Heroes and Martyrs

The men of the cross stand against the mob

Rory Wilson, left, and Charles Beck, right, face down a mob at Hamilton Hall

Nobody was making them be there, but there they were anyway.

In the middle of the night on April 30, Columbia University senior Rory Wilson was fast asleep in his dorm, when friends suddenly shook him awake with some news: “They’re taking over Hamilton Hall.”

It wasn’t the first time a mob had stormed the building in a campus protest. You can read all about its “history of occupation,” from the 60s to the 80s to the present day. In 1985, the demand was to “divest” from South African investments. Today, the demand is to “divest” from Israeli investments. Clearly, our would-be revolutionaries see themselves in a long and honorable tradition. Just look at them, all heroically lined up and singing “We Shall Not Be Moved”! Oh, but we shall demand “humanitarian aid” in the form of freely flowing chocolate milk and pizza, of course, unless you just want us to die of dehydration and starvation. Well, do you?

Of course, it was “We Shall Not Be Moved” for we but not for thee, as Rory and his friends were about to discover. Everywhere they looked, they could see young people in masks, many not affiliated with Columbia at all. Some had already begun smashing windows with hammers. Others were forming human chains. At the doors, some were trying to drag up a barricade of lunch tables.

The police were nowhere in sight. So the students decided to act.

Pro-Israel student reporter Jessica Schwalb captured multiple up-close clips of the unfolding scene: Rory and his friend Charles Beck calmly holding the door, the masked mob by turns scolding and screeching. Rory is taller and quiet. Charles, in the glasses, is animated and flushed with indignation. With Rory, he pushes back on the would-be lunch table barricade while somehow never letting go of the book he was reading when he rushed outside (for the curious, we’ve learned it was The Memoirs of Lady Hyegyeong: The Autobiographical Writings of a Crown Princess of Eighteenth-Century Korea). In vain, Charles tells everyone to “knock it off, man!” “Get out of here,” a girl coldly tells him. “Just get out of here. This is ridiculous, what you’re doing.” Charles and Jessica respond at once, “This is ridiculous? What we’re doing is ridiculous? What are you doing?” “We’re trying to end a genocide in Gaza,” the girl says. “How is this ending a genocide in Gaza?” they ask.

At this, the girl unleashes a barely decipherable shriek, which sounds like “IF YOU LISTENED TO US, YOU WOULD KNOW! IF YOU LISTENED TO US, YOU WOULD KNOW!”

Once again, Charles explains that he and his friends are “trying to defend this university,” at which the girl continues to shriek, “IT’S NOT YOUR UNIVERSITY!” The irony is thick, of course. Among the non-university participants identified in the mob was professional protester Lisa Fithian, caught on camera mocking the boys as “assholes.” Fithian, a woman in her 60s, has a long history of getting paid for this sort of thing. In her own words, when people ask her what she does, she tells them, “I create crisis. Because crisis is that edge where change is possible.”

Charles would later recall dryly that Ms. Fithian initially presented herself as “a moderating figure,” there to ensure that everyone involved was “safe.” But as Rory told Fox News, she kept up a steady stream of invective throughout the confrontation: “Do you guys think you’re white saviors? Check your white male privilege. Who do you think you are?”

At various points in the footage, the mob retreats to its customary tactic when it lacks a serious argument: inane chanting. “[Something] settlers go back home, Palestine is ours alone!” goes one. “One, two, three, four, occupation no more! Five, six, seven, eight, Israel is a terror state!” goes another.

The sheer farce of the thing is so ridiculous, Rory starts to smile. It’s all he can do not to laugh. “You know what?” Charles says in a little of Rory’s own footage, “I’m glad to be here, Rory.”

But it’s no laughing matter when Charles is finally peeled away from the door, with chilling warnings not to resist, or else “it will ruin your whole life.” By now, even Charles and Rory’s friends were telling them they had done enough, as the mob began to scream “SHUT IT DOWN! SHUT IT DOWN!” One friend whispered in Charles’ ear, “Don’t get martyred for a building.” So, having more than amply demonstrated their courage, he and Rory decided to take this advice. On their way back to the dorms, they immediately called 9/11 and campus public safety. And still, no one came. Next morning, everyone received a boilerplate email with assurances that the university cares very much about all the students’ safety. Needless to say, Rory wasn’t convinced.

The police did come, eventually. Their surreal footage from inside the Hall shows the mess left behind—more smashed windows, tables and chairs overturned and piled up. Stained glass figures flank the scene, looking on with bewilderment.

