By Dr. Shirley Tamoria
Special to the Herald
Violence today rarely looks like violence. It arrives quietly — through interfaces, policies and systems designed to keep human beings out of view. People are no longer confronted; they are processed. Harm hums in the background, efficient and sanitized. What has disappeared is not cruelty, but proximity.
This disappearance matters. When distance becomes the organizing principle of power, empathy erodes — and with it, responsibility. Catholic social teaching names this condition structural sin: injustice embedded so deeply in systems that no one feels personally accountable. Long before the term existed, philosophy and mysticism diagnosed the same danger: When the other ceases to appear as fully human, anything becomes permissible.
Edith Stein understood this with unusual clarity. A Jewish philosopher who became a Carmelite nun and was later murdered at Auschwitz, Stein argued that empathy is not sentiment but perception — the act by which one apprehends another as a living subject rather than an object. Without empathy, the other becomes unreal. And once unreal, suffering becomes manageable, even justifiable.
Modern power depends on this unreality. Immigration systems that separate children from parents do so by converting families into cases. Drone warfare turns bodies into coordinates and deaths into metrics. Algorithms sort threat and value without ever encountering a face. Killing at a distance is not a flaw of contemporary systems; it is their moral function.
Stein saw where this trajectory led. Writing later from within the Carmelite tradition, under the rising shadow of Nazism, she turned to St. John of the Cross and composed “The Science of the Cross.” There she proposed a radically inverted understanding of knowledge: Truth does not arise from mastery or control, but from humility — from participation in suffering love. Light, she insisted, is found not by ascent but by descent.
Nazism embodied the opposite logic. It sought transcendence through force, blood and destiny. After World War I, Adolf Hitler emerged not merely as a political figure but as a vessel for something older and more diffuse. The psychologist James Hillman later argued that Hitler functioned less as an individual pathology than as a carrier of a collective archetypal force — unintegrated trauma, humiliation and mythic longing erupting through a single figure. Evil, in this account, does not require monsters. It requires meaning without mercy.
That force did not disappear in 1945. It fragmented.
Today it circulates through systems rather than speeches: autonomous weapons, bot-driven disinformation, predictive policing, automated decisions that shape life and death while insulating their creators from consequence. Violence no longer needs a demagogue. It needs infrastructure. Responsibility dissolves into workflows.
This diffusion is what makes contemporary violence so dangerous. The pilot is continents away. The programmer writes code, not commands. The policymaker signs frameworks, not orders. Each role appears neutral. Together they kill.
Pope Francis warned repeatedly against what he called the technocratic paradigm — the belief that efficiency can replace ethics, that means justify themselves, that progress absolves responsibility. But the deeper crisis is anthropological. Distance does not merely kill bodies; it erodes mercy.
Against this stands a different vision of the human, embodied not in power but in presence. One of its clearest witnesses was St. Marianne Cope, who lived among those with Hansen’s disease at a time when fear had turned them into outcasts. She did not heal them by technology alone. She touched them. She stayed. She refused distance.
Stein would have recognized it immediately. Empathy, she argued, does not weaken the self; it enlarges it. To encounter another as a subject is to allow oneself to be changed. Systems of domination cannot tolerate this vulnerability. Mercy is inefficient. Presence cannot be automated.
There is a word for this kind of presence in Hawaiian culture: aloha. It is often reduced to a greeting, but at its root it names shared breath — mutual being, attention without possession, care without control.
Aloha is not softness. It is resistance. It insists that no one is disposable, no one unreal.
The crisis we face is not primarily technological or political. It is a crisis of what we allow ourselves to see. Darkness rarely arrives announcing itself as such. It comes wrapped in necessity, security and progress. Light appears more quietly: a refusal, a witness, a person who stays.
In an age of machines, salvation — if the word still has meaning — will not come from smarter systems. It will come from those who choose proximity over power, humility over dominance, mercy over distance.
That choice is older than ideology and more radical than protest. It is the choice to remain human. It calls the people of God to follow Jesus, Francis and St. Marianne.
Dr. Shirley Tamoria is a parishioner at St. Elizabeth Church in Aiea, a Franciscan Associate and a member of the Order of Saint Lazarus of Jerusalem.