Tuesday, December 10, 2024

Part I

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‘Delay, Deny, Defend’: Modern Surveillance and the Arrest of the “Person of Interest” in the Murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO

We are immediately drawn to stories of crime and punishment. We are immediately drawn to stories and accounts of how investigators, criminologists, and police eventually find who has committed a crime. We are inherently drawn into the mystery and the symmetry of the judicial system and all of its majesty. And we are inherently drawn to questions of law and order, right and wrong. And that’s why the nation has been so focused on the murder last Wednesday in Manhattan of Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, in what was understood to be a targeted cold-blooded killing, and one that took place on video nonetheless.

The arrest was made yesterday in Altoona, Pennsylvania of Luigi Nicholas Mangione, a 26-year-old young man who was almost certainly the one who committed the crime. And we can say that at this point because you can simply do the logic of holding up the image of this man and the images that have been caught on countless surveillance cameras. You can look at the DNA evidence that is almost suredly going to be brought forward. But even before that, you can look in the man’s possession where he had a weapon, an illegal weapon, a ghost weapon that has led to the immediate charges by which he is held.

He also had a multiple-page manifesto; a manifesto against the private healthcare industry. You’ll recall casings that read, “Delay and deny and depose.” Now there is a multi-page manifesto and it matches in intent, and in some language, the words delay, defend, and deny that were found on the expended casings of the murder weapon there in Manhattan last week.

Now, there are many angles for us to look at here. For one thing, there is the cold-blooded killing that took place there in Manhattan of a man who, of course, is a husband, albeit separated from his wife. He is also the father of two sons. We’re talking about a cold-blooded killing of a man who was targeted, it was believed even at the time, for his job, not so much for his personal identity. He is the CEO of the nation’s largest private healthcare provider. Lots of enemies there, lots of people angry with him, lots of people angry with the industry.

But the first thing we need to recognize is that we are looking at a case that even the most morally confused society understands is a case of homicide, and in this case, deliberate intentional criminal homicide. And every society takes this as an attack, not only on an individual, but an attack upon life and an attack upon the entirety of civilization. No sane society tolerates any form of premeditated murder, period.

But there is a second issue here, and that almost immediately arose. And that had to do with, for instance, the fact that when the company put out a statement mourning the murder of the company’s CEO, in social media context there was a virtual celebration of the man’s death, indeed of the man’s murder, on the part of many who expressed frustration with the healthcare industry, and perhaps even with this particular company. It is after all the biggest in the field. But that’s where we need to recognize social media has unleashed the opportunity for many people to say things, even encouragement for people to express things that in any sane society, at any particular point, would have been unthinkable, unworkable, unacceptable.

But you’re also looking at the fact that many of those who were posting in social media, not all, we should underline, but most were anonymous. They were able to make some kind of response without even revealing their own identity. They were venting, basically, against the healthcare industry. But it does show you two things. It shows you yes, there is a lot of outrage at the private healthcare industry, no doubt about that. More on that in just a moment. But it secondly shows you that there’s something deeply sick in a society, but it’s not by accident that that sickness shows up in social media where people can say things while taking absolutely no responsibility for them.

Now, when people can say things or express things without taking any personal responsibility for them, well, here’s a prediction I assure you is true. They will say just about anything, and we know that’s true because they do. But the second thing here has to do with the private healthcare industry, and it’s being treated as a legitimate issue of concern. And, of course, it is. We’re talking about healthcare, which is a matter of life and death. It is certainly a matter of the deepest personal interest. And we’re also looking at the fact that the healthcare industry is inherently controversial.

And we could look at this, there are no doubt many cases of corporate negligence, of corporate corruption, of corporate greed, but we are also looking at the fact that Americans now expect a healthcare expansive empire that simply takes up so much of our economy, you are going to be talking about big jobs and big companies with big, big dollars and big profit motivation. And here’s where I want to say that in the Christian worldview, that profit motivation is understood as something that can easily be corrupted, but is more likely not only to be corrupted but corrected by market forces than say turning this over to an all-powerful government.

Because that’s really the option. You’re talking about this much money. It is either going to be very big corporations highly regulated by the government, or it is going to be the government itself. And let me just ask you the question. If you’re concerned about a denial of service and you are concerned about an impersonal bureaucracy, do you really think you’re going to do better with a government, let’s just say our national government taking that on?

