Signs of Sacrificial Solidarity

"Hacking as an act of faith" is a front page feature in today's Baltimore Sun. Reading between the lines, I find it brings out something I alluded to in my last post, Faiths of Our Fathers.

In that post I said:

One of the most fundamental aspects of our [human] nature is that we value our communal solidarities so highly.

When Catholics or Evangelicals, or secular humanists, or anyone else, bond into communities, there have to be some meaningful signs given by each member of communal solidarity, which generally amount to the making of some sort of personal sacrifice on behalf of the community.

Personal sacrifices on behalf of one's community, made as meaningful signs of solidarity, play a noticeable role in the Sun article, which is about how a legendary computer hacker managed to turn what many would say is a force for evil into a force for good.


Johnny Long, known online as just "j0hnny," with a zero, not an "O," had a split life. He was a lifelong Christian who nonetheless dismissed fellow Christians as "culturally and socially inept." And he was a hacker: someone who devotes himself to figuring out how to defeat security schemes and break into computer systems.

Long thought he'd hit the heights when he was invited to address the famous DEF CON hacker convention in Las Vegas in 2003. Yet, though his speech went fine, the adulation he received from his fellow black-shirted hackers left him feeling ... nothing at all, just empty inside.

Even though Long is married with kids — "he's also funny, self-effacing and a hands-on dad to his three kids. He takes in stray cats, houses a Korean exchange student, mentors dozens and wants to be a ninja (he has a brown belt in Bujinkan Budo Taijutsu)," says the article — something was missing: meaning.

After stewing about the emptiness he felt, about the apparent meaningless of his life, he took action.

The first thing he did was to make it crystal clear to others in his hacker community that he is (surprise!) a professing Christian.

The reaction to that surprised him: a big collective yawn. No one seemed to care one way or the other about his religious convictions.


Meanwhile, his hacker career began to hit the stratosphere:

Within a month, a publisher had called and asked Johnny to write a book (Volume 1 of Google Hacking for Penetration Testers was published in 2005, and Volume 2 hit the shelves last year). That led to a dozen more book projects.

He became a talking head on CNN, MSNBC and CNET. Within a year, there were more than 80,000 users registered on his site — johnny.ihackstuff.com — up from 500.

Here's where it gets interesting. Long was still without a sense of purpose in his life when he went with his wife Jen to Uganda, "a small country obliterated by AIDS," on a church-sponsored trip to do missionary work. There, the AIDS Orphans Education Trust, or AOET, put him to work turning discarded computer parts into a functioning online network that was sorely needed by the charity, an organization that treats and educates AIDS orphans.

Long was, actually, miffed about this. He had envisioned "romantic notions of [doing] manual labor. He wanted to work side-by-side with his wife and feel the nightly satisfaction of aching muscles and a hard day's work." Leveraging his computer expertise wasn't his first choice.

Even so, it turned out, "for a while, [the success of his cobbled together network] was enough for Johnny. He'd done something, he'd made a difference, he'd put his skills to work in a way he never had before. And he was feeling pretty good."


Once home, though, he found the feeling was fading.

At home, he started pining, then thinking. How could he get that feeling back, but from here?

Then he struck on it: He would hack charities.

Through a web site, www.hackersforcharity.org, he would "get hackers from around the world to volunteer their time and used gear to various charities that seriously need technical help, whether it's through securing their sites or finding ways to pair children with sponsors online, like Johnny is working on for AOET."


Here's what I find really interesting about Johnny's story, though. When Johnny and Jen Long wanted to go to Uganda — it was the first time for Johnny; Jen had been there before — they didn't have enough money to finance the trip. This was just after Johnny had "come out" to his fellow hackers as a Christian, and they had generally been nonplussed. Then ...

Johnny wrote a letter about his desire to go to Uganda and ... sent it to The Hacker Foundation, an organization that connects technology projects with the resources needed to get them off the ground.

His missive was immediately posted online and asked its readers to "forego that triple-venti white chocolate mocha, and send [Johnny and Jen] a few bucks instead." Roughly 24 hours later, $4,800 had been raised — $600 more than they needed for the trip.

And so, in May of this year, Johnny, Jen and a half dozen others from the church set out for the Jinja district of Uganda ... .

As soon as Johnny gave members of his hacker community a way to make personal sacrifices in order to show solidarity with him, the community pricked up its ears!


