MANN TALK: The Comfort and Mischief of Complacency
By Perry Mann
Hinton, WV (Special to HNN) – A bus driver and an aide unintentionally left a 3-year-old in a school bus. The child was discovered six hours later asleep and unharmed. The driver and aide were suspended without pay for an undisclosed period of time. An editor of a newspaper with dogmatic glee pounced on the school employees with this editorial pronouncement: “More severe punishment is due both employees. A slap on the wrist is not nearly enough. When a child’s life is at stake, nothing less than zero tolerance for such neglect of responsibility is acceptable.”
Zero tolerance is a concept conceived, gestated and hatched in a snug nest of a dogmatic mind. Zero tolerance, responsibility and accountability are the commercial and legal Trinity of dogmatists, a violation of which, particularly if committed by a commoner, is secular blasphemy expiated only by severe retribution. Zero tolerance is the moral milk of ultra-conservatives and fanatical theocrats, but the imposition of zero tolerance is often vinegar to the lips of the unfortunate. The concept is the ultimate mischief-maker particularly if applied in man-made law; and it is the antithesis of the Christian concepts of understanding, compassion and forgiveness.
Havelock Ellis, the great English psychologist, opined that society has the criminals it deserves. And Andrei Sakharov, Nobel Peace prize winner, observed: “I am convinced that society as a whole and each of its members individually, not just the person who comes before the courts, bears a responsibility for the occurrence of the crime.”
Zero tolerance places the blame entirely upon the accused with no room for mitigation, regardless of whatever the circumstances of the matter reveal. The advocacy of such a medievalism reflects a stunted moral nature and a circumscribed imagination. The mischief of its inflexible application is horrible to contemplate. Inquisitors cradled the concept in their hearts and minds and used it as a sword against all those who questioned the certainty of their dogma or had the audacity to think for themselves. And petty politicians use it as the measure of patriotic punishment against those whose indictment and conviction gain them political credit.
Bush, Ashcroft and company have espoused the concept wholeheartedly and have exhibited it in their treatment of captured Muslims held at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, “without permitting such prisoners recourse of any kind to any judicial forum, or even access to council, regardless of the length or manner of their confinement.” However, such treatment even in times of fear of terrorists’ atrocities is unconstitutional according to recent decisions by federal appeal courts, which held that “enemy combatants” cannot be held prisoners indefinitely without access to lawyers or American courts. Zero Tolerance is basically un-American and God knows it is totally adverse to Christ’s exhortation to forgive any wrong.
All minds seek a rock of certainty. Once one has presumed that he has heard God’s word on any issue, he seeks a podium from which he can preach to the world the message God has delivered to him---personally. No logic, no reason, no consequence can inhibit him from pounding the podium with absoluteness that his view is God’s view. Certainty is the bread and wine of preachers and politicians. And certainty is the father of oratorical passion and persuasion, which when conceived by an evil person brings poison to the political process and often disaster to those who are enthralled by the oratory.
There is great comfort in presuming that one’s words are God’s words; but the complacency thereof is often to the detriment and often the destruction of the society that is taken in by the voice of the person to whom God has allegedly revealed truth. Some Jews will not hear any argument but that Jehovah deeded in perpetuity to them the lands long inhabited by the Palestinians. Some Palestinians will listen to no other words but that their God willed the land to them. Both certainties are a complacent comfort to the respective believers; but a comfort riddled with realities and subverted by the entailing discomfiture of eye-for-and-eye violence and retaliation. Suicide bombers are the progeny of certainties.
An advocate of zero tolerance with regard to any issue has dismissed from his mind any bother with ambiguities that ethics, reason, logic and philosophy might give rise to. He doesn’t think, he feels. He doesn’t use his intelligence; he reacts to his emotions, to his gut feelings and more often to his economic gain. . “He is a gut man; not a textbook man.”
Pat Duffy Hutcheon, a woman distinguished in the field of sociology, has observed with regard to certainty and thus to zero tolerance: “I have thought for some time that the enduring popularity of the quest for certainty---and the dualism that justifies and perpetuates it—is highly dangerous in the modern world. A reasonable inference from her observation is that there is a widespread belief that man has an eternal soul housed in his body, a soul capable of discerning God’s will and hearing His voice of certainty regarding how man should act and think. The danger comes from those who believe that they have heard the word of God and that they have a mandate to spread it and enforce it with might and main.
Secular and religious men have had the comforting vision of certainty and have through politics or religion attempted to impose their certainty and their zero tolerance upon their fellow citizens. The result has been, as headlines attest, dangerous in the modern world and has caused no end of mischief in ancient and recent times.
Perry Mann is a former teacher, a lawyer, a former prosecuting attorney of Summers County and a regular columnist for the Nicholas Chronicle in Summersville. Born in Charleston, WV, in 1921, he lives in Hinton. The portrait accompanying this column is by Robert Shetterley from his book “Americans Who Tell The Truth.”