Every now and again I’ll come across and article or a book that becomes an apocalypse for me, in the sense that it reveals something, a paradigm or a cultural phenomenon, and the world around me makes a little more sense. Terry Gross’s interview of Quentin Tarantino on Fresh Air was one of those moments for me. It was just after the release of Django Unchained. I eagerly listened to the interview, because I really wanted to know how Tarantino thought about the violence in his movies. I was chewing on this question since I watched Inglorious Basterds in the theater. At the end of that movie, the good guys mercilessly torture and kill a room of Nazis. The method is intentionally cruel and vicious, and it seemed to me like the protagonists become akin to what they hated: inhumane in their treatment of enemies. But the cheers in the theater, mixed with the tone at the end of the movie, made me suspect that Tarantino either didn’t see the irony, or didn’t see it as a bad thing.
My suspicions were confirmed as he spoke on Fresh Air. He was abundantly clear that there are two kinds of movie violence: The kind that happens to your protagonist, and the kind that they exact in revenge. The first is bad, the second is good. The violent third acts that characterize his movies are meant to be crowd pleasers, and he wants his audience to leave the theater cheering and relishing in the retribution.
I understand the impulse. I do. Justice is a virtue worth pursuing. But if violence is a necessary evil, (and I regard very highly those who reject that it is, in fact, a necessity), it is still an evil. A situation in which violence occurs is always a tragedy, likely at the end of many other tragedies. And if the least bad scenario means using violence, then we ought not to celebrate the it. It is like amputating a gangrened limb. There are no winners.
I have been thinking about this again in light of the murder of Brain Thompson, the CEO of United HealthGroup. The internet is full of Tarantino-esque responses, overwhelming delight at the murder. When anyone pushes back, the response is that “violence against bad men is good, actually.” According to this crowd, the murder is justified because of the horrible practices of the American health care industry. The wealth that has been created in part by denying claims to sick patients. But two things can be bad at the same time. It can be bad to murder someone, and it can be bad to run a company that promises to help and instead creates medical poverty. One can be worse than the other (I’ll let you do that moral calculus yourself), but that doesn’t make either of them good.
Again, I am sympathetic to why violence feels like the only option. If a riot is the language of the unheard, the celebration of this murder is the response of a society that is being crushed to a breaking point by a health care system in which so many are forced to choose between taking care of themselves or paying rent. In fact, I am in the process of finalizing which is the least bad health care plan to choose on the marketplace for next year, trying to do predictive math to guess at how I can minimize health care costs. Make no mistake, I also hate the predatory health insurance industry. But as understandable as it is, I can’t bring myself to celebrate murder.
I think a culture that loves violence is a culture that has not been sufficiently infused with a Christian imagination. For the Christian, the highest good is not punitive justice but reconciliation. Not a cheap reconciliation, mind you. Reconciliation requires repentance and some degree of restitution. It does not exclude the possibility of punishment or consequences to one’s actions. But it does, in the end, require the injured party to choose some degree of mercy. The God revealed to us in Jesus not only teaches us to love enemies and turn the other cheek, but modeled it as He chose to take the cost of reconciliation upon Himself rather than exact justice without mercy.
I think the way of Jesus offers something better than “the violence done to me is bad, and the violence I do in return is good.” Jesus words to “Love your enemies” and pray for those who persecute you,” is quoted far less often than “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” But I think it is as critical piece of what it means to be a follower of Jesus. That doesn’t mean injustice is left to wreak havoc. But vigilante murders don’t bring about either justice or reconciliation. “Those who live by the sword, die by the sword.”
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