I’ve always held that when you put people on a pedestal and act as if they are above ordinary failings, you strip them of their humanity as effectively as if you ground them under your heel.
As Catholics, we know that there is no such thing as collective guilt or collective absolution — we all stand before our Creator to answer for what we’ve done, or not done, in our own lives.
But in the media — whether it’s news or scripted fare — we’re constantly told that members of certain groups aren’t responsible for what they do, that their actions are entirely excusable because of what somebody else did, in the present or in the past. At the same time, other groups are always to blame, even if the individuals involved had nothing to do with the situation at hand.
Theodore Dalrymple explores this dynamic in his excellent piece at Taki’s Magazine, called “The Importance of Being Guilty.” It focuses on the psychology behind the disconnect between the headline of a story about “Jihadi John” — an ISIS beheader exposed as British-educated Mohammed Emwazi — and the content of the piece about him …
Whenever anything terrible happens, or rather is done, in the world, “we” are somehow to blame for it, not the merely apparent perpetrators. The root cause is always in us, the us in question being our biological, cultural, or political ancestors, but never me in particular. We are responsible, but I am not. We have done something to make them behave badly, and if it were not for us the world would be a peaceful, happy place. And to be ultimately responsible for all the evil in the world is at least flattering to one’s sense of self-importance, the defense of which motivates an important part of many people’s intellectual activity.
And …
It seems to me likely that whoever fashioned the headline and standfirst assumed that a Muslim who was writing about these matters must, almost ex officio, believe that the root cause of Islamism (how intellectuals love roots!) must be some original sin practiced in or by the West. This is because only the West is capable of sin, the rest of the world not being fully human and therefore incapable of sin, in the same way as animals are incapable of sin.
Click here for the rest.
Image: Jihadi John, screenshot from ISIS video, via CNN
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