Let’s start with the basics: What was so appalling about Liam Neeson’s behavior?
When he was a young man, the Irish actor learned from a friend that she had been raped by a black man. He responded, as he admitted in an interview with a British newspaper this week, by arming himself with a cosh (a short club that British and Irish people use to bash one another) and wandering about “hoping some black bastard would come out of a pub and have a go at me about something, you know? So that I could kill him.”
We can all agree that this is deeply disturbing. Neeson himself is painfully ashamed of the incident, saying that he finds it “horrible, horrible.” His purpose in recalling it is to explain the frightening way in which people can become possessed by revenge — which is the theme of his forthcoming movie (as, indeed, it is the theme of pretty much all his movies). Predictably enough, Twitter went into meltdown. The fact that Neeson had volunteered the story as a cautionary tale, and the evidence of his obvious and unfeigned remorse, were no defense. Media appearances have been canceled, and other actors have been excoriated simply for speaking out on his behalf.
It is important to put our finger on precisely what is so disturbing about the story. It is not the fact that Neeson was ready to have a fight with someone, nor even that he was ready to kill someone. That is bad enough, but what makes the episode truly troubling is surely this: that had Neeson ended up assailing a black man coming out of a pub, he’d have knowingly hurt an innocent guy.
That may seem an obvious point, but it is worth dwelling on it for a moment. The essence of racism, and the reason we find it wicked, is that it falsely extrapolates from the individual to the group and from the group to the individual. It is an especially pernicious form of collectivism, striking as it does against the notion of personal responsibility which is the basis of modern civilization. It judges people not by their intelligence, their kindness, their generosity, their honesty, or their courage, but by their physiognomy. Our personal characteristics are overlooked in favor of the imagined characteristics of our group.
Why am I belaboring this point? Because precisely this form of false collectivism is coming to dominate our public space today.
In his new book, Unjust: Social Justice and the Unmaking of America, Noah Rothman defines this ideology as “retributive justice.” White people, historically, held a relatively privileged position, runs the theory, so they now owe a debt to everyone else. The same is true, to a lesser extent, of men, straight people, and so on, but race remains the biggie.
To see how powerful this notion has become, look at the way ethnicity is used as the chief test by which almost every institution is measured. A company board is judged, not by whether it makes money for its shareholders, but by its skin tones. A university exists not to teach but to ensure that its intake is racially representative. A legislative chamber is supposed to resemble its electorate physically rather than in the more important sense of representing its political convictions.
What is wrong with this idea? Precisely the same thing as was wrong with the behavior of the young Neeson. It holds that Person X is responsible for the misdeeds of Person Y, even if Person X has never met or even heard of Person Y. Indeed, if anything, it is more absurd even than that, since it judges Person X not by the actions of Person Y, but by those of Person A who lived many years ago and whose moral code reflected his own age rather than ours.
This notion is so preposterous that it barely merits serious refutation. In what way is, say, a white American descended from Russian serfs under obligation to a black American who is descended from both slaves and slaveowners? Yet, so pernicious has this idea become, that articles like this one will be dismissed out of hand on no other grounds that its author is white.
Is that not the very definition of racism? Does it not represent the wholesale abandonment of the ideal that we should all be judged as individuals? Neeson grew up, acquired wisdom, and came to see that his earlier actions were indefensible. America as a whole, sadly, is traveling in the opposite direction.
