A couple of weeks ago, a comedian I follow on IG posted this and it really hit home. It crystallized a lot things that have been bouncing around in my brain for years now. We have turned into a nation of Javerts.
If you aren’t a fan of French literature or Broadway musicals, Javert is the main “villain” in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. I put “villain” in quotes because it’s very much a novel without a true villain (unless you count society or, I suppose, God). But Javert is a real problem. He’s an inspector who hounds the story’s hero, Jean Valjean, for decades over some stolen bread. Well, okay, to be fair to Javert, there’s also the whole “breaking out of prison and running away” bit, but, in Javert’s mind, Valjean’s crime was stealing bread and he deserves to be punished for that.
Jean Valjean, of course, stole the bread to feed his starving family. And then, after breaking out of prison and being gifted a pair of silver candlesticks by a kindly priest, he does truly good and lovely things for the rest of his life. But still, at every turn, Javert pops up to condemn Valjean and tear down every good thing he’s built. Spoiler alert: by the end of the story, Javert runs headlong into some serious cognitive dissonance when he witnesses, personally, Valjean’s selflessness and can’t reconcile that with his rigid sense of morality and then kills himself. He kills himself rather than accept the idea that a person can be more than one thing.
Because he’s right. Jean Valjean broke into a store and stole some bread. But he did it to feed his family. He was sent to a brutal, dehumanizing prison and came out barely better than an animal and immediately went to steal more stuff to survive. But the priest buys his redemption with those candlesticks and, for the rest of his life, Valjean does kind and noble things, even when it risks him being found out. In fact, Javert gets back on his trail when he witnesses the famously strong Valjean lift a heavy cart off of an injured person. (Yeah, that bit and quite a few others in the book are pretty coincidental. It’s still a banger.)
What Keara Sullivan was getting at in her video is the undercurrent of staunchly black-and-white thinking in our online discourse. Things need to be either all good or all bad. Movies, politicians, musicians, influencers. Any slight blemish or misstep lives forever. And it’s making us all rigid and unempathetic.
Let me pause right here to say that some people do and have done terrible, terrible, unforgivable things. And people should be accountable for their actions and accountable for making appropriate restitution to the people they harm. And I do think that extends beyond the scope of their lifetimes. This isn’t a plea for people to shrug and say, “Welp, all bad things should be understood.”
But it is a plea to learn how to manage cognitive dissonance. To take it back to a familiar topic, The Closer, there’s this one scene that really encapsulates this. Brenda is working on a case with a missing young woman. The main suspect is a drug addict who is being very squirrelly about his involvement in the woman’s disappearance. Brenda, despite her usual distrust of, well, everyone, is taking this man at face value and it worries her team enough that they bring in her husband, Fritz, a recovering alcoholic. He explains to Brenda that addicts lie, they deceive, they do not take responsibility. He points to his own rock bottom, when, in a drunken blackout, he shot up his own car and still has no idea why. Brenda responds saying that Fritz is painting himself as a monster but he’s the most decent person she knows. Fritz kindly responds that he’s both. Because he is.
And because we all are. One of my favorite quotes is from Reinhold Niebuhr: “Man’s capacity for justice makes democracy possible, but man’s inclination to injustice makes democracy necessary.” Humans are both things: fascists and freedom fighters. Often on the same day, sometimes even at the same time.
This is a complicated truth to accept, both on an individual and personal level and on a global and historical level. And it’s a complicated truth that, especially in the last few years, is completely escaping us as a nation and a culture.
I think one of the reasons that happens is because of the rampant injustice around us every day. Very bad, very terrible, very awful people do harmful, disgusting and cruel things on a very public stage every single day and there seems to be no way to hold any of them accountable. Those injustices stack up and build a wall inside of all of us, separating our understanding of humanity from our very harmed souls. And, frankly, it feels like when that wall topples, it crushes our understanding and leaves a howling rage that must be served.
Again: this isn’t about anyone being canceled or shunned. It’s about trying to hold competing truths in your head and to give them equal weight and understanding. You do not have to accept or forgive someone who has harmed you. Or someone who has harmed anyone. But if you don’t at least try to recognize the humanity in someone else, you will lose your grip on the humanity in yourself. If Javert has just been able to accept that Jean Valjean did steal some bread, but that didn’t make him a terrible person, maybe he would have just walked home from that bridge. But he couldn’t do that.
One more analogy that’s been living in my brain: The Bridge on the River Kwai. It’s a classic WWII film about a group of British officers who are captured by the Japanese army and forced to build the titular bridge. The main officer is a proud, noble man and is determined to earn the respect he deserves from his Japanese captors. It begins as a battle of wills as the British officers prove that they can endure punishment and torture and not break. But, by the end of the movie, the British commander has been so dedicated to proving his mettle that he’s actually built a bridge that’s going to help the Japanese war effort and when American saboteurs show up to destroy it, he tries to stop them. He had started to take pride in the effort he was making.
To me, that officer is another kind of Javert. So dedicated to his own honor, so dedicated to proving himself noble and righteous, that he lost sight of what the war was actually about. He’s not a villain, he’s not the bad guy. He’s an object lesson in not losing the forest for the trees.
We all need to spend more time looking at the trees and understanding that they’re all a part of the same forest. Just like we are.
And also go listen to Les Misérables. Or read it. You’re gonna learn way too much about the Battle of Waterloo but you’re also gonna have a good time. I promise.