Just Policing: An Ellulian Critique more

The Ellul Forum For the Critique of Technological Civilization Issue 48 Fall 2011 Yahweh is Still King: Engaging I Samuel 8 & Jacques Ellul Thomas Bridges 3 Anarchism & Jacques Ellul 9 “Come Out, My People”: Rethinking the Bible’s Ambivalence About Civilization Wes Howard-Brook Just Policing: An Ellulian Critique Andy Alexis-Baker Going Offline Brenna Cussen Anglada 18 12 In Review Christian Anarchism: A Political Commentary on the Gospel By Alexandre J. M. E. Christoyannopoulos Tripp York Call to Meeting Jacques Ellul Centenary Conference: July 8-10, 2012 21 24 The Ellul Forum For the Critique of Technological Civilization Founded 1988 The Ellul Forum is published twice per year, in the Spring and Fall. Its purpose is to analyze and apply Jacques Ellul’s thought to our technological civilization and carry forward both his sociological and theological analyses in new directions. Editor Clifford G. Christians, Univ. of Illinois, Urbana IL Associate Editor David W. Gill, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, So. Hamilton MA Contributing Editors Patrick Chastenet, University of Bordeaux, France Dan Clendenin, Stanford, California Peter F. W. Davies, Buckinghamshire College, UK Marva Dawn, Vancouver, Washington Darrell J. Fasching, University of South Florida Andrew Goddard, Oxford University, UK Joyce Hanks, Univ. of Scranton, Pennsylvania David Lovekin, Hastings College, Nebraska Carl Mitcham, Colorado School of Mines Pieter Tijmes, University of Twente, Netherlands Gabriel Vahanian, Strasbourg University, France Willem Vanderburg, Univ. of Toronto, Canada Publisher The International Jacques Ellul Society www.ellul.org 130 Essex Street, Box 219 South Hamilton MA 01982 USA Dues, Subscriptions, & Payment Options The Ellul Forum is sent twice per year to all members of the IJES. An annual membership/ subscription, anywhere in the world, costs US $20. Please send check or money order (e.g., international postal money order) drawn in US funds for $20 to “IJES”, 130 Essex St., Box 219, So. Hamilton MA 01982 USA---or make payment to “IJES@ellul.org” electronically at www.paypal.com. Be sure to note your address and the purpose of your payment. Change of Address Please notify IJES of any change in your address. Our mailings are infrequent and postal forwarding orders expire. Manuscript Submissions For Ellul Forum writers’ guidelines, visit www.ellul.org---or e-mail: Editor@ellul.org---or write Cliff Christians, EF Editor, Institute of Communications Research, University of Illinois, 810 S. Wright St., # 228, Urbana IL 61801 USA We welcome your proposals. Books, Reviews, News Send books for review, book reviews, and news to David Gill, EF Assoc. Editor, 130 Essex St., Box 219, So. Hamilton MA 01982 USA Back Issues Visit www.ellul.org for a complete index of back issues and information on how to access them. © 2011 International Jacques Ellul Society Contact IJES for permission to copy EF material. From the Editor This issue of the Ellul Forum deals broadly with Ellul and Anarchism. The first two essays look at various aspects of Ellul’s biblical interpretation with regard to anarchism. Thomas Bridges examines how Ellul uses the rise of kingship in 1 Samuel 8, arguing that a close examination of the Deuteronomistic History very much supports Ellul’s reading in Anarchy and Christianity. Wes HowardBrook takes a different approach, and draws from Ellul’s ideas in Meaning of the City. The very idea of civilization—a way of life based on cities—according to the Bible is at the root of much violence and domination in human history. Wes Howard-Brook tries to advance Ellul’s analysis further by asking whether the origin stories in Genesis “challenge the agriculture-based imperial assumptions of the Babylonian creation epic” and then asks how this potential challenge relates the holy city of Jerusalem in the Book of Revelation. Ellul’s critique of the city and agriculture have not been the focus of much scholarly attention. Howard-Brook thus carries the conversation forward and points in helpful directions. My own contribution to this volume leaves the biblical studies realm and asks what Ellul thought of the police and how this thought relates to recent work in Christian ethics on “just policing”—the idea that an international police force could replace the system of war and make the world a less violent place. I don’t think Ellul would support this, and would have a number of pointed observations. Thus my article is more “Ellulian” than analysis of Ellul’s work per se. Finally, Brenna Cussen Anglada — a Catholic anarchist from Dubuque, Iowa — takes up some of Wes Howard-Brook’s themes as she examines her own use of the personal computer. She draws on Ellul’s analysis of technique, arguing that for her, giving up the use of a personal computer is one small step toward recovering a life focused on things that matter, in ways that matter. Computer manufacturers have exploited the earth, oppressed laborers, and for an anarchist like Cussen Anglada, these are deeply troubling things to be implicated in. Ellul’s thought on anarchism hasn’t really received the due attention it deserves. Sometimes Ellul Forum readers have dismissed his anarchist claims as naïve and things he really didn’t mean. In this issue, we take him seriously and look at what it means for a number