Trinitrotoluene. Some of us will not recognize that word. It is the stable but potentially destructive chemical compound more familiarly known as “TNT” (2-4-6 trinitrotoluene). Some terms, such as trinitrotoluene, explode forth with a single unambiguous noun meaning, while others meander and gambol, like so many crispy orange-brown sidewalk leaves ready at any moment to be tossed in this direction or that by objectless gusts.
“Loyal” might be considered in still a third category: its meaning seems explicit, but it can be understood in near infinite shades of degree and applied to a similarly boundless host of persons, things, aggregates, concepts, wrinkles and impressions. “Loyal” is not a term as irreproachable as it may at first seem, for our culture teaches us to apply the word far more to things, people, social aggregations, organizations, etc., and infrequently to principle and abstract matters associated with (uneasy) demurral and perplexity (such as jurisprudential rectitude, ethical consistency, and humaneness). We are comfortable with being loyal because the word references an affinity, an agreeable (or obligational) social relationship and we are social creatures.
One might contend flatly that our being social is a good thing… very good. But we must take greater care about a word like “loyal”. The word is as ready and convenient to incongruous aims as a handgun! While, superficially, it is commendable to be loyal, we must confess that a specific human can be just as loyal to the mob boss, the Fuhrer, or the overconfident, know-it-all writings in a little red book as to his ailing mother. And quite often, as we all know, people are very well compensated (to remain loyal and) to maintain their minds and words uncluttered by compunction and qualm.
What are we each loyal to? A loyal person is not understood as somebody who is just faithful to truth. No. We never use the term that way. (We’d just say the person is “truthful”.) Again, it is a group, a club, an organization or some other entity that is proximal, demonstrably friendly, necessary or human (or contains humans within it) to which we declare our fealty. Few of us have ever (in honesty and sincerity) avowedly declared our loyalty to scruple. Our loyalty thus often amounts to a kind of insensate position.
And our own ready commitment to loyalty traces its genesis mostly to its esteem as a cultural ethic in addition to our own steadfast want not to be ratted on.
Sin exists; it is a concept transpicuous even to irreligion. The irreligious just use a different word (maybe “vice”, “iniquity” or “corruption”) to reference the same thing. There are, so our Western religious heritage teaches us, “Seven Deadly Sins.” Sin is not like a magical turning of water into wine, ambling ostensibly upon sea, or feeding several thousand mouths with a ludicrous insufficiency of fish and bread. Shortcomings of personality are observable and undeniable. Though the self-described atheist will shun the religion-steeped term “sin”, he or she still recognizes all of the Seven Deadly Sins in the human personality: pride, envy, gluttony, lust, anger, greed and “sloth” (avoiding work). They exist. No sane and truthful person denies this. In political discourses and treatises, surely far the most recognized and discussed of all these is “greed”, almost synonymous with selfishness.
There is still another socially-based personality corruption closely related to loyalty: tribalism.
Before World War Two, there was only our “social” nature that we understood as wide-ranging and impactful. But the shocking malevolence of Nazism forced scholarship to take a far deeper and discriminating look at the precise mechanisms of our sociality. And postwar behavior research has uncovered many quondam mysteries of what remain our diverse and sempiternal group identities.
Among the most propitious developments of the twentieth century is that this tribalism inhering so deeply within almost all of us has been culturally directed into an expression/outlet in the field of athletic competition; we’ve learned to attach our allegiance to a sports team, and this has doubtless contributed (in admittedly immeasurable ways) to the diminishment of war and group violence in the developed world over the past seventy years. This welcome outcome is not the same as enlightenment and its deserts. It is largely this to which the long-term “pax Americana” and general diminishment of societal violence owes its fortuitous manifestation: bullets and battlefields have been replaced by arenas and stadia.
