I want to talk about this clip. This is a very confrontational statement for Jordan to make. I know he’s famous for being confrontational, but generally he’s takes a more clinical approach, the approach of a therapist; listening and sympathizing, but ready to question and challenge.
This statement is a refusal, an indictment, a declaration, a warning. He’s not trying to cross barriers; he’s drawing lines. Which means that he’s decided that the situation merits and demands this sort of reaction. That partisan encroachment and escalation and armament have gone far enough to demand such a shift in approach.
And that’s not great. Fighting and confrontation is costly. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t sometimes necessary, but it’s very costly. And it changes us and changes our tactics in ways that present an immediate danger to ourselves and to others. We make ourselves and our actions more dangerous, presumably because we must, because there is a justifiable danger to be confronted that cannot easily be defused by less confrontational means. Violence isn’t only an evil, it is also a limit on evil. It draws a definitive line across a projected future and says, I won’t let it happen, and I’ll fight for it if necessary.
This development doesn’t please me. The disagreeable side of me that sees the need to confront immanent danger may be pleased, but the more agreeable side that wishes to preserve what we have and move it all in a better direction together knows what drawing such lines means. A war can be just, but is no less terrible for all that. And both to desire and embrace war and to hate and refuse it are dangerous commitments.
In this kind of struggle, the real battle will be to divide identity from identification. The great wisdom of America in the Civil War and in World War II was the decision to be as committed to fighting the battles that had to be fought as we were to caring for and restoring the very people that we were fighting against. Without giving us too much credit; to seek to do this at all is such a rare decision that even if our efforts were limited and imperfect, they were nevertheless exceptional.
We ultimately didn’t destroy the South or the Germans or the Japanese. We made them our friends, or at least tried to, with some success. We did it because we seperated their identity from their identification. The people of the South were our brothers and sisters, fellow Americans. They weren’t defined at an ultimate level by their identification with the Confederacy or the things that it stood for, any more than the Germans or Japanese had for all time and completely to be defined by their identification with the Nazi party or Imperial Japan. When the battles had to be fought, we fought them, and we fought our enemies. But when the battles were won and decided, we made the restoration of our enemies to their proper place beside us one of our key priorities. We didn’t give in to vengeance and perpetual retribution. We pursued reconciliation.
This is the wisdom of seperating the sin from the sinner. We struggle against the sin, we seek to save the sinner. Why? Because we are sinners ourselves. We seek to be reconciled because we are, at heart, the same, subject to the same weaknesses and mistakes. We have the same potential for good and evil. And the mistake of identifying ourselves with goodness just because we fight against dangerous evils or pursue good by some happy accident, is just as toxic and hazardous to our souls as confusing our enemies with their mistakes.
Correction often spills over into pathology when we forget that our goal is to clear the disease from the patient, not cleanse the patient themselves with our treatment. That isn’t medicine, it’s culling. But it isn’t people that need culling in our society, it is harmful and pathological ideologies. It is not against flesh and blood that we fight, but against the powers and principalities.
But the only possible way to do that is if you are able to seperate identity from identification. If you are able to draw some line between what people think or do and who they are in their deepest essence. Identity politics is so dangerous in large part because it makes such seperation impossible. It leaves us no options but the struggle of life against life, because we are, in our inmost being, identical with our politics and race and sexuality.
The great temptation in this struggle will be the same as what we faced in our previous conflicts. The temptation to use the same weapons and methods as our enemy, because we have misidentified the true enemy. Japan and Germany and the Soviet Union had no plans to make friends or equal companions of their enemies. And they didn’t hold back. They saw no division between sinner and sin. It seems to be to our disadvantage to hold back and not use the same methods, and it is a very costly and risky prospect to propose to care for and rebuild people who had been our enemies. But America did it in the past. We paid the price. And it was a good call. We were stronger, not weaker, because of it.
We will be tempted in this conflict to forget to seperate sinner from sin, identity from identification. We will be tempted to identify goodness with ourselves and evil with our opponents, instead of recognizing our own proclivity for evil and our opponents’ potential for good, and fail to fight the true enemy. We will be tempted to use the same tactics and weapons and words as our opponents, the same ruthless and shallow identitarian psychological tactics.
We will be tempted to see the world through the same lens as our foes and enter into a conflict of us against them and wage a war of flesh against flesh, when the real battle is with the powers and principalities and ideologies that endanger us all and that all of us are prone to collapse our beliefs into. We will be tempted to give up the very things that make our position worth defending. We will be tempted to commit the very errors that we are attempting to correct in our opponents. And we will risk losing what is worth saving in our opponent’s perspective what needs to be preserved and treasured, not only for their sake, but to save us from our own proclivity for pathology.
I understand the need to make this kind of call to arms, and I agree that the need is there. DIE is becoming more and more visible and more and more entrenched in parts of our lives that can’t be avoided. It has to be dealt with openly and opposed openly, and that will carry a cost, not least of which is being cut off from the goodwill of those who support it. Among which there are many manipulative and resentful and deluded people, but also many manipulated, coerced, mistaken, well-meaning, and deceived people. We aren’t out to stop them, we’re out to help them, and to stop what DIE would do with and to them. We are in this to save all of us, because we are all the same and all at risk and all in need of protection.
We love the sinner because we are all sinners. We show mercy because we were shown mercy. We confront and dispel lies because we were confronted and freed.
Making Nobody Happy 