A tweet from a local prophet got me thinking today. To offer a little context, there’s been a consistent effort to persuade Governor Bill Lee to behave like an equal among his constituents in Tennessee since the beginning of our pandemic. In partnership with our legislature’s Republican majority, his office ordered the Tennessee Highway Patrol to stand guard against citizens waiting to speak to him outside the Tennessee State Capitol at all hours and confiscate their supplies. When they kept declining to disperse (and I’ll mention that I occasionally joined them), Governor Lee and our legislature eventually changed our law to criminalize nonviolent protest outside our Capitol at night. In short, Governor Lee’s fear of conversation with particular Black people appears to have cost Tennesseans millions of dollars in THP overtime and a special legislative session which made us all less free. One of the most publicly prominent leaders of that effort was/is local prophet Justin Jones. This is his response to the call to stop asking Governor Lee to meet with Black leaders and/or remove the white supremacist terror idol outside his office and/or issue a statewide mask mandate and instead pray following news that his wife, Maria Lee (who I consider a friend), has now contracted COVID.
With the public expression of this wish, Brother Jones continues to invite our elected officials to behave like human beings among human beings. It’s perfectly fine to pray, but the suggestion that Governor Lee’s responsibility to those he’s sworn to serve is any less pressing than it was or that continuing to demand baseline moral seriousness of our employee is now inappropriate is abusively farcical. “Now is not the time for politics,” is a very strange utterance from elected officials—some of them millionaires—whose every material need is met by the American taxpayer, especially when those officials are publicly blocking our access to our own money and resources. The idea that "politics" is a thing any human being ever steps in and out of is, it seems me, a tool of white supremacist terror. You can pray for a man and still insist that he behave like an adult. Such insistence doesn’t mean someone suddenly got political, and it need not be construed as an attack, a blast, a slam, or an attempt to cancel anyone. Insisting on better behavior of people with whom we’re in momentary or constant relationship is part of emotional literacy, the everyday, relatively common effort, we might say, of observational candor. And observational candor can be, I think, a form of love.
In recent years, I’ve begun to suspect that many of us have immunized ourselves against this love with a peculiar posture which can easily be mistaken for self-respect. I call it the Beyondist Personality. I see it on social media when someone inscribes upon social media their alleged conviction that some things can’t be meaningfully discussed on social media. It’s an out-of-body rhetorical tool. To adopt the Beyondist Personality is to commit to a strange disavowal of ones own presence within the social world which is also, paradoxically, an assertion that ones own presence is more substantial than—or functions differently from—the presence of others. The Beyondist Personality is also a form of forgetfulness in which a journalist, an administrator, a pundit, a preacher or an elected official loses sight of the fact that they’re somebody in a body like everyone else and that their real peers are their fellow human beings. Consider the sight of a Senator receiving the COVID vaccine on camera and then tweeting that Americans are tired of all the inaction in Washington. Who gets away with speaking this way? The one who wields the Beyondist Personality.
To choose an example of two people who aren’t easily decreed “left” or “right,” consider Bob Woodward sitting on information that could have saved American lives (the President of the United States was lying about COVID) in order, I guess, to time the revelation to better serve the publication of his latest book. Consider Reality Winner choosing to pull the fire alarm by leaking intelligence the American public deserved to know almost four years ago and getting mercilessly punished for it. To this day, she is incarcerated, gagged, tortured, and denied access to her Bible. Woodward and Winner are both our peers, but Woodward is accorded popular leeway Winner isn’t. Why is that?
As an established public figure and something of a household name for most of my life, Bob Woodward is accorded the privilege of speaking and behaving in the manner of a Beyondist Personality with impunity. Reality Winner, a decorated veteran whose act of conscience doesn’t appear to serve the interests of most elected officials and their parties, slips through the cracks of the stories Americans like to tell themselves about themselves. Are we, the people, responsible for what our system’s done to her? Absolutely. But her existence, needless to say, is beneath the interest of the Beyondist Personality. To acknowledge her at all is to challenge the Beyondist Personality, which comes at a certain cost. Those who appear on our screens to weigh in on that which is successfully sold to us as news (news product) will be edged out if their questions, concerns, and testimonies threaten ratings (and therefore ad revenue). Bob Woodward’s Beyondist Personality spells big bucks. Reality Winner’s wild and precious life does not. With the exception of a few brave souls like Mark Hamill, Mia Farrow, and, most recently, Congressman Justin Amash, most famous people dare not speak her name. She’s slipped beneath the popular conscience like a stone.
Perhaps this goes without saying, but I want to stress that the Beyondist Personality is the natural yield of what we’re free to call the Beyondist Fallacy. If we hold to the beautiful idea that all people are created equal and are to be endowed with certain inalienable rights, the fact that Bob Woodward is famouser than Reality Winner shouldn’t have any bearing on either human’s testimony. We’re free to find one person more credible than another. I do that myself all day every day. But the suggestion that one person deserves a public hearing more than another in a market-driven conception of what is and isn’t “newsworthy” is an abusive one. If you’re Reality Winner or her family or anyone who cares about her, that suggestion can begin to look like terror. Terror based in, let me say it again, the Beyondist Fallacy. “Who do you credit and why?” is a question Jessica Hopper taught me to put to myself and others. The more I repeat it aloud, the more Beyondist thinking loses its hold, the more I feel my own presence as someone whose speech, inquiry, and action can make a real difference for people with whom I share a world.
The Beyondist Personality is based in the myth of critical detachment. It’s the posture through which one speaks of oneself as operating outside of "politics" & thereby capable of opining & weighing in supernaturally above the fray. Folks do it when they think they're defending a "biblical worldview," for instance, against, critical theory, for instance. Or, in the case of Governor Bill Lee in regard to our pandemic, urging personal responsibility on the masses from on high while refusing to take any personal responsibility for his own abdication of oath, office, and baptism.
The Beyondist Personality often charges others with being hysterical or hyperpartisan or filled with rage while insinuating that a frenzy is a-foot on "Both sides," but never—See how this works?—ones own thinking or doing. The Beyondist Personality might be mostly harmless in some contexts, but it's no help at all during a pandemic or when a white supremacist terror regime is trying to overturn the results of an election.
Since I started writing this, Governor Bill Lee has appeared on camera to announce that he still refuses to issue a statewide mask mandate. I see that Brother Jones has offered another public statement which, very fittingly, ends with a biblical reference. I’ll give him the last word while urging everyone reading this to resist, without and within, the Beyondist Fallacy in all its forms. It’s a wicked spirit. Here’s Brother Jones:
Thankful for the witness of both y'all.
Not thankful for the photo at the top #nightmares
"The Beyondist Personality often charges others with being hysterical or hyperpartisan or filled with rage while insinuating that a frenzy is a-foot on "Both sides," but never—See how this works?—ones own thinking or doing."
This is an excellent synopsis. So much hides in the word "extreme." It's like calling something "big," which is always a relative descriptor (is it big to a child, to an ant, to a galaxy?). The middle, or the beyondist, is just as extreme when viewed from any number of vantage points.