security is not a Christian concept
Occupational hazards and guns as communications technology
“Our whole modern economy is based on preparation for war and that is one of the great modern arguments for poverty.” — Dorothy Day, The Catholic Worker April 1952.
Last week, outside the wall outside the compound of the White Fathers—which includes the crusader church of St. Anne and the archeological excavations of the Pools of Bethsaida—just south of Lion’s Gate, I noticed a plaque that commemorated Eyad Al-Hallaq. Al-Hallaq was an autistic 32-year-old Palestinian man who was shot by Israeli police on his way to school, on May 30, 2020.
May 30, 2020 is five days after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. On another wall, on the way into Bethlehem, that coincidence is made into a connection.
In Jerusalem, as in the United States, there’s a lot of reading about and witnessing and reckoning with violence. There’s also an interesting phrase invoked in both places “security.”
To be secure is a core desire of a human being, to exist in relationships of mutual trust. That much is certainly true.
Abe Greenwald, author at Commentary, wrote a long—well, commentary—on the breakdown of social trust. Greenwald wrote about a string of shootings in April that were prompted by the extremely young victim approaching the wrong house, car, or driveway, and being shot. He describes the shooting as a replacement for what should and does happen in most of these situations: “No worries, have a good one.”
…It would be wrong to claim that the six-day period of April 13–18, 2023 is perfectly representative of present-day America. But you can’t say that the bloodshed of that week doesn’t tell us something dreadful about the age we live in.
On April 13, 16-year-old Ralph Yarl was sent to pick up his twin brothers at a home in Kansas City, Missouri. He mistakenly rang the bell of the wrong house and was shot twice through the glass front door.
On April 15, 20-year-old Kaylin Gillis was in a car with her friends, looking for another friend’s home in upstate New York. They pulled into the wrong driveway and were in the process of pulling back out when Gillis was shot and killed by the house’s resident.
And on April 18, 21-year-old Heather Roth mistakenly got into a car she thought was hers in a supermarket parking lot in Elgin, Texas. A man was already sitting in the passenger seat, so Roth soon realized her mistake, exited the vehicle, and got inside a friend’s car. The man whose car she had initially entered came over and opened fire, wounding Roth and nearly killing her friend, 18-year-old Payton Washington…
Abe Greenwald and I have some major disagreements (including on what social institutions are truly trustworthy), but I agree with him that erosion of trust is a fundamental social concern. What I also find telling about his particular analysis is that he makes the gun a linguistic replacement for words. A phrase— “oh no worries, have a nice day”—that both reflects a social fabric of trust and weaves one.
Marshall McLuhan, the Canadian English professor who became the unofficial patron saint of communications theory in the late twentieth century, wrote, in his book Understanding Media: the Extensions of Man, that the myth of Narcissus is fundamentally about the human fascination with “any extension of themselves in any material other than themselves.”
He goes on to define an invention as an extension of a human organ—that is, a wheel as the extension of the power of a foot, or a telephone as an amplification of the power of a voice—and, by increasing the power of that human activity the invention also numbs that quality in ourselves.
For example, because wheels have created a more mobile world, people in car-dependent countries are, ironically, less likely to walk, because mobility has accelerated to the point that we depend upon the wheel and not the foot. Plus (McLuhan doesn’t really get into this in this chapter), inventions bear fruit in infrastructure. The world becomes molded around the invention, and now our traveling infrastructure is catered to the wheel—the car—making travel by the faster medium more expedient—and even more possible, in some places—than walking on foot.
McLuhan continues:
To behold, use or perceive any extension of ourselves in technological form is necessarily to embrace it.
In this embrace of technology, McLuhan says, human beings relate to the tool they made as “servo-mechanisms.” We are the technology’s servant and the mechanism through which it wields its power. If we are to use inventions, McLuhan says, we put ourselves at the use of them and the human potential they embody—dis-located from the body, isolated, intensified and extended out into the world.
As the iPhone records, takes photos, holds our correspondence, and captures our digital lives, it holds all the memories we no longer have to retain, outsourcing the task of memory to our “memory aids.” The technological device that is supposed to aid and support—strengthen—our human faculty causes what McLuhan calls the “auto-amputation” of that faculty. In simple talk: if we have a device that is supposed to help us do something better, the device ends up doing that thing for us. I no longer have to remember, because my phone remembers for me.
Guns, in this sense, are a ubiquitous piece of communications technology in our society that “do our talking for us.” There are more guns than people in the United States—almost 450 million guns, as of 2020—and they are loquacious. Nearly 50,000 Americans died of gun-related injuries in 2021—more than died in car crashes. Over half (54%) of those gun-related deaths were suicides.
So we may be servants to our machines, but our machines do not love us back.
Human beings have a finely-honed ability to avoid or eliminate threats. Our nervous system has developed this over millennia, perfecting our flight or fight response. A gun is a tool designed to amplify that power of a human being—to ward off or eliminate a threat. Advocates of gun control don’t crow about their desire to maim, kill, and destroy, but instead insist on their sacred right of “self-defense.” Self-defense is the top reason Americans purchase handguns, according to several surveys. Guns, then, are primarily an intensification of that defensive flight or fight response.