of areas. I hope further explorations of this type can be done in the future. Andy Alexis-Baker, Guest Editor 12 detail in Come Out, My People, the core Exodus narrative may well have been composed to legitimate and support both the rebellion and the alternative vision of a wilderness-based covenant relationship directly between YHWH and the people. Thus, “from the beginning,” Jerusalem was an imperial project, hardly different from that of Babylon or Egypt. Throughout the remainder of biblical history, prophets and apocalyptic visionaries proclaimed judgment on Jerusalem for its participation in empire, both “at home” and “abroad.” The collection of apocalyptic texts gathered as 1 Enoch express such a radical critique of this imperial participation that the Jerusalem-centered scribes and priests who established the scope of “scripture” excluded the texts from the eventual canon. Of course, it was Jesus’ own harsh critique and rejection of Jerusalem that led Jerusalem’s defenders to provide him an imperial execution. Space does not permit exploration of how consistently the core texts of what we know as the New Testament continue this rejection of Jerusalem’s claim to embody the divine will even as it collaborates with the Roman Empire. Ellul anticipated this in his groundbreaking interpretation of Jesus’ relationship with Jerusalem, both in the gospels and in the book of Revelation. However, as we know, a few centuries later, the unthinkable became reality: the claim of the Roman Empire to be “Christian.” Constantine’s audacious act of imperial authority is in many ways a perfect analog for Solomon’s own claim for a YHWH-authorized empire. But Christians should have no basis for accepting such propaganda, given how radically it conflicts with the Good News of God’s kingdom of love-based peace. Imperial propaganda, as Ellul so cogently noted throughout his career, has an amazing capacity to convince people of what they otherwise know to be false. The revelation in Jesus Christ of God’s true purpose for human life continues to be the most powerful means of defeating empire and its propaganda. We should all continue to be grateful to Ellul for opening doors that allow the Light to shine in the darkness. Just Policing: An Ellulian Critique by Andy Alexis-Baker Andy Alexis-Baker is a Ph.D. candidate in Systematic Theology and Theological Ethics at Marquette University Since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, many pacifistminded Christians have began to explore differences between policing and warfare with the noble hope of limiting or even abolishing war as we know it. For example, Catholic theologian Gerald Schlabach has developed a theory he calls “just policing.” Schlabach argues that the differences between policing and war are significant enough to merit a wholesale realignment of just war and pacifist thinking. Rather than justify war according to abstract criteria, just policing would draw upon international law to pursue suspected criminals, which should limit civilian casualties and demonizing of individuals and groups (Gerald Schlabach, ed. Just Policing, Not War (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 2007), p. 4). If just war theorists would honestly explore these distinctions, they would recognize policing is more appropriate to Christian duty than war. If pacifists would “support, 13 participate, or at least not object to operations with recourse to limited but potentially lethal force,” then a rapprochement might occur between just war theorists and pacifists through policing (Schlabach, p.3). In God’s Politics, Jim Wallis claims that since 9/11 many Christians have re-read Jacques Ellul, “who explained his decision to support the resistance movement against Nazism by appealing to the ‘necessity of violence’ but wasn’t willing to call such recourse ‘Christian’” (Jim Wallis, God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), 166). Similarly, Christian pacifists might respond to terrorism, Wallis claimed, by advocating that the international community create a global police force to deal with violations of international law and human rights (Wallis, 164–67). Such a force, Wallis wrote, is “much more constrained, controlled, and circumscribed by the rule of law than is the violence of war, which knows few real boundaries” (p. 166). Wallis’ suggestion that Ellul’s works may help to formulate a response to terrorism, and that such a response ought to be “policing” raises the question of what an Ellulian analysis of policing might look like. Ellul was after all an anarchist and viewed the police as a technique. In fact, his most famous text, The Technological Society, by my count uses police as an example of technique over thirty times. In what follows, I will use Ellul—rather than summarize his views—to critique just policing. Those who advocate for just policing have not adequately tested whether police are less violent because of the rule of law, and they make ahistorical arguments that do not countenance the possibility that policing may in fact sustain or even worsen violence, not lessen it. The importance of history At the outset of his book The Technological Society, Ellul decries the scholarly tendency to reduce technique to machines, stating that this “is an example of the habit of intellectuals of regarding forms of the present as identical