusions are possible and about how to get from where we are to one of those, as fast as possible and with the least cost. Right now, people on all sides aren't thinking this way. They're trying to "win" an unwinnable war. If you don't like the idea of strangers flinging death threats around, heed the advice of Joshua: the only winning move is not to play:

Taking Goldhagen Seriously

A great deal of my FB feed of late is taken up with a steady stream of articles, memes, and statements around one argument: that Donald Trump is politically akin to Adolf Hitler, so much so that we should be worried about the United States slipping from democracy to fascism or some other form of nationalist authoritarianism.

Like all historical analogies (and especially like all instances of Godwin's Law), this one tends towards confirmation bias - people see the similarities and discount the differences. It seems material, for example, that Adolf Hitler had by the early 1930's a thoroughly developed political ideology, which he had written out in book form, whereas Donald Trump appears to have no coherent ideology and has never written a book on his own in his life. The former was an ascetic vegetarian, the latter a sybarite with enormous appetites.

While this exercise is intellectually interesting, it doesn't get at the important question: how likely is the United States to change from a functioning democracy to an authoritarian regime of some sort? Focusing on the election of a particular leader is one piece of the puzzle, but it misses other important variables.

If we are insistent on using Hitler's Nazi Germany as the yardstick, then we need to look seriously at that case and not merely at simplified versions of it. In particular, I think we need to take seriously the argument put forward some twenty years ago by Daniel Goldhagen in his book, Hitler's Willing Executioners.

Goldhagen's work should be required reading for anybody who wants to use Nazi Germany as an analogy, not because he is necessarily right (he may be) but because he tells a very different story about how the Nazi regime worked. Our simplified American story is that Hitler and a small group of fanatically committed followers were able to take over the German political system and turn it the Nazi regime we know today by a combination of repression, intimidation, and keeping people in the dark. The "cause" of Nazi Germany is reduced to Hitler and his immediate inner circle, which absolves the rest of the population of responsibility. This story also raises the specter of the same thing happening here against our (the people's) will.

Goldhagen's book turns this story on its head. He argues that the Nazi regime succeeded because, and only because, a large majority of the German population actually agreed with its aims (in particular, the racial purification of the country) - hence the title, "Willing Executioners". In his work, Goldhagen casts serious doubt on parts of our standard story, in particular that Germans were kept in the dark about the Holocaust and didn't know what was going on.

Goldhagen's work raises a serious question: to what extent is the acquiescence if not enthusiastic participation of the population a necessary condition to a nationalist authoritarian regime? Leaving aside the details of Goldhagen's argument, this is the fundamental issue - are the feelings of the population a relevant variable in enabling a fascist government?

I think that the answer to this question must be "yes". Authoritarian governments have maintained their status through power and intimidation, against the will of the population - East Germany and North Korea come to mind - but these cases tend to be governments established in time of war, when force of arms was sufficient to shape a new political order. The Nazi example is so compelling to us precisely because Hitler didn't conquer Germany, he got elected (albeit by 1/3 of the population, at least initially).

There is no reasonable scenario under which the US government will be overthrown by force and our new political order established by military might. For all of its lumps, our current structure of government is our starting point. And if Goldhagen's hypothesis holds any water, it will be very difficult - perhaps even impossible - to turn that structure into an authoritarian one, whatever an elected leader may say.

It is clear that at this point that there is no ideology that commands the loyalty of the majority of Americans, largely because we are mostly tribal and post-ideological in our politics. Donald Trump has, as of this moment, a 40% approval rating - lower by 1/3 than George W. Bush's at the same point relative to his inauguration in 2001, and that was after the most contentious election in modern US history.

Because the internet has provided a megaphone to anyone who wants one, we can easily confuse volume and shrillness for strength. Our enemies (on whichever side we think they may be) seem large and terrifying. But if you're looking for a constituency ready to support a Trump authoritarianism, I suspect that (despite their loudness and shrillness) you're not looking at very many people.

