One of the elements of Day’s thought which proves attractive in the telling but hard in the practice is her anarchism. She’s not an anarchist in the silly sense that there should be no rule except that which we give ourselves: that would make here simply a modern person. Her anarchy is more of the “we will have no king but God” variety, one founded in the notion that governments, at their best, morally deform, and that a good institution (and good governance) must emerge in ways fitting in scope and intent among the people they benefit. Institutions, when becoming self-invested, become in turn myopic toward their friends, and in the end, malicious toward both friends and enemies.
In 1950, writing on the Korean War, Day offers this, and note how the institutions of media, government, and military all work out the kind of dynamics we’ve been describing:
It is all such a strange doctrine, so upside down, so contrary to the world we live in, so impossible to practice, so they say. Who are the poor? They are our soldiers in Korea fighting in zero weather, thousands of them suffering and tortured and dying. How many casualties are there since June 25? They are the Koreans themselves, north and south, who have been bombed out, burnt out in the rain of fire from heaven.
“You do not know of what spirit you are,” our Lord said when his apostles urged that fire from heaven would come down on the hostile country. Forty thousand bombs were dropped on a city of 45,000. Who made up that city? Men, women and children, the old and the sick and the crippled. The innocent, the noncombatant in other words. A thousand guerilla soldiers were “fried” the World Telegram quoted a soldier, when jellied gasoline was dropped on them, to “mop them up.” God have mercy on them all and those who killed them as well as those who died! And these men are our brothers, made to the image and likeness of God, temples of the Holy Ghost.
Over the last week, as Ukraine becomes engulfed in Putin’s imperialist designs, I’ve struggled with what to say, or what to pray. The assault of one people by another in the name of cultural integrity is demonic, and should be called as such. This is, I think, what Christian pacifists like Day always get right: the death of another person is not just wrong, but not something God takes delight in; the Catholic Worker famously nearly folded during the Second World War when they reiterated their opposition to going to war, recognizing that German Christians and American Christians would be killing one another.
And reflecting on Day and institutions has helped me to pray for Ukraine, but also for Russia: what Russia needs is not to be destroyed, but to be exorcised. The Russian invasion shows its government to be the kind of Bad Institution we’ve been describing, a kind of tyranny over its people which promotes values in ways which do not ultimately care whether people die in their promotion. And God loves Vladimir Putin, enough that I think it’s fair to say that God wants Putin to repent and to repair the damage he’s done. These prayers aren’t mutually exclusive, to pray for Ukraine’s safety and for Putin’s exorcism, and to pray that in the aftermath of this, that people would get the good that they need and the idolatrous institutions which facilitate these conflicts would be torn down.
Such an approach to internationally-facing institutions like governments squares with what we’ve been looking at the last several weeks in domestic life. Reflecting on the Civil Rights Movement, Day offers the following quote from a 1966 volume she’d been reading (assumedly as a commendation):
“The anarchist message is to reduce the operating room of government by laying claim to functions the movement can better perform by its own devices. What would it mean for the civil rights movement if its endowments of money and human energy were devoted to anarchist reconstruction? Instead of begrudged and sporadic protection by the federal government of the right to equal participation in second class educational facilities offered by the state governments, suppose the Negroes sought to develop new facilities of their own, with the finances and talent, now depleted by demonstrations against government, campaigns for its offices, appeals to its courts, a network of economically autonomous communities might be established which would have no place for government prejudice or oppression.”1
It’s a sentiment which echoes what black thinkers since at least W.E.B. Dubois had been arguing, with a twist: instead of aiding people with the aims of institutional incorporation in mind, what if people were given political access unbundled from the expectations of institutional money? That is, what if the institutions really cared about outcomes, and assumed that local communities had a better sense of how that should play out, and just gave them the resources? This, of course, is not how most institutions work: they have a specific idea not only of what values should be transmitted, but how, and the how usually matches the ability of the institution to be in control of the what.
There are two things to note here. First, there is the drive toward self-organization, using funds and resources not to ingratiate oneself deeper into existing patterns of value propogation, but to build institutions which are inseparable from the people. Institutions, as we’ve been describing them, operate with a logic of value perpetuation, with a kind of neutral relation to the persons within them, by design: they are means, not ends. BUT, the kind of means we have matter: they can either be made to be attentive to the people within them, by keeping them scaled appropriately and responsive to needs, or they can become a principality dominating life.
But it is the second part here that I think is equally interesting with respect to our posture toward those who populate institutions which we see as disinterested, Big Institutions which perpetuate good but in indifferent ways. What the authors that Day quotes here recognize—and which matches, I think, Day’s own sentiments—is that institutions are flesh and blood: they aren’t machines. They are populated by actual people who are in need of escaping the iron demands of an institutional arrangement in which value, money, and means are all tied together.
The new institutions envisioned in the quote above are still institutions, but ones which are attached to names and faces. Day’s intent is always to keep this second piece in view: even government workers have children they love, and even government workers need to be delivered from the thing which is killing them. It’s where her love of enemy and her anarchism kiss: we are all in this struggle together, and what institutions need more than to be lit on fire is to be exorcised.
What I’ve Been Reading: on the road last week for work, I had occasion to listen to some of the collected work of C.S. Lewis. Screwtape Letters remains brilliant, and The Great Divorce some wonderful speculative work, but I was less taken with Mere Christianity, which I hadn’t read in…a long time. Some of this is that I don’t think written apologetics really work the way that maybe they once did (if they worked that way at all?), except for helping Christians clarify their internal commitments.
On the other hand, Annette Gordon-Reed’s On Juneteenth was fantastic: lively history, personal narrative, contextual Texas ruminations—highly recommended. This came on the heels of listening—for the first time!—to DuBois’ The Souls of Black Folk, which may be my favorite thing that I’ve read this year so far. It’s just electric. I’ll probably write about it here in the future.
I’ve also been spending time with George J. Borjas’ We Wanted Workers: Unraveling the Immigration Narrative, written by an immigration economist. I’ve been reading a lot in migration studies for a few years now, but little about the economics: Borjas’ account takes a fairly sober and nuanced view of the economic impact of migration upon host countries, focusing predominately on the United States. As a theologian and ethicist, economic theory is not my field, but if you want something on this, this is a great place to dig in.
https://www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/articles/840.html