Congratulations to Odin Halvorson and to Michael Dea for their winning submissions for the second annual Alexander Phillips Arete Award.
Our theme this year is on innocence, as you’ll see from the link I posted some months back on our website. I’ll post their winning submissions shortly on the site, and also look forward to having them as guests on our podcast The Openist.
September 17, 2019 marked the 8th anniversary of my father’s tragic passing. I’ve tried more than ever to launch ‘redemptive’ projects or undertakings, in the aftermath of the sickening ugliness that unfolded in his death’s wake (and continues to unfold), that speaks to all that was good and honorable about my father. This award is one of them.
Though these two insightful winning essays are on the general theme of innocence and experience, as the award contest announcement describes, rather than the circumstances that led to the theme, these are for you, Dad. I love you.
Here they are:
Odin Halvorson
Second Annual Arete Award Winner
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Potentia Innocentiae: The Power of Innocence
It is the duty of every generation, as it ages, to bemoan the present day as “worse off than (insert idealized era here).” As creatures evolved for survival, our brains are wired to look for the potential dangers surrounding us. Sometimes, this leads us to a state of panic. We look around and see disaster everywhere. For many who recognize this psychological tendency, the first reaction is to declare as loudly as possible “it’s not as bad as all that, don’t make a mountain out of an anthill!”
And yet, we are facing a mountain. The changes faced in the modern age are only loosely, at best, analogous to those of past millennia. The threat of war experienced by our predecessors is not the threat faced today, one of looming worldwide annihilation. Concern about the role of today’s technology is not the same as Plato’s concern over the prevalence of the written word (1) (nor is even that as straightforward as some might assume). Perhaps most profoundly, those localized changes in climate faced by our ancestors are as nothing compared to the human-created (2) climate change faced by our civilization today.
Old models of human activity are failing in the face of our own inventiveness and growth. While free market idealism may have done much to elevate the underclasses of society during the early ages of expansion and then industrialization, it also promoted the mindset of exponential expansion and unlimited extraction; of aggressive competition as a positive value; of the rule of the vicious and crude over the intelligent and gentle. Now, we have an emplaced power structure which rewards the conniving and ruthless at the expense of literally everyone and everything else.
Now, surging against the impacted and ossified rules of the Old Order of “might makes right,” a massive wave of insightful thought is on the rise — worldwide. Popular focus rests, too often, on the pockets of villainy and disaster which are being uncovered and laid bare by this gathering current — but, if we stand back and concentrate, we can see the true triumph for what it is. That there is a shift occurring in the fundamental pattern of rationalization — of the way people construct logical systems of belief about their lives and the world. This change, because it is a fundamental one, is incredibly powerful despite its simplicity. It is no more than simply this: When confronted by the phrase “that’s just the way things are,” (or any of its surrogates), this new model of thinking steps in and interposes that greatest of all human inventions: the question “Why?”
In one of his novels, the great satirical writer Terry Pratchett wrote:
“Commander Vimes didn’t like the phrase ‘The innocent have nothing to fear’, believing the innocent had everything to fear, mostly from the guilty but in the longer term even more from those who say things like ‘The innocent have nothing to fear’.”
Our systems of government, our structures of economics; all our patterns that we take as “normal” are, at their heart, rationalized fictions, not universal absolutes. It is our belief in them that grants them strength, and it is this unthinking belief which grants power to the autocratic, the selfish, and those terribly afraid individuals or groups who grasp for power and control. The people who use phrases like “The innocent have nothing to fear” are, by and large, those with so much power that they, themselves, have nothing to fear (save for the fear of an uncontrolled populace). The innocent, especially when alone, are generally not strong enough to defend themselves against the unscrupulous actions of the powerful.