with that of the past” (Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society, trans. John Wilkinson (New York: Vintage Books, 1967), 3). But the caveman’s tool differs qualitatively from modern technology. This same bad habit applies to current reflections on police. Police have not always existed; they are a modern invention. Greco-Roman cities did not employ officials to prevent or detect common criminal activity; citizens themselves performed these tasks. (For more on law enforcement in ancient Athens and Rome see David Cohen, Law, Violence, and Community in Classical Athens (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995) and Wilfried Nippel, Public Order in Ancient Rome (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995)). Athenian law centered on private prosecution, which meant that the victim or her family prosecuted the perpetrator in Athenian courts. For public crime like stealing city property, any citizen could prosecute and would do the necessary detective work and witness solicitation (Virginia Hunter, Policing Athens: Social Control in the Attic Lawsuits, 420-320 B.C. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), 125). Athenians usually settled disputes through negotiation, mediation and arbitration with minimal formal structures or authorities and stressed keeping peace over blame. To Athenians, democracy meant “consensus rather than coercion, participation rather than delegation. At the judicial level, the principle of voluntary prosecution . . . was fundamental” (Hunter, p. 88) Far from pandemonium, the Athenian system worked well. A state police would have been unthinkable. Roman society worked in a similar way. If a person witnessed a crime, they cried out for those nearby to help aid in capturing the perpetrator and in aiding the victim. The Roman military never involved itself in such acts unless a riot or rebellion was about to ensue that would disrupt the flow of goods to Rome. Classicist Wilfried Nippel even claims, “We do not even know to what degree (if at all) the Roman authorities undertook prosecution of murder” (Nippel, Public Order in Ancient Rome, 2). This informal “hue and cry” system prevailed through the Middle Ages as see in Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale. As Chaucer described it, the hue and cry involved shouting to draw attention to a crime. Those nearby gathered to witness, to help, to investigate and even to right the wrong. They might form a posse comitatis, led by the shire reeve (later called “sheriff”) who was an estate manager, to hunt for a fleeing felon. The entire process was a community activity, not the responsibility of a professional police. This description is confirmed in legal codes throughout Europe. For instance, the municipal code of Cuenca, Spain, published around 1190 C.E., describes city employees such as judges, an inspector of market weights, a bailiff to guard incarcerated individuals, a town crier and guards for agriculture (The English translation is published as 14 The Code of Cuenca: Municipal Law on the TwelfthCentury Castilian Frontier, trans. James Powers (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000)). But the code does not mention any officials to detect or prevent crime. At most medieval cities had night watchmen, who were not police but firemen who might also warn of other danger. The American colonies used the hue and cry and night watch system, memorialized in Paul Revere’s night-time warning, “The British are coming!” The English-speaking world developed professionalized preventative policing during the nineteenth-century. In America, these police forces evolved along two paths. Southern police forces evolved from state-mandated slave patrols, which monitored every aspect of slave life to prevent revolts. These armed patrols morphed into southern police forces before and after the Civil War. Despite occasional white protests, the police carried firearms because, they claimed, the shadowy fear of slave revolts and the mythical physical prowess of a revolting slave necessitated well-armed police (See Bryan Wagner, Disturbing the Peace: Black Culture and the Police Power after Slavery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009)). Most southern police departments, however, formed postbellum, simply taking over slave patrol disciplinary methods and applying them to the newly freed back populations through arrests on disorderly conduct, public intoxication, loitering, arrest “on suspicion,” “on warrant,” larceny and prostitution. Born in 1868, W.E.B. DuBois later said (Souls of Black Folk (New York: Penguin Books, 1989), 124, 25): The police system of the South was originally designed to keep track of all Negroes, not simply of criminals; and when the Negroes were freed and the whole South was convinced of the impossibility of free Negro labor, the first and almost universal device was to use the courts as a means of reenslaving the blacks. It was not then a question of crime, but rather one of color, that settled a man’s conviction on almost any charge. Thus Negroes came to look upon courts as instruments of injustice and oppression, and upon those convicted in them as martyrs and victims. In the North, police departments emerged in the nineteenth century to suppress the “dangerous class.” In city after city police departments combated working