I've argued before that Presidents aren't Gods. We ascribe far too much importance, and far greater power, to the office than it actually has, even in modern times as successive Presidents have used a dysfunctional Congress to expand the Executive reach. Donald Trump cannot turn the United States into a fascist country. Only we can do that. And I don't see any indications that Americans are willing to do so.

There Are No "Deplorables"

A couple of weeks ago Hillary Clinton made a comment at a fundraiser in New York to the effect that half of the voters supporting Donald Trump's candidacy belong to a "basket of deplorables". She included in this metaphorical basket people who are racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, and Islamophobic, as well as other unspecified categories.

The comment was obviously bad politics, and Clinton suffered for it for a few news cycles. As one commentator put it: it's fine to denigrate your opponent, but never a good idea to denigrate the electorate (see "Romney, Mitt, 47 percent").

Trump supporters, of course, immediately decried the statement. Clinton supporters, and in particular many statistically- and data-minded academics, immediately began discussing whether 50% was too high or too low an estimate. But here's the thing that the Clinton supporters and data-miners missed:

Clinton was fundamentally wrong.

She was not wrong in the sense of getting the numbers incorrect. She was wrong for a much more basic reason: people aren't "deplorables".

People aren't Skittles, either. They're not "makers" or "takers", they're not Republicans or Democrats, "losers" or "rednecks" or "thugs".

People are people. If we insist that we treat one group of people - blacks, Syrian refugees, conservatives, what have you - with dignity and respect, that's only because we believe that all people are worthy of dignity and respect.

Most of us, in practice, don't really believe this in a practical way. We afford dignity and respect to people who are like us, or people whom we sympathize with. It's good when we do so for people who have been denied respect, because denying basic human dignity is wrong. That's why Trump Jr.'s tweet about Skittles was so bizarrely offensive - he was making it clear, by equating human lives with candy, that some lives (Americans) are more important than others (Syrian refugees). "I might get hurt if I try to help you, so screw you - you're not worth the risk" was the basic message. And yes, that's racist.

Think this is only a conservative/Republican/Trump problem? Check out this meme, widely circulated in liberal circles:

This hits a lot of classic stereotypes: poor, stupid white redneck with a pickup, no shirt, and hay between his teeth. It plays on a narrative of rural whites as morons, inferior to those of us who "know better". In its own way, it's as racist as the image of the hoodie-wearing urban black man - an object of ridicule and scorn (and often, of fear).

I'm not interested in offering advice or direction to either political campaign, or to voters. My point here isn't political at all, it's moral and theological. For those of us who claim adherence to the Christian faith, Hilary's "basket of deplorables" comment was as far away from the Kingdom of God as many of the terrible things that Trump has said. Because in the eyes of God, nobody is "deplorable".

There are deplorable ideas, deplorable actions, deplorable behavior. Christians call these "sin". But the fact that people sin does not make them "deplorables"; it makes them sinners, which is to say it makes them human like the rest of us.

This is one reason I have grown increasingly uncomfortable with the conduct of American politics. We don't disagree with our fellow citizens (or even our opponents), we demonize and dehumanize our enemies. The people that Clinton called "deplorables" are humans made in the image and likeness of God, just as much as the "losers" that Trump is so fond of talking about or the "Skittles" that Trump Jr. insists are poisoned.

The recent shootings in Tulsa and Charlotte have brought back to the fore this basic question: are we really treating all citizens with dignity and respect? It seems clear that the answer is "no", but for anyone who believes in the fundamental nature of human dignity that's not a liberal or conservative problem - it's a fundamentally human one. It's not a problem we will solve by continuing to demonize each other, much less by winning an election. If we really believe that all people are worthy of dignity and respect, we should speak and act like it.

Going Out On a Limb on Race

Let me state the obvious up front: I'm a white man in a privileged position. I have tenure, rank, and an administrative position of some authority within a university. I have a social position within my community that is comfortable and oftentimes even respected.

