“Comment is free,” wrote The Guardian’s famous editor, CP Scott, “but facts are sacred.”
Things, alas, are not so simple today. Postmodernism has cast its ominous shadow over Scott’s solid, sacred facts and, in the age of the blog, comment is not so much free as worthless.
Those prepared to waste five minutes of their life trawling through the comments posted under most broadsheet opinion pieces, not least those relating to religion, will soon realise that such pages are, by and large, a sump for those who, under the cloak of anonymity, mistake abuse for wit.
This is not to say that crafted contempt, self-satisfied posturing or out-and-out invective cannot be illuminating, of course. Last December John Sentamu, Archbishop of York, wrote a seasonal piece in The Telegraph. Christmas, he wrote, “is an RSVP from God, inviting us to the party of our lives.” It spoke of the “the self-sacrificing love of God… [that] places an infinite value on everyone's head [without] exception.”[1]
This clearly upset one “gerry” who posted the marvellously irritated comment, “What a load of claptrap! The murderers, rapists and criminals in our society are all "precious sacred (human) individuals": spare me.”
Our enlightened generation is liable to dismiss gerry’s comments as grotesque or morally primitive. Yet they chased me around this August as I read about Garry Newlove, the father of three who was kicked to death outside his Warrington house, and then about Philip Lawrence, the headmaster killed in 1995 for stepping in to defend a pupil, and then about Rhys Jones, the 11-year-old boy shot as he played football in a pub car park, who died later in his mother’s arms.
Like many others, I was brought to tears by the letter Mr Newlove’s 12-year-old daughter wrote to him as he lay dying in hospital, and then again by Jan Moir in The Telegraph writing about how Mr Lawrence never lived to see his two elder daughters graduate and marry or to hold his first grandchild, and then once again by Melanie Jones talking about how her last image of Rhys was not of a little laughing boy but of one “lying there in a pool of blood.”
As I cried (and, if truth be told, for some time after), I was 100% with gerry. I wanted to see Mr Newlove’s and Rhys Jones’ killers and Mr Chindamo, the young man who murdered Mr Lawrence, hang. I wanted to see them swing on the gallows, tasting in their pain and loneliness a little of what they had inflicted on their victims and their families.
Such stories, and our reactions to them, open up vistas that are normally closed to us in the mundane routine of our everyday lives. I saw, in these stories, a picture of sin – not the naughty, arcane or immoral picture we have filed away in our mind but something physically nauseating, the picture of a little boy dying in his mother’s arms, a little girl trying to bring her father to life by the strength of her love alone. More disturbingly, I caught sight of the sadist the slumbers somewhere in my soul, the part of me that wants to see another feel pain for the pain they have caused.
And somehow, in such visions, I understood the value of vengeance. The phrase sticks in our throat. The word is linked in our minds to vendettas, violence and vindictiveness. It represents everything that we have supposedly left behind, all the brutal, basic instincts of the morally retarded. Yet, without recognising the value of vengeance, the need to compensate fully for what is lost, to recognise the true moral weight of our actions, the forgiveness and restoration to which we rightly aspire become hollow, even heartless.
Vengeance, for all its apparent brutality and moral myopia, is flip side of value. If people are valuable, certainly as valuable we like to claim they are, their death, or indeed their dehumanisation by other means, demands recompense. And if justice is receiving that which is commensurate with a freely chosen action, then the price of a life willingly taken would seem to be another life. There is great wisdom in Mahatma Gandhi’s oft-quoted aphorism, ‘an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind’ (although it has a hollow ring to it when spoken by comfortable westerners who have had nothing more than a mobile phone taken from them), but there is hardly less insight in the original. Failure to extract equitable payment for a life is tantamount to declaring that the individual lost was not really worth that much, repeatable, irrelevant, expendable. Without any concept of vengeance, we stop being human.
Now, before my few remaining Guardian-reading friends close the page in disgust, and cite this article as proof that Christianity breeds moral inadequacy, it is important to emphasise the argument doesn’t end here.
Where Christianity parts company with gerry (and indeed with a significant number of the British population) is in the belief that just because someone is a “murderer, rapist [or] criminal”, it does not follow that they are no longer a “precious sacred individual”. There is no shortage of ethical systems that disagree over this point, insisting that an individual’s inviolability is conditional on them respecting the inviolability of others. But Christianity, predicated as it is on a particular understanding of God, insists that an individual’s worth not only limitless but also indissoluble. There is nothing they can do, no matter how grotesque, to forfeit their value.
This is happily reflected in the idea of human rights. This, like the Christian thinking from which it partly derives, insists that an individual’s rights are based on the simple fact of their humanity. They are not contingent on the community in which the individual lives and which would, otherwise, inform their moral worth.
However, Christianity’s understanding of this intrinsic value is balanced by an act of vengeance. Yes, I know we don’t talk about the Cross like that today. The question of atonement has received enough attention over recent years without some theologically semi-literate hack re-opening old wounds. But I challenge anyone to read the letter Mr Newlove’s daughter wrote to him and deny that such a crime demands full repayment. You can eschew the word vengeance in preference of something that sounds less barbarous, like restitution or settlement, if you like, but the concept remains the same. Without recognising the value of vengeance, we cheapen the forgiveness, mercy and amnesty to which we rightly aspire.
So how do we do that? How do we recognise vengeance? The answer – that those who have inflicted pain and grief on others must be made to understand its seriousness – is unlikely to recommend itself to our society, not least since, historically, that has meant often brutal physical punishment. But it need not.
Every now and then you read of some US judge who has exercised their prerogative to impose an ‘innovative punishment’ on an offender. The phrase sounds vaguely comic. “He was made to wear a dunce’s hat and hop on one foot in front of his friends.” It isn’t.
In 2004, one such judge passed sentence on a number of teenage girls who had taken ecstasy at a slumber party (!) and then watched their friend convulse and die, failing to call parents or authorities for fear of being punished themselves. Recognising the futility of sending them to a prison environment in which they were hardly likely to avoid drugs, the judge sentenced them, among other things, to lecture at various schools on the evil of drugs and to interview the dead girl’s family and friends in order to write an extensive biography of her. The idea was that such punishments would “help the girl recognize the cataclysmic thing [she had] done."
My friend gerry would probably classify such punishments as wishy-washy liberal pandering to criminality. I do not. Spending minutes, let alone hours, in the presence of the parents of a girl you had let die, listening to how much they loved her, does not sound soft to me.
The point in all this is not for our imaginations run riot inventing creative punishments for minor criminals. Rather, it is to remind us that, without recognising the value of vengeance, the call to treat actions and lives with the moral weight they merit, we will cheapen the forgiveness and restoration that is our only true end.
Forgiveness may ultimately be free but in order for it not to become worthless, lives need to be sacred.
[1] John Sentamu, “A nation in two minds about Christmas”, The Telegraph, 19th December 2006
This article first appeared in 'The Difference Magazine.'
