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.