In praise of strangeness: Part II

Keep your enemies closer (and don't assume you know them)

Dear Soulful Revolutionary,

My first real enemy was my high school bully. A football player whom I first encountered in my sophomore Physical Education class, he regularly humiliated me, making inappropriate, sexist jokes about me to his friends. He even embarrassed me during my teacher father’s speech to my graduating class. When he was around I felt small and scared. That he was cruel and domineering, seeming to take pleasure in making me feel uncomfortable, was all I needed to know in order to keep my distance. I didn’t care to know him any more than this.

Last week I wrote about how keeping a keen sense of the strangeness of the other can keep us curious, connected, and open to those we count as friends, loved ones and allies.

Today, we’re turning our attention to our enemies, considering how not assuming that we know them might, ironically, help us love them.

Let’s begin with the wisdom of 6th Century BCE Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu, who wrote in The Art of War:

“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”

In our own time, it’s not a common thing to hear someone explicitly speak of having enemies.

But in the ancient world, that one would have enemies was taken for granted as a fact of life. What was not assumed was that the enemy was intimately known.

Photo by yang miao on Unsplash

The Bible, for its part, is rife with examples of people having enemies. From Egypt’s enslavement of the Hebrew people, to the Babylonian exile, to the Roman occupation, there’s no shortage of people to count as enemies. The Psalmist’s plea, “Wipe out my enemies because of your faithful love,”¹ may be hard for many modern readers to stomach, but this desperate prayer would have made good sense to ancient readers living under existential threat, as it still does to those living under the boot of empire.

So when Jesus taught his followers, “love your enemies,” this would not have been received as an esoteric abstraction. His listeners knew very well who their enemies were. They could have quickly identified those whose participation in the Roman occupation — through economic investment, religious collaboration, or brute force — rendered them enemies.

Yet the command of love takes this knowledge of the existence of enemies to a much more intimate and vulnerable level of engagement. Love demands we not assume that we really know our enemies.

This is spiritually and strategically sound counsel.

Spiritually, because hatred of enemies obscures their humanity, making the pathway of dehumanization which we have loathed seeing others tread readily accessible to us.

Strategically, because love is about truth. Loving enemies means avoiding making assumptions about them. Not seeing them as we wish they were, or as our snap judgments would have us see them, but as they actually are. All of which will shift the ways we engage enemies on the field of social change.

This approach to engaging with enemies diverges significantly from what is most typical today.

Here are two of the most common approaches I have observed to having enemies:

The first is to deny their existence. This is obviously wishful thinking. Violent, dehumanizing systems don’t come into existence ex nihilo. Systems are created, sustained and grown by people, whose consent and participation enables them to run roughshod over the vulnerable people of the world.

Yet all too often, people with more privilege can pretend as though enemies do not exist. My first personal encounter with violence happened at 14. Up until then, I wondered: “Why can’t we all just be friends?” This idealism was devoid of any power analysis or understanding of systemic oppression. Experiencing violence decompressed power dynamics that had previously been invisible to me.

Most of the white, suburban churches I’ve encountered live solidly in the camp of enemy-denial, spouting “reconciliation” without reckoning with power differentials. Some were rattled by the 2016 election, and spent the next four years bemoaning the Enemy-in-Chief, as though he was an aberration, and not endemic to this system of “Imperialist White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy” (as writer bell hooks aptly described our reality). There is a collective failure to know the enemy within and amongst us.

In her book How to Have an Enemy, Mennonite pastor Melissa Florer-Bixler (catch her writing at Bad Theology in the Good Place) writes, “It is the work of the gospel to uncover the source of our enmity, to stand fully before it, to confront it, and to be transformed.” Love of enemy begins with knowing who our enemy is, and then holding them responsible for the harm they are doing. We must learn to name the reality we inhabit, including who is supporting the evil that pervades our world — which includes when we have met the enemy and they are us.

Belfast poet Gail McConnell powerfully unveils the reality of enemies with her below erasure poem. With painful precision, she redacts the last lines from Psalm 23 to reveal the presence of enemies in that text, as in her own context as a child growing up in Northern Ireland, where her father was killed before her eyes when she was three:

From McConnell’s book The Sun is Open

To deny the existence of enemies is to set ourselves up for defeat by the systems they support, which are omnipresent, operating right under our noses.

Meanwhile, oppressed people have always been crystal clear about the existential threat posed by those invested in the status quo. The presence of enemies is assumed.

Which brings us to a second common approach to having enemies, characterized by a commonly invoked refrain amongst targeted communities:

the oppressor is better known by the oppressed than the oppressor knows themselves.

To a certain extent, making assumptions about enemies as a group serves in-group safety. Oppressed groups of people are able to quickly identify patterns of domination and subjugation used against them by people of privileged groups. On a collective level, deferring curiosity in favor of snap judgments is an often life-saving form of common sense.

But this becomes a spiritual and strategic stumbling block when applied to individuals. Assuming full knowledge of any individual erases their strangeness. There needs to be some region of mystery presumed when encountering any person, including those with whom we have the greatest amount of enmity. Or else, as Sun Tzu taught 2500 years ago, “for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat.”

It’s one thing to make generalizations about systems and the groups that collectively uphold them. But the individuals who make up systems exist along a spectrum of allies. They can be appealed to using different tactics and pressured by varying means. Assumptions can crowd out creative possibilities for engagement with enemies.

Not seeing them as an amorphous bloc, but as individuals with unique needs, desires, hopes and fears, both keeps our humanity intact and helps us exercise curiosity about the tactics that will be most effective in getting their attention.

Assumed knowledge of the enemy also contributes to a dynamic where assumptions are made about shared beliefs within the in-group. When we assume we know the enemy fully, we shut down the possibility of strangeness within our own ranks. This leads to not only failing to see the nuance of the enemy (with the tactical miscalculations that accompany such an assumption), but also the erasure of diversity amongst those considered part of “us.”

Insisting on the sameness of those with whom we experience enmity easily shifts into assuming sameness amongst those with whom we are in solidarity. Slipping into this binary thinking is an easy set up for conflict.

Take, for example, the recent open letter to the Chancellor from UCLA Jewish faculty and staff, who wrote, “We notice a tendency to treat Jewish people on campus as a homogenous bloc despite our many backgrounds, convictions, and experiences. A great deal is being said in our name, without our consent.” They complicated the administration’s assumption of their possessing a shared in-group identity — a convenient homogenizing that rested on the administration’s assumptions of who constituted the “enemy.”

It is a practice in prudence – and even love – to presume strangeness. This means remembering that we do, indeed, have enemies, many of whom are yet unknown to us. Getting to know who they are is both spiritual and strategic work. Presuming the strangeness of our enemies allows us to engage each relationship with curiosity and creativity, knowing that we may well be surprised — perhaps even transformed — by what we encounter.

1. Psalm 143:12a, Common English Bible