So from some points of view, I may not be the best person to engage the current discussion about race, racism, and higher education. On the other hand, there are a lot of people like me running universities and colleges across the country. So if we don't engage, then solutions will be difficult to find. So I dip my foot in these waters tentatively, with humility and understanding that mine is a particular perspective.

A number of articles have been written of late that are well worth reading. There is Nicholas Kristof's excellent piece in today's NYT. There is a very good article in the Atlantic in defense of civility and against censorship. There is this blog post about racism written compellingly from a young black man's perspective.

In the midst of all of these conversations about clashing free speech and racism concerns, I appreciate these perspectives. In particular I appreciate the voice of the young blogger trying to explain what racism really is to those who never experience it. It is powerfully put and I believe sincere. He isn't attacking anyone in particular, but a broader problem in general. This is the kind of thing that can contribute to a conversation.

In order to actually push that conversation forward, however, it is not enough to hear from the victims of racism about the pain it causes. We need to know more - not about those who suffer from these indignities and injustices, but about those who perpetrate them.

Not all whites (or members of any group, for that matter) are racists. But some are. How do we address those who engage in these behaviors? How do we identify them, engage with them, and ultimately persuade them to change? That, it seems to me, is the real challenge. Beyond the protests and the screaming and the back-and-forth internet trolling, this is what real leadership (from wherever it emerges) needs to do.

Earlier today I likened the ongoing protests (some of which are occurring on my campus today, in solidarity with others) to a conflict. As a conflict scholar, the steps towards resolution are clear:

- Identify the essentials of the conflict. Who are the players? What are their interests, and what are they fighting about? What are the rules of the surrounding environment that shape how the conflict is conducted?

- Decide on the desired end goal. If the conflict were over, what would you want that to look like? What resolution do you seek, and what does that resolution look like for ALL of the actors involved?

- Evaluate and choose a strategy for achieving that goal. Can I get there through unilateral action, or do I need the cooperation of those with different views? Can I engineer a solution that meets my needs regardless of what the other side wants, or do I have to persuade others to join with me in a mutually-agreed settlement?

I don't think we've yet had much clear thinking about any of these things. Conflicts often arise between aggrieved students and university administrators or faculty, which is an example of the lamppost fallacy: tackling what you can see, rather than going where the problem really is. The fundamental conflict is between members of minority groups (blacks, latinos, transgender, etc.) and members of the majority group who want to discriminate against and oppress them. If that is the core of the conflict, there is no unilateral solution - neither group can wipe the other out, both must continue to live in the same society together. The question is, how?

I don't have any good answers. I don't know how you identify who the racists are, much less how you draw them into a political process designed to address their real interests and fashion a mutually acceptable solution. All I know is that until we do so, we are likely to be stuck in the ugly stalemate of today - sometimes quieter, sometimes louder, but with very little progress towards a better future.

"They" Are Not All the Same - Ever

Ben Carson, in his quest for the White House and/or personal fame and fortune, has been treating the nation to the latest round of "let's demonize an entire group of people we don't know".

For those who missed it, Carson apparently said this on NBC's Meet the Press:

"I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation. I absolutely would not agree with that."

He later went on to expand on these comments in an interview with The Hill. He stuck to his guns and gave various reasons, which I won't repeat here. He admitted that the original question was a form of "gotcha" journalism, but expanded his argument to say:

However, he acknowledged the question “served a useful purpose by providing the opportunity to talk about what Sharia is and what their goals are.”

Here, of course, is the big mistake. It's ironic that a black man would make this mistake, but as a friend of mine is fond of saying: it's good that irony is so funny, because there's so darned much of it.

The mistake lies in the word "their", as in "their goals". With one little word, Carson wraps all Muslims up in a single, neat, tidy package of people who all apparently share the same goals, have the same views, and behave in the same way.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how you play the stereotype card.

