Wednesday night.

Jack enters Doc’s basement office and finds that Mick has already arrived.

MICK: Good evening, Jack!

JACK: Hi there, Mick. Evening, Doc. Did you start without me?

MICK: Sort of, but not really. I just arrived about ten minutes ago and I was itching to get Doc’s perspective on an essay I read today by James Baldwin.

JACK: Oh! Which one?

MICK: It’s titled, “Letter from a Region of my Mind.”

JACK: Oh, yes, that is a gut-wrenching and yet beautiful essay.

MICK: So much of what he wrote relates to our conversations.

JACK: Indeed. I recall that he describes ordinary religious belief as involving a kind of blackmail.

MICK: Yes, he uses that phrase to describe the tendency to believe in God out of fear of damnation or hope of salvation. As a boy, he thought they should simply love God for God’s sake. I was particularly struck by his depiction of the church he preached at.

DOC: And, by extension, all or most other churches.

MICK: Right. Can I read a line from the essay?

JACK: Please do.

Jack takes off his coat and sits in the battered high-back chair. He crosses his legs, ready to take in Baldwin’s words.

MICK: This is in the context of his reflections on the time he spent as a young preacher. He writes, “there was no love in the church. It was a mask for hatred and self-hatred and despair. The transfiguring power of the Holy Ghost ended when the service ended, and salvation stopped at the church door. When we were told to love everybody, I had thought that that meant every body. But no. It applied only to those who believed as we did, and it did not apply to white people at all.”¹

He’s giving expression to the phenomenon that you attributed to Feuerbach, but as it manifested within the Black Church.

JACK: Yes, and I recall that he also argues that the Christian duty to evangelize and save those who would otherwise be damned was bound up with its quest for political power. That is similar to Feuerbach’s claim that religion becomes concerned with policing the boundaries of the saved and the damned. I’m not sure if we discussed that yesterday, but it is another important dimension of his critique of Christianity.

MICK: Yeah, totally. What I found interesting was the unique way in which the “malignant principle” of faith gets inflected by the racist culture of our society.

DOC: In that regard, Mick asked whether his experiences were at all similar to my own. As I was saying, Mick, there are aspects of the essay that resonate deeply with my experiences. The passage you just quoted is among them. However, I’m thirty or so years younger than Baldwin would have been, and my experience coming of age in the late 70s and early 80s was probably quite a bit different than his experience during the late 40s.

MICK: Ah, right. That makes sense.

DOC: As we were skimming the essay, I found myself particularly struck by the sense of resilience that he recalled being characteristic of his community.

MICK: Right. I have that passage marked. Do you mind if I read it?

DOC: Please do!

MICK: He says, “In spite of everything, there was in the life I fled a zest and a joy and a capacity for facing and surviving disaster that are very moving and very rare. Perhaps we were, all of us—pimps, whores, racketeers, church members, and children—bound together by the nature of our oppression, the specific and peculiar complex of risks we had to run; if so, within these limits we sometimes achieved with each other a freedom that was close to love.”²

DOC: Yes, that is a really important insight on his part. I have to confess, it is not one that I could imagine writing myself.

MICK: Oh, really?

DOC: No. I hadn’t thought of it until reflecting on it a moment ago, but I don’t think I could say that I felt a similar sense of vitality and resilience in my community.

JACK: What do you suppose accounted for the difference?

DOC: Oh, it’s hard to say. I recognize that it’s impossible to speak in universals and to speak accurately about the experiences of every member of a group of people; there are always outliers and exceptions. Also, I didn’t grow up in Harlem or even a big city. I’m from a rural county in Illinois. Maybe that’s all it is. But I also know that a lot of shit happened between the 1940s and the 1970s, and I think the effect might have been that the folks I grew up with had become more like the White people in a certain sense.

JACK: What do you have in mind?

DOC: Well, he writes of Black folk having an almost absurd tenacity, and he claims that White people sense that it is, as he calls it, “sensual.” By this he means it flows from a kind of immediacy with respect to life. He says they—the White folk—lack this sensuality.

Mick flips her pages, running her fingers over the text.