That eighth sin of tribalism still plagues us. Our tribalism mostly remains free to ignore or discount moral, ethical and prejudicial aspects. A participant in our (comforting) belonging and security, tribalism, however hidebound and backward, is held apart from the intense scrutiny that so many other values and tendencies are subject to. We join a club, become a fan, or credulously amble on a balmy Sunday morn through that familiar threshold of the nether-steeple without ever apprehending a downside.
For clarification, let me take a moment to distill for the reader what is meant here by the term “tribalism”. It is the tendency of the individual (always within a political culture) to join his or her identity or value-identity (in any of its facets or guises) with a larger group. A person exhibits tribalism in significant identification with a religion, a race, an ethnicity, a club, an organization (sometimes religious), a family, a blood line, a strictly-defined ideology, a political party, a narrowly framed social agenda, a movement, a nation, a state, a sports team, an occupation, a social class, a community, a political or social demographic, or a clique. And this is more complicated than it at first seems, because, as the American political scholar Samuel Huntington has pointed out, people often frame their identity in terms of what they themselves are not; religious fundamentalism and religious opinionatedness often acquire greater resonance by the zealot feeling deeply what he or she is not. Add to this the fact that our tribalism is often immixed with our selfishness and we’ve got a concept (in ‘tribalism’) that is extremely hard to get a handle on.
As civilization (or the aggregated social and political structures that go by that presumptuous designation) progresses, tribal identities become more difficult; other competing interests (like money, status, and opportunity) often compete with and curtail tribal identities. But we obviously remain tribal.
Earlier this year I began reading a prolix, three-volume treatise on the American Civil War by a twentieth century American writer named Shelby Foote. His descriptions of that contestation and its personages seemed odd: it were very much as if I had begun reading a book about World War Two penned by an unrepentant Nazi. I halted my reading and googled this guy to try and somehow sleuth out this weirdness in his prose. What I suspected was absolutely true: Foote was a lifelong Southerner and Confederate sympathizer. He remarked, apparently in fullest sincerity, that he would have fought against the United States government back in the 1860s, and he would also do so a century later, in his life as a writer. He explained that he would do so because he would fight to defend his state against any army that “invaded”. His tribal identity was set on his Southern-ness, and he lived his whole life, apparently, conquered, as he never himself conquered the tragic tribalism that dwelt deeply and inextricably within his core self-concept. He was ready to literally die in what he already knew was a failed and hopeless cause.
I, Barry De Saw, am a very odd fellow. My extreme social misfortunes have played out as a kind of intellectual boon to me. With no social, family, religious, political or community identity, and nothing reassuringly soothing and proximal to call “home”, I am free to appraise everything with a rare degree of impartiality. (This must not be confused with absolute objectivity, which does not exist in humans.) And though I am male and heterosexual, my wives and girlfriends have often looked at me in near-stunned amazement at how genuinely supportive I am of female emancipation and LGBTQ rights. I stridently support these demographics to which I will never strictly belong because I have lived my teen and adult years in an ilk of political and ideological and logistical itinerancy. I am that uncommon character who ever drifts upon figurative non-prepossessing seas (and has no aspiration whatever to walk on them). When I was in college I recall rejecting opportunities to join honor societies; that kind of joining was anathema. “I don’t want to position myself to rub shoulders with the upward movers,” I remember telling myself. It was that initial betrayal of the vulnerable, the small, the poor, the oppressed and the victimized that I needed to be mindful of. At least twice in my adult life, rich people have abandoned me as a friend when they realized their finances did not esteem them with me at all. I remain apart and unaffiliated, albeit now no longer peripatetic.
In 2003, I read a book entitled The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr. The man never wrote an autobiography, but his family authorized it to be put together by capable writers and editors many years after his death. The book was comprised largely of his various writings, finessed into a coherent narrative. Perhaps it was there in that book that I discovered that Dr. King felt people often became more immoral in groups; the sanction of the group allowed what the conscience of the individual could not. We might consider his philosophical observation critical of tribalism.
