When saints walk among us
We're just not quite sure what to make of them
I urge you to answer the highest calling of your heart and stand up for what you truly believe. — Rep. John Lewis
Our perceptions and emotions about any particular person or event are always the product of the workings of our particular constitution and sensibilities. We react differently to the same thing because we are different.
John Robert Lewis (1940-2020)
The civil rights leader and member of Congress John Lewis died a few years ago. The distillation and summing up of his life through his own and others’ words and remembrances and eulogizing is a stimulus to which we each respond in our own way.
The details of John Lewis’s life are well known:
the “boy from Troy” Alabama USA
son of Black sharecroppers
participated in non-violent action for voting/civil rights starting at age 19
Chairman, Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, age 23
nearly died during Selma AL protest march, age 25
elected Atlanta city council, age 41
elected US Congress, age 46
re-elected 16 times with >70% support
Describing his biography is not difficult. Understanding how to account for his highly unusual life and the wide-ranging reactions to his death is more challenging.
Extra-ordinary: falling outside the norm
While scientists and their statistical tools often focus on the study of averages, the mean/median is nothing more than a short-hand fiction for representing the central tendency of a distribution of data points. Science is and should be concerned with accounting for the variance and differences between events. But a hundred chaotic points on a graph are harder to grasp and make sense of, and so we tend to grab on to the averages for anchors in the data storm.
John Lewis was anything but average. He was exceptional and extraordinary and many standard deviations away from the average of the human “normal” curve. And according to the paradigm of evolutionary biology, he should be a very rare breed indeed! While many of us may admire how he lived his life, he possessed a set of traits (righteousness, unconventionality, devotion to others over self, courage/risk-taking, high tolerance for suffering and a disposition toward opposing the powerful and privileged) that significantly REDUCED the probability that anyone like him would survive and reproduce and pass on their genetic make-up to others.
John Lewis very nearly died at age 25 during his planned confrontation with a white-supremacist police force in Selma Alabama. He was at risk of state-sponsored murder during his many incarcerations in the jails of the former enslavement-sponsoring states. Many of his fellow civil rights activists did die, some unmemorialized and buried in nameless graves. Advocates for justice who protest against the evils of corrupt power (e.g. Jesus, Mohandes Ghandi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Alexei Navalny) are often deprived of their lives and liberty by those whose control they threaten in the name of the powerless.
We can therefore assume that the John R. Lewis genotype is not widely represented in the human population because it conspires against its host’s very survival. So how can we account for the strong reactions to his life and death? Imagine that John Lewis is like a tuning fork sending out specific sound waves and vibrations and harmonics and creating varying degrees of sympathetic resonances in the millions of people receiving those powerful signals broadcast through their apps and devices.
While there may not be many exact copies of the JRL genotype in the population, there is a wide distribution of the traits expressed in his life story. If a person possesses even a few of the virtues (altruism, idealism, compassion, courage) of the JRL genotype, they will vibrate and resonate to his example in kind and degree. All of us members of what John Lewis envisioned and aspired to create as the loving community are resonating (or not) to his signal, playing loudest and clearest since the moment of its silencing.
Depending on our degree of attunement to that signal and symbol, we are left with the question of what to DO with those good vibrations. As John Lewis said in his posthumous statement:
Democracy is not a state. It is an act.
What we decide to do with the moral example of John Lewis’s life must ultimately align with who and what we are in all our individuality.
[Update 2/16/2024: Alexei Navalny, crusader for justice and liberty and democracy, died today in prison at the order of Russia’s psychopathic crime boss. In recognition of his ultimate sacrifice for the good of humanity, I respectfully nominate him for “sainthood” status]
Would you say that there are as many John Lewis in life as there are psychopaths? Or less, given their rare breed?