MICK: I have a line here where he defines this. “To be sensual,” he says, “is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread.”³

DOC: Exactly so. What I chiefly have in mind is that I don’t think I could have fairly described many of the people in my community as being sensual in that sense. Maybe some of the older people, but not those of my parents’ generation and not those of mine. I think we tried to have this orientation to life, but that was the problem: we had to try. In the intervening years, between our respective periods of adolescence, I think our people might have lost something of that joyful presence. Or, at the very least, I didn’t sense such joyful presence. Baldwin wrote that his people didn’t feel they had to pretend to be something they were not. I have almost the exact opposite memory: I feel as if we were constantly pretending. (Pauses.) Are you familiar with Audre Lorde?

MICK: Yes, of course.

DOC: As you probably know, she argued that the pornographic is the opposite of the erotic.

MICK: Yes, that’s in her essay, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.”

DOC: Right. Her concept of the erotic is very similar to what Baldwin writes about: a kind of immediate and sensual engagement with others and reality. Pornography, she rightly argues, is the denial of this.⁴ 

MICK: Right, the erotic is an internal life-force and creative power, whereas the pronographic works against this internal spiritual force. 

DOC: Yes. I bring it up because I think during the 70s and 80s, especially, we were in the throes of a major wave of pornographic consciousness or false consciousness. Of course, it probably pales by comparison to what we are facing these days.

MICK: Oh, that’s fascinating.

DOC: And when you throw in shit like the systematic dismantling of the Black Liberation movement by the FBI, the CIA flooding cities with crack, mass incarceration, the rise of neoliberalism and the scapegoating of Black mothers—it was all overwhelming.⁵ I think my parents and others their age were keenly aware that they needed to present themselves and their children very intentionally. I think we were, in some important sense, overly concerned with conforming, since nonconformity spelled doom.

MICK: That must have been a terrible situation for you, in particular.

DOC: Yes and no. The bad side of it is obvious. However, I think one of the reasons my own parents were eventually able to accept me was that they could discern an effort at authenticity on my part. Whether they explicitly acknowledged it or not, I think they felt that elements of their lives—even when just considered in relation to other Black folk—were inauthentic. I like to think they saw something honest and noble in me.

JACK: I hope they did.

DOC: It definitely wasn’t sunshine and roses, but when they eventually left their church, they were able to identify what they had done to me was wrong. During their later years, after they moved here to be close to me, they were damn near gay rights activists themselves.

After a brief lull, Jack gestures to Mick’s copy of the essay.

JACK: Do you mind if I take a look? There’s something near the end of the essay that relates to the point we ended on last night.

MICK: Not at all.

She hands the essay to Jack who flips through the pages.

JACK: Here we go. “It seems to me,” he says, “that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death—ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us.”⁶

DOC: I fully agree.

JACK: I have a slightly different perspective, but that’s not important right now. Do you remember that I had said that there were incommensurable systems of value or worldviews?

MICK: Yes, I wanted to follow up on that.

JACK: Good, because I did too, and I think Baldwin provides a useful avenue into the issue.

MICK: How so?

JACK: Well, he is clearly offering an alternative to what he takes to be a prevailing conception of life and death. However, I’m not confident that he appreciated how radically incommensurable his view is in relation to more dominant views.

MICK: So, I meant to look up that word—incommensurable—but I forgot to. It appears you’re going to keep using it though, so I’ll need you to define it!

JACK: Haha, yeah, of course. It has a very specific meaning. Two propositions are commensurable if there is some common measure that can be used to decide between them. So, most propositions concerning matters of fact are commensurable, even when they are contradictory.

MICK: I don’t think I understand the difference. How can two contradictory views be commensurable?

JACK: Well, take for example the claim that CO2 emissions contribute to climate change and then consider its negation—namely, that it is not the case that CO2 emissions contribute to climate change. These can’t both be true: in that sense they are contradictory. But we can figure out which is true and which is false.

MICK: Okay, I see. So just because we say they are commensurable, we aren’t committed to both being true.

JACK: Correct. Now, two propositions are incommensurable if there is no principled way to determine which is true, but they cannot both be true. So, in other words, they are about similar subjects and they make competing and incompatible claims about that subject, but we cannot rationally adjudicate the options.

MICK: Hmm. What would be an obvious example of this?

JACK: Well, consider the distinction between the conception of the human person that seems to have been operative during the medieval period and the one that became the norm during the modern period. 

DOC: Haha, oh, Jack! She asked for an obvious example!

JACK: Bear with me! In medieval Europe, it wouldn’t have made sense to say that a human being was an autonomous agent in the way that later modern philosophers and political theorists assumed we were. (Pauses and rubs his chin.) Have you ever seen  Monty Python and the Holy Grail?