The contention, of course, is absurd. There is almost no generalization that can encapsulate all Muslims any more than there exists a general behavior that can be attributed to all Christians. How many American Catholics practice birth control? How many Protestants tithe? How many in all denominations get divorced, or remarry? There are a host of behaviors and beliefs that, when you look at what people actually say and actually do, vary widely even though people share the same religion.

The psychology behind all of this is well-understood. People who are part of "my" group - the folks on my side of the wall - are complex, interesting, and capable of a range of human variation. We differ from each other, and that's OK - maybe even a good thing. But folks on the "other" side of that wall - the outsiders - well, they're all the same. Just one big, monolithic mass. They're All Bad. They are THEM.

This is why I'm so fond of the term "tribalism". It's all about tribes, yours and mine and theirs.

Never mind that the evidence for monolithic belief and practice is non-existent. Never mind that people said this about Catholics - in the face of a real candidate for president - back in 1960. And never mind that JFK didn't take orders from the Pope, or impose Catholic doctrine on America. Because, really, Catholics are part of "us", just like Blacks are now part of "us" (but didn't use to be). Muslims - well, you know about them...

There is no difference at all between the thought pattern Carson has evidenced in these interviews and the thoughts of those convinced he shouldn't be President because he's black. We just have different labels for them. In the latter case, we call them racists. In his case, it's called Islamophobia. Potato, Po-tah-to.

This is absolutely rooted in the Politics of Fear. I don't know whether Carson actually believes this nonsense or not. But he knows that there are a bunch of Republican primary voters who do, the kind who can be whipped up into a frenzy and will show up to vote in low-turnout primary elections. And so he panders to the fearful and pours another spoonful of poison into the national well.

Thanks, Ben. Way to sell out the history of your own people in pursuit of personal gain.

Forgiveness: Really Hard and Really Important

Recently I attended a series of seminars by a master teacher, one of the best I have ever seen. He was fond of saying about the subject at hand: "This should feel hard, and it should feel really important."

There is an aspect of the shootings in Charleston last week that feels very hard and also very important: the question of forgiveness. This is much bigger than one incident - indeed, I think it's one of the most fundamental questions there is.

What follows here are partly reactions to what others have written, but mostly musings of my own. Some of this will wander into theological territory, and some of it will bridge from the societal to the personal. It's also likely to be long. I'm not an expert in any of this stuff, so I can't stand on title or degree or authority. Take it for whatever you find it's worth.

Cases like the Charleston shootings tend to get reported in context of other similar events in the past. The most common recent case I've seen cited is the Newtown shootings, although other racially/religiously-inspired shootings (the Sikh temple in Wisconsin, for example) have also been referenced. These past cases serve as a means of identifying and defining what's happened - they form the boundaries of the present.

One mass shooting I almost never hear referenced is the Nickel Mines case. In October 2006 a man entered a small Amish schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania. He allowed adults and boys to leave, but took a group of ten girls aged 6 through 13 hostage. A short time later, he shot all ten girls, killing five, and then turned the gun on himself.

The case was briefly a national story, in part because of the exotic nature of the victims (most Americans know nothing about the Amish, who keep largely to themselves) and in part because of what followed. After the initial frenzy had died down, the story came to focus on the response of the Amish community to the killings.

Within hours, members of the Amish community approached the gunman's family offering forgiveness and comfort. Those who had been victims reached out to the family of the perpetrator; many attended his funeral, and the gunman's widow was one of very few "English" invited to attend one of the funerals for the slain girls. The community responded with forgiveness and compassion far beyond simple words. A colleague of mine at the time, Donald Kraybill, and two other co-authors wrote a book, Amish Grace, which was later made into a movie. It is a powerful story almost wholly outside the mainstream American experience, which prizes vengeance far more than forgiveness.

