Societal Donatism
Societal Donatism

        
It has been said that you should never try to meet your heroes, lest
they be found to have feet of clay.

This adage has never been more true in our hyper-connected world,
where everything is but a single click away and news—both real
and fake—travels at the speed of light.1 One of the unintended
consequences of this technology is that our views of our (cultural)
heroes—the movers and shakers, the artists, the scientists, and so on—are constantly
shifting and being re-evaluated. While this is not bad per se,
many eulogies or award ceremonies are quickly followed by some new data
that calls into question everything we knew about that person. Given the
extreme speed in social media, we have conditioned ourselves to react
immediately. In this post, I want to discuss whether an immediate
reaction is a good idea, and to what extent we are demanding moral standards
that are nigh unachievable.
Caveat lector: I refrain from mentioning any names of contemporary
or quasi-contemporary persons because it is neither relevant nor
interesting for you to read my opinion about what I make of their
behaviour. This post is primarily meant to provide some food for thought
as well as some ‘societal scaffolding’ to give certain trends a name.
That being said, let’s set the stage with two examples of persons long
passed away. First, consider Richard Wagner,
who is known to have harboured some heinous anti-Semitic views.2
A less high-brow example is given by H. P.
Lovecraft, the horror
writer known for his ‘purple prose’
and his very backwards and despicable views on race.
When learning about this for the first time, people tend to emit either
one of two different knee jerk reactions.  Some try to brush this off as
stating that both men ‘children of their time,’ while others are suggesting
that we should neither ignore their works altogether. What is one
to do here?
I suggest that both the simple dismissal and the uncompromising removal are
not the right reactions in most cases. The former reaction is wrong
because of its rigidity. At its worst, it enforces an uncritical view of
the world and the people in it. As mature adults, we need to be able to
cope with the disappointment that some of our heroes might indeed have
‘feet of clay.’ However, the latter reaction—the uncompromising
removal—is also wrong because it fails to separate creator and
creation. In fact, it falls prey to the assumption that a moral flaw of
the creator also infects the creation. While there are certainly
instances where this is true, it does not follow by necessity.
Historical Donatism
As with many ideas, this position is ’nothing new under the sun.’
I like to think of it as a specific type of Donatism.
To put this into context, the Donatists were a group of Christians in
the fourth century. Their core tenet was that priests need to be
‘faultless’ in order for their prayers and for their sacraments to be
valid. Before you scoff at this, consider that a priest in the fourth
century performed several important roles, some of which contained legal
elements, such as keeping track of marriages. Regardless of what you
think about prayers and sacraments, having your marriage invalidated by
the discovery that your priest was actually not ‘qualified’
to perform one because he committed a sin, could lead to all kinds of
issues down the road.3 To provide a somewhat modern example, suppose
that your driver’s licence turns out to be invalid because the clerk who
gave it to you was found out to have committed a crime.
Societal Donatism & Its Implications
I believe that some recent trends can be seen as a form of
Societal Donatism. By this, I refer to the unspoken requirement that
any creator in our society needs to be (almost) faultless or (almost) morally
impeccable in order for their work to be allowed to persist in the
public sphere.
If, retroactively, it transpires that a person committed a crime or
behaved in an untoward manner, their work is immediately called into
question. Are we still allowed to enjoy their music, their films, their
lecture materials? Should their awards—if any—be revoked?
In many cases, I find this belief to be slightly misguided. I am not
saying that we should accept or excuse any form of behaviour. There
are many heinous behaviours or crimes that should have some societal
consequences, such as some form of public shunning. However, we need to
stop operating under the assumption that excellence in one area also by
necessity translates into moral excellence.4 It should not come as
a surprise to us if our heroes indeed appear to have feet of clay. In
some cases, this may even make them more human. We might not recognise
ourselves in the genius of our heroes, but we can easily recognise
ourselves in their flaws! Moreover, we need to be cognisant of the
fact that many human endeavours do not require moral excellence.5
You do not have to be morally excellent to perform well in sports,
mathematics, or gardening…
A straightforward consequence of these observations could be not to
have any heroes at all any more: no more awards, no more eulogies, no
more naming things after people. This strikes me as extreme and counterproductive.
Another option could be to pick our
heroes more wisely—but do we really truly know enough about them in
advance? Before I discuss a few suggestions out of this mire, I want to
present one of the quotes that stuck with me for a while now. It is
due to Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
and appeared in his book The Gulag Archipelago:

If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil
deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us
and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the
heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of
his own heart?

This quote serving as our guiding principle, here are some suggestions
to overcome societal Donatism:

We need to learn to endure ambiguity. Few people are fully good or
fully evil. Slapping labels on them reflectively and without due
process is not helpful. A person can both be an excellent composer
and harbour despicable political views. A scientist can be at the top
of their field and still be an insufferable human being. We have to
ask ourselves what kind of behaviour or accomplishments we want to
reward and acknowledge in the public sphere.
When dealing with such cases, we need intellectual honesty. That
is, we need to carefully incorporate the context of quotes or
actions, and must not intentionally present a misleading narrative.
Intellectual honesty also means that we are free to say ‘I lack the
facts to form a full opinion.’ We must not let ourselves be dragged
into every skirmish, lest we are forced to pick a side in a battle
in which we should not participate in the first place.
Last, and this is the most important aspect, we need forgiveness.
Nowadays, the internet makes it extremely easy to be haunted by
thoughts of our younger selves. We should not think of all opinions
as being permanent. People change and mature, often resulting in
adopting a different set of beliefs. I believe that people can change
and have a right to redeem themselves.

So should we still lavish praise on persons, regardless of their
behaviour in other domains? I have no proper answer for this—I
posit that ‘It depends’ is probably the fairest option; this has
to be a discussion about what we as a society want to accept! In
general, I find it easiest to praise the accomplishments of an
individual, without implying that these accomplishments indicate
any moral stance. Again, nuance is key for me here. We should be
able to separate creator from creation; a person’s work can well
be excellent, while their character might be horrible.
As a parting thought, I want to emphatically stress that accepting that
everyone is at least slightly broken does not mean that we should not
make an effort! If we stop denouncing and condemning people vocally, we
can achieve a true dialogue and move beyond knee jerk reactions.


      