I’m like many in my generation, that being millennials, in that I am irreligious. I don’t believe, and I don’t disbelieve. Instead, I withhold judgement of things I do not understand. This is part of what it means to be humble: accept your limitations. But, as they say, the moment you think you’re being humble, you’re no longer humble. So clearly I have a ways to go.
Despite my lacking of religion, I still do believe in the ubiquity of sin—and I know I have sinned. I know I’ve wronged my fellow man. But I also believe in redemption, and I believe that redemption comes in two parts: acknowledging your transgressions, and improving from that understanding. I’m not Catholic, but the Catholic Church did a great thing by institutionalizing the first part of this redemptive combination. The confessing of sins through a screen to a religious figure, with the surety of forgiveness, is a psychologically potent process. The knowledge of wrong doing will wrack the mind of anyone who attempts to course-correct, and without a solid model of redemption, that downward spiral will result in a personal living hell.
The alternative is to board the train of nihilism, and decide that honest living, objective truth, and the need for the conservation of cultural traditions are worthless directives. When nihilism is settled on internally, no amount of rhetoric can persuade you otherwise. Logic itself has been abandoned. Logos, in Ancient Greek, is the word for the divine order that God(s) created. It’s what separates man from animal, and it is what opened the eyes of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. To be without logos is to be without God, and this too is a living hell. I could go on, but my point is made. A model for redemption is essential.
Redemption is required for both personal flourishing and for a society to function long-term. I’ve explained the two parts of redemption as popularized in the west, where we have developed a cultural norm for redemption through the Judeo-Christian teachings. To reiterate, the steps are:
Acknowledge your sins/transgressions/mistakes.
Learn and grow from this new knowledge, so that you don’t continue to act in the same manner that led to your prior sins.
Despite this long-standing cultural norm, we’re living in a time where redemption is being reserved for a certain class of people. That class of people depends on where you stand politically, and we will arrive at that delineation later in this essay. First, I’d like to use myself as an example.
I’ve done wrong in my life, many times. I’m 27, and I’m currently trying to live a life with truth as my directive, but that was not always the case. In my youth I stole and lied. I have often spoken ill of my friends and family. I have lived lifestyles of gluttony, lust, and hedonism. I’ve abused my body and my mind. I have been a bad friend to my friends, and an unfaithful boyfriend to my exes. And I acknowledge these things, not to self-flaggelate, but because it’s the truth, and because acknowledgement is essential in redemption. I want to learn, grow, and improve.
I’m lucky to live in the West, in America, where I’ve received grace and forgiveness. Some of the sins I’ve listed above would have guaranteed me much harsher punishments in several other cultures (ex. traditional Islamic societies in the Middle East; Communist China; Singapore). In the West, redemption is a foundational tenant of our norms. We agree, generally, that those who do wrong should be afforded another chance. We disagree on the details. Most Americans would agree that a nineteen year old who is arrested for marijuana possession should not be executed by the state. Folks disagree on whether the possession of marijuana has any import at all, but few would suggest that an appropriate punishment would be capital. Consider a man who is found guilty of serial rape and murder. Nearly everyone would agree punishment is requisite. Again, we disagree on the nature of the punishment. Are there unforgivable offenses?
Both the modern progressive and conservative political ideologies of the United States lack a comprehensive and practical model of redemption. The right pushes capital punishment, which is the ultimate rejection of mortal redemption. Perhaps a life exists beyond this world, but to execute a person is to deny the possibility at earthly reformation. Even those who oppose capital punishment, and would prefer life-long jail terms, also deny them redemption in society. Our prison structure is built on an antiquated model of infantile punishment. Incarceration in the United States is a systematization of the concept “Go sit in the corner until you’re ready to join the rest of the children.” Imagine trying to raise kids using exclusively this education model. No guiding hand towards improvement. No one to take the time to educate the child on why hitting his friends is bad. The child, who is already troubled and ill-equipped to succeed, must decipher the constant fluctuations of our world and our society. Good parents do not use this lax approach. We all understand it doesn’t work.
Despite the fact that we all understand this doesn’t work, we believe it is effective with adult prisoners. Convicts are shunted through a system that condemns them, and does little else. Punishment is sitting in a cell, left to mingle with other poorly educated individuals and the prison guards who hold a near-tyrannical control over your life. The concept that you would come out of prison an improved person is hysterical. It’s true that some United States prisons offer courses. Some prisons offer GED courses. Literature is sometimes taught. But without a hand to hold, most well functioning adults wouldn’t know what to make of the works of Fitzgerald or Twain. Literary analysis is taught, it’s not innate. Redemption is not a quality instilled in our prison systems. Too many conservatives like it this way. They are the Law & Order party, but they are also the Let Them Rot party. If you’ve done wrong, you’re unredeemable, and never you mind those who are falsely imprisoned.
Convicts who make it out of prison fare little better. Our nation treats ex-cons as damaged property. Most businesses and corporations won’t hire a felon. The punishment continues beyond the jail walls. Rights that are, according to the Constitution, God-given (ex. Voting rights, the right to a fair trial[which is waived if you take a plea deal]), are somehow forfeited by the prisoner upon their conviction. It’s beyond me how a person can abandon that which is bestowed by God. To undo God’s work, one must be an equal of God. I can’t stress enough the importance of this. If a right is God-given and self-evident, it is impossible to undo. It would be like undoing basic arithmetic—I can decide that I don’t believe that 1+1=2, but that doesn’t make my point of view true. Similarly, if a felon waives his God-given and self-evident rights, it has no affect on whether or not he still has his rights. They are God-given, according to our Constitution, and therefore immutable.
