Tragedy Rightly Understood
Aristotle and St. Augustine on Death in Minnesota
On January 7 a woman was killed in a confrontation with ICE agents in Minneapolis. The facts of the case are not much in dispute, but the interpretations are.
The woman stopped her SUV in the road, trying to impede the ICE agents. Several agents exited their vehicles and one went to her window and spoke with her. He asked her to step out of her car. She refused and put the vehicle in reverse then in forward. Once in drive the tires spun and then the vehicle jumped forward. A second officer had moved to the front of the car as all this was happening. As he jumped out of the way, he drew his weapon and shot her through the front window, killing her. The vehicle raced down the road and smashed into a parked car.
The interpretations are almost completely partisan. Democrats are saying the woman was murdered. Republicans are saying the agent acted in self defense. It has got to such a pitch that the governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, has said he may call up the National Guard to protect his citizens from ICE agents. Meanwhile, Kristi Noem, Secretary of Homeland Security, has called the deceased woman a domestic terrorist.
Almost no public official seems to be acting responsibly. Aristotle would recognize all of this as a tragedy.
Aristotle
By calling this event a tragedy I do not mean it is merely unfortunate. It certainly is that, but it is more. It was inevitable, and yet turned on a moment.
Almost no one watching Sophocles’ Oedipus, whether at its first production or now, would be surprised by the ending. The drama arises from watching the inevitable happen. Yes, each character could do or say something to change events. But the logic of their role—who each one is—drives them on to a conclusion that all of the audience can see coming. This is how Aristotle described tragedy. He was describing the process of watching a play on stage.
We, because of the ubiquity of video recordings, are able to watch tragedy in real life, from several different angles. Tragedy for us is real life.
So much of what happened in Minnesota was inevitable. With all the protests against ICE throughout the country, and ICE agents on edge after several attempts on their lives, someone was going to die. And the two people involved were playing out roles in such a way that they could not help themselves. Well, they could have, but not really.
The agent involved was actually struck by a car and dragged over 100 yards earlier this year. On Monday two ICE agents were struck by a car, bitten by a Cuban illegal migrant, and sent to hospital. A Hilton hotel refused to allow ICE agents to book rooms. Both these last two episodes happened in Minnesota in the past few weeks. Everyone at ICE is on edge, fearing for their lives and the safety of their colleagues.
While information about the woman is still emerging, we do know that she fits every demographic for opposing Donald Trump and his deportation of illegal aliens. We know that she was widowed and is now living with a woman as her “wife,” who was there filming from outside the vehicle. She traveled from out of state as part of a group that tracks ICE agents and tries to disrupt their activities. She was primed for the confrontation. Moreover, she was in an SUV on an icy road being confronted by men with guns, men she was probably sure are trying to subvert the Constitution.
Meanwhile, the governor of Minnesota and the mayor of Minneapolis have denounced ICE as a modern Gestapo, the brutal enforcers of Hitler’s NAZI regime. People on the left are convinced that ICE is randomly “disappearing” people off the streets. (To “disappear” someone was common under the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet in Chile, where hundreds of his political opponents were apprehended by his agents and never seen again.) I don’t agree with this assessment, but many people sincerely do.
We can and should have sympathy for both people in this tragedy, just as we have sympathy for Oedipus, despite the many terrible things he did. In many ways their fates were sealed the moment they woke up that day. They might both have been wrong about how much of a threat each was, he to her and her to him. But none of that mattered in the heat of the moment. And now a woman is dead and a man will forever be condemned by half the country, and possibly by himself. Police are regularly put on suicide watch after being involved in a fatal event.
St. Augustine
St. Augustine wrote his The City of God against the Pagans to explain how Christians can and do live in the political world. It was initiated in response to a friend who said he would like to become a Christian, but was afraid Christianity was incompatible with Roman political life. His concerns arose from the Sack of Rome in 410, which had just occurred.
The City of God goes well beyond responding to St. Augustine’s friend, but it does address this problem squarely in Book 19. He there considers the dilemma that we cannot do without civil law while we must also admit that it is imperfect. Innocent people will be condemned and even executed and the guilty will go free. But to abandon law and the legal system would result in even more injustice than an imperfect legal system. Judges must be honest with themselves about this. They can never be certain.
What do we do? We must adopt a tragic sensibility. We can look on these two unfortunate people who, each making what he or she thought was a good and just decision, raced down a path to tragedy. It is naïve (today we tend toward the political term “partisan”) to think that one was wholly in the right and the other wholly in the wrong. Even if he is legally innocent, the agent will regret his actions for the rest of his life. The woman will have no chance to do so.
It is our task, those of us not directly involved, the spectators of the tragedy in Minnesota, to learn from this. Both sides are gearing up for confrontation. And, yes, decisions must be made about policy. It would be irresponsible to abandon our stations in life. But we must also look upon the world with two eyes: one looking in hope to the city of God and one looking with pity on the earthly cities, of which we are also citizens. This is a good time to take as a special study the Sinai Pantocrator, reproduced below (from Wikipedia).