Doc and Mick both laugh, having been caught off guard by his question.

MICK: Haha! Yes, yes I have. Truth be told, I am a bit of a Python geek.

JACK: Excellent, then I’m sure you recall the scene where King Arthur meets the peasant and explains how he became king?

MICK: (Proudly quoting the film.) “Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.”⁷ 

Doc laughs uproariously and Jack grins appreciatively.

JACK: Exactly so. But I actually have in mind what the peasant says a bit earlier, upon initially being addressed by Arthur.

MICK: Ok, hmm. I know he indicates that he is an anarcho-syndicalist.

JACK: Yes, that’s it. When he asks how Arthur became king, the peasant—Denise—ventures to guess that it was (he coughs and switches to a Cockney accent) “by exploitin’ the workers and ‘anging on to outdated imperialist dogma which perpetuates the economic an’ social differences in our society!”⁸ 

They all laugh. Jack makes a show of coughing and readjusting his voice.

JACK: Now, why is the scene funny?

MICK: Well, because it is so absurd to imagine a peasant addressing a king in that way.

DOC: Specifically, the absurdity is grounded in the anachronistic character of the peasant’s political perspective.

JACK: Exactly! It isn’t just that these political conceptions hadn’t been developed yet, but—more importantly—they would have made absolutely no sense in the ideological context of medieval Europe. Anarcho-syndicalism is a political theory that is contingent on a conception of the human person as autonomous, but that conception of human beings develops after the Protestant Reformation. Indeed, the idea that ordinary people are capable of being fully rational autonomous moral agents really doesn’t get adequately expressed until the 18th Century.⁹

DOC: Right. Jean-Jacques Rousseau and then Immanuel Kant seem to provide the first really full-throated defenses of that idea.¹⁰

JACK: Exactly. So, the illustrative point is simply that the medieval notion of what it meant to be a person would have been incommensurable with a modern conception. The modern notion has the concepts of autonomy and individual agency baked into it, whereas the medieval concept did not.

MICK: Huh. It is strange to think that people might not have thought of themselves as individuals. That is what you are suggesting, right?

JACK: Yes, at least in some sense. They obviously had a sense of personal identity, or an ability to distinguish themselves from others. But their conception of what it meant to be a person was more what we would now call a “communitarian” conception than an “individualist” conception.

MICK: Oh, okay. That makes sense. And I suppose you could even point to the difficulty that we have of imagining such a way of thinking as evidence of the incommensurability.

JACK: Yes! That’s a good point. Incommensurability makes communication difficult. When someone from one position attempts to understand an incommensurable position, they often find themselves confused, for the very words that are used have a completely different meaning to them.

DOC: You were going to use this concept in relation to what Baldwin said. What do you have in mind?

JACK: Oh, right. I almost forgot what got us onto this topic!

He once again picks up Mick’s copy of the essay, and examines the paragraph he previously read.

JACK: There are two elements of the passage I read that I wanted us to dwell with for a bit. The first is when he says that “one ought to rejoice in the fact of death—ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life.” And the second, which is obviously related, is his claim that we “must negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us.”

MICK: I understand what you meant when you said he is presenting an alternative conception of the meaning of life and death. That is clearly his rhetorical purpose: he is trying to convince his readers of just that point. He says that Americans don’t want to face the fact that life is tragic.

DOC: Yes, and he prophesizes that we will continue to deny death by identifying with, and losing ourselves within, religions, nation-states, military campaigns, and so forth. (Pauses as he raises his finger, signaling a thought.) You know, that reminds me of a book by Christopher Hedges.

Doc turns to his left and rummages through one of his many bookshelves, quickly producing the book, which has numerous dog-eared pages and bits of paper sticking out, marking key passages.

Here it is. It’s titled War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning.

He flips through the pages he marked and finds a passage.

Here’s what I had in mind. He writes, “The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life. It can give us purpose, meaning, a reason for living.”¹¹

MICK: Oof. Unfortunately, I think he’s correct, at least for the vast majority of people. It’s amazing how easily people get caught up in the war machine whenever it is put into action.

JACK: Absolutely. Now, what I am concerned with is the possibility that there are fundamentally irreconcilable and incommensurable perspectives on the tragic nature of life.

MICK: Do you mean that some people fail to view life as tragic whereas others do view it as tragic? Or do you mean that even if people agree that it is tragic, they can have irreconcilable perspectives on it.