Despite its power, the Nickel Mines story has largely vanished from public discussion. This is perhaps not surprising - the Amish exist largely outside American society and our categories. They are white, but we don't think of them as privileged whites. They eschew technology, yet aren't poor. They practice a radical form of both nonviolence and separation that largely keeps them outside our society. We don't know where they fit, and so they disappear (which, I suspect, suits them just fine).

Now we're faced with another shooting of innocents, in a religious context, by a white man. To early appearances Dylann Roof seems to have clearer motives than the Nickel Mines shooter did, which helps us put this event in the context of race and history which we already know. Some of the same questions are already being raised, about mental health and access to guns. But despite both similarities and differences in their particulars, both cases - indeed, ALL such cases - face us with the question: how do we respond? How are we to think about, and react to, the person who commits these crimes?

How we respond to the killer is important both for us and for the future. In the long run, responses of vengeance and anger shape us into vengeful and angry people bent on returning violence with violence. It is no coincidence that most major world religions have within their doctrines powerful injunctions regarding forgiveness, because the alternative is terrible: unending spirals of violence that spill blood for generations. We've seen modern examples from Jerusalem to Sarajevo to Chicago and Los Angeles. We know where that road leads. We forget sometimes that in the gospels, "An eye for an eye" is the start of a cautionary parable, not a prescription.

So in the long run, forgiveness and reconciliation are the only answers if we really want what we say we want: peace and justice for all. We know this is really important. We also know that it's really, really hard.

Stacey Patton in the Washington Post has beat me to the punch in bringing up the question of forgiveness towards Mr. Roof. Hers is a different take - she is frustrated at the speed with which blacks victimized by white violence are willing to forgive, at least in words. She points out that white America was not asked, and would not consider, forgiving al-Qaeda or ISIS - although the wars of vengeance launched by our responses there may not be the examples she's looking for. But she also writes this:

If we really believe that black lives matter, we won’t devalue our reality and cheapen our forgiveness by giving it away so quickly and easily. Black people should learn to embrace our full range of human emotions, vocalize our rage, demand to be heard, and expect accountability. White America needs to earn our forgiveness, as we practice legitimate self-preservation. [emphasis added]

Patton wants more anger from the black community as an expression of power - a means to force the white majority to come to terms with racism and take action to actually end it. Hers is a calculus of force, even if the force she envisions is rhetorical and political rather than lethal. It's interesting, in complicated ways, that the civil rights movement of the 1960s had this same debate, embodied in the twin figures of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. The latter seemed a bit more like what Ms. Patton is calling for, though the former is credited (rightly or wrongly) with having been more effective in bringing about change.

But can forgiveness be earned? This strikes me as a very slippery slope indeed. How much does the perpetrator of the offense need to do before forgiveness is owed? Is forgiveness a market transaction? We teach our children this script - one child offends and then says they're sorry, the other says "that's OK" or similar words of reconciliation. Then we watch them (and we watch ourselves) twist this script to our own ends. "I said I'm sorry!" "Yes, but you didn't mean it!" Asking others to earn forgiveness is really just a means of exerting power the other way, and can quickly turn into a form of punishment.

So demanding accountability and acceptable action prior to forgiveness isn't just putting the cart before the horse - it's connecting two things that really should not be connected at all. At the heart of Christian theology is exactly this kind of radical separation: the forgiveness of God does not come because of our actions, but in spite of them. We are not forgiven because we go to a priest or a pastor and say confession - otherwise God is nothing more than a magic Forgiveness Box waiting for us to push the button. God's grace precedes our action and does not depend on it.

This question, of course, goes far behind our response to terrible events like the Charleston shootings. We are faced with this question nearly every day, every time someone does something to harm us. Do we wait for the offender to apologize? Do we even allow them to apologize, or do we accept the apology at all? When we are hurt and wounded, this is really, really hard, even when the harm is social or relational rather than physical.

Yet even at this level, we perpetuate the damage when we don't seek and extend forgiveness. Relationships remain broken or fragile. Grudges can be held, hidden and waiting to surface later in another conflict. Potential is lost, work doesn't get done, and we miss out on the benefits of human connection at work, in the home, or in our communities.

