Reflections on discovering someone I know did something awful

I recently found out that someone I used to know did horrendous things. We were never close, and had drifted apart over time so it didn’t do me any great harm, but it was still a little shock to the system. It reminded me though of other, earlier experiences involving people I was closer to.

What happens when we find out someone we are close to has done horrendous things? I was talking about this with someone over lunch. He suggested the word grieving for how these revelations affect us. That seemed to me to fit well. It is grieving, because it’s like finding out someone you thought you knew has died. Except instead of dying, you find that the person you thought you knew never really existed. In an odd way it’s even sadder, at least if a person is dead, they have lived. Finding out the person as you knew them is fictional erases them from being altogether. It also erases the truth of your memories. Or at least it feels like this for a time.

That isn’t to say you can’t still love what remains after the illusion is gone. In fact, the longer you reflect on it, the more it will seem like your first instinct might have been a mistake. This illusion metaphor has its truth, but it is a limited kind of truth. The person you knew was real- it’s just that we’re so large that what you loved coexisted with the hideousness. It was fictional only in the sense that it didn’t go all the way down- but then again, what does? It may be that what you loved was, sadly, less real than the hideousness, but except perhaps in extreme cases it was real. It wasn’t just an act. How? I dunno. We don’t really understand people, in general or in particular.

Another thought on the topic. I am not the first to notice that there is no natural secular concept of redemption. If you accept guilt exists at all, then in the minds of most people, unless some supernatural tide washes it away, it remains. Forgiveness is possible, but it is like spotwashing in comparison to the old floods of redemption. Moreover, forgiveness is for the victim to give, it is a dyadic relation between a forgiver and the forgived. Redemption is different, redemption is both a private phenomenon (changing how the subject relates to themselves) and a social phenomenon- which changes how everyone else stands in relation to the redeemed.

The absence of redemption isn’t a necessary feature of secularism. You can choose to believe in redemption even if you're a secularist, like me. But many, perhaps most people just… don’t. Without religion to give them a concept of redemption, many people just forget about it. Our only concept of redemption becomes “when a sin is small- usually very small in the scheme of things- and time passes, everyone forgets about it”.

There’s a kind of oblique parody about the lack of a coherent concept of redemption in a skit I love by the comedian Conner O’Malley called Fuck Coin (NSFW). Take a moment to watch it before reading on (it’s two minutes).

For those who don’t want to watch it it goes like this. A young man “discovers” a new cryptocurrency called Fuck Coin which greatly improves the world economy but he is subsequently canceled for his acts- he is recorded trying to have sex with a strangers Amazon package, plunging the world into chaos. He makes a video explaining himself and his difficult situation and is socially redeemed. The video cleverly describes the process of social redemption as “all the celebrities forgave him” and for me, that’s the funniest line in the video because it’s true. The closest we have to a concept of social redemption these days is all the celebrities forgiving you- i.e. a collective decision to move on from your sins by famous people and tastemakers who talk publicly about these things.

I believe if Tamerlane were raised from the dead then, at least in principle, he could become a good person, but more importantly a redeemed person. a person who should not be hated for all those genocides, and even more, a person who should no longer spend time feeling guilty about his genocides.

The thing is, this isn’t most people’s instinct. Unless you can tell a story like “There’s a big guy upstairs, and he can decide a person has done enough penance, and you should accept them” - most people will say, “No, fuck that, Tamerlane’s still the guy who did all the genocides”. i.e., without a supernatural force in play, most people have trouble accepting redemption. Trying to make up for it is all we have to recommend and it’s often almost impossible to do as much good as one has done evil. And even if you did, what of it? “If the cake is 50% flour, eggs, sugar, and butter and 50% poop, who would eat it?”

Here’s a thought. The problem with not having a secular concept of redemption might not just be that people don’t believe in redemption, I’d say that most people probably do still believe in redemption even if they’re unsure when it applies. It’s that in a secular society there’s no Schelling point for people to ‘coordinate’ redemption around, and it’s difficult for individuals to know when they are supposed to regard a given individual as redeemed in the absence of such a Schelling point. There’s a reluctance to regard wrongdoers as redeemed ‘on a limb’ when others disagree. This might lead to a bias against treating people as redeemed resulting from the uncertainty in social principles around the matter.

Alternatively, we could see too much laxity in the absence of a social concept of redemption. Some merciful or overly indulgent souls might reason “Well, there’s no socially accepted concept of adequate penance or contrition, so if someone says they’re morally better now, I guess I just have to accept that.”

There are at least three good reasons to believe in redemption:

1. So we will not lose the good in those who have done evil.

2. Because it is often necessary to diffuse social conflicts. If you believe, as many do, that voting for the wrong party, or backing the wrong side in a civil war, or participating in an evil regime is a monstrous crime, then there will often be so many wrongdoers that we need some practical concept of redemption to proceed.

3. So that wrongdoers have a sense that there is something they can aspire to- something to give them an alternative to doing more evil because “I might as well now”.

But if we want it in a secular world, we must consciously choose to affirm it as secularists. Religion will not give it to us ready-made.

Alternatively, if the effort is required to accept as redeemed is too much without the framework of religion, perhaps we have a pragmatic reason to accept hard determinism and non-compatibilism. I’ve often wondered if there’s a middle path between hard determinism and compatibilism- one that makes us more merciful but leaves some notion of responsibility. I think a lot of philosophers intuitively want something like that, but I haven’t yet seen it articulated, likely because I haven’t read enough in the area.