On the Fear of Becoming a Monster

As a kid, I loved monster movies (think Godzilla) and old-time horror (think Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee). They didn't scare me. 

But then I watched The Exorcist. I was terrified. My sleep was disturbed for weeks. Being a kid, I wasn't identifying with the would-be exorcists or the other adults confronting this terrifying child. I was identifying with the Linda Blair character--a child possessed by evil. What terrified me was the prospect of being possessed or taken over by evil. 

The next movie that I remember really scaring me was An American Werewolf in London. I saw it as a teenager, and I identified with the young American who became a werewolf and thus became a deadly threat to innocents, including friends. My sleep was disturbed for weeks. In my dreams, I'd look in the mirror and see my face begin to change, fangs forming even as I lost control of my own body and actions. 

The prospect of being attacked by a monster never scared me as much as the prospect of becoming a monster. 

This fear probably played a bigger role than I generally credit in shaping my life's trajectory. It helps explain why I gravitated towards pacifism as a young man, why I studied ethics in college and wrote a dissertation on Christian love and violence. 

These days, my sleep is disturbed in the same way it was after watching The Exorcist and An American Werewolf in London as a child. It is disturbed because I have been reading the news, and because I identify with my country. 

While it has always been imperfect, as every country is imperfect, I love my country and have always believed it to be on a trajectory towards moral improvement--sometimes an erratic trajectory, often not enough, but a trajectory nonetheless, one shaped by a deep desire at the heart of the American public to be and do good. 

A conscience. And because of guarantees of freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and freedom of the press, not just a conscience but a will and capacity to give voice to that conscience and hold the nation and its leaders accountable to it. 

What scared me as a child was the idea of a child who could be taken over by a demon in such a way that even a deep desire to be good would become irrelevant, utterly impotent, until it was finally stamped out altogether by the demon inside. I had to convince myself that reality doesn't work that way, that demons can't wholly possess us so long as we cling to the deep desire to be good. I was finally able to sleep again when I could tell myself with confidence that my conscience and my will were mine, and no monster could simply usurp them. 

The same happened after watching An American Werewolf in London. I had to work to convince myself that monsters like this--with the power to turn me into a monster with just a bite, overriding and rendering impotent my moral compass--weren't real. 

Now I'm facing the same crisis of fear by reading the news. You can probably guess the news items that stoke my fear, but here is a partial list: 

My country, in a gleeful rush to deport Venezuelan gangsters, suspends due process and ends up deporting innocent refugees and asylum seekers (along with some real gangsters, I'm sure) to an El Salvadoran prison notorious for its abusiveness and from which it seems there is neither rescue nor escape. 

The federal government builds a holding center for detained immigrants in the Florida everglades that it gleefully nicknames "Alligator Alcatraz," a place built in mere days that appears to be a bunch of cages enclosed in prefab structures--the kind of facility that cannot possibly meet the sanitation and climate control standards required for detaining large numbers of people in ways that don't jeopardize their health.

Meanwhile, Stephen Miller is furiously demanding that the number of immigrants detained and deported ramp up to unprecedented levels, pressuring ICE to meet quotas that drive them to sweep up the low-hanging fruit--that is, those most easily detained rather than the criminals who pose a threat to our communities. Among theM:

*The wife of a US Marine, still nursing their youngest child, her green card application denied because of her estranged mother's legal status issues. 

*An 18-year-old high school kid who has grown up in the US, taken into custody while driving his teammates to volleyball practice. 

*A young man who came to the US at 16, has been in the asylum process for years, and in the course of making a life in the US actually became involved in conservative politics and was an advisor to Oklahoma Governor Kevil Stitt. 

*A young college honors student engaged to be married, with no criminal record and actively working through the process of acquiring permanent residency--ripped from her fiancé and her classmates.

And of course there are all those asylum seekers who are so law-abiding they show up for their regularly scheduled immigration appointments, as they always have, only to be met there by ICE agents, handcuffed or zip-tied, and ferried away to an unsanitary cell or cage far from everyone they love.

And in the mad rush to detain as many people as possible, without regard for the harm caused to human lives and families and the American communities being targeted, American citizens are being swept up and detained as well--their lives disrupted, them and their loved ones traumatized, because they fit the wrong racial profile.

Meanwhile, there are the systematic efforts to find legal ways to suppress free expression, especially views and ideas that clash with the ideology or the egos of those in power--by threatening to withhold funding from universities touting ideas the administration doesn't like; by prohibiting use of "diversity, equity, and inclusion" language by all federal employees and agencies; and especially by abducting, terrorizing, and deporting foreign students here on student visas whose only offense was that they participated in nonviolent protests of what they took to be injustice or wrote the wrong op-ed for the school newspaper (thinking, perhaps foolishly, that the country that touted liberty for all and guaranteed freedom of assembly and freedom of expression for its citizens would include them in the scope of those guarantees.) 

I fear that these legal avenues for suppressing speech aim to normalize the practice, easing us--like the frogs in a pot of slowly heating water--into tolerance of more widespread suppression to come. 

This is not news about some other country. It is news about my country. The country I love and identify with. And so, I am once again that child watching The Exorcist, terrified of being turned into a monster by some demon who invades my flesh and has the power to shut down my conscience and my capacity to say no. 

And I am struggling now, as I was then, to affirm that such monsters are not real. There may be monsters out there that can hurt or kill me. Monsters like Godzilla are surely real. But there are no demons or werewolves who, with a spiritual or physical bite, can shut down my conscience and turn me into a monster against my will. And I must believe, in this moment, that this is not just true of me alone but also true of US together.

Things I Believe that Bear on this Political Moment

I believe in human decency. 