Maybe giving up a triple-venti white chocolate mocha wasn't a big sacrifice, but that doesn't matter. What matters is that, in coming to Johnny's aid, several thousand hackers were proving how powerful the spirit of shared sacrifice can be in cementing a community in their mutual search for good works that can be effected in the world.

So it becomes clear to me why Johnny Long's "coming out" as a Christian at first provoked such a massive yawn: there was no way his fellow hackers, most of whom were presumably not practicing Christians, could show solidarity with him through personal sacrifices they could envision themselves making.

Only when Johnny figured out how to ask for visible signs of sacrificial solidarity from them did his Christian orientation begin to "work" for them. And, though they weren't themselves Christian, they responded.


I'm beginning to believe that signs of sacrificial solidarity lie at the heart of all human community and at the heart of my (Catholic-Christian) religion. I believe they lie at the heart of the latter because they lie at the heart of the former.

• Remember, the whole Christian belief system revolves around Christ's cross, on which Jesus of Nazareth made the perfect and ultimate sacrifice: he died once, scourged and in shame before his own community, so that all of humankind could live forever.

• Remember, the Holy Communion which is the high point of every Catholic Mass celebrates and even recapitulates Jesus's sacrifice. As the bread and wine of communion become Christ's body and blood, we recollect how and why he died for us, and then we consume that consecrated body and blood for our spiritual nourishment.

Just before the rite of Holy Eucharist begins, it is no coincidence that we Catholics put money in the collection plate, in a way that makes it clear that we are making our own signs of sacrificial solidarity: we publicly give up some of the money which nominally sustains our lives. There'll be one less triple-venti white chocolate mocha for us because we put a dollar or two in the plate.

• Remember, in my last post I talked about how the sign of sacrificial solidarity made by a soldier who takes up arms against an enemy on behalf of his or her country and possibly has to kill an enemy combatant. What is being sacrificed here is much more than a chocolate mocha: a soldier's very innocence (if not life or limb).

The principle is the same, though, even if the stakes are higher. Communal solidarity, even at a national level, demands personal sacrifices. These personal sacrifices, whether tangible or intangible, are vouchsafed by visible signs made before the eyes of the community. The soldier's uniform is just such a tangible sign of an intangible sacrifice.

When those who are not in the military and aren't making personal sacrifices put yellow ribbons on their car bumpers in support of the troops, they are doing what little they can to join in the shared sacrifice.

I think signs of sacrificial solidarity, whether they are in a religious context or a secular one, come close to defining what is truly special about human nature.

Faiths of Our Fathers

A Brief, Liberal, Catholic Defense of Abortion, by Seattle University philosophy professors Daniel A. Dombrowski and Robert J. Deltete, continues to interest me. It argues that Catholics such as I should be open to a pro-choice position concerning abortion because the church, prior to the seventeenth century, objected to early-stage abortions only because they were said by St. Augustine and others to pervert the only non-sinful use of sex: procreation by married couples.

St. Augustine and, later, St. Thomas Aquinas, held that a fetus could have no truly human soul until the later stages of pregnancy, when it was fully formed.

When scientific inquiry in Europe ramped up during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, scientists at first incorrectly found reason to think the embryo was, contrary to Augustine and Aquinas, fully formed from the moment of conception — just very, very tiny. Ergo, it could have a God-given soul after all, and early-stage abortions were wrong.

Since that time, two key things have happened. The sexual mores of Catholics have changed, and procreation is no longer seen as the only legitimate function of sex. The intensification of conjugal love and even the taking of physical pleasure in the sex act are now seen as legitimate uses of sexuality.

Sex can be appropriate today, many Catholics believe, as long as there is "mutual agapic respect" between consenting adults. Agape, a Greek word for love, is synonymous with Christian love. As long as erotic love is subsumed within agape or Christian love, Dombrowski and Deltete argue, it is not necessarily sinful — even if the adult partners are not married or are of the same sex.

Also, science has rectified its original supposition that the tiniest embryo is a fully formed, potentially soul-bearing "homunculus." We now know (for example) that the ability of the fetus to undergo experiences — e.g., to suffer — begins only when the cerebral cortex has been fully "wired up," which happens no earlier than the 24th week of fetal development. It looks as if Augustine and Thomas Aquinas were right about "delayed hominization" after all.

Dombrowski and Deltete argue that today's liberalized sexual mores and the latest evidence concerning fetal development combine to offer us Catholics a reasonable way to support a woman's "right to choose."


