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Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not qui

Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one's first feeling, 'Thank God, even they aren't quite so bad as that,' or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally we shall insist on seeing everything -- God and our friends and ourselves included -- as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred. (C.S. Lewis)

tptacek 4y ago
Now a step further. Does loving your enemy mean not punishing them? No, for loving myself does not mean that I ought not to subject myself to punishment—even to death. If you had committed a murder, the right Christian thing to do would be to give yourself up to the police and accept the punishment. It is, therefore, in my opinion, perfectly right for a Christian judge to sentence a person for their crimes or a Christian soldier to kill an enemy soldier. Worth mentioning, the subtext of much of Mere Christianity was Nazism.
- Ajedi32 4y ago
  1. How is that quote at all relevant to what's being discussed? 2. What does any of that have to do with Nazis? Your comment seems to be a complete non-sequitur.
  - tptacek 4y ago
    The C.S. Lewis quote above (the one I replied to) is from Mere Christianity. As to whether the original quote is relevant to this Quillette story, your guess is as good as mine. Later I'm being coy, because I don't believe most people who deploy this quote have read Mere Christianity, which is ungracious of me (and technically a violation of our guidelines). So: to put it more directly: Lewis isn't asking people to be skeptical of wrongdoing. The quote is from an essay on forgiveness. That chapter explicitly references the harm Germans inflicted on Poles and Jewish people. Lewis isn't skeptical of that harm (to say the least), and he's not exhorting people towards skepticism of wrongdoing in general. What he's saying is that you should be careful not to attribute to random people, by dint of their belonging to some specific group, the worst possible harms you can come up with. And he's saying that you shouldn't because it's an impediment to the Christian virtue of forgiveness; to love your neighbor as yourself, you need to love your imputed enemies as yourself, and to do that you have to find a way to forgive them their transgressions against you, and, more immediately, the transgressions of their groups. I quoted the paragraph immediately following the quote offered (in implicit support of skepticism, as that quote is almost always used). I could just as easily have quoted the paragraph that immediately precedes it: Consequently, Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery. We ought to hate them. Not one word of what we have said about them needs to be unsaid. But it does want us to hate them in the same way in which we hate things in ourselves: being sorry that the man should have done such things, and hoping, if it is anyway possible, that somehow, sometime, somewhere, he can be cured and made human again.
    - prvc 4y ago
      Even after all that exegesis, your presumptive point remains obscure. The top-level comment is relevant because it happens to describe the malicious credulity of the journalism consumers who chose to believe the mass graves narrative.
      - tptacek 4y ago
        I don't think my point is obscure at all. It is, simply, that C.S. Lewis didn't write that quote to exhort people to skepticism of all wrongdoing; he was instead reminding people not to invent wrongdoing to impute to strangers by dint of them being "enemies". The quote, here, was ill used, as it so often is. Again: when Lewis wrote this, he was talking about the Nazis, the authors of many of the worst crimes in history. Lewis was no Holocaust denier: he was acutely aware of --- and reminds his reader throughout Christian Behavior of --- the wrongdoings he's alluding to. It might be hard to find a more inapposite quote for this story. I have no idea what happened in the residential schools in Canada, and no opinion about this particular article. But I do have an opinion about the abuse of C.S. Lewis on message boards.
        hprotagonist 4y ago
        > The quote, here, was ill used, as it so often is. You’ve misread me/my intent, i’m afraid.
        tptacek 4y ago
        Certainly more than just possible. Could you say how?
        cstrahan 4y ago