I believe that there is a moral obligation to be decent to other human beings, even when there is no legal one. And I believe this obligation falls with special weight on those in power. Those who have the power to make the lives of others miserable...or not...face an especially weighty moral responsibility to embody basic human decency as they exercise that power. 

This moral obligation extends even to people who can do nothing for them: people who can't vote for them or won't vote for them, for example. It extends, for example, to immigrants, even to those who do not have proper visa or residency status, and to people who in other ways violate our laws. 

We can uphold our laws without being indecent. And we should uphold our laws without being indecent. 

If elected officials and their agents, tasked with upholding the laws of the land, can do so in ways that show human decency and in ways that don't, they ought to choose the former even if the latter is not illegal. And if they choose the latter, we should call them out for their indecency and insist they do better.

If they refuse, remember: they are our employees. As citizens and voters, we have both the right and the obligation to fire them. 

I believe in due process and our legal system's presumption of innocence. 

Every fair system of justice aims to prevent the wrongful conviction of the innocent even as it aims to apprehend and convict the guilty. Due process, in which an impartial system weighs evidence of guilt, is essential for achieving these aims. 

The presumption of innocence--and the related requirement to establish guilt beyond a reasonable doubt--exists in part because we view the wrongful conviction of the innocent as a graver error than inadvertently acquitting the guilty.

But there is another reason for this presumption: it constrains would-be abusers of political power. It is a bedrock feature of a free society, because it prevents those in power from using the justice system as a tool to terrorize and punish political critics and opponents.

This is why we should always be on guard against efforts by those in power to circumvent due process. Leaders who look for and try to exploit loopholes in due process requirements may be motivated by a sincere desire to efficiently protect the public. And the loopholes they claim to have found may be real and mean that their actions don't technically violate any law. 

But even when we think this is true we ought to regard such moves with suspicion, and we should look with scepticism at the purported loophole. If we don't, then at best we set a dangerous precedent, and at worst we facilitate the efforts of would-be tyrants.

A variant on the due process norms that guide criminal justice should be in play when it comes to deporting noncitizens. It is true that those who are in this country illegally do not have the same due process rights as citizens and legal residents, especially when it comes to removal from the country. And even for legal nonresidents, deportation to their country of origin does not require the same level of due process protection as is required for criminal punishment. This makes some sense, since being returned to one's country of origin is usually (but not always) a less costly burden for an innocent person to bear than is criminal punishment.

But even with the deportation of nonresidents, whether here legally or not, any effort to bypass due process altogether is something we should be deeply wary of. Partly this is for their sakes: we shouldn't needlessly disrupt the lives and activities of those who are here legally and doing nothing wrong. 

But at least as important is the following fact: due process is how we make sure that those being deported are not citizens or permanent legal residents who have been misidentified.

Due process is how we make sure that American citizens and legal residents aren't deported to an entirely alien place with no family or friends and nothing but the clothes on their backs (or worse, to some foreign prison)--either because of some tragic mistake or because of someone's misuse of power.

I believe in empathy.

By this I mean the practice of putting oneself in the position of others, to imagine what it feels like to be them. 

Humans beings are limited creatures and we get things wrong, so we often fail to accurately imagine what another's situation is like. But if we consistently strive to listen to others with compassionate attention, we can get better at it.

More seriously, we are often limited in the scope of our empathy: it extends to some people but not others. We empathize spontaneously with people who are "like us" but fail to empathize with those who are different. We empathize with "us" but not "them."

This is not a reason to be suspicious of empathy but to be suspicious of its selective, tribal application. It is a reason to call for more empathy rather than less, a reason to practice empathy in contexts of diversity, a reason to aspire to cultivate our capacity for and disposition towards empathy such that it is stronger than our tribalism.

I believe in freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. 

Our nation's founders wrote protection of both into our constitution, in the very first amendment of the Bill of Rights, because they are foundational for a free society. 

The right to free speech does not mean that everyone has the duty to offer their platform or their microphone. Part of free speech is the right to decide what to do with your platform and your microphone--who to lend it to, and who not to lend it to.

So what does it mean? Above all, it means the government should not prohibit or punish mere speech, even speech that is deeply unpopular, and should not prohibit nonviolent assembly, even when it involves unpopular messages.

A nation that cares about free speech does not seek to dole out as little of it as possible or look for legal loopholes that can be exploited to create fear of speaking honestly about what we think. It does not target those who can be legally targeted for their speech (such as by using political expression as a basis for granting, withholding, or revoking the visas of foreign nationals) in order to create fear, fear that if we express opinions unpopular among those in power then they may find a way to target us, too.

I believe in the rule of law. 

The rule of law contrasts most clearly with the rule of an autocrat. Under the rule of an autocrat, the "law" is identical to the will of an individual. That person's will might follow an inner moral compass and so have a law-like character, but there is no guarantee of this. Instead, the autocrat might make decisions based on whim or self interest.

Under the rule of law, there is a clear public code, and all people in society can count on being treated in accordance with this code, whatever the whims or interests of those in power might be. 

No one is above the law, no matter how rich or powerful. 

And no member of society is excluded from the protections of the law.

The rule of law affirms equality under the law.

Under the rule of law, laws might change, but they do so in accord with a public deliberative process designed to preserve stability and predictability. People can *count* on the law. People should not be afraid that their law-abiding behavior today will be retroactively declared illegal, or that legal agreements they base decisions on will suddenly be dissolved.

Under the rule of law, no one who abides by the law is arbitrarily stripped of rights or liberties available to others; and anyone accused of violating the law is given due process in the form of fair trials based on evidence.

This is not an exhaustive account of what the rule of law means, but it offers some highlights.

Every society has fallen short in one way or another of fully living up to these ideals. But I believe the justice of a society is a function of how much it strives to live up to these ideals, and how well it success in doing so.