Lost Souls

There’s an old essay by Freddie deBoer that I think about a lot. It includes this paragraph:

[…] we can’t simultaneously be a movement based on rehabilitation and restorative justice AND a viciously judgmental moral aristocracy. You know who thinks everybody’s guilty until proven innocent? Cops. You know who thinks people don’t deserve the right to defend themselves? Cops. You know who says those who defend basic fairness and due process are as bad as criminals themselves? Cops.

I think about the people who patrol others’ Twitter accounts to make sure they don’t follow any proscribed accounts, any people who have been rendered non-beings, subhuman, cast out from human society. I try to understand that mentality, that desire for domination. It makes me sick.

I also think about those who make a big show of prostrating themselves before the moral authorities of the day, fully knowing the hypocrisy of what they do. Knowing they’ve sinned themselves, knowing the people they’re bowing to believe in absolutely nothing but power, knowing all of this is just a big theatrical performance.

And yet theatre comes out of religion, and I wonder if they think paying obeisance will make it true, will make them good people and give them all the things they’re hoping they’ll get by humbling themselves, even though they know on some level that these moral authorities would throw them to the wolves without even hesitating.

Is the cruelty part of the attraction? Hoping that you’ll be the special one, the one who will be singled out and treated differently, lifted up above the rest?

Is it a kind of religious ecstasy for these people, their hands trembling as they post about the latest bad person who must be castigated? Or is it secret and nasty and masturbatory, because they know that they couldn’t explain any of it to a normal person, that anyone who’s suffered the real hardship of ordinary working life would just laugh at their academic language and their obscure, incomprehensible definitions of sin?

It’s odd to think that people who grew up exposed to the same stories of injustice we all were, the same warnings about self-righteous inquisitors who know no mercy, would go on to openly celebrate every single thing the oppressed and exploited of this world have fought against, while simultaneously perceiving themselves as fighting for that very side whose history they are trampling.

What does that kind of internal contradiction do to your mind?

And how do you get there from the person you were 5 or 10 years ago, when all of this was still obvious? And what do you surrender in terms of integrity to do so?

I wonder what it’ll cost artists in particular. I know what it costs now not to participate, to stick to unfashionable democratic principles, but what will taking part cost in the long run? What will it mean to have named names, to have hounded people, to have put yourself above the processes of justice? To have supported the belief that punishment acts as deterrent when that’s the oldest conservative lie in the book and that’s exactly what you were supposed to be against? When the very existence of your belief system, in a way, was predicated on not thinking that way?

I believe that it’s the best in us that leads us to create art — even those of us who are more broken than others — and I will never judge anyone’s art by their personal follies.

Still, I can’t help but wonder if there isn’t a toll. There’s a difference for artists, I think, between a genuine belief, even if it’s extreme and dogmatic, and deliberate propaganda. There’s a fakeness that creeps into works created by people who don’t really believe which becomes more apparent with time. What seems perfectly in line with popular orthodoxy now will stick out like a sore thumb in twenty years, and seem downright mad in a hundred.

Of course, not everyone cares. There are artists who proudly “write for the market” — and before long nobody but the market will remember their works. But there are people who have a genuine spark, who could have created great things if only they had tried just a little harder to stick to their principles, if only they’d cared a little less about appearances and a little more about truth.

Or kindness. I’d take kindness over truth.

Consorting with sinners is never popular in the present, and yet we look back at those who did so with far more admiration than for those who sought out harsher punishments for the guilty. Who has less hope to offer the world than the person who does not believe in redemption?