The Tragedy and The Confusion: Tyre Nichols & Two Responses to Human Cruelty

The following weeks will bring numerous commentaries on the killing of Tyre Nichols. It is not my intent to address the legal fine points of this criminal act. Neither is it my aim to comment on the politics of policing, nor even on the racial aspects of the attack (although this last point is tangentially related to that which follows). My focus, instead, will be on two contrasting, philosophical responses to this terrible event. These differing responses are very telling about the bifurcated society in which we live. They exemplify two very different views of social reality. However, to demonstrate these two different anthropologies, we must do a bit of analysis.

Two Socio-Political Responses to Evil

The first response, by US Representative from New York, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, represents one view of the human condition. On her twitter feed, AOC writes:

The swift termination, arrest, and indictment of the officers involved in the Nichols incident comports with the outrageous nature of the conduct depicted in the videos released to the public. But for some, it won’t be enough that these actions met with universal outrage and both administrative and legal enforcement actions. “We need to show the world what lessons we can learn from this tragedy,” District Attorney Mulroy said during the press conference in which the charges were announced. But perhaps the lesson is simply this: policing is a human endeavor and is therefore subject to the shortcomings of the human condition, which means that some people, cops included, will sometimes act out of malevolence. For some police critics, this reality is unsatisfactory. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for example, decried via Twitter “[t]he effort to separate the officers who murdered Tyre Nichols from the system of policing that produced them.” As such, tweeted the congresswoman from New York, “Charges alone aren’t justice. Change is.”

Raphael Mangual, “Brutal But Atypical,” [emphasis added]

Conflicting Confessions

There are many ways we could frame the problem of disunity in our nation. It might be a conflict between “the religious and the non-religious,” “patriots and revolutionaries,” between “racists and anti-racists,” or those who are “pro-life” versus those who are “pro-death.” All of these may, to some degree, have greater or lesser validity. However, at the most fundamental level, there is a conflict that runs deeper than all these potential explanations for the fragmentation of our culture. This more fundamental disagreement, subsequently, affects and informs these other areas of social conflict.

The disagreement revolves around the nature and source of immorality itself. It is a deep disagreement, one that divides people along psychological lines, so much so that those who fall into one category often can barely understand, or even tolerate, those that fall into the other. For the most part, it is also the factor that divides the country into two perennially warring political parties, the Democrats on the one side, and Republicans on the other. Or, put more ideologically, liberals on one hand, conservatives on the other.

This deep conflict is best represented by two of history’s greatest thinkers: one ancient and one modern; both of whom penned famous, autobiographical works called “Confessions.” The first “Confession” was written around 397-400 AD by Aurelius Augustine, known to many today as “Saint” Augustine. Augustine describes his basic premise about human nature via a personal story, an anecdote about stealing some pears from a garden:

It is certain, O Lord, that theft is punished by your law, the law that is written in men’s hearts and cannot be erased however sinful they are. For no thief can bear that another thief should steal from him, even if he is rich and the other is driven to it by want. Yet I was willing to steal, and steal I did, although I was not compelled by any lack, unless it were the lack of a sense of justice or a distaste for what was right and a greedy love of doing wrong. For of what I stole I already had plenty, and much better at that, and I had no wish to enjoy the things I coveted by stealing, but only to enjoy the theft itself and the sin. There was a pear-tree near our vineyard, loaded with fruit that was attractive neither to look at nor to taste. Late one night a band of ruffians, myself included, went off to shake down the fruit and carry it away, for we had continued our games out of doors until well after dark, as was our pernicious habit. We took away an enormous quantity of pears, not to eat them ourselves, but simply to throw them to the pigs. Perhaps we ate some of them, but our real pleasure consisted in doing something that was forbidden.

Excerpt From Confessions, Saint Augustine & R. S. Pine-Coffin

Augustine’s Confessions is one of the most influential books of all time. In this pericope, we readily discern Augustine’s view of whence human immorality comes, it comes from within the heart of each and every person. It is even, as Augustine goes on to say, the desire of every person to be immoral. From birth, we are not only capable of breaking the moral law, we are desirous to do so.

The second confession, itself a parody of Augustine’s biography, is that of the 17th century French social philosopher, Jean-Jaques Rousseau. Rousseau’s retelling of his own childhood experience provides the antithesis of Augustine’s recounting of the theft of the pears. For Rousseau, the youthful incident didn’t involve fruit, but vegetables.

In Book I of Rousseau’s Confessions, he tells the story of a man named Verrat. Verrat, being poor, desired to steal some vegetables each morning from his mother’s garden to sell them later in the day. However, the journeyman was not very “nimble,” and, thus, incapable of carrying out the task. Not possessing the physical ability to thieve the vegetables himself, Verrat compels the young Rousseau to do it for him. He does this through flattery, of which Rousseau admits “I could never resist the attacks of flattery.” And so Rousseau begins to steal. However, unlike Augustine, his assessment of his youthful thievery is quite different:

I executed my roguery with the greatest fidelity, seeking only to please my employer;

Rousseau, Confessions, 39

Rousseau is happy to break the law, understanding it as a way to rectify a bad, material situation (the poverty of the journeyman Verrat). Rousseau eventually goes on to embrace his newfound practice:

This practice taught me it was not so terrible to to thieve as I had imagined. I took care to make this discovery turn into some account, helping myself to everything within my reach that I conceived an inclination for. I was not absolutely ill-fed at my master’s, and temperance was only painful to me by comparing it with the luxury he enjoyed.

Confessions, 39

Here are two central features of Rousseau that starkly contrast with his ancient counterpart. First, he begins to understand the act of thievery as itself not inherently wrong. The feeling of guilt associated with it, is only relative to the socially constructed morality of the culture in which he lives. Second, his inability to practice the virtue of temperance is not a problem inherent in him. His intemperance, i.e., greed, only emerges  in light of the discrepancy in material possessions that exists between him and his master.

Rousseau admits he was not “ill-fed,” meaning, he had sufficient food. But, when compared to the luxury of his master, he is pained to be temperate. His conclusion: were there no contrast between him and his master, the feeling of being intemperate would not exist. Thus, the way to prevent feeling vicious, is to eliminate any discrepancies between people or groups that might give occasion for vice.

This idea lays the foundation for the later Marx and all subsequent variations of Marxist thought. It is essentially the view that politicians like AOC express when they tweet about tragedies like that of Tyre Nichols or, more specifically, about the cause of his killing. When AOC indicates a problem with separating the individual officers from the system that produced them, she is parroting the Rousseaun view. In this case, the conflict exists not because of the inherent flaws in the hearts of those involved. The conflict between the Memphis officers and their victim exist in light of a discrepancy in power.

Rousseau’s conclusions about his thievery are, as such, diametrically opposed to Augustine’s, who reflecting on his incident of the pears says:

The evil in me was foul, but I loved it. I loved my own perdition and my own faults, not the things for which I committed wrong, but the wrong itself. My soul was vicious and broke away from your safe keeping to seek its own destruction, looking for no profit in disgrace but only for disgrace itself.

Augustine, Confessions [emphasis added]

For Augustine, and critics like Mangual, the source of social immorality is the self itself, the human nature that each individual human person shares. For Rousseau and AOC, the source of human problems is the system or network of human relations, not the people who fill those relational roles or positions. Rousseau even goes so far as to suggest that the punishment he received when caught thieving, only fueled his desire to further break the law: