Light On Dark Water

Call Me Shiftlet

Some years back there was a widely reproduced frame from the
Peanuts comic strip which showed one of the characters—I
think it was Lucy—with a look of consternation saying
“I love mankind—it’s people I can’t
stand.” It comes into my mind frequently when some event,
large or small, a local case of child abuse or an account of
murder and torture on a nationwide scale, causes me to face what
I would really prefer not to think about: the intransigent
willingness of some human beings to do, consciously,
deliberately, and willingly, things to other human beings that
one would like to think could not even occur to the imagination,
much less be carried out in deed.

I disagree with Lucy. I like people—it’s mankind I
can’t stand. That’s assuming that by
“mankind” she means the human race as a whole and in
abstract, and by “people” she means individuals. I
have to change “love” to “like” in that
first clause, as “love” would be too much for me to
claim, but with that change I can say it quite honestly. I
certainly don’t mean that I like everyone immediately and
entirely, and I admit freely that there are in fact some people I
dislike strongly, but I can say that as a rule I have liked more
than disliked most individuals I have ever known. And I can say
that I have never met anyone in whom I could not find
something to like, even if an effort on my part was
required.

I began to do this many years ago, in one of my first jobs,
with a co-worker who annoyed me greatly in a number of ways. I
undertook to combat this by making an effort to look for things
to like or admire in him, and when I found them they not only
made me less intolerant of what I didn’t like about him but gave me
some kind of real concrete sense of his worth as a human being
independent of my self-centered and subjective preferences. This
little discipline has never really been put to the test; that is,
I have never had to try it with someone who has done me a serious
injury, or done great evil in the world. But it does help with
the daily give-and-take of life, and it helps me to conceive how
God continues to love us all as individuals, in spite of what we
do. And I remind myself often that I stand at least as much in
need of charity as those toward whom I exercise it.

But as for mankind as a species, my opinion is that of
Swift’s King of Brobdignag: “the most pernicious race
of odious little vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon
the surface of the earth.” The misery we inflict on each
other is more than I can bear to contemplate, and if I suddenly
found myself with God’s power at my disposal (but not his
love) I would probably think it best to put an end to the whole
affair, as Genesis tells us God himself was minded to
do (“And God saw that the wickedness of mankind was great in the
earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart
was only evil continually”) until he
decided to spare a few.

One of my favorite Flannery O’Connor stories is
“The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” in which a man,
a Mr. Shiftlet, commits a despicable act which appears to leave
his conscience perfectly serene. Yet when he himself is merely
insulted he calls down the judgment of heaven upon the offender.
We are given to understand that it is he who stands in the
greater danger from this judgment, which threatens but does not
arrive.

I read the daily paper and want to cry out, like Mr.
Shiftlet, “Oh Lord, break forth and wash the slime from
this earth!” But nothing happens, which is fortunate, not
least for me.