It doesn't have to be Joan of Arc

Grade Solomon

I.

In order to be a saint in the Catholic Church, it says on their website, you need to be dead, have been good, and done a few miracles. How to be a villain? Less clear. I've never met anybody who defined themself as the sworn enemy of all that they believe is good. There are people who define themselves in opposition to other people's conceptions of goodness, but that's different. There are narcissists everywhere, and psychopaths here and there, but that's also different. Most of the evil we witness and receive (and inflict on others) cannot be attributed to malicious intent, let alone to malicious nature. People generally believe that they're being good, reasonable, holding the door, pouring half-cup servings of whole wheat cereal into small Ziploc bags for the kids… 

But perhaps I'm ignoring the big fish, the real evildoers. The Nazis. Perhaps you have seen those photographs of Auschwitz officers on vacation. Mass murderers petting dogs, applying sunscreen, adjusting their hair before smiling for the camera. They're a little embarrassed, but not because of the murders – in those photos, they're embarrassed because sometimes it's a little embarrassing to have your photo taken. You know the feeling. It's absurd. My point is not that you are a Nazi. It's that even Nazis don't think of themselves as Nazis. This is Arendt's thesis: that Adolf Eichmann was not a sadistic mastermind but rather a normal bureaucrat who listened to his boss, wanted to do well at his job, and didn't trouble himself to think too hard about the moral consequences of his actions. "Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all… ", she writes of the man responsible for facilitating and managing the deportation of millions of Jews to ghettos and concentration camps. Is she correct? 

In his memoir "I Will Bear Witness", Victor Klemperer describes being stripped from his office, his job, and his home because he is a Jew living in Nazi Germany. Who takes his home? His apologetic neighbors. They don't hate him, they don't consider themselves hateful, they consider themselves decent. But they have a repulsively intimate relationship with destruction, and they profit off of Klemperer's loss, and of the loss of an entire people, in unspeakable ways. Did they not know? They knew. And certainly in 2024 nobody can say that they didn't know: in news reportage and social media content, in Ukraine, Gaza, Sudan, and too many other places to bear, images of suffering and death are produced and reproduced endlessly. "We lived happily during the war," writes Ilya Kaminsky, "I took out a chair and watched the sun." So it's not only hate and anger that causes suffering, it can also be laziness and self-interest and passivity, the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real and vivid as you. Then in the interest of inspiring empathy we are asked this question as children, and we in turn ask it to our children – "would you have hidden a Jew?". There are a thousand variations – "would you have supported integration in the 1960s?" – "would you protect a woman whose drink was drugged?" – "what would you do if your classmate was being bullied?". But these questions have as little to do with empathy as masturbation has to do with sex. What they reveal is not selflessness but rather an obsession with the self as the universe's only subject. And here we see how repression always leaves behind a trace of what's been repressed – how else can you explain the question "would you have hidden a Jew?" if not for the implicit assumption that you yourself would not need to be hidden? Why do you assume that someone else would be "the Jew" in this situation? That it would not be you? What part of you is so deeply Anti-Semitic that it cannot allow itself to imagine the possibility? 

A different, but related question, which we are also asked as children, which we in turn ask our children, is: "What would you do if you were President?" And both children and adults (adults!) answer reliably: "If I were President, I would do good. In fact I would do a much better job than [any name here]. I would be a just and merciful leader, [insert international policy position], and the eggs would be cheap." BZZZZRT! WRONG. You showed your hand the second you said "I would be good" .. in some other lifetime. Lucky for you, you have the opportunity to be good and fair today, in this lifetime. It's called your life. But that's not what you want.

II.

Do you know how solitary confinement began? The practice of isolating people in closed cells, 6 by 9 feet, smaller than a horse stable, for 23-24 hours a day, barred from human contact, for days to decades? The practice which the United States' own State Department has denounced as a human rights abuse? Which the United Nations defines as torture? Do you know whose idea it was? It was the Quakers. The pacifist Quakers. Who opposed capital punishment and slavery, who tithed 10% to the poor, who abstained from drink and drugs, who testified simplicity, peace, integrity, community, and equality, and stewardship, who went and built the first solitary prison in America. By now that experiment has clearly come to ruin. Back then, solitary confinement was thought to be a more humane alternative to the injury and humiliation of the stocks, the gallows, the pillory, the whipping-post. But from the very beginning the Quakers noticed "symptoms of insanity" emergent among their inmates. 