In the early 1990s I lived in an anywhere suburban New Jersey town called Marlton, about a dozen miles due east of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. One day I was driving down the main street – which I believe was actually called Main Street – when I saw an unusual store-like establishment (perhaps newly opened) in what looked like an otherwise residential-type house – right there in the front part of it. And, since there was no real cost in investigating, I decided to go inside to see what they were selling. I was in the place for about fifteen minutes examining books, trinkets, greeting cards, ornaments, and various other sundry items and found myself stymied, still unable to get a fix on what this place was, what it was trying to offer its customers. Follow with me, reader: there were, conspicuously, Christian items in abundance, jewelry with crosses and some with the fish symbol, and much else that was Christian and knickknack-like – but there were other things that were completely unrelated to Christianity, or for that matter even spirituality. There were items with the American flag on them, and there were items exhibiting the humorless countenance of bald eagles. “What a bizarre assemblage of things,” I said to myself. Irremediably flummoxed, I asked one of the two salespersons, each white and in her thirties, what the store was about, and she glibly responded, “God and country.” If it were not for her evident self-satisfaction in uttering those three words – a wide-eyed, toddler-like overconfidence characteristic of those initiates whose delight is in identity and not ideas – I might have enquired further, “Some connection between the two?”
Forsooth, a connection! For all my inexpressible disdain for such nostrums, she might as well have replied, “Prosody, Shaka Zulu, and Milk of Magnesia.”
Around that same time, I happened to participate in a group discussion at the meetinghouse (tantamount church) of my (Quaker) religious community in Haddonfield, New Jersey. This particular day, the topic under consideration was the rapidly changing social and racial composition of the United States. The presenter was a white guy in his early 40s, but the discussion was, as always, participatory. Midway into the (open and democratic) meeting, at which there were about a dozen of us, the presenting guy said, “Soon we’re going to be a minority!” He spoke those words with all the seriousness with which one might reference a dreadful medical diagnosis. I immediately enquired, “Who are ‘we’?”
No one answered (and I believe the discussion may have somewhat lamely continued in the next few seconds). I tried to figure why no one was answering my unambiguous question and concluded that it must be because they too did not know what “we” was supposed to mean; they did not answer because they couldn’t. But then I realized that the speaker himself surely knew what he meant, so I repeated, “Who are ‘we’?”
Again there was no answer. And I began to feel a bit vexed, not really angry so much as bewildered and frustrated. After all, I had not asked, “What is the square root of 93,639?” I had not quizzed those present by enquiring, “What was the nominal GDP of Uzbekistan last year?” I merely asked for someone to magnanimously spare a hemi-second and parse the word “we” for me. And in this waxing botheration, I a third time, a bit more loudly and with a decided emphasis on that last, crucial word, importuned, “Who are we?!” Only then, the lady sitting to my right tapped me gently on the back of my right hand and said, in a furtive tone suggestive of a whisper, “White people.”
“Oh”, I said in embarrassment. And in the ensuing seconds I realized why no one had answered my question on the first two askings: they interpreted my question as a kind of political commentary, as rhetorical and not literal. Yes, my heritage goes back to France (mostly), and everyone categorizes me as “white”. Indeed, I have sometimes remarked that I looked like “a ghost” in photographs, but I have as little interest in that contrived, meaningless (“white”) label as in measuring to the micrometer the precise length of the big toes on each of my feet. I have always very much wanted to be appraised “handsome” by females, but that is quite as far as my superficial interests extend (appertaining to myself). My enthusiasms are for value ideas such as humaneness, conscience, and human dignity, and these remain asomatous.
When we boil it down to its seminal essence, our tribalism is only as deep and significant as our allegiance and loyalty. That word, loyalty, has to rank among the most insidiously beguiling in the whole of the English language.
I will always remember that there was an African-American guy there present and participating in that demographic-change discussion at the meetinghouse where the word “we” was parsed only grudgingly and belatedly. And there were only a dozen of us there. How could the speaker not have seen the inappropriateness of saying “we” when a participant just eight feet to his right is clearly not one of “us”? The answer must be that our tribalism abides a sort of perdu neural-cogitative unseeing; we often discount what the eyes authenticate in favor of what our tribalism commends. Our mental fashioning laid bare: we seek dispensation and esteem, and (disloyal) eyes give us only truth – not at all the same thing.
