Dogville & A Breviary of Sin by Clint
There exists a brilliant film by Lars von Trier called Dogville. Those who have seen it are among the blessed.
There exists a brilliant book by Cornelius Plantinga, Jr. called Not the Way It's Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin. Those who have read it are among the blessed. I thank Brother Matt for recommending the book.
There is a cross-section of these two demographics that are nigh divine. The two articulate each other very well.
And, so writes Cornelius...
In general, we ought to pay evildoers, including ourselves, the "intolerable
comment" of taking them seriously as moral agents, of holding them accountable
for their wrongdoing. This is a mark of our respect for their dignity and weight
as human beings. After all, what could be more arrogant than treating other
persons as if they were no more responsible than tiny children or the mentally
maimed? What could be more offensive than regarding others not as players but
only as spectators in human affairs, including their own? What could be more
condescending, stultifying, and inhumane? What could be more patronizing than
the refusal to blame people for their wrongdoing and to praise them for the
rightdoing, and to ground this refusal in our ssumption that these people
have not caused their own acts or had a hand in forming their own character?
Cornelius continues...
In his Lyman Beecher lectures, William Muehl recalls the humanist passions
of Arthur Koestler, a onetime defender of communism who later became its
critic. What began to distress Koestler was that in the Soviet communist
system the concept of blame disappeared. Nobody blamed reluctant communists. Nobody blamed peasants who resented the loss of their freedoms or who resisted conversion to communism, for surely they had been corrupted by faulty social and economic conditions. Nobody blamed critics of the party line, for surely they had been brainwashed by capitalist propoganda. Instead of blame, party officials offered their opponents pity and reeducation. Of course, the cradle of such pity often turned out to be a mental hospital, and the school for such reeducation a concentration camp--places at least as confining and dehumanizing as any conventional prison. But at least none of the inmates was to blame for being there. Koestler found all this blamelessness progressively disturbing. "Before long it began to become clear that those whom we do not blame we do not regard as responsible. those whom we do not regard as responsible we do not see as fully human. And those whom we do not see as fully human we are willing to twist and manipulate to suit our own convenience."
[POSSIBLE SPOILER BEYOND THIS POINT]
The interesting twist that Trier shows us in Dogville is that the character of Grace who insists on everyone's being blameless does not force the residents of Dogville to become less human nor does she force them into institutions--as did the fore-mentioned Soviet communist party officials. Rather, she is always trying to edify them and place them on almost-godly pedestals, constantly placing herself below them. However, they naturally become 'less human' (in that they do not adhere to social manners and pleasantries, but also 'more human' in that they are acting more and more readily on their depravity) in the context of her blamelessness.