JACK: I mean the second, and to that extent I might be disagreeing with Baldwin. He says that people don’t face or accept that life is tragic. If that were the case, and if we granted that life was, in fact, tragic, we should be able to arrive at a common, shared position by simply pointing out the tragic nature of it all. But I think the matter is more complex than that. I think someone can agree that life is tragic and nevertheless not adopt Baldwin’s perspective.

MICK: Do you have in mind someone who becomes something of a nihilist?

JACK: Yes, but probably not in the way that you think I do!

MICK: Haha, of course. I would expect nothing less.

JACK: What do you take nihilism to be?

MICK: Well, I guess I think of it as the view that nothing has meaning, so nothing matters. I think of nihilists as people who adopt the view that one should just do whatever one wants. In this way, they accept Baldwin’s assessment of the tragic character of life, but they reject the stance that he takes. He says we should act honorably in the face of the tragic for the sake of future generations. Nihilists just throw up their hands and say even that is meaningless and not worth doing.

JACK: That’s very good. You’re certainly correct in identifying that as at least one perspective that accepts the first part of his view without accepting the second. There’s another form of nihilism, which often isn’t understood to be nihilistic, but which I think is. Indeed, I think it is the most pernicious form of nihilism. It’s the view that Saint Augustine gives expression to in his Confession and in The City of God.

DOC: Whoa! I don’t know why I continue to be surprised by your persistent efforts to malign the tradition that you have been ordained to teach.

JACK: I’m a Christian, not an Augustinian! And, no, that is not a distinction without a difference!

Doc and Jack both laugh.

DOC: Go on, Father. Explain the alleged nihilism of Saint Augustine.

Jack gives him a side eye and continues.

JACK: Well, he is very clear that he does not think that there can be any safety in this life.¹² Anything in this finite world which we might care about and any finite persons we might love will ultimately be lost.

MICK: That is the tragic fact of the matter.

JACK: Indeed. On this basis, he rejects the ethical perspectives of the ancient Greek philosophers such as Aristotle and the Stoics, since they were basically materialists who thought that happiness—what they called eudaimonia—was achievable in this life, at least in principle. Augustine says that this is not the case. Happiness, he says, consists in having and holding the object of one’s love or desire. But everything that is finite will ultimately pass away, deteriorate, or otherwise fall victim to the circumstances of our existence. So, he concludes, we can never fully have and hold a finite object of love.

MICK: I think I can see where this is going. The only being that cannot be lost is God, right?

JACK: Exactly. So, Augustine says that the object of our love must not be anything or anyone in this life, but rather God, who is imperishable.

DOC: He doesn’t deny that we should love other people, though.

JACK: No, not exactly. He says that our love of other people must be mediated by our love of God. In a sense, what we should love within them is not themselves, but God.

MICK: Hmm. That doesn’t seem right to me. I think we should love other people for themselves, in their own right.

JACK: I agree. Augustine does not, though. There is a simultaneously beautiful and yet horrific passage in his Confession where Augustine first explains the profound love he had for a young man who was his friend and companion. His description of their love is evocative and deeply moving. For example, he says that they shared one soul in two bodies. And when his friend dies suddenly, Augustine says that it was as if a part of himself died, that he had lost half of his soul.¹³

MICK: That is beautiful. Were they lovers?

JACK: Yes, they were clearly in love. However, he doesn’t give any details about the sexual dimension of their relationship, if there was one. So we don’t know if their love was sexually consummated. (Pauses.) Unfortunately, that isn’t all Augustine had to say about the relationship, and this is where the horrific part comes in. After his conversion to Christianity, he looks back on his relationship with this man as sinful.

MICK: Do you mean because it was a gay relationship?

JACK: No. Simply because he loved the other man in himself. His sin was to love another human being as an end in its own right. He chastises himself for having loved his friend instead of God. It wouldn’t have mattered if it was a woman instead—though, to be clear, it probably wouldn’t have been. Men and women did not, generally, have such deep friendships back then. This was centuries before our modern ideas of love were developed.

MICK: Good grief. I really can’t wrap my head around the idea that loving another person in their own right is a sin. Would he say the same thing about a parent’s relationship to a child?

JACK: Yes, he would. In fact, he explicitly does so. His point is that it sinful to love any other person in their own right. The only proper love is love that is mediated through God.¹⁴

Mick shakes her head in disbelief.

