Acquiring the ability to read, it transformed me, man. Like we say it in Spanish, la cultura cura. Culture heals. And that’s what healed me was culture. It made me positive. One thing for sure it id, it helped me to stop seeing my so-called enemy as my enemy and to start seeing him as my brother.[1]

The first encounter between Max Cerda and Raymond Cruz, members of rival gangs in Chicago, was a confrontation, after which Max had sworn “I’m gonna get this punk, whoever he is.” Soon after, however, their respective gangs united, and Max and Raymond began a friendship that grew into brotherhood. Two years older than Max, Raymond eventually left their neighborhood and its gang lifestyle, encouraging Max to do the same. Yet Max resisted, and after several months he convinced Raymond to return to the neighborhood that they had shared, “just to spend some time with me.” On the day that Raymond returned, April 18, 1979, Max and Raymond were ambushed. Max survived the attacked unharmed, but Raymond was shot 13 times; he died within minutes, in Max’s arms. The night of Raymond’s funeral, Max set out to resolve his feelings of anger and loss in the only way that he knew:

The night we buried him, it was like five of us walking around, trying to find the enemy. We were hurt. Full of anger. Full of pain. I didn’t worry about getting locked up. I didn’t worry about dying. I was looking for death, bro. I was running right into it, head on.[2]

The next day, Max was arrested, charged with two counts of murder and one count of attempted murder. Though charged as an adult, Max was just 16 years old. 

Max Cerda spent 18 years in prison, including five and a half years of solitary confinement. Unlike so many others whom the prison system fails to rehabilitate, it not wholly destroys, Max found a path toward growth, change, and redemption: 

A lot of people go to the hole and they find the end of the world. For me, I found a new world. I found a world of self. That’s where I learned how to think. It’s where I learned how to read. It’s where I learned how to cry. I needed that so much.[3]

While in prison, Max met Luis Rosa, a Puerto Rican nationalist who preached Latino awareness and Latino unity to the other inmates. Max also met Jose Pizarro, personal security to the leader of the Folks gang, the principal rival of Max’s gang People. Guided in equal measure by the newfound sense of solidarity to which his reading and introspection had led him and the influence of Luis Rosa’s doctrines of Latino unity, Max began to work in cooperation with Jose toward an alliance between the two rival gangs. Together Max and Jose co-founded the Latino Cultural Exchange Coalition while in prison, a coalition that, since their release from prison, has given Max and Jose the forum and the authority to discourage local teens from following the path toward violence.

What, if anything, does Max Cerda’s story reveal regarding a possible answer to the problem of violence? Without suggesting that any elements of Max’s story are suggestive of a definitive answer, there are aspects that warrant closer investigation. To begin, in at least two instances Max was able to overcome a fundamental tension with, and propensity for violence toward, another person by recognizing a shared need and a shared experience between the other and himself. Further, as Max explicitly contends, being taught how to read by another inmate had a profound influence on his capacity to recognize, and to value, the growing sense of brotherhood between himself and others. Ultimately, it was this sense of brotherhood, of solidarity, which encouraged and allowed Max to turn away from violence. 

* * * 

The violence that permeates American culture in the second decade of the twenty-first century takes many, many forms. At times, it is blatantly intentional, as in the shootings, stabbings, beatings, exclusions, and exiles perpetrated against individuals and groups because of their race, religion, or ideology; this is a racially motivated shooting in a church or the refusal to grant equal rights and respects to LGBTQ individuals. At times, this violence is more subtle in its motivation but equally appalling and destructive in its manifestation; this is the institutional system that, seemingly with impunity, kills Freddie Gray and Sandra Bland while in police custody, that kills Terence Crutcher, Keith Lamont Scott, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Jordan Edwards in public, and that unjustifiably harasses a poor kid on a street corner for having an ounce of marijuana. And at other times, this violence is the wholly unintended consequence of the conscious decision that it is perfectly permissible to willingly harm another person; this is the innocent nine-year-old girl who, while playing with friends on the first really crisp Sunday afternoon in October, is shot in a drive-by attempt to kill someone else, mere blocks away from where a three-year-old was killed in similar fashion just a year before. In each case, the particular act of violence must be understood as the inevitable product of the unintended inability, or intentional refusal, to recognize, respect, and relate to the inherent worth of the individual person. 