Dombrowski and Deltete go on to argue, in their chapter on "Catholicism and Liberalism," in favor of what they term a "liberal" form of societal governance. To them, "liberal" governance is what makes for political and social "justice," a state of affairs which I think boils down to an active appreciation by all in the society of pluralism. Though we all tend to identify with communities having "relatively comprehensive religious, philosophical, or moral views" (see pp. 106ff.), we all are supposed to see that "the only way to have one 'comprehensive' view reign supreme over others is to force it down people's throats ... " (p. 107).

As an example of a "relatively comprehensive religious, philosophical, or moral view," take Catholicism. As another, take Evangelical Protestantism. Yet another might be "secular humanism," an outlook of which many atheists, agnostics, and freethinkers are accused by Catholics and Evangelical Protestants. The list of comprehensive views is a long one. Each, according to Dombrowski and Deltete, ought to recognize that the path to mutual pluralistic "justice" runs through the setting aside of one's own party's "reasonable" positions concerning disputed matters, such as abortion rights, in recognition that other "relatively comprehensive religious, philosophical, or moral views" can also claim to be reasonable ones.


That wholesale embrace of pluralistic "justice" is a taller order, I think, than Dombrowski and Deltete admit.

I think the reason has to do with human nature. One of the most fundamental aspects of our nature is that we value our communal solidarities so highly.

When Catholics or Evangelicals, or secular humanists, or anyone else, bond into communities, there have to be some meaningful signs given by each member of communal solidarity, which generally amount to the making of some sort of personal sacrifice on behalf of the community.

Not all signs of communal sacrifice need to be in any way illicit. That said, they can be and often are at least quasi-illicit.

Take, for example, the sign of sacrificial solidarity made by a soldier who takes up arms against an enemy. Killing is generally seen as a violation of one of God's commandments — or, for nonbelievers in God, of one of the basic principles of morality and ethics — yet when a soldier kills an enemy combatant, that's not seen as a sin. One reason for the exception is that the soldier's sacrifice of his personal innocence in wartime is an unmistakable sign of his solidarity with the nation as a whole.

Another, more debatable example might be that of a protester against abortions who kills an abortion doctor. As Dr. Susan Wicklund's This Common Secret: My Journey as an Abortion Doctor shows, Wicklund as an abortion provider lived in constant fear of assassination at the hands of true believers who think abortion is murder.

Again, I think killers of abortion providers are sacrificing their personal innocence in order to give an unmistakable sign of their solidarity with other "right-thinking" folks.

Their actions are clearly (a) immoral and (b) irrational. But that's my point. Human nature so values signs of sacrificial solidarity with one's own party or group that considerations of rationality or even basic morality can easily get shunted aside.


We Catholics are far from immune. That's why I think Dombrowski and Deltete's arguments that Catholics ought to reevaluate their positions on abortion fall mostly on deaf ears. Many — dare I say most — Catholics today take it that, even if Dombrowski and Deltete are right from a strictly philosophical point of view, such a view is an intrinsically "deracinated" one.

"Deracinated" is a word Dombrowski and Deltete use often. Stances such as that of Dombrowski and Deltete that Catholic traditionalists and communitarians oppose, the traditionalists and communitarians call "deracinated" ones. To deracinate is to pull something up by its roots. Certain philosophical positions that have been advanced, traditionalists and communitarians complain, tend to pull Catholics right out of the soil of their tradition.

For example, many Catholics feel they are being deracinated by views such as that of Dombrowski and Deltete that make abortion seem less than absolutely wrong.

Consciously or not, such Catholics probably feel that entertaining a pro-choice stance constitutes a break with the faith of their fathers. ("Faith of Our Fathers" is a hymn we Catholics sing often in church. Every community organized around "relatively comprehensive religious, philosophical, or moral views" could adopt the same hymn!)

Accordingly, if only as a sign of sacrificial solidarity, many Catholics consent to give up any personal, individual attempt to reason abstractly about the morality of abortion. Their assumption is that the church has done all the abstract reasoning that is required, and it is simply the duty of themselves as Catholics to follow their church's lead and oppose abortion.

Signs of sacrificial solidarity — ways of upholding the "faiths of our fathers" at some (possibly great) personal sacrifice to ourselves — mean so much to us that "deracinating" philosophical arguments like that of Dombrowski and Deltete don't often stand much of a chance.