I sometimes wish I could share with you the names of those this newsletter goes out to, though don’t worry, I never would. Maybe you would be surprised at the company you are keeping, and I don’t just mean that you would recognise a lot of names, but that the range of political and religious and social views represented is much broader than some presume. I have, at different times, been accused of pandering to an audience, but I have to say, knowing the diversity the email list represents, I wouldn’t know where to start if that was my aim.
I am not even sure where I sit on the political spectrum myself anymore, though if I wanted to summarise my basic position it would be something like “bottom-up democracy”. I’m interested in practical approaches that move political power away from opaque institutions, away from corporate interests and entrenched managerial classes. I want institutions that allow as much participation as possible from a broad range of ordinary citizens. We have to learn to think with our entire social brain, not just a tiny, elite corner of it.
I want solidarity, and I’ll talk about that more below.
My biases are increasingly in opposition to set doctrines or beliefs and stumble towards things like open-mindedness, decency, complication and provocation. Deliberation, at least. A recognition we are all in this together. I don’t think any of us float freely in an ether of pure thought, that we are, as Keynes suggested, “usually the slaves of some defunct economist”, maybe even of him, and I continue to lean left and atheist and rational, with an allowance for what on my grander days I would call love but that most of the time I’m happy to think of as kindness.
In early March, on the plane home from visiting our son in France, I watched, for the fourth time, I think, Dead Man Walking. We were on a Qantas Dreamliner, somewhere over North Africa, and I was scrolling through the list of available movies, trying to make my feet fit under the seat in front me, with one eye on the toilet sign on the bulkhead, willing it to go from red to white, and I found the movie in the “classics” section on the screen menu.
We’d flown into London from France late the previous evening, still sad from saying goodbye to Noah and knowing it might be another year before we saw him again, and we spent the night in the little Aerotel Hotel at Terminal Three at Heathrow in a room the size of a prison cell, barely bigger than the double bed we crashed into. We had to be up at 6:30 the next morning for the flight to Australia and it was only then, when I tried to take a shower, that we found out that there was no hot water, something a call to reception confirmed. “Sorry, the whole building is out,” an Estuary accent told Tanya indifferently. The thought of not having a shower before the sixteen-hour flight to Perth, and the further three-and-half hours to Melbourne, marginally outweighed my trepidation about stepping under the icy water.
Despite having seen the movie before, I’d forgotten about the opening music, a song called The Face of Love sung by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan & Eddie Vedder, an unexpected and inspired choice that rings out as Sister Helen Prejean, played by Susan Sarandon, drives across the Louisiana landscape. I’d forgotten that Jack Black plays Matthew Poncelet’s (the Sean Penn character’s) brother.1 And that the real Sister Helen Prejean, who wrote the book on which the movie is based, makes a cameo appearance in the scene of a candlelight vigil outside the prison where another inmate is about to be put to death. I’d forgotten Tim Robbins wrote the screenplay.
Look in the eyes
Of the face of love
In many ways, the movie is too neat, even on its own terms, and if it sometimes plays like a Flannery O’Connor short story, it lacks what AR Coultard calls the “unevenness” we find in O’Connor’s redemption stories. It’s all a bit too pretty, a by-product, no doubt, of having Hollywood stars in the lead roles. Still, at least the movie deals seriously with the universal question of how the fuck we are meant to respond to those who wrong us.
It’s hard not be preoccupied with such matters at the moment.
A couple days before we left France, I’d spent some time reading two long articles about what is happening in Gaza, one from the London Review of Books (LRB) written by Pankraj Mishra, and one by writer Sam Kriss that he published on his Substack newsletter. I then spent some more time wading through the abuse the authors received in various forums for their attempts to understand the slaughter that has been carried out after the slaughter of October 7.
This is not a season of forgiveness.
Dead Man Walking, you no doubt know, tells the (true) story of a Catholic Sister, Helen Prejean, who becomes the spiritual adviser for Matthew Poncelet, a man on death row, charged with the rape and murder of Hope Percy, and the murder of her boyfriend, Walter Delacroix. Poncelet has convinced himself of a sort of innocence of the crime, insists on blaming the murders on his accomplice, who has in turn blamed them on him in return for the reduced sentence Poncelet is also seeking. Blame chasing blame. The movie charts the efforts Prejean makes in getting Poncelet to take responsibility for his crimes, and he eventually does, as he stands strapped to the gurney in the death chamber. He apologises to the families and leaves everyone with a final thought:
“I hope my death gives you some relief. I just want to say I think killing is wrong, no matter who does it. Whether it’s me or y’all or your government.”