class vices such as drinking and vagrancy, not violent crime. For instance, from 1873 to 1915 police superintendents in Buffalo, New York crime consistently requested increased funding to hire more police, citing as a reason not a rise in violent crime, but labor strikes (Sidney Harring, "The Buffalo Police—1872-1915: Industrialization, Social Unrest, and the Development of the Police Institution" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1976), 43). Arrest records confirm this focus. The 1894 records from Buffalo—then a city of 300,000— show that police arrested 6,824 people for drunkenness, 4,014 for disorderly conduct, 4,764 for vagrancy, 1,116 for being tramps (p. 201). Yet they arrested only 98 people for felonious violence (murder, robbery and rape) (p. 192). The superintendents—invariably tied to big businesses— used “public order” arrests alongside more violent methods to break strikes and control unions. Besides maintaining class order, northern police also helped consolidate political power. The police controlled elections by promoting turnout, monitoring voting stations, and harassing electoral opposition to the current administration since new regimes usually replaced existing police with loyalists. This happened following elections in Los Angeles (1889), Kansas City (1895), Chicago (1897) and Baltimore (1897) (See Robert Fogelson, Big-City Police (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 30). Understanding this history of policing is important. Do the police represent a natural desire for security that is central to all societies, dismissals of which reveal a profound naiveté? Or is modern policing a technique that represents a profound shift in western history as Ellul sees it? My contention is that instead of promoting the common good or protecting the weak, police have historically promoted particular interests, siding with their employers and with dominant racial and economic groups. Police technique is applicable to many areas, as Ellul claimed. The police did not result from inevitable historical forces but from calculated moves to maintain social stratification that continue into the present. The rule of law is an illusion Besides mistakenly making the police into an ancient and natural institution, the notion that the rule of law restrains police violence unlike the military remains untested. For Ellul, the rule of law is a pure illusion: “We must unmask the ideological falsehoods of 15 many powers, and especially we must show that the famous theory of the rule of law which lulls the democracies is a lie from beginning to end” (Jacques Ellul, Anarchy and Christianity, trans. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Grand Rapids: Eerdman's, 1991), 16). Taking this statement seriously, rule of law as it functions in just policing should be challenged at two levels. First, when the U.S. military charges a soldier with a felony, such as abusing prisoners or killing civilians, 90% are convicted and most are incarcerated. (According to the 2009 “Annual Report of the Code Committee on Military Justice” 1098 soldiers across all military branches were charged with the equivalent of a serious felony under military law. Of those 972 were convicted. See http://www.armfor.uscourts.gov/annual/FY09Annual Report.pdf accessed July 21, 2010). By comparison, in 2009 only 33% of American police officers charged were convicted—even if they killed unarmed, innocent people—and only 64% of those convicted were incarcerated. (The statistics on police misconduct are created by an NGO called The National Police Misconduct Statistics and Reporting Project and are “low-end estimates” based on news reports across the United States. See http://www.injusticeeverywhere.com/?page_id=1588 accessed July 21, 2010). These statistics contradict the assumption that law operates more on the police than the military. More fundamentally, however, policing advocates have missed that police operate as a sovereign power that stands above the law through their discretionary powers whereby they determine when, where and upon whom they will implement law. This discretionary power conflicts with western democratic theory, which gives pride of place to the rule of law. John Locke, for example, argued that “settled and standing rules” should circumscribe discretionary authority; due process should prioritize individual rights over coercive police powers; and the rule of law should protect citizens from arbitrary arrest and ensure their fair treatment while in custody. For “wherever law ends,” Locke proclaimed, “tyranny begins” (John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, and a Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. Ian Shapiro (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 189, 90; Bk 2, §202). Locke prohibited discretion as tyrannical except in emergencies where “the safety of the people . . . could not bear a steady fixed route” (169; Bk 2, §56). At that point the executive could “act according to discretion for the public good, without the prescription of the law, and sometimes even against it.” (Locke, 172; Bk 2, §60. For a discussion of Locke’s notion of prerogative see Pasquino Pasquale, "Locke on King's Prerogative," Political Theory 26, no. 2 (1998): 198–208). Locke thus pushed discretion—a decision outside the law—to edge of government, denying its