And yet, there is a great strength within the realm of innocence as well, a strength which tends to be overlooked and dismissed. This strength is the ability inherent in an innocent mind to overlook the invisible barriers of the world. Every parent knows the phase of their child’s life where the child begins to ask the question “why?” in relation to literally every imaginable thing. Why is the sky blue? Why do you have to go to work? Why do we wear clothes? This is a type of power that cannot easily be controlled during its infancy. Sadly, we are eventually trained out of asking this question — either by exhausted parents who proffer unsatisfying answers such as “because,” or “don’t bother me with that,” or else by the larger whole of society — a society built upon a framework of given assumptions and unspoken (or overt) penalties for those who appear naive as to the nature and operation of these assumptions. Make the wrong move, break an unspoken assumption, and face ridicule, social exile, or even socially-acceptable punitive measures.
The rising “wave” of which I spoke earlier has such vast potential for change because it upsets the assumptions supporting those corrupt or ineffectual power structures which attempt to lead us toward catastrophe. This upset, this change in the way people think, has not yet occured in totality — as of 2019 it is only just gathering potential momentum — but it does exist. And, what is more, it is not hampered by partisan ideologies in the same way purely political positions are — this “wave” rises from much deeper psychological waters than that. It is not “blue” — this shift in perspective has no “political ideology” save for that, perhaps, it is driven by a fundamental belief in the worth and rights of all creatures. It’s ideology is a holistic one: It is the ideology of a species awakening to its role in a complex ecosystem — not as governor and overlord, but as a vital part. It is an ideology of hope — hope in the best aspects of our ancestors and hope in the incredible potential of our inheritors yet waiting to be born.
It is now, more than perhaps ever before, vital that we heed the words of President Abraham Lincoln who, in 1862, delivered the State of the Union address of which this is an excerpt:
“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise — with the occasion. We cannot escape history. We will be remembered in spite of ourselves. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the last generation. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of Earth.”
As we dive headlong toward the first-quarter of this uncertain century, we too must rise. The occasion of our time is fraught with danger; though the trials ahead are visible and known, it remains uncertain if we have the Will to meet them with the care they demand. To save our Earth, we cannot indulge the tired dogmas of the past. For the hope of all the generations to come, we must have the courage and insight to stand and ask the question of innocents, the question with the power to lay bare the dusty halls of power. We must stand before the assumptions surrounding us and challenge them. We must rise and ask, with one voice, “Why is this the way things are?”
Michael Dea
Second Annual Arete Award Winner
Title: A Common Humanity
The scene unfolded faster than I could react: two women, shepherding three little girls—one a young child in one of the women’s arms, and two young girls of around four or five years old—around the city on public transit, berating the children for being children. One woman gripped the closest girl by the throat; the other four year old girl moved to stand by the driver. The hand disappeared and the victimized girl began to cry. Water pooled beneath the crying child, and the woman who had gripped the girl’s throat, swearing and berating the child further, knelt to mop up the mess. The four-year-old by the driver spoke little, but observed with the same bewilderment and shock that I was experiencing at having seen something like this play out in public. She looked at me twice through the altercation, and twice I caught her eye.
After they got off the bus, guilt overwhelmed me; I had frozen in the course of an assault, and what was obviously a case where the children were terrified of the older woman. A little girl had looked at me, presumably recognized that I understood what was happening, and had seen that no assistance came for them from the passengers that had seen the behavior of these women who could have been relatives, family friends, or some other relation—or, in the darker parts of my imagination, no relation at all—but had done nothing.
There are plenty of excuses for me to have done nothing, and the two that loom largest are the legal and psychological excuses for inaction.
Psychologically, everyone is subject to The Bystander Effect. The strictest definition of the effect is that individuals in crowds diffuse responsibility to act in emergency situations because they assume that it is another person’s job to step in, or that someone will step in before the individual has an opportunity. This definition, though, often gets augmented in my memory by a social psychology lecture I remember listening to, where the bystander effect isn’t just brought about by a diffusion of responsibility to act in an emergency, but a diffusion of responsibility to determine what a threat might be.
The Bystander Effect often gets illustrated with the story of the Kitty Genovese murder, which took place in 1964 in New York City. The case involved a young woman who was murdered on the steps of a crowded apartment building, whose attacker came once, left, and then returned to attack Genovese a second time. All the while, Genovese was calling for help, and yet no one called the police. I remember sitting in the lecture and part of the discussion was one about whose job it was to call the police, but it was also a question of not being sure what was happening; in New York City, Genovese could have been an actress, they could have been practicing a scene, and it was already dark out, so there was no way of knowing whether she was actually harmed, and so everyone in the apartment building was depending on everyone else to signal that the danger was real, that they were, in fact, witnessing an emergency.
