In defence of witch-hunts
EDIT: My editor has pointed out that parts of this cover similar topics to Rachael Denhollander’s excellent testimony at the Nassar trial which I had read when it was released. Here are the transcript and video which I commend to you.
Dike Astræa was the greek goddess of Justice. Sadly, much like many of our human judges she was far too squeamish to be up to the challenge. When you weigh her up against her slightly more Game of Thronesey co-inhabitants of Mt. Olympus, you can imagine that her haemophobia didn’t help her to fulfil her role:
Upon the discovery of iron, men became rather more adept at destroying one another and, distraught at what she saw, Astræa retreated from the earth to become the constellation of stars we now know as Virgo.
And that was only at the dawn of the iron age! One can only imagine how she would have reacted had she stuck around for gunpowder, nuclear warheads and YouTube comments…
Justice has always been an elusive concept. On one level we demand it, on another we demand that it comes nowhere near us. It’s one reason why we all clamour to play the part of judge when a pervasive crime comes to the fore — the judge is not under scrutiny. Therefore Hollywood elites who have palpably ignored and even defended the perpetrators of sexual crimes force their way out of the dock and onto the bench.
Where shall the guillotine fall?
For my birthday last week I was given a neatly matched pair of gifts: tickets to the Siberian Ballet and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956 in which, as he reflects on humanity whilst rotting in a Siberian Gulag, he says this:
“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
And so what do we say — “More Justice!”? Or less?
Do we cry out for the sky to fall upon us or do we cry for mercy for all of us, begging justice to stay far out of reach in a mythological constellation?
And we flit in these extremes — doing the full Ben Affleck: demanding justice then begging forgiveness when caught.
One phrase which is worth thinking on is that which we are often warned about: “Don’t let this become a witch hunt”.
Bring on the witch-hunt
Late last year, I went with my fiancée & some friends to see one of my favourite plays — Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. The play follows the events of the Salem witch-trials in the late 17th Century and operates as a metaphor (which is about as subtle as that time every one of Mel Gibson’s stars lies cruciform across the screen) for the Communist-hunt which was currently underway in the United States Senate. Thus ‘witch-hunt’ became commonly used as a general term for hysteria-fuelled public shaming and/or adjudication at more or less the same time that the term ‘McCarthyism’ was born. The Salem witch-trials were a farce, and thus bred the term ‘witch-hunt’ for farcical, kangaroo-court movements: A witch-hunt is, broadly speaking, an opportunistic use of a real fear to libel, jail, or otherwise impugn one’s enemies, normally political. The ongoing sweep of allegations about sexual predation is not McCarthyism. But it is a witch hunt… it’s just an actual one.
What made the Salem witch-hunt such perfect satirical fodder for Miller was that there was no real evidence of witchcraft. The story shows the (admittedly futile) redemption of John Hale, who sees that there are no witches in Salem.
When it comes to sexual assault, then, that use of the phrase simply doesn’t apply. In order for something to be dismissed as a witch hunt, one has to believe that there is not really a witch problem. As far as the past 6months of allegations go (and the ones for decades before, which we simply ignored) we’re living in freaking Hogwarts.
And yet, here’s the rub: To one degree or another, all are guilty. Not necessarily of that particular crime, but all are guilty. And yet the concept of scale, bizarrely, is also unpopular. The ever-virtue-signalling Minnie Driver recently lied, pretending that she thought there was no difference between a woman being flashed and a woman being raped:
The idea that there is no distinction between different evils is obviously dishonest and wrong. But it stumbles across something true: They are equally deserving of punishment, and there is no accounting for a scale of damage. However, human legal systems have a task — to keep society functioning. And they have exclusively fallible resources — which demands accommodation for the idea that they might be wrong. As such our systems, for the most part, focus more on protection (for the populace) and restitution (for the culprit), whilst vengeance, though present, takes a back seat and mostly serves as a deterrent.
Thus we will never see the justice that Driver and others want to see (unless the Donald finally pushes ‘Rocket Man’ too far…) Whilst this may seem dark, if your priority is Total Justice and you bring that to the fore above Mercy or proportion, then total annihilation is the only way forward — and you will get what you want. But I’m not sure that that really is what you want…
Fortunately, as we were reminded over Easter weekend, not every God of Justice is as squeamish as Dike Astræa. If Christians are to be believed then the God of the universe saw fit to punish wickedness and evil to the final degree… and by putting himself under that punishment, achieved the possibility also for total mercy.
Not mercy without restitution. Not releasing evil back into paradise… real mercy; real change.
Total Mercy. Mercy for the penitent murderer; mercy for the penitent rapist; mercy for the penitent thief; mercy for the penitent paedophile; mercy for me, in my penitence.
Maybe that’s a lot to swallow. Maybe it seems utterly scandalous. But if the story of the death and resurrection of Jesus is true, then it gives you both your dreams of Justice and of Mercy. And if you haven’t thought on those things then you haven’t yet thought on the evil of this world… you haven’t looked into the darkness. Don’t stand forever in the palliating streetlights of distraction. Look into the darkness that you know surrounds you: no one has ever stood under a streetlight and truly forgotten that it is dark; as we’ve observed before, the only thing a streetlight truly hides is the stars — I’m a country boy, I should know.
I look into the black and I see the stars. And when I see them I don’t see the retreat of justice.
I see that the darkness has been pierced.
I see the brightest star and it is to me the cross and resurrection: the weekend of events which tore such a hole in that dark panorama of night, that it proved that darkness is indeed but a sheet that can and shall be peeled away… and all behind is light and life.