In the movie version of Jurassic Park, the dinosaurs are the villains. In the book, John Hammond is the villain, but this takes the reader a while to realize. He has an idea, and he's sure it's a good one. When someone else dies in pursuit of his dream, he doesn't think much of it. When experts tell him his idea is dangerous and needs to be put on hold, he ignores the experts whom he himself hired, because they are telling him that he is wrong. He is not malicious. He thinks he's a visionary, and nobody understands his vision.¹ 

Then you say to yourself: "I would not do that. I would not invent solitary confinement." Sure. (You wouldn't clone extinct dinosaurs – you don't know how.) But generally, you can't avoid your predecessors' mistakes simply by telling yourself that you won't do what they did. "Never again." "No more war." It doesn't work like that. You have learned nothing from your failure. And you will fail again: first as tragedy, then as farce, then as farce, then as farce… until you find the information you haven't acknowledged and make painful affordances to bring those truths into your life. “You have to do this over and over, like a semi-pro athlete trying to break into the big leagues.”² You must not tell yourself that the solution is simply kindness. And you must not tell yourself that the solution is simply for other people to change their behavior. "If everyone would just …" Everyone is not going to "just."³ Do not be lazy. And you must not tell yourself that the solution involves you behaving badly, but only for a little while. It doesn't work like that. Who you are is what you do. Today. If you cannot accept that, then you are not who you say you are. Do not delude yourself into believing that if only you continue walking straight ahead, you will rise someday into the air. 

When supposed anti-fascists talk about wanting to "punch fascists", they get it all wrong. You do not need to punch fascists. You need to kill the part of you that is a fascist, the part of you that longingly fantasizes about hurting someone while simultaneously sucking the sweet lollipop of self-justification. Rooting out the fascism in one's own heart is much more difficult than assaulting a stranger. It goes deeper. It goes down to all those fantasy books from childhood, where errant knights go questing for princesses in towers. "I'd kill for you," says the knight. "I'll beat him up for looking at you like that," says the dreamy hunk in the 80s romcom. Like what? Like she's a piece of meat? You mean the way you look at her? (She likes it, by the way.) Women are the same. Granted, femininity is defined by an obsession with form and restraint, so women generally don't go around bragging about how they're going to punch strangers. But isn't it funny how the meanest girls, the adolescent terrors, the ones who make secret groupchats to exclude their clumsier friends, still delight to to watch Cinderella triumph over her stepsisters? They rejoice when Cinderella's scorned and overlooked virtues are finally extolled by some very, very high-status man. I was friends with a group of mean girls in high school, and none of them – including myself – saw themselves as mean. They saw themselves as sweet, noble, misunderstood, and full of feeling. No girl saw herself as Cruella or Ursula. Every single girl in the world sees herself as Cinderella. She is rarely taught to see herself as anyone else. This is why women are dislocated from their identities. And this specific form of dislocation is why women can only describe their physical appearance through hyperbole. You are stunning - I'm hideous – I'm a fucking whale. Adjectives stacked on exaggerations as if we're building the Tower of Babel: model already means "top of the line", now let's add super in front of it. Top of the top of the top of the … uh huh. Now how do I look?  A fairly common question. Honestly? You look fine. You look okay. You look nice, even. But try saying this to any woman and it's on sight, bitch. Girls learn by age 8 that this it is not acceptable to tell another girl that she looks "okay", and even the most rational of men learn eventually that if they want to know what a smooth upper thigh feels like, they'd better make some affordances. But why is it not acceptable to say to a woman that she looks "fine"? Weren't we taught that looks aren't everything, anyways?  Sure, we were taught that. Allegedly. But the female protagonist in the movies is beautiful. And if we're not the protagonist, then who are we? 

[EXEUNT WOMAN, moderately attractive, 3-4 fine dark upper lip hairs, bewildered.]

III.

A common error is to interpret situations psychologically which should primarily be interpreted sociologically, and vice versa. One example is telling people to do psychedelics and go to therapy when they probably just need a job that is not below the poverty line. The converse is also possible. Porn is a psychological problem which masquerades as a sociological problem. Identity is a sociological problem which masquerades as a psychological problem. 

Girlfriends freak out when their boyfriends watch porn. The freak out is justified, but not for the reason you think. You freak out because you're insecure. You think you're not as hot as Aella or Brekkie Hill. You're right, you’re not, but that's besides the point. Practically everyone's less hot than Brekkie Hill. The problem is not that he wants to fuck different women. It's that he wants to be a different man. He wants a different life. He likes those women not because they're hot (well, okay, not only because they're hot); he likes them because they don't know him. The reason you can't stay with him is that he doesn't stay with himself. 