necessity in quotidian governance. Echoing Locke, Jeffrey Reiman argues that “police discretion begins where the rule of law ends: police discretion is precisely the subjection of law to a human decision beyond the law” (Jeffrey Reiman, "Is Police Discretion Justified in a Free Society?," in Handled with Discretion: Ethical Issues in Police Decision Making, ed. John Kleinig (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1996), 74). Because police operate in “low visibility” conditions, the only people likely to know that the police officer decided not to invoke the law are the police officer and the suspect. Thus discretionary decisions are unreviewable and risk becoming arbitrary and prejudiced, particularly in cases of racial profiling, police brutality and class bias. In using discretion, police act as sovereigns in a state of emergency and can disregard law. Thus the assumption that police operate under the rule of law ignores routine discretion that transforms the police from an institution that enforces law, into a sovereign institution that can act without lawful authority and even against the law. In the fictional HBO series, The Wire, which is a hard-hitting critique of not only current American policing, but other institutions as well, one of the seasoned police officers named McNulty tells his fellow officer: “Let me let you in on a little secret. The patrolling officer on his beat is the one true dictatorship in America. We can lock a guy up on the humble, lock him up for real, or say fuck it and drink ourselves to death under the expressway and our side partners will cover us. No one, I mean no one, tells us how to waste our shift!” (The Wire, Season 4, episode 10). The police are thus an autonomous technique. In states of emergencies, sovereigns suspend law and use their monopoly on violence most often in police actions both externally and internally. Internally, the Holocaust was a police action within a state of emergency that Hitler had declared soon after taking office. In the Holocaust, the police did not violate German law; the entire operation was legal, which the legally police carried out. Other scholars have also noted that the Holocaust was legal and a police action. See Michael Berenbaum, "The Impact of the Holocaust on Contemporary Ethics," in Ethics in the 16 Shadow of the Holocaust: Christian and Jewish Perspectives, ed. Judith Herschcopf Banki et al. (Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2008), 256. Quoting a Nazi official Hannah Arendt writes, “only the police ‘possessed the experiences and the technical facilities to execute an evacuation of Jews en masse and to guarantee the supervision of the evacuees.’ The ‘Jewish State’ was to have a police governor under the jurisdiction of Himmler.” (Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking Press, 1965), 76). These states of emergencies are not confined to totalitarian states. The United States, for instance, has experienced nearly uninterrupted states of emergencies since the 1800’s, using them to suppress labor disputes, deport “communists,” and to execute people in the Civil War. Police actions are characteristic of sovereign power in times of national emergency, and this power has often been of the most brutal kind. These powers have been routine and are not exceptional at all, as Ellul argues (Violence: Reflections from a Christian Perspective (London: S.C.M. Press, 1970), 86): But so long as it faces crisis or encounters obstacles, the state does what it considers necessary, and following the Nuremberg procedure it enacts special laws to justify action which in itself is pure violence. These are the ‘emergency laws,’ applicable while the ‘emergency’ lasts. Every one of the so-called civilized countries knows this game. Community, policing and order With discretionary powers, police primarily maintain order rather than enforce law. But, Ellul would remind us (The Technological Society, 103): This order has nothing spontaneous in it. It is rather a patient accretion of a thousand details. And each of us derives a feeling of security from every one of the improvements which make this order more efficient and the future safer. Order receives our complete approval; even when we are hostile to the police, we are by a strange contradiction, partisans of order. The trick for police is to make people “partisans of order,” and since the police represent order itself, we must see the police as indispensible. This is how community policing theory works. Community policing theorists have long recognized the distinction between law and order and therefore promote broader discretionary police power, not less. According to Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers, “‘Community policing’ combines greater police/community cooperation with increased police discretion” (See Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers in the Editors preface to Tracey Meares and Dan Kahan, Urgent Times: Policing and Rights in Inner-City Communities (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999), xv). For them, procedural rules and laws inordinately restrict the police to observing an individual’s legal rights over the community’s well-being. Thus ostensibly minor issues such as panhandling, loitering and vagrancy remain unchecked but grow into larger problems as they signal lack of