Together, If...

"Are human beings estranged in essence? 

The importance of this question is exemplified (...) in the conflict of races. Can we sometime achieve full integration? We can if racial hostility is not an expression of the human essence.

But perhaps a human being is essentially an uneasy and suspicious creature who is put off even by superficial differences in others. If so, though we may be deeply convinced that racial differences are insignificant, we probably should not strive for integration; in these circumstances, absence of conflict, uniform justice, and decent conditions of life for everyone would be sufficiently elevated aims.

As fascism shows, it is possible to envision human nature in a way that invalidates even the goal of reducing conflict. War and racial domination, given a certain conception of human nature, may be the highest ideals."

― Glenn Tinder, "Political Thinking: The Perennial Questions"

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Dear Kate,

"We are in this together."  Do you really believe this statement?

It is an anthem of hope sung by many during the pandemic, first professed from the pulpit of health care officials.

During this same time, there have been racial wounds old and new being opened up, for which we found no ointment, let alone a way to close, and the same tune of our togetherness has been played, though with a different riff.

"For today I don’t offer words, but rather, my renewed commitment to actions that arrest and disrupt our deeply rooted ideologies of settler supremacy."  These are the words of our Provincial Health Officer Dr. Bonnie Henry in response to the discovery of the remains of 215 First Nations children.

What she sang was: We can be in this together, if...

If certain elements in our culture can be eradicated, certain people eliminated.  She said "ideologies," but we all know by that she meant ideologists, because an idea on paper is just that, perfectly harmless until personified.

Whatever follows the If has to involve some sort of force (as suggested by the verbs arrest, disrupt, and, more than implicitly, uproot).  Could such force, if necessary, possibly involve violence?

So to put it negatively: We cannot be in this together, unless...

But wait a minute, what is this anyway?  Human togetherness?  I hope not, or else our hope would have been built on a tautology.  Let's assume the aim of this statement is noble, and call this a vision of human flourishing.

"We cannot flourish together, unless certain elements in our culture can be eradicated, certain people eliminated, by force, possibly with violence."

It doesn't sound quite right, doesn't it, once we tried to uncover the assumptions beneath our truth claims?  Of everything wrong you can hear in this statement, most fundamentally, it flatly contradicts itself: We are NOT in this together.  Something has to be an exception to our togetherness, someone an exclusion to our collective vision.

So, Kate, what do you think we will need to rule out, who do you think we will need to cut off, for our vision of human flourishing to come to pass?  You be our queen for a day, and please make it work.

During this past year, there have been calls to "defund" the police, but also calls for them to do more, do better, and do faster.  The brazen contradictions in our vision of togetherness cannot be dismissed as merely incidental.

Our moral outrage can be easily rehabilitated to equivocate, mercurial for our own comfort and convenience, our vision of human flourishing half-baked yet also overcooked--not unlike, may I suggest, those of our fathers and mothers, who were probably not as single-mindedly evil as we made them out to be?

So, go ahead and question their visions and apologize for them too.  But do unto ourselves as we would have ourselves do unto others, and get ready to be dethroned.

Yours, Alex