The message sent by our current system can be interpreted like this: if you are convicted of a felony, you should kill yourself. To do any less is to cling to a life where you are not a citizen, and you are completely irredeemable. No amount of education, training, learning about empathy or philosophy would fix you. You have peaked, and are in a spiral downwards from which there can be no recovery. These are the foundations of conservative justice theory.
Popular progressive sentiment does little better.
Progressive redemptive ideology is paradoxical. A man can rob a jewelry store, kill a few bystanders in his getaway, admit to it, and serve his time in jail. A progressive believes that once his time is served, he is welcomed back into society (regardless of what he’s learned, or if he’s grown at all). At the same time, the progressive believes that if you exhibit a single instance of racism, you are the scum of the earth, beyond all potential redemption. I’ll cite a well-known example: Liam Neeson.
Neeson admitted that when he was younger, he was incited to a racist incident. In the 90’s, after learning that his friend in England was raped by a black man, Neeson went out into the street to find a black man, any black man, to beat. Neeson calmed before he found a victim, but nevertheless his admission is a horrible one. Neeson released these comments publicly because he wanted to atone for this sin. Neeson believed the public would understand that he could’ve kept this private account to himself, but instead admitted that he had gone through a racist and potentially violent time in his life. He wanted to talk about it, because it’s only through communication that these problems are solved. Perhaps Neeson hoped that other people, who have prejudices, would hear his story and realize they don’t need to continue the prejudice. Neeson had clearly learned from his mistake.
His intentions never ended up hurting anyone, thankfully. But the guilt still stewed in him, from his desire to hurt a man based solely on the color of his skin. After explaining his story, the progressive public did not use Neeson as an example. Instead he was condemned, and widely criticized as an example of what is wrong with racists, and white people generally (read: implicit bias). To the progressive mindset, there could be no redemption for Liam Neeson. After having the desire to harm a person for their skin color, despite years of reflection and growth, Neeson is beyond all redemption. He should be shunned from society, and perhaps kill himself. Only then would a progressive consider his punishment just.
We need redemption. We cannot live in a society that does not make room for human error. We all make decisions in haste. We all fail our fellow man. If this continues, and both the conservative and progressive tracts of our culture condemn their neighbor for not following their personalized ideas of what constitutes an ethical lifestyle, the western way of life is doomed to fail. We do, however, have a built-in failsafe that would allow a culture of redemption to continue to grow: the concept of the individual.
One of the precepts of western society is the idea of the individual. The individual is the atomistic component of western culture. What that means is this: as far as society and culture is concerned, the individual is the unit of measurement; collectives are made of individuals, and dividing down beyond the individual is useless, practically speaking (the physical and biological fields non-withstanding. Although these scientific fields are important and valuable, they are not the foundations of our norms). Compare the unit of the “individual” in the west to that of the “group” in the east. Historically, far eastern asian societies, especially China and Japan, can be characterized as being oriented towards collectivist paradigms. Although it’s a complicated and multifaceted conversation, the emphasis on the collective is one of the reasons why in WWII the Japanese Emperor Hirohito was able to corral his country into attacking the United States and fight a war of suicide bombers and take-no-prisoners. A western individuality-oriented person could not be convinced into fighting this way, because we don’t take it as self-evident that the existence of the country is more valuable than the existence of the self.
The importance of understanding the significance of the individual in western canon cannot be overstated. Achievements are personal, allocated to a single name. Stories are about named individuals. The entire premise of Capitalism is that if we get enough competent people to improve their lives, then the quality of life of the entire country will improve as a result. It’s only because our atomistic world view centers on the individual that we can have a fundamental relationship with redemption. For a collectivist society, redemption is useless. The state is what matters, and if innocent lives are executed, as long as it makes the state look good, or look powerful, then those are lives put towards a useful end. The redemptive act of the individual cannot be allowed to exist in a collectivist society if it interferes with the state. It is remarkable that in the country that has the largest military in the history of mankind, individuality is still so important.
But the concept of individuality is slowly losing ground in the US. It’s true that we have never lived in a reality where individuality is bestowed to every person equally. Chattel slavery was an exercise in identity politics; if you looked black, you were a lesser class. Chattel slavery is incompatible with atomistic individuality. Similarly, the treatment of Native Americans as a single mass of people is incompatible with a western concept of individuality. Our country has made progresses over the last 100 years, but popular sentiment, especially in modern youth, are again reducing people to a select few classes.
Identity politics, where a person’s individuality takes a back seat to their membership in a group, especially a group where power dynamics have historically been at play (eg. sex, race, body-type), is spreading rampantly. The reduction of a person to a member of his group is not only antithetical to the western concept of individuality, but it is fundamentally hostile to this model of redemption. Identity politics wants for a collectivist society where the class replaces the state. When you are most importantly a member of your class, your personal redemption is insignificant in the face of justice for whichever class is currently beleaguered.
So, what’s the solution? The solution is to do what our country’s original mandate was. The solution is to actually accept the mantle of the West that we’ve been pretending to hold for centuries: accept the individual as the most important model of human kind. This is not an easy fix. Our justice system disproportionately incarcerates minorities for crimes that are more prolific among whites (ex: drug possession). That is a systematized reduction of individuals to the class of their race. The solution is not, however, the answer that has become popular. The solution is not to further reduce groups of individuals to a “class of oppressors”. We have been driving down a rocky road, and the solution is not to introduce further potholes. We need to right this ship by realizing the truth of the individual as it’s written and thought about in western canon. This does not mean we shouldn't recognize the inequity inherent in our current models of justice. This does not mean we shouldn’t advocate for police reform. But further alienation of great portions of our population will not lead this country to a better place. The reductionism of millions to a gross simplification of their realities will not allow us to base future change on truth, and if our change is not based on truth then it will not be sustainable or healthy. If we are honest with ourselves, we have all sinned. We all need redemption. And that redemption is only available if we collectively accept the individual as the primary unit of human kind.