By Gary Topping–
Powell’s City of Books in Portland, Oregon last summer featured a table of books labelled “Must Reads,” or some such thing. My wife bit, and purchased Rebecca Solnit’s Whose Story is This? Old Conflicts, New Chapters. The book looked good to me, and I applauded her choice. I still do. The book is a collection of essays, mostly on feminist themes, but also dealing with racism and minorities. I’ve only read the first few chapters, and while I find myself in agreement with most of her points, I find her originality not in the ideas themselves, but in her application of feminist analysis to recent cases like the testimony of Christine Blasey Ford against prospective Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.
Solnit’s thesis is pretty simplistic and pretty harsh. She sees the world as divided into two main classes: the powerful and the powerless, the oppressors and the oppressed. The first class, the powerful oppressors, is comprised mostly of white Protestant males, and the second class, the powerless oppressed, is mostly women and minorities. She sees us as living in a world “assembled from ideas, visions and values. . . about race, class, gender, sexuality, about nature, power, climate, the interconnectedness of all things, about compassion, generosity, collectivity, communion; about justice, equality, possibility.” (p. 1) The problem, in her view, is that we find ourselves a long ways from actually living up to those “ideas, visions and values,” and in fact living in a world of power and oppression. Even as a white male, though Catholic rather than Protestant, I readily agree with most of her ideals and even with her observation of our shortcomings.
And yet, as a Catholic, I am troubled by her proposed remedies. Although she rightly castigates those white male Protestant oppressors for their frequent threats of physical violence to maintain the status quo (she cites death threats against American Indian activist Gerard Baker and Christine Blasey Ford) her remedy recommends meeting force with force—not physical violence, to be sure, but force nevertheless. One is struck, even within the few pages I have read, with the repeated occurrence of the word “power” and her suggestion that the oppressed must wrest control of their own destiny by seizing power from the oppressors. They must do this by asserting their “rights” under our Constitution and legal system.
As a Christian, this sounds disturbingly Old Testament to me. One easily envisions Joshua’s armies wiping out the Canaanites in their quest to repossess their “rightful” homeland. And how often does the Psalmist call upon God to justify him against his oppressors? To be sure, the Old Testament contains many passages of love and mercy and compassion, but it nevertheless portrays a world of power and strife and conflict.
What a different world we find in the New Testament! St. Paul tells us in the famous kenosis passage in his letter to the Philippians (2:6-8) that “though [Jesus] was in the form of God, he did not deem equality with God something to be grasped at. Rather, he emptied himself and took the form of a slave, being born in the likeness of men. He was known to be of human estate and it was thus that he humbled himself, obediently accepting even death, death upon a cross”! Where, in all of history and literature, can one find a more powerless person, less insisting upon his “rights” than Jesus on the cross? Was there ever anything more lacking in “justice” than his trial? Even Pontius Pilate admitted that he found no fault in him.
The New Testament world, then, is a world that insists upon obligations rather than rights, compassion rather than justice, humility and obedience rather than power. I have no idea what Rebecca Solnit’s religion might be, if indeed she professes any. But I can imagine that, if she were to read my previous two paragraphs, she would claim that following those values was what got us into the present kettle of fish that she sketches in her book.
I would not try to dissuade her from her point of view. My concern is not with Solnit, but with myself: how can I pursue values similar if not always identical to Solnit’s from a Catholic position? I’m sure I don’t know, but I’m convinced it’s worth exploring.