And it isn’t so much that our tribal thinking is blind, but rather somewhat purblind, a narrow order of “seeing”. On September 18th, 2018, several news media in Europe reported on the signing of a trade agreement between the United States and Poland. The Polish president, Andrzej Duda, was pictured with his American counterpart in the Oval Office of the White House (the residential and administrative building for the current American president), where both are seen signing the trade agreement. (I saw the picture before reading the story, and I confess that at the seeing I guessed – very wrongly – that the guy at left who was bending over the American president’s desk with pen in hand was one of the American president’s assistants or department secretaries.)
The story I read was from the Washington Post. The reporter, Rick Noack, explained that the American president is not nearly as unpopular in Poland as he is in so many other places around the developed world, and Poles generally view the American president favorably. But the online-circulated photo that showed the chairless Polish president bending over the American president’s desk was greeted with piqued indignation by many Poles. They saw what I saw – the inequality of the two men pictured – but within a tribal context; they saw their nation depicted as conspicuously inferior to the United States. On social media, thousands of Poles quickly and vociferously decried the insult.
In 2004, I was teaching ESL (English as a Second Language) at a private school for adults in New York City. Among my several Polish students was a thin woman maybe thirty years old. (I was about 45 then.) This particular young woman, though still having some difficulty with spoken English, was immoderately acrimonious about what she saw as a character of strident imperiousness of the United States, and she felt her own country was relatively denigrated by that (perceived) condescension and geopolitical hauteur. One day, her resentments were expressed full in the classroom. She hated McDonalds, said their food was awful and lacked even the barest culinary appeal and nutrition, pseudo-victuals unfit for farm animals. And I recall that day thinking something with such intensity that I realized immediately that I ought to remain silent, because there was a risk of argument and backlash, as the whole observation had to be embarrassing to her had I spoken out. I thought it amazing that this woman, who was herself Polish and apparently very proud of that identity, aimed her resentments at hamburgers, when I recalled without effort what had happened in Poland on September 1, 1939. Germany introduced on that infamous day what history now calls the blitzkrieg – a well-coordinated super-aggressive, massive military offensive involving land and air ordnance. Poland was taken by surprise and overwhelmed in what was later termed “the September Campaign” and surrendered only a few weeks later. The “war” that September was indistinguishable from mass murder.
Less than three days after (September 1, 1939) both Great Britain and France declared war on Germany. Where was the United States while this was happening? There was no declaration of war from the western side of the Atlantic, from that self-described champion of “liberty and justice for all.” The barbaric and inexcusable assault on civilization was left with only Britain and France responding. Millions of lives were lost in that war that almost certainly would not have been lost if the United States had joined with its democratic European kin at that crucial September moment. Importantly, while the United States remained on the sidelines, the Final Solution took its repellent shape.
But interestingly, my student’s cavil in that memorable 2004 classroom interaction was about a famous present-day fast food restaurant and its menu. The anecdotal episode remains with me as a perfect example of how severely our tribalism can distort and pervert our focus of mind, our apprehension of justice, and bring about a forfeiture of circumspection. We tribe members exuberantly wave a flag or figurative flag that has no virtue of being observant, no true rectitude, no moral vision. It were as if each of the two sides of a hamburger bun had been placed over each of our eyes. We continue waving nonetheless – unseeing, unknowing, and uncaring, or caring about absurdities.
It seemed like all my August, 2018 was filled with concerns for my car’s tires: maybe four episodes of the dash nagging, “low tire pressure” in as many weeks. Labor Day weekend I decided it was time to stop filling them with air and seek their repair.
