At around 8 pm this past Saturday, Mamoudou Gassama, a 22-year-old man from Mali, climbed the facade of a building and saved the life of a 4-year-old child who was dangling from a fourth-floor balcony. You have to see it to believe it. He scrabbles up the building in under 30 seconds, grabs the boy by the arm, and throws him onto the balcony. The crowd on the street bursts into cheers and happy clapping. They have seen something wonderful.
The Malian turned out to be an illegal alien (sans-papier) who traveled from his home country to ISIS-dangerous Libya, crossed the great watery African grave—the Mediterranean Sea—by boat, spent fours years in Italy, which has yet to recover from the financial crisis of 2010, and moved to Paris in the fall of last year to live with his brother. The Guardian reports that he sleeps on the floor of “a residence for migrants in Montreuil, outside Paris, rolling out a thin mattress each night and packing it up in the morning.” Six other migrants share that room.
In this post, I want explain why Gassama’s rescue, the video of which immediately went viral, is more about morality than bravery. The former concerns the social animal; the latter, eclipses the former by emphasizing “the will” of the individual.
After saving the child, after France’s mainstream media made Gassama the celebrity of the day and named him “Le Spider-Man,” after he met the president of France, Emmanuel Macron, at the Elysée Palace, after he was granted French citizenship for displaying that he is French (“France is a will,” said the president of France), and receiving a 10-month internship with Paris’ fire department (it pays €600 a month), we now must examine the meaning of the rescue in its social context. What actually happened when the young human surrendered the safety of the street and exposed his one and only existence to death for a complete stranger? As he climbed up that building, he was being nothing but the utter most that his kind of animal, the human animal, could be. This is precisely Spinoza’s point, when he writes: “Man Is God to Man.”
Gassama told reporters that he thanked “God, [he] saved the child.” This god is nothing but the hyper-social human, and our sociality is part biological and part a moment in time, or historically contingent, as Stephen Jay Gould put it. This is why comparing Gassama to superhero is so inaccurate. A man or woman with super-powers is always unequal, always exceptional. He/she who can lift a car with one arm is not one of us. The human pulling his body up that Paris apartment building certainly had the advantages of youth on his side, but he was not really exceptional. The powers of youth are universal. No, Gassama only revealed that he was one of us. And it’s this equality that made his decision to save the life of a stranger profoundly moral.
Morality has nothing to do with a man giving another man a blowjob, or trans-person using this or that restroom, or an evangelical attending mega-church services without fail. There is nothing moral about prayers, which is why they are so useless after a mass shooting or would have been useless to that boy dangling from the balcony. Morality, as it relates to the human body (the god to other human bodies), and the history of its species-specific development, and the key features of this development, has only one command: make me equal to you. (For more on this kind of thinking, read my longish e-flux essay “The Equalizer.”)
What evangelical Christians call evil is, when removed from all of their confusions and illusions, revealed to be the deliberate act of making someone less and less equal to you. Hell needs no fire, just humans forced to live on the streets, or deprived of the basic necessities and comforts by culturally imposed scarcities. If you see a man sleeping on the streets, you do not assume he is being punished for receiving a blowjob from another man. And yet, this man is exactly in hell, which is nothing but the growing absence (or negation) of the command that names the human animal’s morality.
This is what the illegal migrants are demanding from France, or what that boy demanded from those looking up at him from the safety of the street: make me equal to you. If you do not have this one anthropological commandment as your definition of morality, then you’re not talking or thinking about morality, but its appearance as its exact opposite in an inverted world.
