postmodernquestions

Locked Out

 

    I often feel stranded in between starkly opposed cultures with no way to resolve the tension. It is a matter of my identity and how I relate to those around me. I should warn you here that if, you are looking for nice and tidy answers with a pretty little bow then, you are in the wrong place. When I was eighteen years old and fresh out of high school I decided to enlist in the United States Air Force to the tune of a six year active duty commitment. The reasons I did this are complex and meant for another post. Suffice it to say that I was young and it seemed like a good idea at the time. It did not take long however for me to quickly figure out that I in no way really fit in this military culture for a number of important reasons. 

    I found myself surrounded with people who were proudly anti-intellectual despite the fact that I worked in the intelligence field. They seemed perfectly content in the face of the profoundly troubling nature of what we were doing, to only ask questions of how to do it better and more efficiently. While I meanwhile, found my mind plagued with a radically different and potentially dangerous set of questions that revolved around why. Shamefully at times I wished I could be like them. They seemed so blissfully ignorant and happy. Many of them really seemed to believe in the patriotic american narrative of divine rescue. While I could only see the hands of american empire at work. I felt stuck and suppressed. I had no choice but to keep my thoughts and questions to myself. I found ways of venting of course but I always felt as though I was hiding something. I had to put on an act for not only my superiors and subordinates but for my peers as well. Every morning when I put on that uniform I went through a transformation of sorts. It was, in many ways, a ritual where by the time I tied my boots, stood up, put on my cover, and walked out the door I had become a character in a play that I had no choice but to play convincingly and leave my humanity at home. 

    As time went on the problem intensified to the point where I felt completely at odds with the person I became every morning as I put on that uniform. I had reached the point where I simply could not resolve my personal ethical convictions with the actions I was being ordered to carry out while in uniform. Living in that ethical tension felt like an inescapable prison. To complicate matters, the sensitive nature of my job meant that I legally could not tell anyone outside of my office what it was exactly that I did and still can’t to this day. Inevitably, I increasingly became an outsider at work as time went on. In fact after my assignment in Okinawa I was given my last assignment in San Antonio and there I resolved to keep my personal and professional life entirely separate. I never spent time with people I worked with outside of the office. Almost all of my friends were civilians in San Antonio. 

    Finally in August of 2009 my freedom was given back to me and I literally did a dance out of that office building as I left for the last time. For the first time in a long time I felt like I could breathe fresh oxygen again. I moved to Austin Texas to go back to school and I felt like the whole world was open to me once again. The transition to civilian life however proved to be far more difficult than I would have ever predicted. To begin with my lines of compartmentalization had not merely blurred but had completely vanished. These structures had so regulated my behavior for so long that their removal in many ways left me me confused and questioning my own identity. 

    However, the most troubling thing of all has been the discovery that in many ways my identity had already been deeply formed by my time in the military. The way in which I viewed the world was defined in terms of contrast to the military. The military had become my point of reference. It’s not so surprising I guess that six years years in a system like that will undoubtedly leave its marks. Being around civilians and trying to live a completely civilian life has thrown a sharp contrasting light on my own set of formative experiences that still regulate how I function and operate. But this has created problems for me in how I relate and form meaningful relationships with the people around me. Their point of reference is entirely different than mine. Their respective experiences come out of an entirely different culture and have thus deeply formed them in a profoundly different way. My hope is that as time goes on this will become less of an obstacle. I am firmly committed to continuing to purposefully engaging with those around me. But confessionally it is really tiring at times and once again I feel like an outsider. 

The Clash of Justice

 

    With all of the recent buzz lately over the shocking comments of Glenn Beck concerning his view of social justice, I began to think about the very concept of justice itself. It is one of those words where we all think we know what it means until we have to begin to explain it. Part of the problem for me here is simply the sheer scope that the word justice necessarily entails. People have used this word in countless ways to imply an infinite number of meanings. However, I would like to take it all the way back to the big three of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle and see what, if anything, we can learn. In the Republic, Plato essentially equates the practice of justice as a craft to be practiced like any other. He points out that every craft is performed to the benefit of its subjects. So, when a doctor performs medicine, she is doing it not to her own benefit but rather to her patient's benefit. When a ruler rules, she is only a ruler insofar as she benefits her subjects. When a teacher teaches, he is doing it for the benefit of his students. So, when a judge practices justice, he is supposed to be increasing justice and thereby benefiting those who are brought before him. Therefore it is not the function of a judge to harm anyone but rather, by performing the function of x, increase the level of x. If in fact that means ordering the offender to pay punitive damages, this then is meant to accomplish two things simultaneously. In the case of the defendant, he is being prescribed a medicine of sorts for the state of his soul. The plaintiff, on the other hand, is being given back what was unrightfully taken, or some substitute in order to return to some semblance of previous order and balance. The point being that this is the opposite of vengeance whereby the goal is to harm by way of violence. 

    In the dialogue of Gorgias, the wily Socrates beautifully argues that it is indeed better to suffer injustice rather than to commit it. The beauty of the argument is that it indeed scales. Therfore this applies to the smallest of transgressions of injustice as well as to a brutal tyrant committing unspeakable heinous acts and everything else in between. This sentiment has indeed been echoed in all of our great religious sages such as Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad and many others. 

    However, I want to take a step back and look at societal justice as a whole. Aristotle contended that the optimal political arrangement is where the conditions are provided so as to ensure the people are able to have fulfilling flourishing complete lives. This is a much more robust view of the way in which we as individuals participate in justice in our everyday lives. However, it, like every other, encounters problems in the sense that it has the tendency to create a meta layer of justice that is at least one degree removed from the local of people’s actual immediate experience. However, the screaming rhetoric from today’s conservative faction is entirely predicated on an anemic understanding of justice in the sense that it is reduced to only repressing that which they see as an unredeemable inherently savage human nature. This move purposefully restricts the scope of justice to that of overtly legally criminal acts, completely divorced from the larger socio-economic context in which they were committed. This then allows them to avoid the larger context in which societal injustices have been perpetrated by those in power. This is the classic separation between subjective and objective violence. This move, while highly expedient to their purposes, is indeed deeply disingenuous and protects the societal objective violence on which their privileged positions are entirely predicated.  

    Furthermore, on the micro level it is even more violently reductionistic. This move takes all of human complexity and reduces it to a particular negative moral phenomena. It defines humanity through the single dominant lens of the desire to have power over and against all others. This view of power is predicated on the platonic view of ontological power; whereby things are perfect insofar as they can affect others, and imperfect insofar as they can be affected by others. This is a deeply alienating move because it precludes the possibility of mutual relatedness. This lens does not allow the posture of being actively open to being affected by the world and people around us. This denies the fact that we indeed create our very identity out of what we have taken in. Most profoundly of all: it does not allow the possibility of influencing the world around us by first being deeply affected and formed by it. 

    Lastly, I will conclude by arguing that any conception of justice, therefore, must contain within it the idea of returning us to our full humanity as it were. It must view all of life as indelibly sacred, worthy of being protected and served in all of its overwhelming, beautiful, irreducible, infinite, and  complexity; full of faith, hope and love. It must recognize the alterity of the other as anything but an imperial project but, rather, one to be experienced and mutually engaged! As Richard Rohr would say, "life is not about you. You are to be about life!"