The Golden Thread of Justice

In January, I may be on a panel discussing how to countenance enjoying the art of bigoted artists. On that panel, I will point out the facts as I know them: that there is a reason for Innocent Until Proven Guilty, that As Long As A Man Is Alive He Can Change, and so forth. Pillars that form a just society, a non-fascist society, a society that does not slide into mobs and censorship and purity culture. It will make a lot of people very angry and they may not listen, and they will certainly jump to that island so frequented in the past few years, Conclusions.They will likely conclude I am bigoted because I am defending the humanity of bigots, and not saying they should be put to death and their works burned from public memory. It is frightening to accept this, but I cannot change it.

I may not even be on the panel, anyway. But I am of a nature that I must prepare, and even if I am not on this panel, that is still something I must say.

We must continue to allow ourselves and others to for example discuss Harry Potter, to discuss Bill Cosby’s large body of work, as we discuss Kipling, or Shakespeare, or any of the other dead creative people whose work contains bigotry, whose actions included crimes. And the discussion should not begin and end with apologies and lists of their crimes, or listing off only the bad things we can find in their work. That is not a discussion, that is a reading of sins and an invitation to condemn only. We cannot simply refuse to mention the positive aspects, that is disingenuous and it is censorship. There is no such thing as a bad or good person, there are actions. A person is a person, no matter how much harm they have done. The persons who have raped me, who have physically harmed me, who have abused me—they are still human persons, and still deserve food when they are hungry, and medicine if they are sick, and coolth if they are hot. They are still human beings who are capable of and have made art, some of them—and who have had helpful influence on other people, some of them.

It is, for some people, for the short-term, very emotionally satisfying, to hate. It is even emotionally satisfying to hate in a group with other people. But it is dangerous, to get addicted to righteous anger. It makes you prone to want an excuse to feel it, to unleash actions fuelled by it and that fuel it. It is very comforting to believe the world is simple, that people are simply one thing or the other; but it isn’t true. The truth is, people are complicated, and the world is complicated, and people who do horrific things can often then turn around and do wonderful things. And often, they do both at the same time. It is not human, to hate—it is specifically dehumanising, to be taught to hate, to hate; we must dehumanise another person in order to hate them, and we dehumanise ourselves by hating other people.

And another thing? There is no such thing as moral or immoral art (because, let’s be clear, that is what ‘good’ and ‘bad’ mean); there is only art. The only standard you can judge it by is whether it was well-executed or poorly-executed. Doing anything else is one step toward censorship. Yes, even art that is bigoted is still art. You cannot say it’s not art, or that it shouldn’t be available, because that is censorship, and that is the tool of fascism. There is not a ‘correct’ way to censor anything, there are no ‘correct’ things to censor. Art should not be censored, period. As soon as you make a category of ‘don’t’, you invite yourself to put your enemies, or things you just dislike, or things that discomfit you, into that category. There is no exception to this, this is what always happens when you begin censoring art.

I am fond of a little tv show from the seventies and eighties called Rumpole of the Bailey. It is about a defence lawyer who never pleads guilty, and the show does not pull punches about what that means—Rumpole defends people accused of hate speech, of rape, of blackmail, of everything uncomfortable and everything we would like to believe anyone accused is automatically guilty of. But Rumpole always says the Golden Thread of Justice, the foundation of the justice system as we know it, is Innocent Until Proven Guilty. In other words, if you accuse someone of something, the burden of proving it is on you, the accuser. Accusing someone is easy; proving your accusation is hard. This is on purpose. This is because it is better to let a guilty person go free than falsely convict an innocent person. Doing otherwise is going to get a lot of innocent people slaughtered for increasingly minor accusations with fewer and fewer pieces of evidence until we’re back to exactly the kind of ‘justice’ enacted by witch hunts, which were largely what happens when people

1. want something you have
2. want someone to blame when there really isn’t anyone to blame, or
3. just plain don’t like you.

So no, we can’t go around simply believing every accusation all the time, no matter what the accusation is. We must demand evidence, every time, no matter what. And if we only apply these rules in court, that isn’t enough. “The Devil is in the details” as the saying goes—we have to apply these principles in small situations as well as large ones.

Another thing Rumpole says is “The law is like a spider’s web, it catches the small flies but the big ones break through. Just ask any politician.” and “The trouble with justice is that it’s not always just. But it’s the best we’ve got, so we have to make the most of it.” So this is not to say he doesn’t have a sense of right and wrong, or that the writer and the stories don’t deal with reality as it is, where people lie and cheat and get away with it sometimes. Even so, the burden of proof always rests on the accuser, not the accused, or there is no such thing as Justice at all.