We search for our identies in incognito tabs at midnight, in the carnival of politics and business, in the crinkled slightly-yellow pages of the first edition of Atlas Shrugged, searching not for goals but for roles, striving for an identity that perpetually eludes us. The problem is not that the striving is difficult. The problem is that modern life offers almost 0 compelling answers to the question: "how should I be?" These, of course, are the stakes of the culture wars. But no culture has provided a compelling example. If they had, then they would have won. 

How should a person be? And no, don't give me adjectives. "BE KIND!" Alright. People need visual examples. In the 20th century JFK and Che ruled the television screen. Female democrats over 50 love Michelle Obama, but she doesn't do it for the rest of us. Now Steve Jobs is dead. The 21st century has begun, and the adults have left the room. 

For better or for worse, life, fresh edible life, offers us few examples of true virtue. But without these examples we are lost. Appearing to be just is not the same as loving justice. Loving justice is not the same as loving the gavel. Paradoxically, if you love justice and nothing but justice you inevitably get injustice. This is why myth, and religion are helpful. Myth gives us examples. Myth is not something that never happened. It's something that happens over and over and over again.

Right now, at this very moment, Joan of Arc, the only true believer in medieval France, woman pure as silver, is being judged by filthy religious leaders trying to manipulate her with lies, so unfair, threatening to take away the Eucharist during her last Sacrament. And when she finally gets it. When she kneels down to pray, oh. The purity she displays, the peace that engulfs her is so powerful that even her prosecutors know they are seeing the true meaning of that ceremony for the first time. 

Trying to be like Joan of Arc is as futile as trying to become a glass of milk, or trying to become a crescent moon. It is a task udderly (haha!) ridiculous. But still worthwhile. To move in that direction. A person like a star, a compass, brief flash of light, orientation for the soul. 

Some people say that humility can only be borne of humiliation. They are wrong. It is resentment which emerges from humiliation. Resentment of the self and of the world. Humility is born from wonder. It was Socrates who called wonder, or thaumázein (Θαυμάζω), “the only beginning of philosophy.” After him, Aristotle observed that all philosophy arises from wonder, suggesting that it is “through wonder that men now begin and originally began.” Two thousand years after Aristotle, René Descartes—arguably the first truly modern philosopher—spoke of wonder as “the first of all the passions." It was wonder which led Joan to humility, which simultaneously revealed to her the meagerness of her life as it is and the beautiful infinite possibility of what it could be. And it is through humility that you too will change your life. You too can be a martyr, and you don't even need to die. You can be a martyr many times before you die by killing the man inside you who needs to be right, who insists that the present version of yourself is the finished version.

It doesn't need to be Joan of Arc. But I hope there are saints in your life. I hope you have images of them. Not ideology but images. The visual medium is ideal here because it leaves so much to be desired. Ideology is a wall of text. But an image… You can fill in the blanks with your doubt and hope like a child learning to draw with a clutched fistful of crayons.

A saint is not an answer. A saint is not the end of the game. A saint is not a demagogue. A saint is another question. A saint is a door which opens on more and more. A saint is a friend you fell out of contact with, or an ex lover whose face changes each time you dream of him. Who are you, you wonderful recalcitrant stranger? Letting go is difficult. But in another sense, just the fact that he exists is enough. Enough to think of him smiling at dinner with his friends, washing his sheets every 2 weeks, keeping the apartment clean, taking pictures, texting his dad. Maybe one day he’ll learn to drive. Sorry, that last one was mean.

A heart's a heavy burden to pin on a human. Many first girlfriends, mothers, and last wives are burdened with the enormous task of being the moral center for their male partners. But then you're not seeing the person, you're seeing your own dream. So we need saints. Even if the miracles never happened, even if the people didn't even exist, we need to believe in them. I am a realist, I don't believe in miracles. But I know that I'm alive. Which means that there's still play in the game. I know it sounds stupid. I'm trying too. Help me. Help me cease being a moralist. And become a student next to you.  

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Please excuse any typos, I'm trying this new thing where I don't reread any of my writing after I publish it but I force myself to publish something every day.

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Many thanks to James Hill-Khurana for his comments on this essay.

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And thanks to Cynthia, Wes, Jack, Jamaal, Ben, James, Dustin, Yena, Alice, Kaitlyn for existing.

1. someone wrote this on tumblr, but i don’t remember who, and my efforts to find the op were unsuccessful. i’m sorry

2. @br___ian on twitter

3. https://squareallworthy.tumblr.com/post/163790039847/everyone-will-not-just