The morning of that Saturday, the first two places I visited were singular, family-owned (or seemingly family-owned) establishments. These places were closed for three long days. The third place I went, arriving at about 8:30 in the morning, was one of the large national chains (here unnamed). I strode in and saw no one, and it almost felt that the place was not open: no customers and no employees anywhere. I ventured to the back, where a large sign hanging from the ceiling read: “Service”.
Nearly under that sign were four customers waiting to be seen. I took my place behind them. Peering unobtrusively over the shoulder of the person in front of me (not difficult, as it was a smallish lady, and I am a man of ordinary stature), what I saw behind the counter was not encouraging: a lone attendant, a fair-complexioned girl about nineteen talking on the phone at length with what seemed to be a customer or prospective customer. All seemed routine and normal, except that the young “woman” had two conspicuous tattoos ON HER FACE! One was a diminutive heart on one of her cheeks, and the other was a spider web design that proceeded three inches forward from her left ear. (I have never been a person inclined to any sort of bodily ostentations or adornments of any sort, much less these sorts of obscenities.) As she spoke with her absent interlocutor, I began to wonder if this was a person so dreadfully inexperienced with assertiveness and adult responsibilities that she had not the requisite temerity to explain that she had to leave the conversation very soon to deal with customers right there in front of her. Several minutes later, the youth still failing to allay my concern about “temerity”, I drew the invisible-available into my lungs, silently sighed, turned and exited.
As I ventured that morning toward an as-yet-notional repair place, I considered those free will scars etched dreadfully upon that naïve mug, about the emotional-maturational stirrings that gave those scars birth. We usually construe the entreaties of emotion a ‘loud’ thing, but the mother-voice that birthed those two visage-ravaging abominations never enjoyed a presence in the ether.
Wants often amount, for all their subjective and psychic quietude, to covert, shadowy dictators. It’s hard to silence them. Socrates is reputed to have said, “Having the fewest wants, I am nearest to the gods.” Oh, how very distant from divinity are we raw, unprepared, self-adorning mortals!
We want. And among our very most pressing wants in our teens is a great deepening of ‘we’. “We” – that familiar, that nominal tract, that hither social amplitude… so much yearning and so much hazarded devotion for such a wee word! The pronoun flows neatly from the lips with all the nonchalance of the stalest, humdrum exhalation. But the word’s employments are almost limitless. I recall in the 1990s telling my students – many of them adults of not great sophistication – that they needed to be very careful about that word. “When you say ‘we’,” I warned, “you say it at the sacrifice of objectivity.” Many of them seemed dissatisfied that such a banal word should be so maligned. A word ought to have at least three syllables, they seemed to think, to be treated so critically.
But we say and write “we” with such verve. ‘We’ can often function as a term of tribal and quasi-tribal identity.
In mid-March, 2018, the New York Times published an exposé about a company none of us had ever heard of before: Cambridge Analytica. The story was also very much about another company, with which we are all too familiar: Facebook. It seemed Facebook had allowed Cambridge Analytica – a paying customer – to buy the Facebook-collected data of tens of millions of Facebook users. Less than a month after that initial New York Times exposé, it was revealed on news media all over the world that the original figure of 50 million Facebook users’ information sold was more accurately 87 million. Facebook was facing a major scandal.
Like millions of people, I deleted my Facebook account in the wake of the scandal. But my “millions” amount to a puny minority: Facebook has tens of millions more users today – a mere few months afterward – than it did on that March day the story broke in a major U.S. newspaper. And here we see the effects of selfishness, indolence, unscrupulousness and tribalism. People want a certain benefit – in this case to easily communicate and share with family and friends in a ready fashion and from anywhere at all – and they rationalize the decision that affords continuation of the social-delight benefit.
Organized crime families are very loyalty oriented. The very “family” aspect of the organization is an effort at greater surety in loyalty. Why does organized crime so often depend on an ethic of loyalty? It is because something, a big something, needs to act to supplement that social benefit that the criminals always (by definition) lack: resort to the police and the law. Loyalty functions to treat that enormous lack. In the famous movie The Godfather, there is a set of scenes where a driver is faulted for getting sick and not being present when the family patriarch, Don Corleone, is repeatedly shot at close range and nearly killed. The driver is literally executed for his having gotten sick and not working that day. And this illustrates how extreme the criminals’ loyalty code can become: it murders someone for getting sick.