This is not to say that reconciliation comes through a magic panacea. It's hard work on both sides. There's no push-button formula, where you say magic words ("I'm sorry") and I say magic words ("I forgive you") and we're done. Forgiveness, like everything else in human relationships, takes time and effort from both parties. I have failed to hold up my end of that bargain at times in my life, and I've been in relationships where I wanted to do the work but the other side didn't. Both end up hurting.

And all of that is in the easy cases, the ones where the offending party can recognize the offense and wants to do something about it. How much harder can this be, then, in cases like Charleston where the perpetrator of violence may not recognize his actions as wrong or harmful? What if there is no remorse, no apology forthcoming?

This is where it becomes clear that we need to separate reconciliation from forgiveness. The former is what restores relationships, not to their former state but to a functioning condition again. Reconciliation makes it possible for people to work together again, despite the harms of the past. Forgiveness is a necessary but not sufficient part of that process.

Forgiveness, by itself, is important not so much for the offender who is forgiven as it is for the victim who does the forgiving. If I am harmed by someone, whether that person repents or not I have only two choices: to forgive or not to forgive. By withholding forgiveness I am retaining the anger and the pain by choice. I think this is what Ms. Patton wants - she wants her community to hold onto that pain and channel it into power. In the short run, this can be a potentially effective tactic. In the long run, retained anger poisons the soul.

So by forgiving, I may or may not be helping the person who hurt me. But I am absolutely helping myself. This, I think, may be the motive behind the expressions of forgiveness seen in the last few days towards Dylann Roof. And though I understand (and to some degree share) Ms. Patton's frustration at the lack of change around issues of race and racism, I cannot share her need to tell those victims how to cope with their own grief or demand that they do so in ways to advance my agenda. Pain is personal first.

In this case, the harm radiates out in waves. There are the shooting victims (those that survived) and their immediate families. The members of Emanuel AME church. The members of the surrounding black community, and the broader citizens of Charleston. There are blacks, whites, and communities across South Carolina, and across the South in general. And there are Americans across the country, many of whom felt the pain of this shooting if only distantly.

People in each of those layers will have to decide for themselves how to respond in ways that suit their own needs and serve the needs of the larger community. There is strong consensus on much: the need to heal the racial wounds of our society, the need to prevent as many of these terrible acts as we can, the need to forge a better and more peaceful community. How we do these things is the subject of much debate. That they need to be done isn't.

So we're left with the original question: do we forgive Dylann Roof? Actually, I think this is more an individual question than a collective one. It's something we each have to face. For those of us at a comfortable distance from the shooting, it may seem like a trivial choice. But in reality, it's a choice we face nearly every day of our lives. We are constantly hurting, and being hurt, taking apart our relationships and communities and putting them back together. Forgiveness is an important part of the putting back together process. And like anything else, if we want to become good at it we have to practice.

Ideas Kill: Charleston and Our Failure to Talk About Race and Hate

A lot of words have been written in the last couple of days about the tragedy in Charleston, South Carolina. Interesting and important discussions have broken out about whether this act constituted terrorism (yes) or a hate crime (yes) or whether this is a manifestation of broken race relations (yes). Some have taken the opportunity to advance their favorite pet theories, perhaps the most absurd being  that pastors should arm themselves so they can be prepared to shoot assailants (I guess we should ask, "who would Jesus shoot?")

Smart things are being said, too, about the language we use to talk about these kinds of incidents. Why is it that whites who commit mass shootings are put in the "mentally ill" category when others (Muslims especially) who commit similar acts are labelled in other ways? Would reactions be different if a black man went into a white church and shot nine people as opposed to a white man in a black church doing the same? (almost certainly)

I don't have a lot to add to many of these conversations - a lot of smart folks are already saying smart things, and while it's fun to echo I suspect that many are only being listened to by those who already agree with them. That's one of the downsides of social media (says the guy who primarily uses Facebook to distribute his blog posts...)