Let’s just say that even though the private healthcare industry is a legitimate target of many, many concerns, the fact is that when you do have a plurality of private firms, you at least have some opportunity for correction you would not have in a system of government-run socialized medicine. And that’s something that is just not a part of the normal conversation here. But simply because of all the outrage on social media and because of some outlandish arguments that have been made, this is all of a sudden a part of our national conversation.

But back to law and order. As you think about the apprehension of this man, remember a couple of things. If you think about something like, say, what might have been a targeted killing on the streets of New York in 1924 versus 2024, what’s the big game-changer? And of course there is a single biggest game-changer, and that is surveillance cameras. And let’s just face it, when you’re looking at New York, there were at least 60,000 surveillance cameras that were providing information that might have led to either a filling out of the picture concerning this murder and what the man had done before the murder and after the murder.

We do know, even as New York City law enforcement officials reported, they were going through thousands of hours of recording from thousands of cameras. Again, much of this is being done not just by somebody sitting in a room with a cup of coffee and a computer monitor. It was being done by automated intelligence, artificial intelligence. Nonetheless, you are talking about thousands of hours of information from thousands of cameras. Again, the number we have been given is 60,000 plus cameras. That’s a lot of cameras. So almost immediately, the first response on the part of many law enforcement officials outside New York was, “Well, they’re going to get him because they’re going to have plenty of footage that will accomplish two things. Number one, identifying him, and number two, locating him.”

Now, as it turns out, identifying him became easier because he had dropped his mask at a certain point when he was checking into a hostel. On the other hand, by the time this man, Luigi Nicholas Mangione was arrested yesterday in Altoona, Pennsylvania, he was found, and at least a part of the criminal holding charge against him may be related to the fake IDs he had at the time, including the fake ID he had presented at that hostel. So in other words, he was credited with being very smart in terms of planning the crime and getting away. But if he had that ID, that identification on him at the time he was arrested, it is almost as if he intended for his identity eventually to be known. And that is underlined by the fact that he also arranged to be found and arrested with a manifesto in his pocket. That is not an anonymous act.

But thinking in worldview terms, let’s just talk about the surveillance for a moment. Because I decided this was an important thing for us to think about, so I went to get some data. So let me give you the number of cameras found in some cities estimated as of January of 2024. So this is already about a year old. Shenzhen in China. How many cameras? 1.9 million. That’s 1.9 million. And as you’re looking at other reports, you go back even for the last 15 years, the country that has had the cities with the greatest number of cameras, not by accident, is the autocratic totalitarian surveillance regime of China under the control of the Communist Party.

Okay, so now that leads to a contrast with the situation in New York, because in New York, as you look at the saturation of cameras, the number of cameras per human being in the city of New York, the number is big, but you are looking at a number that’s dwarfed by, for example, the cities in China. If you look at the current list of the cities with the greatest number of cameras and the greatest density of cameras, there’s only one city on that list that is not in China, and that city is London.

But there’s another big difference that I don’t hear people talking about, and that is this. If the police in New York, or for that matter any American location. Well, let’s just take this crime in New York. If they want to get the surveillance data and they want to use it, guess what? They have to have a court order that allows them to do so. They can’t just show up at a building and say, “Give me all of your surveillance.” They can’t just demand it. In China, the government controls everything. So there is no need for such a warrant. There is no protection about the accessing of this information or the confiscation of it.

And so, in New York, it also takes a little bit of time for all those permissions to be given. And furthermore, all of the preparation is going to have to be made so that all that information is accessed and used in such a way according to a schedule of court orders and authorizations that means it will be available for a prosecution to use that information as evidence in court at a future date. You following this? In other words, the police have to get this right.

Another list of the cities with the greatest number and the greatest saturation says that Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates may also rank up, as highly as in the top five, estimated with about 2.5 million cameras. Otherwise, all the cities are in China or Abu Dhabi or London. New York’s actually way down the list. But you know what? 60,000 cameras is still a lot of cameras, and that means that it is, over time, unlikely that you can do anything on the streets of New York without eventually being caught on some camera either coming or going, or for that matter committing the crime.

This is a new power, and it is just a reminder of the fact that this kind of technology comes with pluses and minuses. This is what the Christian worldview reminds us of. There is no technology that doesn’t come with moral implications. The good news is that we can catch a killer. The bad news is they might be able to catch someone in some societies doing something like going to church, which might be a crime in that society. Surveillance cuts both ways. It all depends on who’s watching the cameras and who controls where that information goes.