In August 2016, an American football star began a “protest” of police killings of unarmed African-Americans. His political dissent was simply kneeling during the playing of the national anthem. The athlete’s name was/is Colin Kaepernick. By the middle of the 2017 NFL season dozens of other players from several teams all around the League joined in solidarity with this protest. There was much news reportage of all this, characterized as a “controversy”. Between September 2016 and September 2018 millions of American viewers tuned out. The League seemed headed for a crisis.
What makes a person so sharply disapproving of such a symbolic act as kneeling? These “disapproving” persons are not mental giants, so it should not be hard to explain their “thinking”. “A person ought to honor his country or get out,” is a remark that many of these “disapproving” might have thought or uttered or written, without ever caring to study or learn exactly how a person “gets out.” As they are totally consistent, they cannot expect Kaepernick to go to another country and live there illegally; they utterly disapprove going to another country and living there as an illegal! But they have no firsthand knowledge about how one endeavors to emigrate legally.
I recall that I too disapproved of what Kaepernick was doing, but not at all for the same reasons as most of his 2018 critics. I felt that kneeling was a lame way to show your disapproval about something that seemed to warrant a much louder protestation. But in 2016 I underestimated American racism and its effect; I did not realize that the (racially charged) outrage against these protesting athletes would bring the issue to national prominence. An imbecilic American president added his gasoline two cents to the TNT controversy over and over again. And this worked to further divide an already opinionated and self-righteously tribal political culture! (Did Americans realize that they were not just voting in favor of racism and sexism and crassness and idiocy but for division too when they voted with the instrumental minority for the unprincipled imbecile? I think not. They doubtless discounted a causal correlation clear to more enlightened minds: that his numerous “character flaws” would play out to greater and still greater divisiveness in the whole nation.)
Regarding my initial assessment of Kaepernick’s protests, I was wrong, and I have to admit that. I did not apprehend that the protest would continue, that its critics would be so numerous (perhaps, in some measures, at some points in time, a “majority”) and that this backlash would make the otherwise-scarcely-visible kneeling so very politically impactful and newsworthy.
A Washington Post poll released in May, 2018 revealed that “53 percent” of American respondents agreed that it was “never appropriate” to kneel during the national anthem. But we claimants to democratic ideals often fail to recognize that this figure – 53% – is not representative of God’s opinion, but ignorance’s. And it is in the nature of ignorance that those issues and ideas that are poorly understood – or illiberally conceived – change over time; people learn, although sometimes very, very slowly. A poll of Union Soldiers taken in 1864 revealed that seventy percent did not think ending slavery was a cause worth fighting for. Probably over 80% of American military service personnel today believe that ending slavery was a cause worth fighting for in the 1860s. A methodologically-sound poll was taken in the 1960s and revealed, consistent with other polls, that about 10% of Americans believed that marijuana should be legalized for recreational purposes. In the second decade of the twenty-first century several methodologically-respectable polls revealed that over sixty percent of Americans believe that marijuana should be legal. In 1964 a vast majority of Americans believed that the war in Vietnam was well worth fighting. Only ten years later, in 1974, a majority of Americans believed that the war was a mistake.
Decades ago, a huge majority of Americans (including me!) believed that gay persons had no legal right to marriage. Public opinion has shifted however, and today a majority of Americans approve gay marriage.
The lesson: do not let that 53% lead you to falsely conclude that the kneeling protests will remain as detestable as they are now. History has shown that nonviolent dissent does not remain so adamantly detested as the reactionary hopes it would. And just because a majority of Americans in 1918 would vociferously denounce interracial marriage does not mean they will feel the same a century later. (Interracial marriage is an unarguably nonviolent act.)