Beyond human compassion for the victims and the affected community (which I hope we all share, regardless of our political, racial, or identity leanings), I want to offer a thought for consideration. Even this I can't claim full credit for - a friend of mine sent out a group email earlier today that got me thinking along these lines.

I often write about cases of gun violence from a self-defense point of view, as a student of interpersonal violence. In this case, I don't want to do that - the argument about whether pastors should be armed is to me so ridiculous as to not be worth engaging in. Instead, I want to approach this from the point of view of someone who has spent his life in higher education. From that vantage point, there is one important concept that I'm not sure has been fully grasped:

Ideas kill.

This is easy to say but much harder to understand. In our drive to both defend free speech and promote tolerance (both noble and excellent goals), we have neglected the much harder work of engaging ideas. Instead, we sling mud and names and labels at each other, pat ourselves and our friends on the back for our righteousness, and go out for a beer.

I started to address this problem after the Newtown, CT shooting in this blog post. The ideas I was talking about there were ideas about guns in particular. I think that post has held up pretty well, though most of the hard-liners in the gun debate don't want to hear it.

But what we appear to be seeing in Charleston is broader. It wasn't just Dylann Roof's ideas about guns. It was his ideas about race and society, his vision of the world as a whole, that led him to kill.

This is the part of the conversation we are terrible about. We've been talking about race in this country for centuries, but haven't made a lot of progress recently. To minorities - blacks in particular - racism is a major problem, but to far too many whites it's an annoyance, a "special group" issue, a side bar to the "real" problems our country faces. The problem with our conversations about race is that they're primarily conducted by blacks, Latinos, sometimes Asians, and a few sympathetic whites. We see this on our university campuses - chief diversity officers tend to be minorities, and the events they organize and the dialogues they hold tend to attract the attention largely of the minority population. For much of the white population, it's simply "not my problem".

So here's why we have to start taking this much more seriously: ideas kill.

Those nine people in Charleston didn't die because Mr. Roof is mentally deranged, though by some standards he may be. They didn't die because he had easy access to guns, although that was certainly a permitting factor. They died because Mr. Roof held ideas - ideas he learned and inherited and absorbed from a lot of other people - about race and American society.

This fact makes this a critical issue for higher education, because ideas are our stock in trade. If universities can claim anything, it is to serve as idea foundries - places where ideas are developed, tested, debated, tried, and shared.

This does not mean that universities should run out and frog-march their students and faculty into diversity sensitivity workshops so that their latent racism can be lectured out of them. It does mean that we need to pay much more careful attention to the ideas that lead to violence and killing, both as individual components and in constructed views of the world. We need to study these ideas, where they come from, and how they are spread, in much the same way that epidemiologists study diseases.

This is true not only of racism. It is also true of the ideas behind rape and sexual assault. It is true of the ideas behind religious extremism. It is true of any number of ideas and constructed ideologies that lead people to believe not only that it's OK to kill other human beings, but that it is necessary and laudable to do so.

These are difficult, difficult conversations. They are hard topics to tackle. If this were easy, we would have done it already. How do we separate ideas from people (because people tend to get defensive and, when cornered, will shut down or lash out) and how do we work together as people to deal with ideas? How do we do all of this without becoming coercive about it, which defeats the whole exercise? I don't know - I'm as guilty of anyone else of not trying very hard.

One thing I do believe is true: if this is going to happen anywhere in American society, it will happen in colleges and universities. Our politics are too fragmented and vicious and infected with cynicism for a public figure, another MLK, to force a conversation onto the national stage. But despite all the ridiculous rhetoric from people outside the academy, all the "sky is falling" predictions of how universities are going the way of the dinosaur, universities still succeed for the most part in creating environments and spaces for real and difficult conversations. And sometimes, they even succeed in leading them.