The problem of violence today is an incredibly complicated, multi-faceted issue, which comprises the seemingly disparate issues of gun control, health care (particularly, but not exclusively, mental health care), institutional racism, and the “war on drugs,” to name only a few. It would therefore be misguided to attempt to attribute the problem of violence, particularly in its current iteration, to any one cause. At the same time, it would be equally misguided, if not downright destructive, to fail to acknowledge the place of alienation and marginalization at the heart of the problem. Marginalization is itself an act of violence, forcefully exiling an individual or group from the whole and setting them outside as ‘wrong,’ ‘bad,’ ‘evil,’ or ‘inhuman.’ Further, the perpetuation of such conditions, by inflicting the constant pressure of violence, begets more violence as the marginalized and oppressed must rebel against their condition by turning the violence away from themselves and redirecting it outwardly. Maurice Jackson, a professor of history at Georgetown University, contends that this trajectory is precisely what is playing out in cities across the United States, including St. Louis, Baltimore, and Washington, DC. Noting the political and social conditions that have created the margins that divide these and other cities into distinct groups that end up at odds with each other, Jackson concludes that there can only be a catastrophic consequence: “Marginalization and alienation are dynamite just waiting for a match. People don’t suffer in silence forever. Their pain always finds a way to express itself. As long as the levels of social and economic inequality exist, no city can absolve itself of the waves of violence, no city can be riot proof.”[4]Weapons are not the only means by which we are killing each other in America; discrimination, judgment, intolerance, and hate are profoundly destructive components of our contemporary culture. At the same time, and although these forces far too often cause far too much pain on their own, very often they also lead to the use of physical implements of violence for their ultimate expression. So what is to be done?  

One possible answer was suggested recently by Michael Wood, a former Baltimore City police officer. Wood, whose first assignment with the BPD in 2003 was walking the Western District, worked with the Violent Crime, narcotics, and Major Crimes divisions before leaving the department in 2014. In June of 2015, Wood began to publicize some of his personal experiences of the corruption and abusive policies of city’s police department. There was little in what Wood reported that did not accord with allegations that have been made in the past. Particularly in the wake of Freddie Gray’s death in April of 2015, numerous accounts of police brutality in Baltimore have been advanced,[5] adding to a chorus of the same from Ferguson, St Louis, New York, Cleveland, and many other cities across America. Yet there was one aspect of Wood’s story that was both surprising and remarkably insightful; in an interview with The Washington Post, when asked what fostered his own transition from participation in these practices to reporting them, Wood revealed the following: 

I got my master’s degree. The critical thinking required to earn my degree helped me more fully process those revelations [of the wrongness of the actions by police] I had in 2007. It taught me to think about things differently, to evaluate information in different ways. I started reading news from alternative media, seeking out different perspectives. Then I think the national discussion after Ferguson really drove it all home for me. That whole discussion was so divisive, but it was also instructive. So much of it goes back to a lack empathy. You start to see how neither side is able to see things from the other’s perspective.[6]

Ultimately Wood posits his newfound “critical thinking” skills as that which not only allowed him to fully understand the horror that he and some of his fellow officers had been perpetrating, but also to take personal responsibility for those actions and to report both what he had seen and what he had done. This is the essence of critical thinking, entailing not merely the active acquisition and synthesis of new knowledge, perspectives, experiences, and reasoning (though these are of immense importance), but also necessitating choice and action; once a new understanding is reached through the acquisition and synthesis of knowledge described above, the critical thinker, to be worthy of that designation, must be compelled to decidewhat she has learned, what she now deems to be the state of things, and act in a particular manner guided by that knowledge. In the case of Michael Wood, once he allowed himself to recognize the varying perspectives and positions of those effected by his behavior and that of his fellow officers, he gained a fuller understanding of them as individuals, as people, and he was thus able to change his behavior accordingly and report those who would not change their behavior. The point of crisis is, ultimately, a choice; critical thinking is the active openness to all perspectives, experiences, and knowledge, the discipline to synthesize these with one’s own understanding, and the commitment to choose a manner of acting as a result. 

