Josef Peiper, a Catholic philosopher of the mid-20th century, was asked to expound his ideas on love:
What is the nature of love? On the other hand, we are inclined to feel from the start that the fact of there being one single word for all this cannot be entirely without some foundation in reality. But if the recurrent identity underlying the countless forms of love does exist, how can it be more exactly described?
My tentative answer to this question runs as follows: In every conceivable case love signifies much the same as approval. This is the first of all to be taken in the literal sense of the word’s root: the Latin word for “good”. It is a way of turning to him or it and saying, “It is good that you exist; it is good that you are in this world!”
The reader can almost feel Pieper slow himself in this last paragraph, and with intent emphasis the you in his Catholic personalism. It is good that you exist! It is good that you are in this world!
This personalism is something we have lost today in the recent focus over law enforcement in Ferguson and New York. Black lives matter, so we are told. Blue lives matter as well. All lives matter… and while there is a certain ring of truth to it, there is a danger in the mattering that should matter to us all.
Life, according to the Lutheran philosopher Albert Schweitzer, respects life. “I am a life which wills to live, in the midst of life which wills to live,” he argues. Schweitzer, a veritable refugee from Nazi Germany’s pogroms, chose to live out the rest of his life running clinics in the Belgian Congo in Gabon — quite the opposite from his peer Deitrich Bonhoeffer who instead chose to remain a witness to political terror, and ultimately suffered martyrdom for his cause.
Yet it wasn’t an ideological cause that drove Bonhoeffer, Schweitzer, or Peiper towards their deep sense of Christian individualism. It was a faith, a deeply rooted sense of values and purpose that said life wasn’t something that merely mattered, but rather was so invaluable that it couldn’t be owned even by the personal self. Life was invaluable, a gift, one that had to be respected and not possessed as if it were a material object that is gained, used, abused, and when it fails to matter becomes disposable like so many other things in the postmodern West.
Life respects life, not because lives matter, but because they have inestimable quality as a reflection of the Creator who made use all. In that Other — as my oft-quoted friend Emmanuel Levinas reminds us — is that encounter with God.
This is something that the Alinskyites — both left and right — in their grasp for power temporarily forget. Ta-Nehisi Coates does a marvelous job at identifying Alinskyite overstretch, but makes the utter mistake of speaking about which lives matter to whom:
To challenge the police is to challenge the American people, and the problem with the police is not that they are fascist pigs but that we are majoritarian pigs. When the police are brutalized by people, we are outraged because we are brutalized. By the same turn, when the police brutalize people, we are forgiving because ultimately we are really just forgiving ourselves. Power, decoupled from responsibility, is what we seek. (emphasis added)
This forgiveness of self is where Coates identifies the weakness of the protesters. All well and good to torch businesses, and in the wake of the Garner case, the merits “offer(ed) some hope” that the conversation would remain on the topic of police brutality. Yet, as Coates accurately defines, the American public invests a great deal of their own identity in those who protect and serve. The time to question local law enforcement, so it seems, has not arrived.
Thus the Alinskyite tide breaks on the two rocks — Officers Wenjian Liu and Rafael Ramos — and the cause is ultimately suppressed for the time being. Yet Coates does not end his discourse there:
But now, through a merciless act of lethal violence, an escape route has been revealed. This overstates things. To the extent that this weekend’s murders obscure the legacy of Eric Garner, it will not be due to the failure of protests, nor even chance. The citizen who needs to look away generally finds a reason.
I wonder if there is some price attached to this looking away. When the elected mayor of my city arrived at the hospital, the police officers who presumably serve at the public’s leisure turned away in a display that should chill the blood of any interested citizen. The police are not the only embodiment of democratic society. And one does not have to work hard to imagine a future when the agents of our will, the agents whom we created, are in fact our masters. On that day one can expect that the tactics intended for the ghettos will enjoy wider usage.
In this, the Coates of the beginning of this essay who pronounces the execution of two NYPD cops as “merit(ing) particular censure” yields to the Coates who allows such rage to subside. Thus the Alinskyite will wait and watch, and the tactics that push a community to the edge of violence will receive none of the censure reserved for others. Instead of introspection, we are asked to yield to the scapegoat. Instead of renouncing violence, we are asked to let it sleep — for a time. We ask for understanding; we yield none of it to the Other, otherwise a certain sort of power built on resentment and distrust might yield to something else much more ennobling.