MICK: That is so bonkers! 

JACK: Perhaps, though if we understand that, for Augustine, God is love, I suppose he should be understood as saying that his particular and finite love of his friend should’ve been mediated by his love of infinite love itself. 

MICK: Hmm. Okay. I’m genuinely not sure whether I agree or disagree. I tend to think it is only through loving particular people that we come to know what love itself is. I don’t know whether it makes sense to talk about love as something infinite and disembodied. Regardless, I suppose it is another case of incommensurable perspectives. Was that the point you were going to make?

JACK: Well, sort of, but not quite. I chiefly wanted to draw attention to the fact that Augustine agrees with Baldwin’s assessment that life is tragic. 

DOC: Hah, that’s for sure! He even ups the ante, so to speak, since he doesn’t allow for the finite loves that Baldwin would surely hold up as meaningful.

JACK: Yes! And that gets to the sense in which Augustine is nihilistic. If nihilism is understood as the denial that there can be meaning in this life, he is an exemplar nihilist. He explicitly rejects that anything in this life can have meaning or be meaningful in its own right.

MICK: Okay. I see that, and I think that is totally off-base. However, Augustine isn’t ultimately a nihilist; he thinks that there is meaning in and through God.

JACK: That’s true. He is a nihilist with respect to this life, but he affirms that there is meaning outside or beyond this life.

MICK: Even though I disagree with him, that means it is unfair to characterize him as a nihilist.

JACK: Perhaps so. In the grand scheme of things, he thinks there is meaning and goodness. But I want us to acknowledge that he is at least a partial nihilist: he thinks that the things of this life cannot be worth pursuing or loving on their own terms. Moreover, he seems to indicate that it is because we recognize that our lives are tragic and that the objects of our love will be lost that we should seek a transcendent ground for our happiness. In other words, he uses a nihilistic proposition as a premise upon which to defend faith in God.

MICK: Okay, that makes sense.

JACK: So, here’s where we are at: Augustine would accept Baldwin’s claim that life is tragic but—and here’s my main point—he doesn’t accept that we should, to use Baldwin’s terms, “negotiate this passage as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us.” 

DOC: Well, now, come on, Jack! He surely thinks that we should live as nobly as possible in this life.

JACK: That is true. My point has to do with why. It is absolutely not for the sake of those who are coming after us.

DOC: Ah, right. It is going to have something to do with God.

JACK: Exactly. On Augustine’s view, everything is to be done for God. Nothing is to be done for the sake of this life or the people of this life, in their own rights. I understand Baldwin to be suggesting that the highest good—the life well lived—is a philanthropic one that is lived nobly in the face of death and non-being. I imagine he would say that such a way of being is good in itself, not because we operate under the promise or hope of fulfillment, but because it is the responsible way for us to be.

MICK: Right. He doesn’t put it in exactly those terms, but that seems to be what he is driving at. And he suggests that operating under some sense of promise or hope of fulfillment is a way of denying the tragic quality of life.

JACK: You’re right that he suggests that. I think on that point, he fails to appreciate that something like the Augustinian view is different. Augustine, as we’ve noted, does not deny or fail to accept the tragic nature of life. But Augustine does deny that it would be reasonable to live and act nobly if all was for naught. He needs there to be a God that will finally bring meaning to our tragic lives.

MICK: Hmm. Is that the sense in which there are two incommensurable views at play?

JACK: It’s getting there. I think the incommensurability arises at a deeper level. Augustine assumes that if something is to be the “highest” good—what he and other philosophers call the summum bonum—it has to be complete in itself and not subject to assault and accident.¹⁵ Baldwin, however, seems to understand—indeed, he seems to be calling us to recognize—that the highest good, the excellent life, is one which is lived eyes wide open to the incompleteness of life and its ambiguity and tragedy. The relationship between these two competing conceptions of the summum bonum seems to me to be one of incommensurability. How could we possibly adjudicate between them? They seem like two fundamentally different and irreconcilable perspectives.

DOC: I see what you mean. For Baldwin, what is good is incomplete and subject to assault by accident whereas, for Augustine, the good must be complete and immune from assault.

JACK: Exactly.

Mick stares off, lost in contemplation.

MICK: (Tentatively.) I don’t think I can accept that.

JACK: Do you mean you think my assessment is mistaken?