Christopher Nelson, former president of St. John’s College, has been a long-time proponent of the importance of critical thinking for the betterment of society, and an outspoken champion of the particular manner of education which he believes fosters such thinking. In his essay “Lincoln and Liberal Education,” as in so many other essays and speeches, Nelson champions a liberal education, which he describes as a twofold education in the “political and intellectual foundations, including the economic, scientific, and social traditions and principles that have shaped our nation,” and in the “arts needed to question and examine those very foundations and traditions in the light of reason, so that we may keep them vibrant and alive, and so that we may redefine and improve on them when we discover we have good cause.”[7] Apart from the obvious dichotomy of practicality of science and abstractness of art, there is a more striking paradox in Nelson’s juxtaposition of, and according of, equal primacy to foundational knowledge and the imperative to question. Although a primary purpose of higher education is to provide a sound foundation on which one can begin to identify oneself and one’s world, and subsequently orient oneself accordingly, a proper education must equally equip one to question these ‘foundations’ to better understand and clarify the world as well as our place, and that of others, within the world; it is a movement toward, and commitment to, a manner of not merely knowing or understanding, but also of relating. At the heart of a liberal education should be, among other things, an acute recognition of, and respect for, the profound diversity of human character and human experience, which should in turn motivate and direct the promotion of justice. If as a society we are unable to learn how to think more critically, to engage and give weight to other points of view, and ultimately to expand our own boundaries to begin to overlap those of others, then there is no hope for an open, equal, and free society.

This is not to suggest that the hopes for an end to violence and the equality of all hinge on a formalized, advanced education of a particular kind; at the same time, the founding and guiding principles of the kind of education alluded to by Michael Wood and described by Christopher Nelson can be extremely instructive to a society that wishes to properly care for itself and its people. One very simple and accessible manner in which this can be achieved is through reading—not just as a means of acquiring knowledge per se, but also as a means to engage new perspectives and experiences. An recent issue of Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts features a study from Eva Maria Koopman, of Erasmus University Rotterdam, who investigated the effects of the foregrounding of particular emotional states/responses while reading on the affective response of the reader, particularly as that response is manifested in empathy. Guided in part by Susan Sontag’s contention that “[l]iterature can train, and exercise, our ability to weep for those who are not us or ours,”[8] Koopman uses both quantitative and qualitative measures to demonstrate that what we read can actually affect not only how we feel, but also how we then relate to others. In her study, Koopman presented readers an extract from the Dutch novel Contrapunt (Counterpoint, Anna Enquist, 2010), either in its original form or modified to remove all emotionally foregrounding elements, and found that “readers who had read the ‘original’ version scored higher on empathy after reading than those who had read the version ‘without foregrounding.’”[9] By actively engaging the context and perspective of the text, reading allows one to immerse oneself in a new position, new characters, and a new world, which in the best of circumstances may allow one to feel ‘other than’ oneself, to feel like someone else who has undergone different experiences, and to understand both the good and the bad that is attendant to those experiences. 

Baltimore’s own D. Watkins has similarly suggested reading as a primary way in which the propensity toward marginalization and violence in our cities may be quelled. In his essay “My Neighborhood Revolution,” Watkins offers the following: 

I once heard Sherman Alexie say, “Rich people who don’t read are assholes and poor people who don’t read are fucked!” He’s right. So if we can help create readers and writers, thinkers will be birthed, people will be better communicators, social relations will enhance drastically, and our city will be a less violent place.[10] 

It is worth emphasizing that reading is here proposed not as a manner of gaining knowledge as Truth, but rather as a manner of gaining new experience and understanding and synthesizing it with one’s own. With this revelation Watkins echoes pragmatist thinkers like the late Richard Rorty, who so insightfully posited that philosophical inquiry should be less concerned with Truth as such and more concerned with its capacity to serve human society.[11] Rorty proposed a turn away from Truth and instead toward freedom, fostered by an “unjustifiable hope, and an ungroundable but vital sense of human solidarity,”[12] suggesting that individuals can be united as a society in the shared recognition of the contingency of language and of belief and by the simultaneous recognition of the shared potential for suffering. Rorty concludes that the goal for philosophy and society, and the ideal by which belief and behavior may be directed, lies in this conception of solidarity, constituted as “the ability to see more and more traditional differences…as unimportant when compared with similarities with respect to pain and humiliation—the ability to think of people wildly different from ourselves as included in the range of ‘us.’”[13] It is thus through solidarity that we see ourselves in the other, and we recognize in the other’s suffering the potential for our own suffering. As Emmanuel Levinas concluded, “In the relation to the other, the other appears to me as one to whom I owe something, toward whom I have a responsibility.”[14] This is what reading can contribute to individuals and to society: it compels one to more fully examine the world and one’s place in it; it allows one to begin to see from the perspective of others and to better understand the world as they see it; and it offers the opportunity and the means by which a deeper understanding of oneself and of others can be achieved and the capacity for relation between the two realized. 

