Speaking now against the day
Our silent witness enables the moral code of a different time to be the alibi for bad actors today
At the start of this month I made several posts on this platform on consecutive days, on several separate issues: bureaucratic attacks on the homeless, book bans (which are attacks on children who don’t fit within the Christian nationalist cookie cutter form), and thirdly, as current events would have it, America’s inexplicable tolerance for gun hobbyists in the face of school shootings.
I didn’t plan on that flurry of activity. I certainly hadn’t planned on a school shooting.
All the same, there’s an unintended theme here - a common frustration of the self-imposed indecency and indignity that stains us all when we fail to bend the prevailing political will to behave decently, or merely civilly, to our neighbors, particularly those who are in most urgent need of relief and succor these days.
This frustration is compounded by the near certain future defense of present-day bad actors:
“They didn’t know better in those times.”
Yet we do know better! They did know better. They’ve always known better.
Everyone who avails themself of that alibi knew better. Indeed, we extend that defense to long dead people because we know better right now and, I submit, it’s an appealing argument when it’s our hope to receive such protection from future judgment.
There’s no escaping news of people who are presently committing morally atrocious acts for which they will seek refuge in the alibi of moral ignorance. For instance, I see news that South Carolina is prepared to kill Freddie Owens, an easy-to-dislike, extremely violent character, by lethal injection on September 20. When it’s carried out, his will be the first murder that’s been approved and requisitioned by the state in 13 years.
What’s certain is that those who send him to the execution chamber know better than to poison or fry a human being in the name of the public interest. Even when it’s Freddie Owens.
We know that they know better because many people are making numerous moral arguments against the death penalty that has fallen on deaf ears among those who could stop his murder. The governor has received and rejected appeals for clemency that articulate the moral code and how capital punishment is a moral outrage.
The ebb and flow of state-sanctioned executions is not so much a function of a moral code that waxes and wanes with time as it is, in this point in Freddie Owens’ case, a function of the cold, calculated political decision by the governor that he can continue to violate the established moral code without personal consequence.
Gov. Henry McMaster can ignore all pleas for clemency, supremely confident that people will look back at this decision and excuse his conduct based on his alibi that “he didn’t know better.”
William Faulkner, predicting how Southern states would resist the calls and edicts for school integration, noted how this conveniently invoked ignorance of the moral code works when he urged decent people to at least make the effort of setting the historical record straight as to the fact that we knew better in the moment that we committed our various atrocities and maintained our stalwart defense against basic human decency intruding upon the culture:
“We speak now against the day when our Southern people who will resist to the last these inevitable changes in social relations, will, when they have been forced to accept what they at one time might have accepted with dignity and goodwill, will say, "Why didn't someone tell us this before? Tell us this in time?" - William Faulkner, remarks to the Southern Historical Association, Memphis, Tennessee (1955)
Consider, too, the curious case of Christopher Columbus.
Columbus often receives a free pass by those who contend he didn’t know better in the late 15th century. So, we might ask: did Columbus comprehend that he was committing atrocities against the Taino “Indians” or is he exonerated as a product of his time for not knowing any better? Well, we know, from the diaries and chronicles of that time - writers who “spoke against the day” - that Columbus did not operate according to a moral code of his time that was materially different from the one he’s judged by today.
The moral code was very much the same. The chronicle affords no alibi to Columbus.
The sense of not incurring any consequence for violating it was the variable that was measurably different. The goal posts have not moved. The sense of what infractions will be suffered without penalty is all that has changed. Columbus committed unspeakable atrocities because it was normalized or safe enough for him to ignore the moral code.
Speaking against the day - laying down the factual record for the future - may have the time-traveling effect of amending behavior right now, because speaking against the day alters the calculus of consequence which bad actors take their license from. Simply establishing that the world is watching now - and will be watching later - can alter history.
Which is why present-day bad actors are so keen to dismiss those who articulate the moral code for the crime of being “woke,” a pejorative that they have difficulty defining because they’re not very well going to say, “it’s the articulation of present-day mores and a code of decency that I plan on telling my grandchildren I didn’t know I was breaking.”
It’s tragic and fascinating that so much of human history recounts horrors that were set in motion by recalcitrant figures who took “principled” stands of not behaving decently until compelled to do so.
Worse, perhaps, is how the knowledge of all of this history (which itself arguably “speaks against the day”) doesn’t seem to slow down the stream of recalcitrant figures who go kicking and screaming into the night defending their right or prerogative to do no good.
The people who defend ancient bad actors with the alibi of moral ignorance strike me as people who themselves would like to benefit from such grace. They foresee their self-interest in promoting the fiction of moral ignorance. Decent people have no need to perpetuate this lie.
It’s not just these historical and present-day bad actors who are a curiosity to me.
The public apathy that offers them false comfort is also astonishing and inexplicable.
As members of the public, we have the benefit of a long, repetitive and growing historical record to see more clearly that we all incur a huge price by looking the other way when bad actors go on their escapades. With each passing decade, history adds to the litany of bad actions that reverberate into the future. One might think the public would be less and less tolerant of bad actors and more and more encouraging toward actors who chart a path of kindness, equity, justice, and overall decency toward our neighbors.
The misery of the present day has always echoed ahead into the future, so (if not for ourselves then for our children and grandchildren) we need to do a much better job of breaking the silence and speaking against the day.
Wow. You shine a strong light on it. With respect to capital punishment, I suspect "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do" has been used to justify the alibi, when it signifies the opposite: maybe they didn't know what they did THEN, but we, with the privilege of reading the scripture, SHOULD know. Going back to the Ten Commandments we should have known not to kill, and Jesus picked up the thread by speaking against stoning the adulterous woman. It's astonishing that anyone claiming to adhere to Judaeo-Christian morals can fail to notice that the central image of Christianity is the brutal crucifixion of an innocent man.