By Gary Topping–
In his typically thoughtful posting this week, Mike O’Brien asks us to consider what to do when bad people produce good things. His primary reference is to Michael Jackson, the immensely talented singer and dancer who has now been credibly accused of child abuse. My thoughts on that do not differ much from Mike’s, but I immediately thought of the inverse of the question: what to do when apparently good people do bad things?
I’ve had to wrestle with both questions during my career as a historian, but the latter one is provoked most dramatically by the infamous Mountain Meadows Massacre where, in September, 1857 in a high mountain valley between Cedar City and St. George, Utah, members of a Mormon militia murdered in cold blood some 120 innocent immigrants on the California Trail. Mormon historians beginning with Juanita Brooks and most recently with Richard Turley, Glen Leonard and Ronald Walker have been baffled by the question because both before and after the massacre those militia members were upright, church-going, morally impeccable pillars of the community. How could such people have jumped the track so unpredictably and committed such an unspeakably horrific act?
My answer is that those historians have too shallow a conception of human nature. This is perhaps a far-fetched analogy, but in his attempt to bring the United States back together after our first really acrimonious presidential election in 1800 between Thomas Jefferson’s Republicans and John Adams’s Federalists, Jefferson said, in his inaugural address, “We are all Republicans; we are all Federalists.” To put that on a moral scale instead of a political one, I would say that we are all saints; we are all sinners. Those Mormon militia members, despite the fact that they might not have kicked their dogs or beaten their many wives, were not entirely good people if they could have nursed such a grudge over persecutions of Mormons through most of an entire generation, so that the embers of that grudge could have been fanned suddenly into a conflagration by the impassioned preachers of the so-called Mormon Reformation of 1856.
This kind of thinking also informs my judgment on the inverse question Mike is asking us to consider: what would happen to us if we allowed our puffed-up Puritanism to avert our eyes from all the bad people and bad things in life? I have a friend who won’t go to anything but G-rated movies, and I shudder when I think of all the great movies she has missed out on. I myself do not relish bad language and immoral acts, but the fact is that people do talk that way and they do those things, and honest art has to deal with those facts. I’ve never read Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, but I’ve seen a couple of times the wonderful movie with Jeremy Irons as the tortured Humbert, the good person who tragically succumbs to the temptation of sex with an underage girl. I find such an act unthinkably repulsive, but you know what? As the story goes along, the wonderful Jeremy Irons actually gets me feeling sorry for poor Humbert and even sympathizing with him! If I just turned up my nose and averted my eyes, what would I have missed!
