The horrific body camera videos Henry Nowak’s last moments have shocked millions of viewers. Nowak was stabbed to death by a man who then claimed to the police responders that Nowak was a vicious racist and that he was the victim. In accordance with British police training, the claim was instantly taken as true, not because of evidence of Nowak’s violating a law but because of the ethnicity of the murderer.
Nowak’s feeble attempts to tell what had happened were treated with contempt, and as he was lying on the ground, he was handcuffed, and his call for help as he was dying ignored. As his father said at the sentencing hearing for his son’s murderer, his son’s last memory, handcuffed and drowning in his own blood, was of his pleas being ignored and his life treated as worthless because he did not belong to the right ethnic group.
This is not the first time an innocent person has died with his or her pleas being ignored because of race. In past times, the injustice in the West went in a different racial direction. The injustice of American justice for blacks under the Jim Crow laws is a stain on American history, one that many have labored for decades to expunge. The systematic exclusion of blacks from juries, the exclusively white composition of the judiciary and the legal profession in many states, and the subjection of the black population to the terror of lynch mobs enjoying all but overt governmental support are an impartial list of the injustices that community suffered.
It is natural and a matter of history that a pendulum pushed far in one direction will swing back in the other. It is natural that it will then swing back yet again, failing any intervention and minus the workings of entropy. The long and slow reaction to the sins of past racism have carried the pendulum well past the mid-point of colorblindness to the sanctimonious reductionism under the banner of DEI and the open borders movement. Again, race and ethnic identity become the focus for judgment, and the long, hard-won effort to develop just law based on objective moral principles is rejected with cynical contempt.
Does this reflect our doom? Will the pendulum swing endlessly past the middle point, never to rest at the rule of just law, administered impartially? It is a question raised by our civilization and which points towards real answers.
Aristotle in his Nichomachean Ethics proposes a broad test for determining good behavior: we should deliberately seek the middle path between excess and deficiency, between the far points of the pendulum’s swing.
It is clear, as Aristotle himself suggests, that this is no simple arithmetical calculation. He teaches that this principle must be applied with practical wisdom so that we are not easily gamed by bad people. For years, Americans sought compromise on the issue of slavery, and only with the Dred Scott decision did it become clear that the racists were maximalist and did not seek compromise at all. At last, it came down to a struggle in which the house of America could not be divided any more.
But living together cannot be on the basis of one person’s ancestry being superior.
This practical wisdom is what enables us to make the following distinction: between the normal situation in which we work things out naturally by seeking a broad middle ground that supports us all, and the terrible situations in which compromise will be useless, and the principles being attacked are so fundamental that we must fight for them with all our resolve.
We all can imagine a better world. But only those who do not know the practical world imagine that our imagining alone changes the outer reality. But there are those who double down, stay poorly behaved children, who have no tolerance over their world not measuring up to their desires, and will use their unconstrained emotion to force you to make it better.
When someone grows older and accretes adult power without that practical wisdom, they have more weapons than a toddler to employ in their tantrum. In place of wisdom, they learn to control and manipulate, to play others like a game. They know most everyone is willing to invest in a relationship and compromise. These people read the seeking of a middle position as an exploitable weakness. You compromise; they take what you offer, give nothing back, then make a further demand.
These people are most often ideologues. They believe that, having the whole of the truth in hand, compromise is only for the benighted. Thus, the bargaining tactics of Hitler and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard regime, remarkably similar in their choice of enemies, methods, and ways of thinking.
Another even older cultural layer gives us examples of that practical wisdom at work. About racism, Genesis tells us all humanity comes from the same source. The rabbis of the Mishnah, compiled from older oral sources around the year 185, draw out the implications of the Genesis texts.
[But a single person was created] for the sake of peace among humankind, that one should not say to another, “My father was greater than your father.” Again, [but a single person was created] against the heretics so they should not say, “There are many ruling powers in heaven.” Again [but a single person was created] to proclaim the greatness of the Holy Blessed One; for humans stamp many coins with one seal and they are all like one another; but the King of kings, the Holy Blessed One, has stamped every human with the seal of the first man, yet not one of them are like another. Therefore, everyone must say, “For my sake was the world created.”
So human unity underlies human difference. Both unity and difference are true and real and express irreducible truth.
This awareness seamlessly manifests in law. The people of Israel start as a family and remain that way. But from the beginning, they understand their God as everyone’s. When they become a nation under law at Sinai, citizenship is a birthright of that family forever. But the texts of the law speak of the stranger who will come to join the people, and those texts play out a theme: if they come to join you, one law will embrace you both. The former strangers accept the equal duties of citizenship and thereby, the family core is obliged not only to accept them but to love them.
The entire book of Ruth is devoted to this theme. In its few beautiful chapters, it tells us that the story of the acceptance of the other person on the equal terms they accept opened up the key to the future redemption of the nation and the world, for Ruth of Moab becomes the mother of the line that leads to King David and so to the Messiah.
As medieval philosophers in all the Western faiths taught, there is a confluence of wisdom in our civilizational sources that feeds our humanity. Our individuality is for a reason — each person is a seat of consciousness, the focus of all the cosmos and its Creator. But living together cannot be on the basis of one person’s ancestry being superior. It is through acceptance of the equal responsibility to live together under one law and so guide a life in which each one of us gives their nation their effectual support.
It is not far away from us, not in heaven nor across the sea, as Deuteronomy teaches. It is very near to us, in our hearts to feel, on our tongues to say, and in our bodies to do. Enough of the tantrums and the miserable excuses. Time for wisdom, divine and practical.
READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin:
The Stories That Saved the West