Prejean does not particularly like Poncelet (maybe she does); she does not forgive him for his crimes (not her job); she does not excuse him. But she does love him. She offers him love, despite all he has done. She is the moral centre of the story, wholly admirable in my estimation, but not without her faults. In trying to find the humanity in Poncelet, a full-time occupation admittedly, she overlooks the families of his victims and is finally forced into the confrontation with them that her support for their children’s killer demands of her. These parents are not just angry at her, they are disgusted, and you realise: it doesn’t matter whether Prejean can find love for the criminal Matthew Poncelet or can find a way for him to accept responsibility for his specific crimes. The real issue is whether the parents of the victims can accept his contrition, and the movie, rightly, I think, leaves that much more ambiguous.
The movie doesn’t let you forget the horror of Poncelet’s crime, or that the list of his victims extends well beyond Hope Percy, the woman he raped and murdered, and Walter Delacroix, the man he shot in the back of the head. The consequences of the terror he enacted extends not just to the families of his victims but to his own family too, and we see their suffering. It extends to society itself. The Poncelet character is presented as the racist, murdering, self-deluded creep that he is—never presented in a single dimension, but never glossed over. He isn’t allowed to hide behind any justifications for his behaviour, the poverty he was born into, the abuse he himself suffered, the lack of options available to the poor, white trash that he is. Prejean does not allow him the comfort of self-delusion and self-justification. She literally tells him there are no loopholes; she gently denies him the get-out-of-gaol-free card that God forgives and that Jesus died for his sins.
PREJAN: Have you been reading your bible?
MATT: I tried last night but reading makes me want to sleep. I’m trying to stay conscious as much as possible. Look, I appreciate all the efforts to save me but me and God have squared things away. I know Jesus died for us on the cross and will take care of me when I appear before God on judgment day.
PREJEAN: You know, Matt, Redemption isn’t just some kind of free ticket admission that you get because Jesus paid the price. You need to participate in your own redemption. You’ve got some work to do. You may want to check out some word of Jesus that might have some meaning for you; “You shall know the truth and the truth will make you free.” It’s in the Gospel of John, chapter 8.
MATT: I’ll do that. I’ll check it out. The truth will set you free. I like that. I pass that lie detector test and I’m home free.
PREJEAN: Matt, if you die, as your friend I want to help you to die with dignity and you can’t do that, the way I see it, until you own up to the part you played in Walter and Hope’s death.
Nothing that has happened to you justifies what you have done, Prejean makes clear to him, and unless you recognise that, you are condemning yourself to the hell we both believe in. She takes on the role of spiritual adviser in last few days of his life, after his final appeal for clemency is rejected, not to comfort him, or not just to comfort him, but to make him confront the reality of his crimes and take responsibility for them. Confort and responsibility are a package deal.
Poncelet lives encased in the ambient evil of his own self-righteousness. He works actively to pose the mannequin of his own morality in a shape that flatters his purposes until Prejean, over many months of bearing patient witness and loving devotion—not forgiveness nor redemption, but devotion—finally convinces him to admit his crimes to the families of his victims.
What people don't realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross.
—Flannery O’Connor
The righteous anger that drives the Percy and Delacroix families, their need for justice, even revenge, is about as human an emotion as you can get, and it is indeed righteous. But the movie also makes clear that this is precisely the thing that makes the bearers of that righteousness—those parents—the last people who should decide the punishment to be inflicted on the perpetrator, Matthew Poncelet.
And even if we accepted that they do have a right to exact justice by killing Poncelet through the agency of a state-sanctioned death penalty, I doubt any of us would accept that that right—that extraction of justice—would extend to them killing Poncelet’s family.
Right?
Society recognises all this, of course. The whole point of society is to contain—within laws and norms and moral codes and values—such righteous anger the parents experience to maintain the collective space within which human life can continue, indeed, flourish. We surrender something of our choices, our righteousness, to Leviathan in order to sidestep a life that is nasty, brutish and short. But even more so, to avoid transitioning from victim into perpetrator. We need protection from our own righteousness, and the mere existence of the death penalty—this legitimated state violence—undermines the intent of such philosophy, which is why the whole process of death row must be deeply ritualised.
Dead man walking!
Prejean’s goodness is not only revealed in the love she finds for Poncelet but the determination she exercises in opposing the death penalty in general. The death penalty short-changes us because we can’t really be sure Poncelet’s confession is sincere and not just another get-out-of-gaol-free card, another Pascal’s wager made at the moment of inevitable death. His sincerity can only be established over time, had he been allowed to live and sit with his contrition.
We’d find out soon enough.
