So powerful is our tendency to revere, to mark as sacred what brings us awe, that when we witness others expressing gratitude—the simplest act of reverence—we ourselves are moved to kindness. In one study on this, participants were tasked with editing a movie review that was authored by a writer. Before doing their own editing work, participants first looked at a past editor’s efforts. In one condition, participants viewed the writer expressing appreciation to that editor with a “thank you.” Witnessing this simple act of reverence led participants to be more willing to assist the writer they were responsible for editing. Others’ acts of reverence stir us to likeminded actions. We find ourselves joined with others in interconnected webs of reverence.
Moral Beauty Inside and Out
If we are lucky, when we are children our lives are surrounded by everyday moral beauty.
This was not the childhood Louis Scott was born into. When he was six years old, he saw his father murder a man. His mother was a sex worker, and her business filled the days of his childhood, he says, more so than Little League baseball or playing with Tonka trucks. It was only a matter of time before Louis was pimping—and doing very well at it—which led to a host of pimping and pandering convictions and a prison sentence of 229 years. Here is a story of awe he shared with me:
I was standing before the judge being sentenced to 229 years to life. I can remember being so angry, frustrated, feeling so hurt and ashamed. I felt as though I was being made a public spectacle. Everyone in the courtroom was white. I didn’t know if someone was going to step out of the crowd and attempt to shoot me. I can remember my thoughts were everywhere at that time. It was as if I was having an out-of-body experience. I’m standing there watching myself argue with the judge during the sentencing phase of my trial, telling the judge that sentencing me to 229 years to life isn’t going to do anything. I was so angry I told the judge that I haven’t done anything that this country was not founded upon and I feel that I’m still paying for that statement to this day.
Institutions that embody moral beauty—universities, museums, cathedrals, courthouses, monuments, the criminal justice system—can inspire awe in those who live lives of privilege. For those who’ve been subjugated by such institutions, the feeling is often much closer to threat-based awe and its bodily expressions, shudders and cold shivers.
Once inside, Louis was transformed by an idea: a way he could bring peace to the confines of prison and stir an awareness in those on the outside about the kindness and courage of those on the inside, allowing a goodness so rarely considered its own speech within prison. Moved, he has produced award-winning shows for San Quentin Radio on the illusions and costs of gang loyalty inside, living and dying with hepatitis C, and the stigma of AIDS in prison. For the San Quentin News, he interviewed the Golden State Warriors and people like Susan Sarandon, Helen Hunt, and Van Jones when they visited SQ. He is the only prisoner to have been elected to the Society of Professional Journalists.
Louis was one of four restorative justice facilitators that first day I visited San Quentin. RJ is grounded in principles of nonviolence: it centers upon perpetrators recognizing the harm they have caused, taking responsibility for their acts, making amends, and expressing remorse. It is a radical and ritualized implementation of the idea that if we allow people, even those in the heat of conflict, the chance for allowing goodness its own speech, we can build more peaceful relations, often fragile ones. It is a cultural archive of moral beauty with a long past: RJ dates back to Gandhi and MLK, in our deeper history to Indigenous practices from around the world, and further back in our evolutionary history to mammalian peacemaking tendencies. It is grounded in the conviction of moral beauty, that all people, including those who have murdered and those who’ve lost loved ones and are overheated with thoughts of revenge, can find kindness and overcome.
A central practice of restorative justice is the talking circle, in which individuals sit in a circle and take turns sharing where they are that day while others simply listen. After my talk on awe, we broke into groups of ten, and Louis led the talking circle I happened to be part of. As we took turns speaking, the men in blue spoke of the following: their remorse, a cellie in his fifties dying in the infirmary, a son landing in prison, an upcoming appearance before the parole board, the latest thinking on sentencing laws, the school-to-prison pipeline, drug legalization, police brutality, and mass incarceration. The conversation often sounded like a graduate seminar in sociology. Louis provided a narrative thread to the disclosures with the slowly measured, grammatically pure clarity of someone used to narrating trauma and uniting warring sides.
On one of my last visits to San Quentin, I sat in a pew most of the day next to a white prisoner named Chris. He had been raised in a white neighborhood in Orange County, California, and fell into that region’s street life of skinheads. They required him to go on missions, to “put violent intentions upon other people,” namely, people of color. That led to many arrests, and a third-strike conviction for armed robbery, landing him in SQ. There he would join RJ. Here is what Chris said about what he was learning:
In order to make something grow, you gotta own a little dirt
My dirt, in order to grow myself
Chris was growing his hair long, to dissociate from the white supremacist skinheads inside. And he was getting the tattoos on his neck removed one by one. That day, he spoke to the audience of two hundred men in blue. He talked about being a Nazi skinhead. About assaulting people of color with baseball bats. From the pews, I could see the reddening of shame wash over his face. Darwin reasoned that the blush is a manifestation of our moral beauty, signaling that we care about the opinions of others; studies 130 years later would find that others’ blushes trigger forgiveness and reconciliation in observers—a millisecond pattern of behavior joining perpetrator and victim in a transformative dynamic at the heart of restorative justice. At the end of Chris’s talk, the men in blue shifted in their seats in an awkward silence. Louis strode to the dais and embraced Chris. He noted how much courage it took for Chris to do what he had done.
At break that day Louis introduced me to a prisoner who had done time in solitary. He stood off at an oblique angle, avoiding direct eye contact. People who have done solitary can be overwhelmed by others’ faces, in particular, others’ eyes. This prisoner, Louis explained, had been part of a hunger strike protesting solitary confinement. He had pressed small notes into the handle of the broom he used to clean parts of the prison. Those notes would make their way into the hands of other prisoners, who in turn passed them on to other prisoners. It was a vast, interconnected web of resistance.
Louis explained to the prisoner that I had written an amicus brief in the case Ashker v. Governor of California, which was inspired by the moral beauty of the hunger strike that took place at California’s Pelican Bay State Prison. The Ashker in the case is white supremacist Todd Ashker, who had lived twenty-eight years in solitary at the Pelican Bay maximum-security prison in Northern California. In solitary, Ashker spent twenty-three hours a day by himself in a windowless cell about the size of a parking space. He could see no other prisoners; nor could he hear them after correctional officers covered the front of his cell with plexiglass. Guards “messed with his mail” from his family. He was not allowed to hug visitors. In my brief I argued that depriving prisoners of touch, our most powerful language of reverence, harms them physically and mentally, and worsens their chances for reform. In one study of prisoners in solitary, 70 percent showed signs of impending nervous breakdown, 40 percent suffered from hallucinations, and 27 percent had suicidal ideation. Solitary confinement is the annihilation of everyday moral beauty. One inmate summed it up aptly: “I would rather have gotten the death penalty.”