        FWIW, I read their quoting of C.S. Lewis as supporting precisely the viewpoint C.S. Lewis was intending — and the very same as you make a case for throughout this thread. Though I’ll admit I could be wrong. However, applying Occam’s razor: GP merely quoted C.S. Lewis, so it would seem to me that the simplest (and most charitable) interpretation is that they understood the quote and we’re not using it in any ironic/sarcastic way. I find your reaction/response to GP a little confusing, but as best as I can tell: are you thinking they were using the quote in an intentionally ironic way as a means of making a jab at C.S. Lewis’ character/beliefs? This whole thread has been really confusing, so I’d love to understand where the (apparent) disconnect is between both parties :).
- hprotagonist 4y ago
  personalism shot/chaser: bonhoeffer’s “on folly”.
  - tptacek 4y ago
    I said downthread that it might be hard to come up with a more inapposite quote for a story about skepticism of wrongdoing, and you'd've one-upped me here. :)
    - renewiltord 4y ago
      I believe the quote, with context excised and transported here, has value without its original subject. i.e. if someone had written it without being C.S.Lewis talking about Nazis, I would have upvoted them. And there's lots of stuff like that. I suppose we have implied meaning to appending the original source we got it from: meaning transported from context of source, meaning transported from author, and meaning solely from text.
      - tptacek 4y ago
        If the quote hadn't been italicized and followed with "(C.S. Lewis)" I wouldn't have responded. And, if I'm misreading the intent of the quote --- that it isn't being used as a sort of generic "be skeptical of claims of wrongdoing and generous with mitigating claims", well, then, I'm just wrong. But if the quote was intended the way I think it was (see previous sentence): it's being used to say almost literally the opposite of what Lewis was saying. More generally, on any thread owing to a Quillette article, I think we can do much worse than to have a curious conversation about C.S. Lewis (and, for that matter, Dietrich Bonhoeffer).
        renewiltord 4y ago
        Absolutely understand. I was sort of alluding to that with the last line (one must, after all, source what one is repeating). And for what it's worth, I enjoyed what you and the other fellow mentioned because I am neither familiar with Lewis nor Bonhoeffer. More "I think that other guy meant this" intent from me, and less "you shouldn't have said what you did".
pyuser583 4y ago
- idiotsecant 4y ago
  So when a child is raped (which definitely happened, by definition) we should avoid talking about it because it might hurt the case of the person accused of the crime? The justice system assumes innocence until proven guilty. The court of public opinion need hold no such lofty ideal. Nor should it.
  - kradeelav 4y ago
    There's a difference between talking thoughtfully about a child's lived experience/trauma and "using" it shamelessly as political points to own [the other side].
  - pyuser583 4y ago
    Sorry I had the age wrong. There should be a presumption of innocence in the sense that the public should assume the accused is innocent until evidence is publicly shared that suggests their guilt. So far the only evidence shared with the public is a confession. Confessions are notoriously unreliability. There will be more evidence. DNA tests are being done as we speak.
    - munk-a 4y ago
      They were 10, if the other party was the suspected 27 year old adult then... That is rape. If the other party was some other person - then that 27 year old shouldn't be wrongly convicted, but someone raped that 10 year old. I, btw, haven't seen anyone chomping at the bit at the specific suspected other party - the discussion I've seen has been focused on the health care and trauma treatment for the 10 year old.
    - stefan_ 4y ago
      When the suspect is acquitted, does that mean the girl is no longer pregnant? This is an even more absurd point.
dmarchand90 4y ago
It's extremely unlikely these graves are fake. Why? Because the large number of deaths is not something newly-discovered. It has been known for a hundred years that large number of children were dying from disease (mainly turburculosis) due to overcrowding. For example Dr. Bryce wrote of the appaling conditions he saw in the 1920s https://archive.org/details/storyofnationalc00brycuoft https://archive.org/details/storyofnationalc00brycuoft One clarification I suppose is that it is unlikely the graves were always unmarked. Most likely they, like many poor people, were buried with wooden crosses which later disintegrated.

