A Tale of Two Slaps
Whether it is the Sede Gestatoria or the Popemobile, our Papal ceremonies have always included provision for a very basic fact for popular public figures: people like to touch and reach out for them. This of course carries with it a degree of risk, as one encounters both the overzealous and the malicious. Simply put: fame is dangerous!
On March 27, 2022, I woke up expecting to read the typical latest news on things like the Russo-Ukrainian War, the soaring cost of goods and services, and other serious topics. What I found instead were literally thousands of articles, and millions of comments, about a ‘slap heard around the world’, that of Will Smith slapping Chris Rock live during the 2022 Oscar Awards.
Perhaps we poor human beings cannot handle reading and hearing serious things all the time, and things like that slap and the Johnny Depp trial provide a break. Perhaps also I am the only person who made a mental connection between Will Smith’s slap, and the Pope’s slap. The cases are both similar, where we have a public figure striking someone in public. The Pope’s slap caused a very public brouhaha among the Catholic twitterati, while Will Smith’s slap caused a similar brouhaha among the wider world.
Both these slaps, and our responses, raise several interesting topics for discussion. Both slaps revealed our society’s ambivalence regarding violence. After all, we are the same nation that kills innocent women and children in sloppy and poorly planned drone strikes with nary a word uttered by the press, yet a slap draws worldwide condemnation. It also showed how bankrupt, how degraded, our capabilities for moral analysis is at the present time. We saw the Manichean splitting: good/bad Pope vs. good/bad woman, like good/bad Chris Rock vs. good/bad Will Smith. The world of Reddit and daytime TV did not seem capable of grappling with the fact that two people in a dynamic situation can both simultaneously be at fault, but not in the same time or in the same respect. Even more difficult for people to understand is how two very good people may experience conflict, with neither being in the wrong, necessarily.
Another aspect of these two slaps that I think is important to mention is that, because of Mass Media and Social Media, there has been a massive increase in what is considered ‘newsworthy’, and also less of a willingness among people to suspend their own judgments: I hear less and less people saying “it’s none of my business”, and more and more people waxing indignant regarding subjects about which they are only half-informed. The fact that both the very image of the Pope’s slap and Will Smith’s slap both became instant memes attests to this. The power of the image to generate interest once again lays bare the fact that although humanity in its nature may be composed of rational creatures, there is no strict obligation to act according to that faculty.
Interestingly, regarding violence, Pope Francis once said in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attacks in France in January 2015 that violence in the name of religion is wrong, but also that when one chooses to insult someone else’s faith, “you can expect a punch.” I wonder if he would say the same regarding insulting someone’s life or family. There are several confusing points among these comments, like so much of what Pope Francis says. First is the assertion that religious violence, or really any violence short of self-defense, is always wrong. Pope Benedict XVI in his Regensburg Address in 2006 perhaps makes the most cogent argument against religious violence based upon the reality of faith as a free act and the reality that coercion, of which violence is a type, restricts and/or takes away true freedom. Now, this certainly is a valid argument for imposing religious belief, an offensive action, but is it valid for defending the faith? I would argue that it is not. If it were, everything from the Crusades to the Cristeros would automatically be a grave moral evil.
Moving on from matters of faith, we once again see the tension between the non-violence advocated by Our Lord in the Sermon of the Mount, and the reality of violence in the world. Is it justified to slap a man who insults your spouse? In an honor-based culture, like that of Medieval Europe, an insult to one’s family was considered an offense to their reputation which demanded retribution. Is that a Christian understanding, or simply a social convention? Violence is a very hard thing to understand with nuance if we take as an a priori assumption that it is wrong in almost all cases.
These two slaps, like so many other events in contemporary life, reveal far more about us and our inability to grapple with the complexity of violence and its legitimate and illegitimate uses, than the actual motivations behind either the Pontiff or Will Smith.