Here’s the rub, in response to that tool that now extends and amplifies that human faculty of flight or fight we numb or “auto-amputate” the power within us. We “outsource” to the gun our ability to distinguish if something that disturbs, disgusts, enrages, surprises, or frightens us is, in fact, a threat in need of eluding or eliminating. The problem is that guns narrow the definition of “elimination” to mean annihilation. Guns do only one thing well: destroy. And thus, they have set the linguistic tone for our cultural response to what is foreign, strange, uncomfortable or disturbing: destroy. Studies prompted by the surge of gun sales and gun deaths during 2020 and 2021 show that buyers of guns are more likely to see the world as dangerous and view others as untrustworthy.
Police officers are trained to “shoot first and ask questions later”—a ‘flight or fight’ form of communication that both arises from a social breakdown of trust and catalyzes that breakdown. One wonders, as we have created weapons that are ever more powerful extensions of our ability to wound and destroy ourselves and others, how we create a vocabulary of peace in their presence. How is it possible to create a society that talks in the language of trust, of mutual respect, of care, when we are shouted down by linguistic agents of distrust, destruction and death?
“Guns don’t talk, Renée,” you protest, rolling your eyes while reading this. But the gift of McLuhan’s theory of communication is that it recognizes—like most of us—that everything talks. Communication is not just the words written on the page (the medium is the message) or words we share with others. The aphorism “Speak softly and carry a big stick,” is under no illusions who is doing the more powerful communicating in that situation.
Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, in I and Thou, writes:
“The primary word I-Thou can be spoken only with the whole being…”I become through my relation to the Thou; as I become I, I say Thou. All real living is meeting.”
What Buber means is that to be a person in our own right means meeting other souls as Thou, as subjects and persons in their own right. We meet them in their distinctness from and also kinship with our own selves. The opposite of seeing a person as a thou is seeing them as an “it.” To “objectify” them, to see them as data to be manipulated rather than as someone constitutive of our own ability to be ourselves. Meaning, we cannot be ourselves without the other.
Guns are a two-sided weapon. On one side is a subject and on the other side is an “it.” But seeing others as “it” diminishes our own ability to see ourselves as anything other than an object.
Rona Segal’s documentary “Mission: Hebron” features six IDF veterans, who have also shared their testimonies with Breaking the Silence, an organization dedicated to gathering the testimony of IDF soldiers, exposing the reality of the brutality of the IDF’s daily interactions with Palestinians, and ending the occupation.
The young soldiers’ “mission” in Hebron is really a mission of communication. They are tasked with communicating through checkpoints, containment, entering private homes and stop-and-searches a “sense of persecution,” one soldier put it. They are meant to communicate to the native Palestinians living in Hebron the power they have over them. The soldiers have the right to enter the Palestinian family’s home, they have the right to force the young men to spread their legs, put their hands above them on the wall in the middle of a public street, and pat them down. I saw one like this last week on the plaza in the middle of the Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem’s old city. The soldiers have the right to stop any car they feel like, they have the right to detain them. A young man said an Israeli settler would offer a coupon to a pizza place for every Palestinian shot.
One of the IDF soldiers in “Mission: Hebron” describes stopping a car late at night driven by a young Palestinian woman from America who was visiting her cousins. She was terrified, he said. He had gone to high school in the United States, and he said to her, in English, not to worry, that this was just a routine check. She was going to be okay.
“If every Palestinian had an American accent, I don’t think I could have done what I did,” said the soldier.
One soldier says he arrested a boy ten years of age. Segal’s film shows boys being blindfolded, handcuffed, and dragged away by their ears or with an elbow locked around their neck. Another describes hearing a baby cry as glass from bottles was shattering through the windows of the child’s house.
“If my mother knew what I did, she’d slap me,” says one soldier.
On the comments for Rona Segal’s documentary, there are plenty of debates over the ideas of racism, apartheid, war crimes, there is pushback on the truth of the documentary. Concerns for state security are frequently invoked in defense of violent tactics, rather than the dehumanization of our neighbor. “Security” is the West’s new favorite word. It has replaced all the notions of the universal rights of the human person, brotherhood, the enlightenment principles, which, whatever you think of them, sprung from Christianity.
Security is a post-Christian concept, it is the fundamental concern of a soulless capitalism—all human rights or concerns about human dignity, what it means to be human, can be suspended for the “security of the state.”
To make a living—to have a household or an economy—that lives by the sword, that is, that runs to the tune of the $2 trillion that is the U.S. Department of Defense’s budget, that profits of the sweat of the brow of fathers and mothers fighting to feed their families in poverty, that exploits, that puts its faith in the security of the sword is, Christ says, to die by the sword. Tools like swords and guns are double-edged—they cannot destroy others without destroying those who wield them. We read this lesson in fairy tales, or in the myth of Narcissus but have not learned to value our own souls as much as our stock portfolios. What does it profit a man to defend himself against all possible threats and lose his soul?