Dystopia on a New York subway

In late December, we bundled up our kids and made for the zoo. We go every year to see the Christmas lights, drink hot chocolate, and ride the carousel. It’s a tradition.

This year, something had changed. Our city zoo had installed metal detectors at the entrance. My first reaction was cynicism: “We’re here to see the polar bears and the Christmas lights, I grumbled, not to go through the TSA line at the airport.” Ultimately, though, I found I was grateful for the extra security. And ashamed it’s come to this.

The late Chuck Colson used to say that a peaceful society would be ruled either by the conscience or the constable. We are fallen humans in a world haunted by sin, so a constable is a perpetually necessary safeguard. But people who value self-control and despise evil, who teach their children to do the same, and who have a fixed moral reference point by which to define good and evil will rarely need to restrain evil by force.

Sadly, the American conscience has been fraying for a long time. We struggle to call something “evil” before interrogating the context in which the evil was done—for example, what was the perpetrator’s race? Could he have had his reasons? We’re shy about calling anything “good” or “beautiful,” because aren’t those subjective and maybe oppressive?

By Colson’s reasoning, our weakening conscience ought to prompt a growing need for a constable. And it has. Our zoo has installed metal detectors. Last summer, I traveled to Portland, Ore., where hard drugs were decriminalized in 2021 (they’ve since been recriminalized), and the “stigma” against crimes like shoplifting has evaporated. Every local store and business that could afford it had hired private armed security. The same has happened in cities like Seattle and San Francisco—except for those retailers who’ve simply abandoned the area because of rampant theft.

These are the same cities that went hard against the “constable” in 2020. Interestingly, when those in the abolish-the-police crowd were doing their thing, they appealed to the conscience. More “social services,” they said, and we won’t need police.

Setting aside that history shows it never moves in this direction—by the time the constable is active enough for you to hate him, the conscience is likely long gone—the activists never had a vision or a moral footing for the conscience they were hoping for.

This raises a frightening question I wish I could ask Chuck Colson now: What happens when a people lose their conscience and evict the constable?

Enter the New York City subway.

On Dec. 22, a psychotic Guatemalan man who had illegally entered the United States set a woman on fire on the New York subway. The woman burned to death while her killer sat on a bench nearby and watched. It was caught on video. Other passengers walked—they didn’t try to help, they didn’t even run—by. A police officer watched.

This happened just a couple of days after the trial of Daniel Penny, a U.S. Marine who saved a New York subway car full of people from another violent man and was, in return, charged with that man’s murder. Penny was rightly acquitted, but his ordeal is exactly the wrong kind of cautionary tale.

I think we have part of our answer here. When men give up both their conscience and the constable, they’re conquered by chaos. We might have predicted that. There are nations in the underdeveloped world where power has been the only animating principle of public life for centuries, and it’s hell. These are places where children are slaves or soldiers, where men kill women for talking out loud, and where people live in the dump.

What I didn’t expect, and what horrifies me now, is that people with neither conscience nor constable are capable of growing numb to the chaos. We live in a cultural moment in which every mildly uncomfortable human emotion is designated as “trauma.” But we can’t even muster enough shock and revulsion to run past—let alone help—a woman being burned alive?

Of course, the world has known chaos since the Garden. The Romans used to nail people to trees along the roadside for the expressed purpose of murdering them slowly while people walked by.

Our hope now is the same as it was then, that Christ, who humiliated the chaos, will renew everything. Until He returns, the Church must do what only Christianity can: try to rebuild a shared moral conscience. We have to try to convince our neighbors that there is no such thing as a “victimless” crime or “context-dependent” evil, because God gave this world a moral order, and violating it always rips and breaks something He meant to keep whole.

Until then, we’ll have to hope there are enough men—men with chests, as C.S. Lewis would say—willing to serve as our constables.