When Does a Person (or Anything Else) Become Irredeemable?

In the age of “cancel culture,” which is sometimes silly and sometimes a powerful tool for separating bad actors from their means, we continue to butt up against a deeper underlying question: When does a person become irredeemable? I would extend this to include social organizations as well.

Is the US a corruptly capitalistic, war-mongering empire founded by racists for racists, as I’ve heard it described? Or, is it the “shining city on the hill,” a democratic beacon and powerful promoter of freedom and equality, as I’ve heard it described elsewhere? If we zoom in on the history of the country to one of its founders, do we find that Thomas Jefferson was a sadistic slave owner who, even in death didn’t grant his slaves freedom, despite having had an affair with one, Sally Hemings, or was he the brave, intellectual tour-de-force that worked tirelessly to grant the world its best chance of enduring freedom?

This way of looking at things can be extended to the human race as a whole: Are we an inherently evil and repugnantly ignorant species for having committed such heinous acts of barbarism that we shutter at their recollection? How could a species with such actors as Aline Skaf, Muammar al-Gaddafi’s daughter in law, who would pour boiling water on the head of her nanny, Shweyga Mullah, as punishment, call itself good? What about when nations have made it their practice to use horrific torture devices on people, sometimes just for speaking their mind or loving who they love? What good is a species that has attempted mass genocide countless times? At the same time, how can a species that has created countless mass networks designed solely to put food in the mouths of the hungry or to get medical care to those that have none be all bad? Surely it must be an amazing species that invented writing and the internet, traveled to the moon, and learned to communicate across the world with radio waves? What about Desmond Doss who entered one of the fiercest battles of World War II unarmed and singlehandedly carried somewhere between 50 and a 100 wounded soldiers out of the “kill zone”? Surely, his species is not all bad.

Who was more human, Sophie Scholl — a member of the White Rose, a group that wrote and distributed leaflets advocating passive resistance against the Nazis, and who, as she walked to her execution at twenty one years old, said, “Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go…What does my death matter, if through us, thousands of people are awakened and stirred to action?” — or the executioner who beheaded her? Which of these two better exemplifies our species?

Was Gandhi being more Gandhi as he led India peacefully to independence from Britain or when he said that black people “are troublesome, very dirty and live like animals”? Are you your worst actions or your best? Or, is it true, as the words of Will Durant, summing up some of Aristotle’s teachings, say, “…we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then is not an act, but a habit”?

This concept of monolithic wholeness, or, conversely, of individual existence, is hard for us to come by even on an atomic level. Why am I viewed as a single entity when I’m composed of trillions of cells and magnitudes more molecules, when the molecules, in turn, are mostly empty space? Who am I as a mental “self“ when my emotions and desires can pull me one way and my rationality another? It is from this recognition of the fragmented nature of self, that we can recognize the difficulty of our undertaking in establishing a threshold beyond which a person, social organization, species, etc., can be called “bad.”

The most obvious answer seems to be a utilitarian one: If a person does more good than bad, then they’re good. This is nice in that it theoretically does away with the concept of irredeemability. Theoretically, if Hitler had, after ordering the murder of millions of Jews, somehow saved millions of people (more millions than he killed) from some other murderous tyrant, he would then be good. On a much smaller scale, we can see how Martin Luther King’s being unfaithful to Corretta Scott King can be outweighed by his efforts to attain equality for black people in the United States. Yet, there is something unsatisfying in these, particularly in the Hitler analogy — it’s difficult to accept any system that construes Hitler as redeemable.

The real answer is one of nuance. It is not to try and make final judgments like God on high but to look into the particulars of the case. We should be able to say everyone is bad and good — that they’re human. We can say that MLK was not a role model when it comes to being a husband, but he was when it comes to being a leader. We can say that Christopher Columbus was as bold and entrepreneurial as he was murderous and thieving. If we try to box people into “good“ or “bad,” we’ll gain a little time at the cost of a lot of understanding.

Most of the people that seem horrible are that way as a consequence of upbringing, trauma, ignorance, complexes, and sometimes insanity — I’d even go so far as to say this is the case for all of them. It is likely that all of them suffer intensely under their own maliciousness as well. We can “cancel” whomever we want to — largely it is a free market decision that boils down to people just not liking someone or what they stand for, and there is nothing wrong with that — but let’s not get lost in subscribing to absolutes, irredeemability, and total badness, as is sometimes implicit in “cancel culture.” Michael Jackson’s music is, objectively speaking, exactly the same whether or not he was inclined towards indefensible, sexual perversions. His creative process for music should be followed by those who strive for great achievement as musicians, other parts of his life should be strenuously rebuked. It’s easy to call him and anyone else who would do such a thing “bad,” but then the world must be bad, and why would we throw so much good out for the slight reward of sounding definitive?