This is not a prediction so much as a call to purpose. For those of us in higher education, we need to take our jobs seriously. We need to take ideas seriously again. Because as the world keeps reminding us, lives depend on it.

Confederate Flags and Aggressive Identities: When Did "Just Being Me" Become an Offensive Game?

Another conflict over the display of the Confederate Flag has cropped up on a college campus. That's not particularly remarkable; such conflicts occur all the time. What's interesting about this one is that it has stirred up an institution north of the Mason-Dixon line generally thought of as a more liberal/progressive place - Bryn Mawr College.

Despite its unusual location, the conflict has played out predictably as an argument between those asserting their rights to display their heritage under the basic doctrines of free speech, and those asserting their rights to learn in an environment free from coercion or oppression.

As usual, almost everyone is disappointed in the outcome. The students who displayed the flag eventually took it down, likely disappointed that their rights to free speech and to their cultural identity had been trampled on. On the other side, many minority students were disappointed that it took so long to affect that outcome, and are now blaming the college for being insensitive to their needs and voices. I feel bad for the college administration - if ever there were a higher ed version of the Kobayashi Maru scenario, this is it.

What interests me about this story is not so much where it takes place, or the predictable nature of how it has unfolded. It is the origin of the conflict itself - the decision by two students (unnamed, at least in the story above) to put the flag up in a public space in the first place. That's a decision I both understand and find puzzling.

I understand it, in that college students do a lot of things out in public as a means of asserting and experimenting with their identities. Clothes and hairstyles change; attitudes and arguments are adopted, often loudly; posters and flags put up in decoration. This is the time of life when students are growing into their own identities. As southern young women in a predominantly northern institution, it doesn't at all surprise me that these two would choose to assert their southern-ness. I imagine that they, too, felt the pinch of being in a cultural minority (which they undoubtedly were).

I also get the "they have every right to" argument. Yes, we all believe in free speech, even speech that offends. But we see what happens when the argument turns only on rights. It bogs down in anger, recrimination, and division. Rights are important, but they are not the highest good here. They are necessary but not sufficient if the goal is building real human community.

Given that, what I don't understand is why these two young women chose to assert their cultural identity in a way that they must have known would cause pain and anger in others. It's possible that they might argue naiveté - that they didn't see this reaction coming. I find that hard to believe; even relatively sheltered young women from the south must know how incendiary the Confederate Flag is as a symbol. So I can only imagine that this was done deliberately - not necessarily to cause anger but indifferent to whether it bothered others or not.

And there lies our great failing. 150 years after the Civil War and 50 years after the Civil Rights movement, we have not yet found a way for two important identities - African American and White Southerner - to coexist. The two groups pose no existential threat to each other anymore, yet they continue to behave as if they do.

Some of this, of course, is the difficulty of coming to terms with history. But this far removed from that history, that is an obstacle that should be overcome. Most White Southerners who fly the Confederate Flag today don't want to enslave African Americans, and many of them have overcome the racism of their ancestors. They, and their African American colleagues who are generations removed from slavery and Jim Crow, are free to forge their own identities for themselves.

The problem is not that we can't fashion identities that are both true to their roots and yet coexist with others. The problem is that we don't know how. We know what doesn't work - flags and snarky memes and "in your face" combativeness don't get us where we want to go. Sadly, that's a lot of what these young adults see the rest of us doing - we're no better at it then they are.

But there is a better way. Its details vary from context to context, but it starts in the same place every time: I am who I am. You are who you are. I respect you for who you are, and I ask that you do the same for me. After that, everything else is conversation. If I respect you, I don't demand that you change who you are. But if you respect me, you may change anyway. Everything begins and ends with respect.

If I act out of both identity and respect, I don't throw my symbols in your face. I don't put up flags I know you hate and mark the floor with tape to cordon off "your side" from "my side". I hope that out of this latest kerfuffle at Bryn Mawr, a few of their students - some of the best and brightest we have - will figure this out.