Rory’s father, N. D. Wilson, is a children’s fantasy novelist, and in the wake of the incident his wife Heather was prompted to quote an apt passage from one of his books on Twitter. In context, a town is facing an imminent attack, and its people are unwilling to stand up and fight. The story’s young hero and his friends know what terrible things will follow if the bad guys take the town, and so while the townspeople flee, they resolve to be the last line of defense. The boy watches bitterly as everyone runs for their lives, fighting for seats on the last flights out. A wise old monk watches with him. “In every herd,” the monk says, “many stampede, while only a few turn to face the lions. Cowards live for the sake of living, but for heroes, life is a weapon, a thing to be spent, a gift to be given to the weak and the lost and the weary, even to the foolish and the cowardly.”

The monk seems to read the boy’s mind as a few young men scurry past, clutching their luggage. “Aye, even them,” he says. The hero does not die for the stranger because the stranger deserves it. “Love burns hotter than justice, and its roar is thunder. Beside love, even wrath whispers. Not one of us snatching breath with mortal lungs deserves such a gift, and yet every day such a gift is given.” He thumps the boy on the shoulder. “To love is to be selfless. To be selfless is to be fearless. To be fearless is to strip your enemies of their greatest weapon. Even if they break our bodies and drain our blood, we are unvanquished. Our goal was never to live; our goal is to love. It is the goal of all truly noble men and women. Give all that can be given. Give even your life itself.”

It’s a beautiful encapsulation of the Christian ethic. But according to Friedrich Nietzsche, it’s the Christian ethic that unleashed the mob in the first place.

Reading Nietzsche has been a strange, entertaining, and oddly prescient exercise for me recently. The ressentiment he so despised is the animating force of every mob like the one that closed in on Rory and Charles. It’s the same spirit that dragged men and women to the guillotine: bitter, envious, murderously self-righteous. He declares the whole West sick with it, every Western man sick. And what, he asks, is that terrible disease which has so conquered the West? He answers himself: Christianity.

Yes, Nietzsche would tell us, even the French revolutionaries, hoisting their goddess of Reason, were sick with it. Every bitter revolutionary is, whether he knows it or not, because he is playing his part in the great Christian psychodrama: the revolt of slave against master, of weak against strong, of “all creatures that creep on the ground against everything that is lofty.” The world turned upside down.

Nietzsche’s great fear is nihilism, which he defines synonymously with impotence or lifelessness. The wretched, revolting mob has no vitality, no life in itself. Only the man who has transcended the mob’s “slave morality” will be truly strong and healthy and free.

But Nietzsche has a problem. Because Rory Wilson and Charles Beck are strong, and healthy, and free. And Rory Wilson and Charles Beck are Christians.

Here now is the mad doctor’s conundrum: Having identified a sickness, he prescribes a universal acid. He will dissolve truth itself, morality itself. He cannot even say that the resentful mob has sinned, or that they are evil, for in his mind, sin itself is meaningless. In his mind, he is beyond good and evil.

What the doctor had really found was a heresy: a tangled lie, sprouting from a little seed of half-truth. The truth—that reality the doctor in his own incandescent arrogance couldn’t bear—was that God loved the poor, the weak, and the suffering. The lie was that any man could suffer more than Christ.

I have a friend from India, a man who has witnessed far more suffering in his life than any of the entitled brats swarming over the Columbia campus. He grew up at the bottom of India’s caste system—a chandala. An untouchable. The morality of his culture was the morality of the caste system, which Dr. Nietzsche declared imperfect but still an improvement over Christianity, that repugnant chandala morality. For years, my friend lived in humiliation and torment, not only because of how he was treated but because of how he treated others. When he finally grasped the nettle of the Christian gospel, he saw that it was, quite literally, the only thing that could save him. It spoke the only true word that could be spoken into his misery. It healed him, but it did not coddle him. It dignified him, but it did not enthrone him. It prepared him to be, if necessary, a martyr in death. But he would not be a martyr in life. He would not name himself a victim. One Victim was sufficient.

We are not a culture sick with Christian morality. We are a culture that has lost sight of Christ on his singular cross, making his singular sacrifice. And so we make for ourselves imaginary crosses, imaginary sacrifices. It was under the sign of such a cross that the rabble took Hamilton Hall—not Christ’s cross, but the cross of their own making, the cross in their own minds, on which they demand to be lifted up and worshiped.

Watch them in the footage, literally shaking with rage while Rory and Charles stand their ground. Then watch Rory and Charles. Who is full of angst, and who is full of life? Who is screaming, and who is nearly laughing?

The men of the East may spell the stars,

And times and triumphs mark.

But the men signed of the cross of Christ

Go gaily in the dark.