MICK: Perhaps. I’m not sure. I’m wondering what it amounts to if we accept these are incommensurable positions. It seems like we end up in the same position that we arrived at last night: that there is no genuine possibility of convincing others—or ourselves—of the truth. There is just the contestation of will and the contingencies of our psychologies.

DOC: Yes, if the views are genuinely incommensurable and if we have to adopt at least one, then it seems that reason has gone on holiday.

JACK: Haha, right. That would, it seems, follow.

MICK: So, do we just agree to disagree in such circumstances? I’m not prepared to do that! Augustine is just wrong, and we should try to prove this.

DOC: See! I told you she’s a philosopher!

JACK: Indeed. That is the philosophical spirit! You have a dogged desire to make the views commensurable.

MICK: That has to be possible, though, doesn’t it?

JACK: I’m not sure. Maybe, maybe not. It seems at least conceptually possible that we could’ve developed incommensurable views over time, and that any hope of philosophically resolving the tensions would amount to a fool’s errand.

MICK: Sure, I grant that is possible. But when do we decide we’ve run into such a situation?

DOC: I think she’s indicating that you haven’t convinced her, Jack.

MICK: Haha, yes, I suppose I am. Really, I want to put it this way: I think there is more that needs to be said in relation to both Baldwin’s and Augustine’s views before we conclude that we have hit on some rock-bottom, rationally arbitrary, and incommensurable set of views.

JACK: What do you have in mind?

MICK: Well, I definitely disagree with the notion that the highest good has to be complete in itself and incapable of being threatened or lost. So I’m operating from Baldwin’s perspective, but I think we could rationally defend that claim and criticize Augustine’s.

DOC: Well, let’s have it, then!

MICK: Damn. I knew you were going to say that. (Chuckles.) I deliberately said “we.” I don’t think I am prepared to mount either a full-blown defense nor the necessary offensive at this point.

DOC: How about we sleep on it and we each try to prepare our best arguments for tomorrow?

JACK: Perfect. Nothing would make me happier than to hit on an argument to take down the Augustinian view.

They laugh and then gather their items. Jack and Mick wait as Doc shoves a couple of books and papers into his bag and then grabs his keys. He flicks off the lights and closes the door. The three of them walk up the stairs.

MICK: I think the crux of the issue has something to do with life itself .

DOC: Oh? What do you mean?

MICK: I’m not sure how to put my finger on it just yet, but the very idea of completeness and—what’s the word that means incapable of change?

JACK: Immutability.

MICK: Right. The very idea of completeness and immutability seems problematic.

DOC: You might be onto something there.

They exit the library, say their goodbyes, and part ways.

Notes

1. James Baldwin, “Letter from a Region of My Mind,” The New Yorker (November 17, 1962). 

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” paper presented at the Fourth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, Mount Holyoke College, August 25, 1978. Published as a chapter in Sister Outsider (The Crossing Press, 1984).

5. See Virgie Hoban, “‘Discredit, Disrupt, and Destroy’: FBI Records Acquired by the Library Reveal Violent Surveillance of Black Leaders, Civil Rights Organizations,” UC Berkeley Library website. (January 8, 2024), lib.berkeley.edu/about/news/fbi. Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (The New Press, 2020). Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America, Updated Edition (University of California Press, 2023).

6. Baldwin, op. cit.

7. Monty Python and the Holy Grail, dir., Gilliam and Jones (1975).

8. Ibid.

9. Jerome B. Schneewind, The Invention of Autonomy: A History of Modern Moral Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 1997).

10. Ibid. See also Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Harvard University Press, 1989), 11–14, and 193–98. Cf. Rafeeq Hasan, “Autonomy and Happiness in Rousseau’s Justification of the State.” The Review of Politics 78, no. 3 (July 2016): 391–417. doi.org/10.1017/S0034670516000267.

11. Christopher Hedges, Introduction to War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (PublicAffairs, 2014).

12. Augustine, City of God (Volume II), trans., Dods (T&T Clarke, 1871), Book XIX.

13. Augustine, Confessions, trans., Pusey (John Henry Parker, 1851), Book IV. 

14. Ibid. Augustine writes, “Blessed whoso loveth Thee, and his friend in Thee, and his enemy for Thee. For he alone loses none dear to him, to whom all are dear in Him who cannot be lost. And who is this but our God, the God that made heaven and earth, and filleth them, because by filling them He created them?”

15. Augustine, City of God, op. cit.