Liking only good characters and 100% completely unproblematic things (which don’t exist) is not a replacement for actually being a good person
i think about this a lot
Questionnaire
Wendell Berry
1. How much poison are you willing
to eat for the success of the free
market and global trade? Please
name your preferred poisons.2. For the sake of goodness, how much
evil are you willing to do?
Fill in the following blanks
with the names of your favorite
evils and acts of hatred.3. What sacrifices are you prepared
to make for culture and civilization?
Please list the monuments, shrines,
and works of art you would
most willingly destroy.4. In the name of patriotism and
the flag, how much of our beloved
land are you willing to desecrate?
List in the following spaces
the mountains, rivers, towns, farms
you could most readily do without.5. State briefly the ideas, ideals, or hopes,
the energy sources, the kinds of security,
for which you would kill a child.
Name, please, the children whom
you would be willing to kill.
I think a lot of people misinterpret my focus on redemption and empathy as brushing abusive behavior under the rug, and I want to clarify my perspective on that.
I think there’s a huge, huge difference between “this person fucked up, but we’re going to try to help them move forward” and “this person did nothing wrong”. I spend a lot of time thinking about criminals’ rights and how we can reintegrate wrongdoers in a dignified and productive way. Like, a lot. That doesn’t mean I forget for a second that they have, in fact, done something wrong.
It’s not that I believe abusive people are perfect angels who have done no wrong. It’s that I believe in a society where doing wrong is something you can come back from. And I think that’s very difficult to grasp when you subscribe to an angel/demon dichotomy. Either you’ve completely absolved a person or you’ve shunned them forever, so if you’re not doing the latter, then clearly you’re doing the former. Which is not at all what I’m striving for.
You can acknowledge that someone did something really, really shitty, or even a lot of somethings, and still desire a world that treats criminals in a more empathetic way. You don’t have to sugarcoat the abhorrent things that a lot of criminals have done to believe in their inherent dignity. I’m not for prison reform because I believe criminals are blameless. I’m for it because I think blamelessness is irrelevant to whether you should be treated like a human.