The giant sportswear corporation Nike signed a sponsorship deal with Kaepernick in early September, 2018. It was a very shrewd decision! Nike concluded, very cleverly, that it was wise to get on the right side of this issue early, and use that “visionary” status to its advantage decades from now (when perhaps 75% of Americans will say they support any sort of nonviolent political protest or testimony).
I recently got some physical therapy for a back problem, and during one session the therapist mentioned his disdain for the NFL and Nike (and he then surely read perceptively into my reticence). It is fascinating how our tribal identity and ideological determination unfold and develop. This therapist began blaming me for my ouches in the intense stretching exercises; he spoke as if it were the right deserts of a despicable scoundrel to have to suffer severe pain if the guilty were a person who had unforgivably neglected sufficient stretching in his adult years. It were precisely as if not stretching were a moral outrage. A certain sort of ideological conservatism played out to its logical (illogical) extreme will fault every sufferer, no matter how small and subject and hapless and preverbal, for his or her own distresses.
I like history because it is an infinitely vast study of causation. The following is not fiction, but essentially (albeit laughably terse) factual.
In the early fourth century CE the Roman Emperor Constantine sees hundreds of Christian martyrs meet their deaths by both executioner and carnivore maw with astounding aplomb. Some transcendent courage must have affected them, he must have somehow surmised from his eyewitness experiences. He has a dream where he sees a Christian cross in the sky and hears (or sees) the words “By this you will conquer.” Constantine was then at the very cusp of an extremely important battle against a substantial internal Empire revolt. He ordered his troops to paint crosses upon their shields. They did. And they emerged victorious from the battle. The structure of the modern world had changed very quickly: the religion of unilateral kindness, forgiveness and disdain of (human) judgment was co-opted. And dozens of armies have taken to the contest-field with literal or figurative crosses.
Many of those armies succeeded. The Christian West, although diminishing in prestige in the twenty-first century, has (somewhat) conquered the world: the Christian faith is far the largest on earth; the English language is well positioned as (unalterably) the lingua franca of all the world; Western capitalist economics and democracy have spread to all corners of the world; and human rights, an outgrowth of Western liberal political ideology, has become a global cause célèbre.
The Vatican, the Roman Catholic Church, the “Holy See.” The Roman Catholic Church is far the largest Christian denomination. It is the most salient champion of the “Christian ethic” (whatever that might mean). But after it was co-opted in the fourth century, it many centuries later became such a powerful organization that it achieved a near state-like status. (Indeed, the Holy See occupies a seat in the U.N. General Assembly as a “Permanent Observer.”) The Holy See is politically independent of its enveloping state neighbor, Italy, and it has been in the U.N. since 1964. The Holy See has never petitioned the U.N. for full member status, preferring to define itself as above politics.
But none of us are free of political taint just because we refuse a particular association or status, just as we are not free of bias simply because we’ve voted a certain way. The Roman Catholic Church is political. It has political values. It has itself to defend and “honor”, which is unavoidably political.
Whenever a religious denomination becomes (however implied, incrementally or obscurely) an organization it becomes, to that very same extent, compromised. When we place a five into the basket in the Catholic church, do we not simultaneously contribute at once both to “God” and to his Church (the organization)? The Catholic Church observes the Trinity… Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It is sometimes thus criticized as “serving three gods.” But, for practical political purposes, it serves two! It equally serves its organizational conception and its interpretation of the Gospel. The Catholic Church is deeply political, whether it confesses this or not.
Although dozens of stories appeared in Western media in the last decades of the twentieth century about Catholic priests sexually abusing children, these stories never gained headline prominence until the late 1990s, when a subsection of the Boston Globe, Spotlight, issued a front-page story about widespread priest sexual abuses in the Boston Diocese. The revelations sent shock waves through the Church hierarchy. At that time, the principal spokesperson for the Vatican was Pope John Paul II. He was progressive, enlightened, intelligent, and spoke several different languages fluently. But the College of Cardinals had selected him to represent the organization in the late 1970s in part because he had proven himself to be a company man, a guy who would surely not upset the status quo, and the human contrivance, the “See”, that had so marvelously exalted him. And this is always the way with their humbly-garbed, “infallible” champions.
