Unawarding

I suppose that it’s become somewhat clear that I have a fondness for both teapot tempests, and for coming up with other ways of describing same that carry the same connotation of people being worked up over (what I consider to be) trivialities. But part of what makes such coffeecup conflagrations interesting is what they say about the people involved in them, and sometimes by extension, the broader society around me.

Back in August, Nation Public Radio reported the story of a controversy surrounding the Vivian Awards, given out by the Romance Writers of America. To be sure, I have absolutely no interest in romance novels. I’ve understood myself to be Notoriously Unromantic since I was a pre-teen, and find absolutely nothing about the overall genre the least bit interesting. So this caught my attention because it struck me as classic case of people finding a reason to be outraged over something trivial. But, there is something deeper beneath that, and that’s what held my interest (albeit not long enough for me to work out an entire weblog post at the time.

The Vivian Awards are, like a number of such things, broken down into several categories, like “Best First Book” or “Historical Romance.” And what triggered the controversy earlier in the year was the award for “Romance with Religious or Spiritual Elements.” The basic plot of Karen Witemeyer’s At Love’s Command is simple. An officer of the 7th Cavalry Regiment (the same 7th Cavalry Regiment once commanded by Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer) is involved in the massacre at Wounded Knee Creek is what it now the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. After asking for God’s forgiveness and seeking redemption, he gets the girl, as they say, and the two of them have their happily ever after.

Ms. Witemeyer wins a Vivian for her book, cue the outrage.

But outrage, in and of itself, tends to be uninteresting. What stood out for me as NPR relating that author Jenny Hartwell had posted her letter to the Romance Writers of America to Twitter, including the following:

Romances have flawed heroes and heroines who find redemption through the transformative power of love. However, aren’t there some people who shouldn’t be redeemed?

Ms. Hartwell then goes on to list the Usual Suspects for being irredeemable, “Nazis. Slave owners. Soldiers who commit genocide.”

But my answer to her question is an unequivocal “no.” There are, as far as I’m concerned, no people who should not be redeemed. And in this, I’m going to invoke the director of the Equal Justice Initiative, Professor Bryan Stevenson: “Each of us is more than the worst thing we’ve ever done.” And, I would add to that, “no matter how many times we’ve done them.”

I understand the impulse to divide the world into Good and Evil. But, to (screw it) appropriate the language of social justice, calling someone evil is simply a means of “othering” them. And it’s something that people do, in my understanding, as a way of describing themselves. In other words, people call out others as evil, especially irredeemably evil, as a means of marking those people as different from themselves, and not simply as less (or un-) deserving of empathy, understanding or, for that matter, love/being loved. The phenomenon of Whataboutism can be seen as a direct result of this sort of thinking. “If we Soviets are bad actors for the way in which we treat dissidents,” the logic went “are not you in the United States just as evil for the way that Negros are treated?” And to the degree that Cold War criticisms of the Soviets’ human rights record was intended as a means of casting said Soviets as bad people, they had a point. The United States couldn’t claim to be a nation uniquely interested in the rights of all people with Jim Crow being so obviously practiced throughout the South, and all sorts of racially unjust policies (such as redlining) liberally scattered around the rest of the nation. As a defense against the specific charges leveled, Whataboutism is patently pointless. But as a defense against the charge of unique moral deficiency, it’s spot on.

The point behind casting people as irredeemable for the choices of their past is to preclude them from being considered worthy for the choices they may make in their present or their future in a way that most people want for themselves. And that’s different from understanding culpability. While I personally don’t understand the zeal for tracking down and bringing to trial nonagenarians who worked in the prison camps and death houses of Nazi Germany, I understand the idea that as a legal matter, there is no recognized Statute of Limitations on their involvement. But attempting to justify their punishments by claiming them to be perpetually stained by actions that took place so long ago that people have been able to live full lives from end to end in the interim strikes me as attempting to make vengefulness seem like a form of righteousness. (Not that I have a problem with vengefulness, in and of itself. But when people won’t own up to it, then I become dubious.)

But maybe that’s just me. I’m an old man, and maybe I’ve simply aged out of the idea that perpetual grudges are a form of power, rather than simply a millstone around one’s neck.