In his travels, the eighteenth-century explorer, Captain James Cook, once spent several years in the Polynesian Islands. He learned the native language and was befriended by the people. One day, they took him to witness a human sacrifice. The tribe still practiced a certain animism and would sometimes offer a person as a sacrifice to their gods. Cook, a sophisticated English gentleman, was understandably appalled. He wrote in his diary that he expressed his indignation to the chief, telling him: This is awful! You’re a primitive people. In England we would hang you for that!
The irony in Cook’s reaction shouldn’t be missed – and it isn’t missed by anthropologists. When we kill someone in God’s name, it doesn’t matter whether we call it human sacrifice or capital punishment. Either way, we are sacrificing a human life and justifying it in God’s name.
Now I say all this more in sympathy than in judgment because hypocrisy isn’t all of a kind. There is a hypocrisy where the blindness is more willful, and there is a hypocrisy where the blindness is more innocent. Thomas Aquinas once distinguished between two kinds of ignorance. For Aquinas, there is culpable ignorance and there is invincible ignorance, that is, sometimes we don’t see because we don’t want to see, and sometimes we don’t see simply because we can’t see.
In culpable ignorance we do know better. We refuse to look at something because we don’t want to see the truth. In culpable ignorance, we don’t see the parallel between human sacrifice and capital punishment because we already intuitively sense the connection and we don’t want to see it, and so refuse to look.
In invincible ignorance we don’t know any better. Our shortcomings have to do with the limits of our humanity, our background, and our experience. Like Captain Cook, in all sincerity, we simply don’t see the parallel between human sacrifice and capital punishment, even as thousands of our own young people die cruel senseless deaths in trying to find the passage of life from puberty to adulthood.
All of us, liberal or conservative, have blind spots in terms of how we see and assess various social justice issues, be that climate change, poverty, abortion, immigration, refugees, racism, women’s equality, or gender issues. Standing before these complex issues, are we willing to look them square in the face, or are we unwilling to really look at them because we already intuit what we might see? [Excerpt from Ron Rolheiser’s “Hypocrisy’s Two Faces” December 2023]