So as Americans look at this, you might say, well, that’s really good news. In the streets of a city like New York, it’s really good news to know that a murderer like this is almost assuredly going to be caught. Is that good news or bad? It is good news. But it is not good news that in another context that same technology can be used to repress and to persecute believers or those who are just citizens going about the citizens’ business. We are really looking here at the double-edged sword of so many of these technologies, and this is coming out just about every day in one headline story or another. I’ll just mention one of them.

The computer giant, Apple, is being sued by victims of child sex abuse, and they’re suing Apple because Apple has allowed, that’s the word that’s being used here, certain images of child abuse to be stored in private accounts on the cloud service for its iPhones, etc. And, of course, it sounds at first like that is something that Apple ought not to do. As a matter of fact, that is something we can say straightforwardly Apple ought not to do. On the other hand, are we giving Apple the power to do surveillance of all the photographs that individual iPhone owners may put on the Apple device that will be uploaded onto the cloud?

The only way Apple can prevent this is if the company is one way or another looking at every single image that is posted to the cloud by every single user. And once again, that’s going to come as a two-edged sword. When it comes to child sex abuse, any sane person would say that ought not to happen and those photographs ought not to exist, period. But someone else could have a very different agenda with the very same surveillance technology. It is a complicated question in a complicated age.

Part II

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Heroic or Hateful? New York Jury Finds Daniel Penny Not Guilty in Criminal Trial

But quickly, I want to get to another big case in New York, and this comes down to the case, a criminal charge against Daniel Penny in a criminal trial. He was accused of two crimes as of a week ago. The first charge was manslaughter in the second degree. The second charge was criminally negligent homicide, which carries a far shorter prison term and far lesser legal consequence. The fact is that Daniel Penny was arrested because he had held a man on the New York City subway in a chokehold. That man died.

The context is that those on the car, that is on the subway car, felt threatened by this man who had a history. He was known to authorities as having a history of psychotic behavior. He got on the train in the subway, took off his coat, started making threatening and violent statements saying he wasn’t afraid to be arrested. People in the car were afraid. Daniel Penny, a former Marine, went into action, put the man in a hold, in a chokehold and held him. Evidently, the hold may have been experienced for as much as five minutes or more. By the time the door opened, police were able to intervene, the man was dead, and Daniel Penny was about to face criminal charges.

The man in this case is Jordan Neely. And he got up, threw his jacket to the floor, started making these threatening statements, and Daniel Penny went into action. Now, did he do the right thing or the wrong thing? Well, here’s where the Christian worldview says here’s something to remember. If you’re in a context like a crowded subway car and you are located well under the surface of the earth in a city like New York City, and you are in a vehicle at high velocity and there’s nowhere you can go to escape and a man goes into a psychotic episode, and even these episodes known to have happened before, he appeared to present a clear and present danger to those on the car. The former Marine went into action, but he faced criminal charges from the District Attorney there in Manhattan.

Now, here’s where the story gets interesting, and we’ll try to do this fast. As of last week, he was facing those two charges. The first and more significant of the charges was the charge of manslaughter in the second degree. The second lesser charge was criminally negligent homicide. So the presence of the word negligent in that second charge indicates why it was a lesser charge. The jury came to no decision as of the end of last week. In the jury’s deliberations, they couldn’t come to the conclusion as to whether or not Daniel Penny, the former Marine who had held the man in a chokehold, if he had committed a criminal act.

The District Attorney, trying to salvage his case and lead the jury to find some guilty verdict, dropped the major charge, left the lesser charge. And going into the weekend, just about every legal observer thought, “Yeah, that’s likely what’s going to happen. The jury looking at the fact the judge has now dismissed the major charge is more likely to find Daniel Penny guilty of the lesser charge.” But yesterday, that’s not what happened. The jury actually found him not guilty of the lesser charge as well.

Now, this raises huge questions. The New York Times posed the question this way in a headline, “What makes one chokehold heroic and another hateful?” And the answer in the article, offered by Ginia Bellafante, is actually, I think, pretty much correct. And that is the difference between one chokehold and another chokehold, the difference between heroic and hateful is context. And that context takes on a different moral character when that context is in a moving subway car in New York City under the surface and there is no means of escape for those who are confronted with a man in a psychotic episode.

