Punch and Judith

Nahum the Prophet and Johanna of Patmos

 Punch and Judith. 

Some time ago, when I sick, when I couldn’t hardly read or write - or even see - I got this link from Gaspar Stephens. He wanted to know what I thought about it. So he said. But I think he was trying to make me feel better the way people sometimes do when they ask other people, who seem to be scraping bottom, their opinion about something or other. Maybe we want to hear what the person has to say, and maybe we don’t; but we ask because we think somehow it may help them, and we ought to. Help the sad sacks, that is.

     I don’t know if the link is still good, but the central thesis of the Psychology Today essay Pamela B. Paresky, Ph.D., is, as I understand it, this:

How do we - especially how severely do we - punish people that have made mistakes? (The example offered is [conservative] Parkland High School shooting survivor Kyle Kashuv’s acceptance then his rejection by Harvard for racist and anti-Semitic remarks made by (the Jewish) Kashuv, when he was sixteen and for which he had apologized and offered to make amends in whatever way he could.)  In an article in Vox, Zack Beauchamp suggests that those who find the punishment too severe are the “conservatives,” who see racism as a personal failing one can outgrow, whereas those that agree with it lean “liberal or left,” seeing racism as a structural problem and Kashuv as less of “a kid who made youthful mistakes and more like a young man who’s trying to escape responsibility for his actions.”

But, this is not a matter of left and right, Paresky argues. It is an apocalyptic view that cuts across the political divide: “it is not only people on the political right who find it difficult to support” such a harsh punishment. There are many on the left as well. For “it is an apocalyptic view, not a liberal one, that rejects redemption and forgiveness in favor of condemnation and excommunication.” It is an apocalyptic perspective, not a liberal one, that sees the world as needing to be destroyed and replaced rather than improved upon, possibly even perfected. It is an apocalyptic paradigm  that wants to rid itself those it judges irredeemable, especially that seeks “deliverance through ahistorical means; without the help of morally polluted historical figures,” that would, if it could, do “without any of history’s contaminated tools.” Italics mine. Rah retribution. F**k forgiveness.

     Paresky holds up “prophetic culture” as an alternative to apocalyptic, seeking “deliverance through historical persons” working in history, flawed but wanting to do good.

my folder, or one of them

“I don’t know what I think,” I got back to Gaspar at the time. Then I gave it (the link) to Roz, who made a paper copy of the essay and put it in a folder she’d also made for me, “For Later.”

     I looked at the essay again this morning. It seemed to me a good enough explanation of why the pure hate the impure (andnot necessarily vice versa). The problem with apocalypticists is that they are certain that anyone that has the least stain on her record or merest spot on his soul must be completely impure. At the same time, they fail to see any stains on their own records or souls - or, far more commonly, they think of these stains as virtues: they got smudged or blood-spattered in the struggle for Right.

     But I wondered how much of the Prophets Paresky had read, for the essay neglects to say that, on a scale of 1 to 10, the prophets are only slightly less self-righteous than those that are certain - or wish devoutly - that the end is near (9.667’s maybe as opposed 9.944’s).*

     And the rest of us are only slightly less self-righteous than they are.

But I could be wrong. As Roz says sometimes, “We both grew up Presbyterian, what do we know?” Only she knows more now; she was less infected.

09.12.19

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 * I once met an 8.56. He was almost half as kind as the Mr. Rogers character on TV, not to mention almost twice as believable. And he sold cars.