The Cancel Machine: Justice divorced from Mercy

One of the most visibly rising phrases in our country today is that of social justice, a phrase which bears witness to the truth of the statement: “It is not difficult to see that in the modern world the sense of justice has been reawakening on a vast scale; and without doubt this emphasizes that which goes against justice in relationships between individuals, social groups and "classes," between individual peoples and states… (Dives in Misericordia, paragraph 12)”.  The rising concern for serving justice to people interacting presently or historically with others has reached almost a spiraling frenzy, evolving from a movement of dignity to a witch hunt of such magnitude that it gorges itself indiscriminately on peoples and ideas that exist currently or have long since passed.  Not unlike the progression of the French Revolution, the “cancel culture” (the phrase used to describe the manifestation of this hunt) has begun to feed upon even some of the very people involved in earlier versions of the hunt.  It is easy for this movement to run freely, because it is easy to find injustice on all levels of society and history: we all act with injustice and selfishness in our lives.  The concept of mercy serves as a remedy for the fear and insecurity of us who live as refugees of the cancel monster: we see clearly that justice is not enough, nor possible in this life.

Good motives, left unchecked or divorced from reality can easily devolve into machines used to hunt and persecute perceived enemies.  These “programs which start from the idea of justice and which ought to assist its fulfillment among individuals, groups and human societies, in practice suffer from distortions. Although they continue to appeal to the idea of justice, nevertheless experience shows that other negative forces have gained the upper hand over justice, such as spite, hatred and even cruelty (Dives in Misericordia)”.  It is easy for these programs to find ammunition to justify their actions: history is rife with examples of injustices executed against individuals or whole groups of people, and these examples sometimes present themselves even today.  To make matters worse, we are all fallen human beings, and as a result we sometimes act with injustice to varying degrees towards our neighbors, sometimes even without malice.  Such a monstrous machine like the cancel culture can take both real and perceived faults and reduce the individual seen as the enemy to be nothing more than a living shell, devoid of social personal dignity, life, or voice.

The search for justice is admirable, but the distortion of its execution is horrible.  So often, in the name of delivering justice to those who have been injured there are casualties to the machine that were not implicated in the original crime.  Mercy is a necessary part of any society, to introduce the person element back into the equation.  Victims of injustice are victims precisely because their dignity as persons has in some way been violated; the most dignified and human thing possible is to uphold the dignity of another human being.  By introducing mercy into the quest for justice, we not only provide victims with an avenue of personhood again but also prevents further injustice against the innocent.  Justice alone can “even lead to the negation and destruction of itself, if that deeper power, which is love, is not allowed to shape human life in its various dimensions (Dives in Misericordia)”.  

One comedian, in speaking about the dangers and wide-sweeping calls to cancel humans has recently exhorted his listeners to “not [cancel anyone] today that would get you cancelled tomorrow”.  Humans need love and mercy towards each other, and though this is not in any way said to negate the importance of justice, it does serve as a caution against justice alone.  Justice alone, divorced from any concept or willingness for mercy further degrades human nature into nothing more than calculations, creators and in turn victims of a machine.