The same reports coming out yesterday indicated that Daniel Penny may face civil law consequences. And, of course, you could see that coming. But the fact is that the criminal law is the most important issue in this case, and a jury in New York did not find this man guilty; found this man not guilty when the final charge was the only charge that was left. And that doesn’t clarify everything morally, does it? Sometimes in a criminal context, everything doesn’t end up being clarified the way we would wish. But in this case, a jury of people just drawn from the random jury sample in New York found that what this former Marine did was more likely to have saved lives than not.

And basically in finding him not guilty, they said that the case had not been proved by the state that he had done something that a normal citizen should not have done under the circumstances, or at the very least that he did not bring about an act that would come with criminal consequences. You either believe in the jury system or you don’t. And it’s not perfect, but it does seem that that jury yesterday sent a signal in New York City about the frustration of people there with mayhem on the streets, or in this case, under the streets.

Part III

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Highly Secularized France Reopens a Restored Cathedral of Notre Dame: Cathedral Resplendent After Devastating Fire of 2019

But something else happened this past weekend, something really big, and that was the reopening of Notre-Dame Cathedral in the city of Paris. This was a huge event, and of course the background has to do with the fire that broke out in Notre-Dame Cathedral on April the 15th of 2019. So, we’re looking at just about five years ago. Then French President Emmanuel Macron, who is still French President, made the pledge that the cathedral would be saved. And frankly, it was near the point when it could not structurally have been saved. But he said the cathedral will be saved and it would be restored, and it would be so within five years.

Now, that deadline basically was met. And that is something that, quite honestly, is an extreme surprise when you understand the complexity of the challenges faced by those who were going to restore Notre-Dame Cathedral. After all, the cathedral’s construction began in the year 1163. There are some massive issues of history that of course are invoked here. Just think about the Gothic Age. Think about the Medieval Age. Think about the society, the civilization that began that cathedral there on the banks of the river in Paris.

As I said, it was begun in 1163. It wasn’t completed in its first form until 1345. It was usable in some sense by 1210 or 1220. But still, you’re looking at the fact that it took almost 200 years just for the basic construction of the cathedral as we know it. You can think of some other pretty specific dates. Think, fast-forward here, centuries, and I do mean many centuries. And by the way, what had been there on the bank of the river before the Notre-Dame Cathedral was the Cathedral of Saint-Étienne. That is the Cathedral of Saint Stephen. And so even going back centuries before the cathedral construction there of Notre-Dame, the reality is that there had been a Christian presence in Paris, and that had been very significant.

Think about some of the other dates. Think about the French Revolution in the 1790s. Think about the fact that when the revolutionaries gained control of Paris, they immediately de-consecrated the Cathedral of Notre-Dame. They turned it from a place of worship of the one true and living God. They turned it from its Christian heritage, and of course that heritage is Roman Catholic. More on that in just a moment. But they turned it into a Temple of Reason. They turned it into a place as the Temple of the Supreme Being at one point. So they began with reason, they translated to supreme being, but this was not the God of the Bible in any sense, not the God understood by Judaism or Christianity. It was a paganism in the name and in the service of human wisdom and human reason, secular reason.

In 1801 to 1802, Napoleon having come to power, Napoleon Bonaparte basically returned the use of the cathedral to the Catholic Church. But here’s the hitch. It did not return ownership of the cathedral to the Catholic Church. So right now, consistent with the action undertaken by the French revolutionaries, the French government owns the cathedral. The Catholic Church does not own the cathedral at all. It does have the rights to administer it and to conduct services within it. By the way, in that same cathedral in 1804, Napoleon was crowned Emperor. And you may recall that he broke all custom by not being crowned, but by crowning himself. He was the self-crowned Emperor. Deal with it.

The cathedral was largely destroyed on the 15th of April 2019. The fire was absolutely devastating. It reached all the way into the giant timbers at the top of that Gothic cathedral. And when you are looking at Notre-Dame Cathedral, you are looking at classic Gothic there in the 12th century. You’re looking at the soaring transept. You’re looking at the soaring nave. You’re looking at the height of that Gothic architecture. You’re looking outside at the flying buttresses. More on that in just a moment. You’re looking at the towers out front. This is the very great statement of Gothic architecture. It would be matched and paralleled by another cathedral in France, the cathedral at Chartres, which was started about a century to a century and a half after Notre-Dame Cathedral.