Both the need for and the ability to relate is an inherent, fundamental quality of human being; the human capacity to realize and engage in meaningful relation stands as the structural character of reality and of existential meaning.[15] Further, it is through relating that the full potential of human being is most fully realized. The relation is essential. Rorty was right to offer solidarity as the fitting goal of philosophical inquiry. We’re not murdering each other on a daily basis because we haven’t proven whether there is truly a division between body and soul, or that God exists, or that history is a dialectic process; we’re murdering each other because we cannot, or will not, allow ourselves to relate. Instead we create distinctions, we exclude, we judge, we marginalize, and the divided society that results has little choice but to erupt in conflict and violence. As Albert Camus suggested, solidarity or violence truly is a defining either/or scenario of our contemporary world: 

We know today that there are no more islands, that frontiers are just lines on a map. We know that in a steadily accelerating world…we are forced into fraternity—or complicity. … There is no suffering, no torture anywhere in the world which does not affect our everyday lives.[16]

Or, as his character Jean Tarrou so poignantly contended, “on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us…not to join forces with the pestilences.”[17] One particular and profound pestilence that we face today is marginalization, and it is fostering the exact same conditions of exile and death that inspired Camus’ words above. Our only way, then, is to realize human existence as a solidary, shared struggle and to resist marginalization for the violence that it is and for the violence that it nurtures.

Notes

[1] Max Cerda, “Death Is Contagious,” in How Long Will I Cry? Voice of Youth Violence, ed. Miles Harvey (Chicago, IL: Big Shoulders Books, 2013), 91.

[2] Cerda, 89–90.

[3] Cerda, 90.

[4] Maurice Jackson, “Why Police Can’t Fix Urban America’s Violent Crime Problem,” in The Washington Post, September 3, 2015. Available online at https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2015/09/03/why-police-cant-fix-urban-americas-violent-crime-problem/

[5] For a particularly thorough and alarming history of police violence in Baltimore, see Bill Keller’s excellent interview with David Simon for The Marshall Project, available here: https://www.themarshallproject.org/2015/04/29/david-simon-on-baltimore-s-anguish

[6] “An Interview with the Baltimore Cop Who’s Revealing all the Horrible Things He Saw on the Job,” in The Washington Post, June 25, 2015. Available online at https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2015/06/25/an-interview-with-the-baltimore-cop-whos-revealing-all-the-horrible-things-he-saw-on-the-job/

[7] Christopher B. Nelson, “Lincoln and Liberal Education,” from the Huffington Post. Available online at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/christopher-nelson/liberal-arts-education-lincoln_b_2966192.html

[8] From Sontag’s “Literature as Freedom,” quoted in Koopman’s article.

[9] Eva Maria Koopman, “Effects of ‘Literariness’ on Emotions and on Empathy and Reflection After Reading,” in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts (Vol. 10, 2016), p. 82.

[10] D. Watkins, The Beast Side: Living and Dying While Black in America (New York, NY: Skyhorse, 2015), 79.

[11] This line of thinking is extremely well articulated in the essays comprised in Truth and Progress. In the introduction to that volume, Rorty writes: “Instead of asking, ‘Are there truths out there that we shall never discover?’ we would ask, ‘Are there ways of talking and acting that we have not yet explored?’ Instead of asking whether the intrinsic nature of reality is yet in sight…, we should ask whether each of the various descriptions of reality employed in our various cultural activities is the best we can imagine—the best means to the ends served by those activities.” (Richard Rorty, Truth and Progress [Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1998], 6.)

[12] Rorty, “Method, Social Science, Social Hope,” 208.

[13] Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge, UK; Cambridge University Press, 1989), 192.

[14] Emmanuel Levinas, Altérité et transcendance [Alterity and Transcendence], trans Michael B. Smith (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 101.

[15] Steven A. Burr, Finite Transcendence: Existential Exile and the Myth of Home (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2014).

[16] Albert Camus, Ni Victimes, ni bourreaux [Neither Victims nor Executioners], trans. Dwight MacDonald (New York, NY: Liberation) 15.

[17] Albert Camus, La Peste [The Plague], trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958), p. 229.