tptacek 4y ago

Now a step further. Does loving your enemy mean not punishing them? No, for loving myself does not mean that I ought not to subject myself to punishment—even to death. If you had committed a murder, the right Christian thing to do would be to give yourself up to the police and accept the punishment. It is, therefore, in my opinion, perfectly right for a Christian judge to sentence a person for their crimes or a Christian soldier to kill an enemy soldier. Worth mentioning, the subtext of much of Mere Christianity was Nazism.

Ajedi32 4y ago
1. How is that quote at all relevant to what's being discussed? 2. What does any of that have to do with Nazis? Your comment seems to be a complete non-sequitur.
- tptacek 4y ago
  The C.S. Lewis quote above (the one I replied to) is from Mere Christianity. As to whether the original quote is relevant to this Quillette story, your guess is as good as mine. Later I'm being coy, because I don't believe most people who deploy this quote have read Mere Christianity, which is ungracious of me (and technically a violation of our guidelines). So: to put it more directly: Lewis isn't asking people to be skeptical of wrongdoing. The quote is from an essay on forgiveness. That chapter explicitly references the harm Germans inflicted on Poles and Jewish people. Lewis isn't skeptical of that harm (to say the least), and he's not exhorting people towards skepticism of wrongdoing in general. What he's saying is that you should be careful not to attribute to random people, by dint of their belonging to some specific group, the worst possible harms you can come up with. And he's saying that you shouldn't because it's an impediment to the Christian virtue of forgiveness; to love your neighbor as yourself, you need to love your imputed enemies as yourself, and to do that you have to find a way to forgive them their transgressions against you, and, more immediately, the transgressions of their groups. I quoted the paragraph immediately following the quote offered (in implicit support of skepticism, as that quote is almost always used). I could just as easily have quoted the paragraph that immediately precedes it: Consequently, Christianity does not want us to reduce by one atom the hatred we feel for cruelty and treachery. We ought to hate them. Not one word of what we have said about them needs to be unsaid. But it does want us to hate them in the same way in which we hate things in ourselves: being sorry that the man should have done such things, and hoping, if it is anyway possible, that somehow, sometime, somewhere, he can be cured and made human again.
  - prvc 4y ago
    Even after all that exegesis, your presumptive point remains obscure. The top-level comment is relevant because it happens to describe the malicious credulity of the journalism consumers who chose to believe the mass graves narrative.
    - tptacek 4y ago
      I don't think my point is obscure at all. It is, simply, that C.S. Lewis didn't write that quote to exhort people to skepticism of all wrongdoing; he was instead reminding people not to invent wrongdoing to impute to strangers by dint of them being "enemies". The quote, here, was ill used, as it so often is. Again: when Lewis wrote this, he was talking about the Nazis, the authors of many of the worst crimes in history. Lewis was no Holocaust denier: he was acutely aware of --- and reminds his reader throughout Christian Behavior of --- the wrongdoings he's alluding to. It might be hard to find a more inapposite quote for this story. I have no idea what happened in the residential schools in Canada, and no opinion about this particular article. But I do have an opinion about the abuse of C.S. Lewis on message boards.
      - hprotagonist 4y ago
        > The quote, here, was ill used, as it so often is. You’ve misread me/my intent, i’m afraid.
        tptacek 4y ago
        Certainly more than just possible. Could you say how?
        cstrahan 4y ago
        FWIW, I read their quoting of C.S. Lewis as supporting precisely the viewpoint C.S. Lewis was intending — and the very same as you make a case for throughout this thread. Though I’ll admit I could be wrong. However, applying Occam’s razor: GP merely quoted C.S. Lewis, so it would seem to me that the simplest (and most charitable) interpretation is that they understood the quote and we’re not using it in any ironic/sarcastic way. I find your reaction/response to GP a little confusing, but as best as I can tell: are you thinking they were using the quote in an intentionally ironic way as a means of making a jab at C.S. Lewis’ character/beliefs? This whole thread has been really confusing, so I’d love to understand where the (apparent) disconnect is between both parties :).
hprotagonist 4y ago
personalism shot/chaser: bonhoeffer’s “on folly”.
- tptacek 4y ago
  I said downthread that it might be hard to come up with a more inapposite quote for a story about skepticism of wrongdoing, and you'd've one-upped me here. :)
  - renewiltord 4y ago
    I believe the quote, with context excised and transported here, has value without its original subject. i.e. if someone had written it without being C.S.Lewis talking about Nazis, I would have upvoted them. And there's lots of stuff like that. I suppose we have implied meaning to appending the original source we got it from: meaning transported from context of source, meaning transported from author, and meaning solely from text.
    - tptacek 4y ago
      If the quote hadn't been italicized and followed with "(C.S. Lewis)" I wouldn't have responded. And, if I'm misreading the intent of the quote --- that it isn't being used as a sort of generic "be skeptical of claims of wrongdoing and generous with mitigating claims", well, then, I'm just wrong. But if the quote was intended the way I think it was (see previous sentence): it's being used to say almost literally the opposite of what Lewis was saying. More generally, on any thread owing to a Quillette article, I think we can do much worse than to have a curious conversation about C.S. Lewis (and, for that matter, Dietrich Bonhoeffer).
      - renewiltord 4y ago
        Absolutely understand. I was sort of alluding to that with the last line (one must, after all, source what one is repeating). And for what it's worth, I enjoyed what you and the other fellow mentioned because I am neither familiar with Lewis nor Bonhoeffer. More "I think that other guy meant this" intent from me, and less "you shouldn't have said what you did".

pyuser583 4y ago

idiotsecant 4y ago
So when a child is raped (which definitely happened, by definition) we should avoid talking about it because it might hurt the case of the person accused of the crime? The justice system assumes innocence until proven guilty. The court of public opinion need hold no such lofty ideal. Nor should it.
- kradeelav 4y ago
  There's a difference between talking thoughtfully about a child's lived experience/trauma and "using" it shamelessly as political points to own [the other side].
- pyuser583 4y ago
  Sorry I had the age wrong. There should be a presumption of innocence in the sense that the public should assume the accused is innocent until evidence is publicly shared that suggests their guilt. So far the only evidence shared with the public is a confession. Confessions are notoriously unreliability. There will be more evidence. DNA tests are being done as we speak.
  - munk-a 4y ago
    They were 10, if the other party was the suspected 27 year old adult then... That is rape. If the other party was some other person - then that 27 year old shouldn't be wrongly convicted, but someone raped that 10 year old. I, btw, haven't seen anyone chomping at the bit at the specific suspected other party - the discussion I've seen has been focused on the health care and trauma treatment for the 10 year old.
  - stefan_ 4y ago
    When the suspect is acquitted, does that mean the girl is no longer pregnant? This is an even more absurd point.

dmarchand90 4y ago

It's extremely unlikely these graves are fake. Why? Because the large number of deaths is not something newly-discovered. It has been known for a hundred years that large number of children were dying from disease (mainly turburculosis) due to overcrowding. For example Dr. Bryce wrote of the appaling conditions he saw in the 1920s https://archive.org/details/storyofnationalc00brycuoft https://archive.org/details/storyofnationalc00brycuoft One clarification I suppose is that it is unlikely the graves were always unmarked. Most likely they, like many poor people, were buried with wooden crosses which later disintegrated.