Pankraj Mishra’s LRB essay about what is happening in Gaza is a confronting attempt to chart the space between righteous self-defence and turning into what you hate. Sam Kriss’s essay hovers in the same area, and Kriss frames it in terms of a misplaced victimhood: “The usual hope is that Israelis and Palestinians might be brought together by their shared history of oppression.… But that kind of reconciliation is simply never going to happen. A shared history of oppression means victimhood, which means the assertion of rights, which means the claim to justice, which means the innocence that excuses every crime, which means the joyous struggle for liberation, which means bravery, which means death.”
Mishra posits the Israeli state as Christian Europe’s attempt at a redemption story and his piece is an account of how deeply unsatisfactory that story is.
Most of the world doesn’t carry the burden of Christian European guilt over the Shoah, and does not regard the creation of Israel as a moral necessity to absolve the sins of 20th-century Europeans. For more than seven decades now, the argument among the ‘darker peoples’ has remained the same: why should Palestinians be dispossessed and punished for crimes in which only Europeans were complicit? And they can only recoil with disgust from the implicit claim that Israel has the right to slaughter 13,000 children not only as a matter of self-defence but because it is a state born out of the Shoah.2
I am not drawing a parallel between the movie and events in Gaza, as if there are easy lessons to learn from the morality that Prejean enacts with her response to Matthew Poncelet’s crimes and how we might resolve the historic, structural conflict between Israel and Palestine. I am not at all sure that Prejean’s approach scales, that we can ask the nation-state to manage violence in the way that we might expect individuals to. But there is something profound in the story she tells and the movie, for the most part, captures that. I think we have to reject the idea that reconciliation is impossible.
I keep coming back to this, as does Mishra:
I wasn’t naive enough to think that suffering ennobles or empowers the victims of a great atrocity to act in a morally superior way. That yesterday’s victims are very likely to become today’s victimisers is the lesson of organised violence in the former Yugoslavia, Sudan, Congo, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan and too many other places.
The state can defend itself, right? The oppressed can rise up against their oppressor, right? The Percy and Delacroix families can avail themselves of a state-sanction death penalty, right?
We all want things that are not good for us.
I am not trying to walk any lines here, to sit on any fences. What is happening in Gaza is an abomination and we need no grand theories to understand that whatever the wrongs committed by both sides over however many years that there is a huge imbalance of power in play and that the right to self-defence does not extend to annihilation. To kill zones and famine. Both sides see their cause as righteous and can argue until the end of time the regressing justifications for whatever their side is doing. So what?
IF you can sense the end of this essay coming it is because I think I have reached the limits of my powers of reasoning and kindness. You write these things out in the hope that you will find sense in the writing, that some obvious truth will emerge, rise like perfume late in the season from a carefully planted and tended field of flowers, but I am sniffing the air and all I smell is burning flesh.3
There are many critics of the protests around the world who wonder why young people are so concerned about Gaza and Palestinians and are not as voluble about other catastrophes such the fate of the Uighurs, or why they don’t take to the streets in the same numbers about war and murder in Chad or the Congo. The implication is that antisemitism is at work, and surely some of the protesters are that. But to dismiss the scale of the protests entirely, to gloss over the depth and range of concerns from people who are not so easily tarred, or to ignore the involvement of so many Jewish people themselves in their revulsion at what is happening in their name is bad faith.4
It is no accident that the conflict in Gaza attracts more attention than other conflicts, and Kriss suggests:
[The] Western left pays so much attention to struggles in Palestine, rather than, say, Tigray or Sudan [because], despite what the world’s dumbest critics keep insisting, it has nothing to do with the fact that the struggle in Palestine involves the world’s only Jewish state. It’s because unlike those other struggles, Palestine effectively functions as a proxy for domestic political antagonisms. The borders don’t line up exactly, but the bulk of the left and a growing portion of liberals support Palestine, while most conservatives incline towards Israel. Palestine is politically legible in a way that the Karen-Mon conflict in Myanmar is not.
Mishra writes:
The profound rupture we feel today between the past and the present is a rupture in the moral history of the world since the ground zero of 1945 – the history in which the Shoah has been for many years the central event and universal reference.
In the same way that Orwell once noted that you ultimately do more harm to people by calling them “huns” (or whatever racial epithet applies) than by bombing them, the keepers of the “world order” are doing more harm to the world order by failing to enforce, or even take seriously, post-World War II attempts at justice and prevention of genocide. All the get-out-of-gaol-free arguments we make to excuse ourselves from behaving towards others as we expect them to behave towards us damages any chance of lasting justice. Isn’t that what we figured out after Hitler’s war? Aren’t those the self-deceptions and rationalisations we were guarding against? We are draining institutions—the UN, the ICJ, our own parliaments and Congresses—of their ability— skimpy as it may have ever been—of stopping us, whomever we are, from turning into what we hate. Nations like the United States or even Australia who officially designate themselves friends of Israel are not doing their friend any favours by refusing to hold them to a standard they themselves helped establish. Mishra is right to call it a profound rupture.