communal welfare to criminally-prone outsiders who subsequently invade the neighborhood. Community policing argues that police should have discretionary power to “clean up” these initial “disorders” even if their actions are not “easily reconciled with any conception of due process or fair treatment” and would probably “not withstand a legal challenge” (James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, “Broken Windows,” Atlantic Monthly 249, no. 3 (1982): 35, 31). The underlying premise of community policing bifurcates and simplifies community into “orderly” people (the community) and “disorderly” people (outsiders). It strips some people of rights and constructs a simplified community whose sole problems tend to be deviant outsiders and those inside who neglect quality of life issues like “broken windows.” The very word “community” connotes positive images, and masks the contested and complex nature of real communities. Furthermore, community policing deploys the word against some people and advocates that police be permitted to use any means necessary to rid a “community” of these “disorders.” By putting cops back on the beat and giving them a seemingly friendly face in the creation and maintaining of white bourgeois order, police do exactly as Ellul describes them in The Technological Society. They appear to protect “good citizens,” relieving the citizenry of any fear and by patrolling openly lose their secretive aura, and therefore are not felt to be oppressive. Thus most citizens do not seek to oppose or escape police technique because the police have removed any desire to escape. That is the ideal of technique: to make itself invisible and internalized in its object (The Technological Society, 413). But to do this it has to exclude some people from the notion of community. Anybody who might cause “orderly” people to feel uncomfortable must be stripped of liberal rights and chased out. They do not 17 have to be violent, but in the words of prominent community policing theorists merely “disorderly people. Not violent people, nor, necessarily, criminals, but disreputable or obstreperous or unpredictable people: panhandlers, drunks, addicts, rowdy teenagers, prostitutes, loiterers, the mentally disturbed” (James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, "Broken Windows," Atlantic Monthly 249, no. 3 (1982): 30). These are “broken windows” who if left unchecked will cause a spiral of crime and urban decay, indeed, they are the first signs of decay and must be eradicated with “zero tolerance” policies. This scapegoating mechanism has caused police to become much more violent toward these mere objects of police power (See Andy Alexis-Baker, "Community, Policing and Violence," Conrad Grebel Review 26, no. 2 (Spring, 2008): 104–5). The criminal abstraction of the technological society This scapegoating mechanism also reveals another problem in policing. From his experience working with gangs, Ellul argued that preventing youth from sliding into a life of violence “could not consist in adapting young people to society” (In Season, Out of Season (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1982), 120). For Ellul, these youth were part of those “who do not conform to the level of efficiency society demands [and] are pushed aside” (129). Thus instead of helping them become professional bureaucrats, Ellul took “a stand against the technological society” and helped them become rightly “maladjusted” themselves. He saw that society’s labeling of them as criminals and delinquents was simply part and parcel of the technological society. More deeply, I think, the technological society must redefine such people not as criminals and delinquents rather than enemies because criminality creates a permanent class of misfits to justify the state and its police. In just war thought—which, as a Christian pacifist, I am also against—enemies rightly construed have a political agenda that obligates the other side to treat them with a certain degree of equality and fairness. At war’s end, people go home. And war ends eventually through some kind of negotiation. But once that enemy is redefined as criminal, terrorist or delinquent, they are depoliticized. Instead of legitimate political claims, such people act out of insanity and hatred. One only needs to remember how those who planned the attacks on 9/11 were described and how no thought to negotiation was countenanced to see that this relabeling serves to create a permanent conflict and justify the state, including its police technique. The technique becomes much further entrenched and the violence more intractable with this shift in identity. International war in police garb A global police force will only quicken the march of the technological society and is really only a technical solution to technological problems. Ellul himself saw modern policing as a technique designed “to put . . . useless consumers to work” (The Technological Society, 111). Techniques intertwine into a system so that a technique applies across disciplines. So policing naturally carries over into economics. When the emerging capitalist system called for more laborers, the police were created to put nonproducers to work, outlawing loitering, gathering firewood and other necessities from the commons, all of which made it harder for nonproducers to stay outside the emerging