Pope John Paul II spoke quite sympathetically about the emerging and widening priest sex abuse scandals in the last years of his papacy. But he did not speak hundreds of times on this most despicable of offenses, which he certainly could have done (were he not so religious in his loyalty to the organization). Does Mark Zuckerberg ever declare flatly and publicly that “Facebook is no good?” Of course he doesn’t. His baby cannot be blamed for anything: it is only some particular of the baby that will be faulted. Likewise, Pope Francis will not declare that the whole of the Catholic Church has so offended morality as to be unworthy of public trust. Regardless of how valid such an assertion might be in any specific circumstance, the Pope will never say such a thing. To do so would make him a traitor to his tribe. He will always conceive himself a representative of the faith, but we can see easily through his holy vestments to that critical half of his allegiance: the organization of PR-conscious sinners.
On August 14, 2018, Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro stood before dozens of media reporters and revealed the findings of a statewide investigation of Catholic priest sex abuse in his state spanning several decades. The investigation took years to complete and involved the testimony of thousands of victims, witnesses and survivors (not always separate persons). What the report revealed was not only abuse! The exhaustively thorough investigation revealed a systematic policy of cover up within the Church administrative bodies of several Pennsylvania Catholic Diocese. Not one or two… several! The Attorney General described “widespread sexual abuse and institutional cover up across the entire state.” The ghastly tally: over 300 priests were identified, and over 1,000 victims. (The total number of victims – again only in the scope of this one Pennsylvania investigation – is believed to be over 3,000!)
As expected, several days after the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s report was released, Pope Francis issued a statement of sympathy for the victims of abuse and promised to institute reforms. But nothing he said straightforwardly faulted that allegiance that he is purblind to. The Church itself is, for all intents and purposes, unimpugnable; no pope can ever be expected to publicly and forthrightly declare that the functions, protocols and instrumentalities of established organization are fundamentally antithetical to religious probity.
Less than three weeks after the Pennsylvania Attorney General’s 884-page report was released, the BBC reported widespread abuses in Germany. Apparently the Church itself had conducted this particular investigation, and released the report to show the public that it was fully on the side of victims. But it was little reported in the American media. Apparently American news outlets had decided that this priest sex abuse story was getting old.
How many Catholics have left the Catholic Church in the past twenty years? Millions? Yes. But the percentage worldwide is paltry, and the Church grows far faster than its more conscientious, decency–oriented and well-read members desert. Some Catholic schools have had to close their doors due to declining enrollments, but most remain open (albeit often with fewer students).
Let us now follow a hypothetical. What if I and several other activists set up a protest with large signs in front of the entrance to a Roman Catholic church and school facility here in New York State? We all know, because we know human nature and impulse and immature reflex, that a driver entering the grounds to pick up his child from that Catholic school might sneer angrily at the protestors. They shout about something he does not like knowing. And think about this, reader, though there is no joy in doing so: At that very moment that the faithful parent-motorist sneers and scowls at the protesters, and maybe curses them too, it is very possible (as we well know the story of widespread priest abuse) that the motorist’s child may be at that very same instant unspeakably molested by a pedophile priest. Such is the head-shaking world we inhabit.
How can we work to make the world less sad? Unfortunately, the ardor and verve of our professions is conventionally related to its social rather than moral appeal. We think we’re “moral” when we are shouting as an expression of group-think. The tribe’s agenda is the shouting agenda. How often does a (non-mentally ill) person standing on a city sidewalk shout about his own personal laments? Compare that non-existent shout to the throngs that protest together on behalf of the union, the party, the “cause”, the community, the demographic, etc. Our shouts are social expressions. And our social aspect is surely good, but…
How much dignity, how much justice, how much morality and humanity have we lost, and do we continue to lose, consequent to our dissolute (and glib and triumphant) tribalisms?