VULNERABLE MISSION

MISSIO DEI 4.1 (FEBRUARY 2013): 33–48
upon social class and lineage. 48 In this version, it is a black man who already has no social
position and so has nothing to lose who breaks the spell of the tailors and utters, “to me it
matters not whose son I am, therefore I tell you that you are riding without any clothes,”
informing the king of his true state. Whether the child in Andersen’s story, with little
notion of the social mechanisms of honor and shame, or the black man of the Spanish
version, who is at the bottom of a race- and class-based economy, it is those at the margins
of the socio-political empire who can see clearly.
Anthropologist James C. Scott notes that societies tend to have what he calls a “public
transcript” between those in power and the dominated subordinates. This becomes
heavily ritualized with greater disparity between the elite and the oppressed, and masks
the intentions of both sides—that is, the public transcript functions as a display of power
and control for the ruling class, and disguises the true feelings of the lower class in performance
of deference. 49 However, at times this transcript is broken. According to Scott,
“the moment when the dissent of the hidden transcript crosses the threshold to open
resistance is always a politically charged occasion.” 50 When the oppressed can endure
no more, when the severity of life under the public transcript becomes as difficult as
the punishment for piercing the veil of subordination, or when like the black man in
the Spanish tale, the dominated simply have nothing to lose, the subjugated breech the
unspeakable and show their true beliefs. These moments change the ones who openly
resist the public transcript, and in fact, function as a conversion of sorts, insofar as they
give new life to the oppressed. For instance, Frederick Douglass writes after he stood up
to his master, “I was nothing before; I was a man now. . . . After resisting him, I felt as I
had never before. It was a resurrection.” 51
My conviction is that one of the central tasks of Christians today is to break the spell of
the public transcript—that is, to see empire for what it is, and to live and to speak against
it. For those of us from the global North who benefit from empire, this will be difficult.
Philosopher Slavoj Žižek’s distinction between the subjective and objective is helpful on
this point. He notes that Stalin’s daughter Svetlana wrote memoirs describing her father
as caring and warm, and propelled to mass murder mostly by his associate, Lavrenty
Beria. Some time later, Beria’s son Sergo similarly declared that his father was a compassionate
family man, who merely followed the orders of his terrible superior, Stalin. We
too, lie in this tension, as we benefit from the military-industrial complex that oppresses
others. Subjective experience perceives the technology of communication as benign, yet
the iPhones we communicate with were made by workers in suicidal conditions. Medicines
which heal us often are the products of unethical drug trials. Our Wal-Mart goods
are cheap because someone else works for extremely low wages. The point is, “the experience
that we have of our lives from within, the story we tell ourselves about ourselves in
order to account for what we are doing, is fundamentally a lie—the truth lies outside, in
what we do.” 52 Not only this, but we also think that we cannot live without what we now
42
48 Juan Manuel, Count Lucanor; or the Fifty Pleasant Stories of Patronio, trans. James York (London: Gibbings and
Co., 1899), ch. 7.
49 James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1990), 2–3.
50 Ibid., 207.
51 Ibid., 208.
52 Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections, Big Ideas/Small Books (New York: Picador, 2008), 47.