economic order. Thus technique expands. The police are no exception. It seems naïve to suggest that the police would not expand into economic techniques, for example, on the international order. What would a broken window look like on the international scene? Who are the “panhandlers, drunks, addicts, rowdy teenagers, prostitutes, loiterers, the mentally disturbed” that are the human embodiments of broken when one’s community is the whole world? If international broken windows must be addressed so that they do not invite a spiral of unrest and violence, who is to notice and fix these windows? In community policing theory it is an outside police force that aggressively drives out undesirable elements, often violating their rights in the name of community. It seems unfathomable that an international police force would not be used to expand global capital markets. Looking outside the system As one example of a non-technical way of thinking about security we might look to the Paez tribe in Colombia, 100,000 people strong, who have completely disarmed their indigenous guard. This guard is not a professional force, but is made up of all volunteers and includes over 7,000 men, women and youth. They carry a three foot long baton decorated with various colors as a symbol of their authority, not as a weapon. When there is encroachment on their territory they communicate via radios and many of them gather together to confront the intrusion and try to persuade them to leave (a hue and cry). This does 18 not mean that such a decentralized, democratic, and nonviolent practice is always effective in warding off outside aggression: currently the tribe is facing increased pressure from both the government and FARC rebels with encroachment from both sides. However at times they have been able to persuade the rebels to back off and to release hostages. They provide security at great personal risk to themselves and their communities. This is not really “policing,” in the normal sense of this word, but a communal practice of care and concern for communal wellbeing through resolving conflicts nonviolently. Conclusion Just policing advocates distinguish between war and policing in such a way that policing must necessarily be less violent than war. They have historically maintained social stratification and expanded into new areas to justify their existence and operate not under the rule of law, but under the assumption that they should create order, a subjective concept that looks different to a radical anarchist than to a police officer. I have tried to demonstrate the flaws in this argument. In the end, Ellul’s statement on these distinctions holds true (The Political Illusion, trans. Konrad Kellen (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), 74-75): We hardly need to point out how simple-minded the distinction made by one of our philosophers is between “police” (internal), which would be legitimate as a means of constraint, and an ‘army,’ which would be on the order of force. In the realm of politics these two elements are identical. Going Offline by Brenna Cussen Anglada Brenna Cussen Anglada lives at the New Hope Catholic Worker Farm in Dubuque Iowa where she and others try to live out Peter Maurin's vision of a "worker-scholar" by combining farming and education “There are almost seven billion people in the world. Since it is not ecologically sustainable for each one of those people to use a computer, why you?” This question, posed by Ethan Hughes to a small group of us visiting the Possibility Alliance, an intentional community in Northeast Missouri living without the use of fossil fuel, has made a lasting impression on me. Ethan’s challenge, pointed at the privilege that I take for granted, and backed by the weight of sobering statistics about the destructive effects computers have on God’s creation, has triggered my decision to give up the personal use of computers by the end of 2011. I say I will give up the personal use of computers, because I realize it is currently beyond my ability and imagination right now to stop using the computers that are involved in my daily activities like using public transportation, banks, or telephones, or purchase anything. One exception I may make to the personal computer ban is if I travel to Occupied Palestine or another area where extreme oppression is taking place. Then I may use a computer as a means to communicate such injustices. However, I have not yet made this decision My decision did not come in a vacuum. Already, I live in a Catholic Worker farm community that is trying in multiple ways to simplify, and care for, our own basic needs. Eight adults and five children use one washer (no dryer), share three cars, heat our homes with wood, compost our human waste, and raise the bulk of our food. While we still use refrigeration, cook with propane, and depend on electricity (with some solar) for lights and appliances, we hope to implement alternatives for these conveniences in the near future. Part of the reason I live this way is because, in recognizing the immense privilege I inherited as an educated white American, I no longer want to assume that somebody poorer (or browner) than me will perform the daily tasks that keep me alive in order that I can pursue more “intellectual” or “spiritual” interests. And though I don’t own a computer, the fact that I still