Archbishop Charles Chaput at the 2014 Erasmus Lecture offered a thought that touches on the very core of the problem with such tactics that are far more extreme than what Martin Luther King Jr. would have demanded. The antidote for this modern environment is not a buried rage, nor is it a meek acceptance. Rather, it is something much more radical:
The late Saul Alinsky called himself a radical, and he was clearly good at what he did. But I’ve always felt that his book, Rules for Radicals, was a kind of “Machiavelli for people with short attention spans.” His rules, pressure tactics, deceits, manipulations, and organizing skills are finally based on a fraud. They’re not “progressive” at all. They’re the same tired grasping for power that made the world what it is. The truth is, Alinsky wasn’t nearly radical enough. Radical means this:
Blessed are the peacemakers.
Blessed are the merciful.
Blessed are the pure in heart.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness.Blessed are you when men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward is great in heaven; for so men persecuted the prophets who were before you.
We don’t need to succeed in living the Beatitudes. But we do need to try—every day, consciously, with all our hearts. If we do that, the Beatitudes irresistibly transform the world by transforming us.
The truth is, Alinsky wasn’t radical enough.
I have been giving a lot of thought about this ever since I read it in this month’s First Things, and it has stuck with me ever since. For all the radicals, for all the rebels, for all the violent acts committed in the name of justice, how many have in the course of history truly succeeded? The answer is very few.
Yet there are forces out there that do change the world. We are 25 years from the fall of the Berlin Wall — a moment that when I was a young man the same age as my own sons was a moment of immense hope and amazement. Soviet Communism fell, not with the bang of nuclear weapons and the rage of a Third World War we had all expected, but the impotent collapse of an withered and frail regime who could not sustain itself through violence — and it did so in the face of a movement who would not tolerate violence in the accomplishment of its goals.
That movement was Solidarnosc — and the Polish labor movement caught its wind through the force of two inspiring voices for human freedom: Lech Walesa and Fr. Jerzy Popieluszko. Fr. Jerzy was a strong and salient voice for Solidarity in its early years, one who was unafraid of the Polish Communists and one who took courage from Pope John Paul II’s admonishment to let the Holy Spirit heal the land. Fr. Jerzy’s total response to this was one born of love:
Do not use violence in your struggle. Violence is not a sign of strength, only of weakness. He who cannot win the heart or the mind seeks his victory through violence. Each act of violence is vivid proof of moral incompetence.
The most excellent, enduring battle known to Man, known to history, is the battle of ideas. The most pitiful and insignificant battles are the violent ones. An idea which requires weapons to defend it will die on its own account. An idea which can only live by violent means is a perversion. An idea which is capable of life conquers on its own account. Such an idea will find millions of spontaneous followers.
Fr. Jerzy was right. Solidarity won the day in Poland and eventually set into motion the wheels that brought the entire edifice of Soviet Communism crashing to earth. There was no Alinskyite targeting of opponents. No desire to bring the people to the brink of violence and see who matriculated across the line to act on those principles. No blind eye towards acts of violence, but an unequivocal and strong condemnation of violence in the face of injustice.
Alinskyite tactics, whether they seek to defend black communities or look to address police violence (or both), are doomed to failure because they view humanity in the lens of materialism. The cause of human freedom — if it is worth defending as Solidarity has shown us — deserve more than Machiavelli for short attention spans.
It is worth noting that Fr. Jerzy lost his life at the hands of the Polish Communist secret police in 1984. Of the nearly 30 million people who followed Solidarnosc, there were no calls for violence. No violent acts were committed. Only silence, prayer, and a deepened resolve. Fr. Jerzy was eventually beatified by the Catholic Church in 2010, and his cause for canonization is followed earnestly by millions whose freedom from Soviet Communism is owed to one man and the faith — the love — that propelled him.
Their lives didn’t merely matter. Such lives held dignity and deserved a respect far beyond what even a socialist government could give. The same God who made life imbued it with love, and said “It is good that you exist; it is good that you are in this world!”
Such voices are desperately needed today.