This is all a lot take in at 30,000 feet in a crowded plane built by Boeing. I cried as we hugged our son goodbye at the airport, that moment of parting a tiny enactment of the eternal terror that haunts parents, that somehow you might never see your child again. I can barely write the sentence. It’s all I am thinking about as the movie ends. Those poor parents.
“I hope my death gives you some relief,” Poncelet says.
Are you fucking kidding?
It was thirty-seven degrees when we landed in Perth and the heat burned through the thin metal-and-glass of the air bridge that took us from the Dreamliner into the terminal. I peeled off my London layers and would’ve happily stood under a cold shower had it been available.
These protagonists, Israel and Palestine, cannot solve this alone. Global solidarity is needed, the sort we started to build after the Second World War, in the shadow of the Holocaust, in the glare of what we thought was its obvious wrongness and monstrosity but whose wrongness and monstrosity are, at this moment, incredibly, being made contingent by loopholes fashioned around who is perpetrator and who is victim.
There must be room for solidarity, for a coalition that rejects the war mongering of Netanyahu and Biden and Hamas and Iran and the broader regional players and that finds common ground in (perhaps) a bi-national state of equals. There must be solidarity; solidarity transcendent of mere identity, as something beyond the winner-takes-all mindset of might-makes-right. As the coming together of parties to a mutually held debt to future generations.5
The character of Poncelet it based on the life of Robert Lee Willie.
I am conscious I am doing their argument no favours with these extracts, so I hope you read both pieces in their entirety.
Over the last few days, I have also read Gideon Haigh’s piece about his recent trip to Israel. I was disappointed with it, in part because I am an admirer of his work and for once was left wanting. I came away with little clue as to how he processed the scale of Israel’s response to the wrong that was done to them on October 7, which to me is the thing we all have to confront. I’ve read it twice and will read it again, but to me it feels like the start of a discussion. Maybe it is. I also read this piece by Isabel Oderberg and I hope you will too.
Those who worry about the company the protesters are keeping might want to also worry about making any sort of common cause with Netanyahu and key members of his government. Prejean is the member of a church responsible for likely the most extreme example of institutionalised child abuse in human history.
This idea of solidarity comes from, amongst other discussions, a new book by Astra Taylor and Leah Hunt-Hendrix, and I will write up a review for publication here at some point.
“Transformative solidarity is both a means and an end, the process of struggling together and a way of describing a kind of society that is more just and mutualistic.”
….
“[W]e have received a gift from past generations that we owe and must pay back to those who come after us—and fulfilling this debt is a form of healing relationships and ensuring a better collective future for all.”
Hunt-Hendrix, Leah; Taylor, Astra. Solidarity: The Past, Present, and Future of a World-Changing Idea (pp. xx-xxv). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
Always look forward to your articles - they take me on a journey, make me think.
This question of love - reminds me of how we relate to 'snow' as just, well, snow but the Inuit of Canada have dozens of definitions of snow.
Love - what really is it - and how does it apply to Israel-Gaza war?
For mine - love starts with empathy and generosity - it is not about me at all - it is truly about 'wishing' the best for someone else and doing what we can to ensure it comes about. It ain't about being 'nice'. It ain't about being 'in love' - that's just an infatuation where our hormones take over and we are lost in the dreamy state of a sexual relationship.
Re Israel-Palestine conflict - it has to come down to recognition that both sides have suffered greatly, that both sides are simply humans (many holding onto very negative beliefs re the other side), and that the the abuses against each side will continue until enough people stand up and demand a stop to it. There are many that do want it to stop - I see them, on both sides - but fear and self-interest causes too many still to not have 'sufficient' love for our neighbours even though they cause us suffering. Reminds me of parents whose children are killed by dangerous drivers and those same parents come out and forgive the perpetrators. How do they do it? I know I would find it very difficult. And, yet, I would need to otherwise I would destroy my own life and many more - just as is happening in Gaza and the West Bank.
(There are very strong power plays happening with Netenyahu and the Far Right seemingly only interested in holding onto power - no matter what happens - to Palestinians or Israelis.)
For me, sometimes 'love' means to confront the people close to us to stop them from being abusive - the same goes at an international level with Israel - we are not 'friends' if we allow them to continue their genocide.
I feel too many are ignorant about love - that includes me
Very good post, Tim.