People don’t act in an emergency not out of a calloused indifference to the plight of an individual, but because they don’t want to be wrong, and that is especially true when taking into account the legal ramifications of intervention. I do not have a strong understanding of the legal codes governing the situation, but I do know that few legal codes would have condoned intervention. It was a question for the Department of Human Services to handle, or else the job of a therapist those girls might see later.
It is easy, all too easy, to depend on these arguments to pardon my lack of intervention, to throw my hands up and say that nothing can be done to fix their situation or situations like theirs, and to let innocence die. I could pardon the women for whatever hardships in their life led them to see their actions as the ideal course to take, as normal and ok, even if it destroyed the innocence of two little girls, and will destroy that of a third; I could accept that human psychology and society’s legal codes have developed in such a way as to optimally protect those who are most at risk in society, and consequently absolve myself of the need to act in the course of such situations.
Issuing a pardon fails to improve the world, however; the innocence of those girls is not unique, as each person is born free from the hardships and traumas that eventually enable behaviors of questionable ethics. It is true that I failed to act, to intervene on their behalf and delay the day when they realize how alone they are in the world, but this truth offers other ways to make amends both to them and others who face similar situations each and every day.
Assuming for a moment that I was observing a familial interaction, a conclusion that could be drawn is that the assailing woman took an action she believed was acceptable. It is tempting to shun this abusive mother, but she could have taken this action as a result of enduring varied and compounded hardships that have shown the dark side of modern society where horrors far stranger than the human imagination can furnish happen every day. This would make her assault of her daughter mild by comparison, and sets the stage for attempting to understand where the mother is coming from.
However, the victimized girl paid a price for her mother’s ignorance; her ability to believe the world is a good and wholesome place the way children do has been damaged because of the mother’s actions. The loss of this kind of innocence is an attack that requires accountability, and this means her assailant needs to be held to account; simultaneously, it raises the question of what can be done to protect children like her?
The assailant lost her innocent view of the world as benevolent and wholesome, filled with people that will help her, making the problem one of how to protect individual innocence against the wear of age, but this is an impossible task, as every successful defense of a level of innocence lowers the criterion for which it is lost. This means that, at one point or another, everyone will lose their innocence.
We lose our innocence when we recognize how alone we are in the world, and create our own protector. The children we begin as don’t believe that connecting with others may lead to pain; I have known children to come to people they know and strangers alike with a smile and a laugh, but adults behave differently. Adults didn’t intervene on that bus because there was a protector in each of them, that protected their internal child from doing something that could have led to protecting those girls in the moment, assuming an optimal outcome, or to legal battles, economic penalties, and any number of untold costs, if the situation was being misread.
To combat these moments when we are faced with someone like the assailant I saw, therefore, begins with a recognition of the child she was before the world had disappointed her. This establishes first the core humanity of the person, and then proceeds to illustrate that her inner child doesn’t know how to communicate her needs to the outside world effectively, due to extended isolation by the protective part of her psyche. Like a child, she still must be held accountable for the actions that she perpetrated, but rather than allowing society to go uninhibited in its production of such people and even throwing away such individuals who may be hurting, systemic changes must be made.
She should not be allowed near that victimized girl, nor around the four year old who waited by the driver and shared two looks with me while the altercation was unfolding; while the assailant is entitled to exist, her existence cannot be allowed to injure the rights of others, including the right the victimized girl had to feel safe. But in the interim, we as a society should open forums specifically designed to hold conversations enabling us to be vulnerable, in order to foster a community where we do not feel the need to protect our inner child from harm; we must invest in the education of everyone of every age in subjects like literature and other humanities that may not provide a quantifiable gain, but protect against the inability to communicate fear that leads to so many hateful things in this world.
We need the reminders of our humanity ever-present in society, so those girls don’t just have the fear and guilt in my eyes to connect with.