We are, once again and inexplicably, seeing a conversation unfold about reforming the military force in our streets, with body cameras and training standing in for a moral reckoning about the kind of world we want to live in, the kind of world that is livable for more than the wealthy few. We know what such “reforms” accomplish, because we’ve seen this many times before: an armed, unaccountable force with body cameras is no less deadly or immoral than an armed, unaccountable force without. A trained secret police is still the secret police.
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Body cameras promise increased surveillance with no attendant increase in accountability, while training maintains the distribution of money and resources away from care and towards cops and prisons; both reforms represent business as usual, not a remade world.
I take the heart of her point as a very good point, even if she takes it to an untenable place. In fact, that isn’t strong enough: This is very important, even if the “defund the police” direction she seems to favor in that post is the wrong one. (She does seem to me to be saying significantly more that just “abolish ICE.”)
Reform is not enough, or entirely wrongheaded, she suggests. Instead, Brown highlights André Gorz’s “non-reformist reforms.”
For Gorz, a reform is non-reformist if it both exercises the power and agency of workers acting together and foreshadows the future world in the present. That is, a non-reformist reform requires both concrete, bottoms-up action and the reflection of a different world within that action, the way a small fractal prefigures the large.
Far be it from me to knock some fun wordplay like “non-reformist reforms,” but I am skeptical that that could be a term to hang a hat on. (I could be further convinced.) And I don’t know anything about Gorz. And I am still skeptical of the extent to which Brown would take what she is calling “abolitionist demands.”
That description of non-reformist reforms, however, has potential.
Here’s Miroslav Volf, who I couldn’t help thinking of reading Brown’s post, in the closing of a 2012 piece which is included in the second edition of his book The End of Memory:
All the conditions for non-remembrance of wrongs suffered and committed will be realized only in the coming world of love, a world that, in turn, is hard to imagine as a reality with truthful and living memory of the horrors of history. And yet, this eschatological hope can shape our practice today. When the miracle of such non-remembrance happens in families, among friends, or in small communities—on those occasions, not so rare as one may think, a ray of light from the dawning world of love has illumined our lives.
Here’s Volf earlier in the book:
[I]n Jesus Christ God has promised to every human being a new horizon of possibilities — a new life into which each of us is called to grow in our own way and ultimately a new world freed from all enmity, a world of love. To be a Christian means that new possibilities are defined by that promise, not by any past experience, however devastating. If the traumatized believe the promise — if they live into the promise, even if they are tempted at first to mock it — they will, in [David] Kelsey’s words, enter a world “marked by a genuinely open future that they could not have imagined in the living death of the old world they have constructed for themselves.”
Call it what you want, but that sounds like real reform to me. That I don’t find anything this rich in the Brown or Gorz program will likely always be a problem for me. In fact, somewhere in this post is an urge, but not the time, to go down that “Why I’m still a Christian” road. Instead, I’ll settle for some overlapping Venns.
So I trust this in the hands of Volf far more than Brown, but Brown’s longing for changes that foreshadow a world “where care overcomes criminalization” is exactly right. And, my own alarms bells about some secularized postmillennialism notwithstanding, I love the way she puts it:
To put this another way: a reform maintains the old world, often under cover. While a non-reformist reform demands that we build a new world, one in which all humans and the more-than-human world can thrive.
We must take small steps towards the future we want; there is no other way. But each step must point the way toward that future, a drop of water that heralds the wave.