The fire, which seems to have begun in the timbers in the very roof, and just understand the immensity of this building, the immensity of these timbers. They were ancient trees at the time, and, of course, now we’re talking about trees that are almost 1,000 years old. The timbers turned into kindling. It turned into a massive conflagration. The cathedral’s roof was largely melted. The roof was covered with a lot of lead, and a lot of that lead simply turned into molten metal and it set fire to what was beneath it. The multiple pipe organs of the cathedral were affected, although the largest of them was not destroyed. You had massive damage to the leaded glass, the famous stained-glass, including the rose window. But at least many of those windows are preserved and will be eventually restored.

But here’s the thing. When the cathedral was reopened, in this massive project of recovering and restoring the cathedral, the cathedral was actually returned because of the cleaning of the stone to the way it would have appeared in the 12th century. The photographs are absolutely spectacular. Almost 1,000 years had brought an awful lot of grime.

Part IV

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Transcendence, Grandeur, and the Glory of God: The Theological Statement Behind the Gothic Architecture of Notre Dame Cathedral

And so in Paris right now, what you have is the restoration of a medieval cathedral in such a way that it is as if you are looking at it when the cathedral was new.

But now I want to get back to those flying buttresses and the Gothic architecture and the grandeur of the Christian worldview, and I just want to remind us that when you look at the cathedrals, in every way they are the symbol of medieval western civilization. They point to the fact that Christianity was at the center of the civilization. Even as this cathedral is at the center of Paris, everything else radiates from it. You also have the fact that in this Gothic Age of architecture, you have the rise of these massively high buildings; the transepts. The interior of these cathedrals reaching high, high, high and higher. You have a triforium, you have multiple levels, a projection upwards. And what does that represent? It represents the transcendence of the one true and living God.

Entering that kind of Gothic space, human beings are intended to seem small. God looms over as the Creator, the one who brings order, the source of all meaning, whose transcendence is not captured in the cathedral, but is pointed to by the cathedral. The flying buttresses were this invention whereby you had these giant piers outside the building and then you had the big winged arches that went up. In some cases, as many as three of them in a series.

So this beautiful set of piers and arches holds the building up, and that became a threat to Notre-Dame after the fire, because once the timbers had been damaged and once the roof was destroyed, and once the walls, very thin and very high, were made vulnerable, the external pressures that had been brought by those flying buttresses that kept those walls up threatened to bring them down. It was an architectural emergency, and thankfully, they were able to find countervailing forces to keep those buttresses up. Even as now, the buttresses are holding the building up again.

But okay, here’s where the worldview issues get really thick, right at that building. And that is because you can look at two men who looked at that building to draw lessons, and they came to very different conclusions. And I’m going to say one of them was right and one of them was wrong.

The one who was wrong was Lord Kenneth Clark, famed art critic in London who was well-known in the entire artistic world, had a lot of authority. He wrote about this and he depicted this in a massive televised presentation known as Civilization. When he got to the Gothic Age, and when he got to the age of the cathedrals, he pointed to what a great human achievement this was and how this showed so much artistry, so much architecture, so much detail. And yes, they were Christians who were about the business of Christian worship, but the big thing here is the human achievement represented in this cathedral.

In response, Francis Schaeffer, one of the great Christian apologists of the 20th century came back and said, “No. That is not showing the genius of human architecture and artistry.” That’s there of course, but the whole statement made by this building is the centrality of belief in God, centrality in the belief of the Trinity, centrality of belief in the Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It is society’s basis in revealed Christian truth that is represented by this building. And all of it, the flying buttresses, the organs, the arches, the windows, the majesty, the transcendence are pointing to the fact that human beings are not big, we are small. God is so big. He is big, only indicated by this massive towering space. He is infinite in his perfections.

This building tells us something true about God and something true about ourselves. When I walk into one of these great cathedrals, I have to think about the meaning of all these things. And, of course, when you look at the transition from earlier forms to the Gothic, what you see is this massive statement of transcendence. There’s more to it theologically, of course, but there’s not less to it than this.

Sadly, the restoration of Notre-Dame Cathedral was celebrated by a Roman Catholic mass in which I’m sure some of this was reflected, but in the civil occasions, there was no recognition at all of the real meaning of the cathedral. It came back to a great human achievement. Which in terms of its original construction, it was. Which in terms of its rapid and beautiful restoration, it was. But anyone looking at that cathedral who thinks the story is the cathedral is missing the point. We’ll save the argument that we would have with the priests in the cathedral for another day.