Bad reputation of good words

At mass yesterday, a visiting priest delivered a homily on peace and reconciliation, a time-honoured theme in both religious and secular discourse.

So time-honoured, in fact, that it’s hard to move the discussion forward by finding something new to say. However, reducing the subject to platitudes and fallacies is easy, and the good father managed to do so famously.

He stayed within his remit by telling us that we should love one another as Christ loved us, and that was an unassailable statement if I’ve ever heard one.

Universal love certainly beats universal hatred, and this is the kind of banality one doesn’t mind repeated in that setting. It never hurts to remind people of the basics.

But then the priest enlarged on the subject by equating love with absence of prejudice, and there he lost me for ever. For, ‘prejudice’, along with ‘discrimination’, is a good word that has been undeservedly maligned.

The Latin prae-judicium reached English via French to designate an a priori premise, a set of criteria acting as the starting point of any ratiocination. Subsequent thought and experience can put a prejudice to a test, showing it to be either true or false. But without pre-judgement no true judgement is possible.

If the father had given that matter a moment’s thought, he would have realised that his own job wouldn’t exist in the absence of some such presuppositions, starting with faith in God.

True, modern vandals have assigned to that perfectly good word nothing but bad meanings, such as visceral enmity to some groups seen by the vandals as requiring protection. But then any word, including ‘love’, can suffer from similar calumny.

How about “He loves beating his wife” because “she loves having drunken sex with multiple strangers”? It’s not only denotation but also connotation that confers a meaning on a word.

‘Prejudice’ (which, by the way, Burke regarded as an essential political virtue) has suffered more than any other word, however, since it has been deprived of any good meaning whatsoever. And not only because it has got to mean preconceived bias against some fashionable groups.

For modern vandals indeed insist on approaching any issue (except those dear to their hearts) with a mind open so wide that one’s brain is at risk of falling out. No axiomatic premise is allowed to exist, unless of course it tallies with modern fads.

That, I’m afraid, is something yesterday’s priest went on to prove in short order. Though he didn’t repeat the letter of Benjamin Franklin’s fallacy that “there was never a good war, or a bad peace”, he spoke in the same spirit.

Since Franklin was an atheist (fine, a deist – a distinction without a difference), he was unable to ponder such notions at sufficient depth. But a priest, especially one in the most philosophical Christian confession, should be capable of more nuanced thought.

No intelligent discussion of the issue, especially from the pulpit, is possible without a reference to Matthew 10:34: “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.”

Any pursuit of truth and virtue presupposes the possibility of having to defend them by violent means against those seeking evil ends. Therefore Matthew 10:34 leads ineluctably to the doctrine of just war laid down by St Augustine and later developed by St Thomas Aquinas.

Granted, a Sunday homily isn’t a philosophical treatise, and a priest can’t be expected to provide an exhaustive exegesis of a complicated issue in a few minutes. But he should at least hint at some cursory familiarity with it.

Instead yesterday’s priest showed blithe ignorance of that essential Christian concept by citing “the war between Russia and the Ukraine” as an example of a situation in which urgent peace is required on any terms. After all, the war has already produced “many victims, both in the Ukraine and Russia”.

Out of idle curiosity, what Russian victims would those be?

Ukrainian victims don’t require an elucidation: they are civilians of all ages murdered, looted and raped by evil invaders. They are soldiers dying heroically in defence of both their freedom and, at one remove, ours. They are the dozens of peaceful people blown up yesterday when a Russian missile hit a block of flats in a major Ukrainian city.

But who exactly are the Russian victims? The evil invaders? The soldiers who do the murdering, looting and raping or the officers who encourage them to commit those crimes? Those who target schools, hospitals and residential buildings for missile strikes?

That one sentence showed a lamentable lack of discrimination, another word unjustly maligned. The word comes from the Latin discriminationem, defined as “the making of distinctions.”

Discrimination, the making of distinctions, is as essential as prejudice to any rational thought and moral or aesthetic judgement. And there too the father showed a most regrettable deficit.

He spoke briefly about the drive-by shooting at a Catholic church in Euston the other day, when some criminals fired shotguns at a crowd of worshippers coming out of the church after a requiem mass for two parishioners. Many were wounded; two, both children, critically.

They were undoubtedly victims, but suppose for the sake of argument that the shooters had been killed driving their getaway Toyota too fast from the scene. Would they have been victims too? The logic of yesterday’s homily would point at the affirmative answer to this question.

But neither Augustine nor Aquinas nor, more important, Christ would agree. Unlike our visiting priest, they were capable of both prejudice and discrimination – and knowing their indispensable value to finding the truth.

Any commitment to truth in that situation, or indeed in the war mentioned, would demand that the perpetrators of evil be damned as such and, in due course, punished. That would in no way contradict loving them in the Christian sense, hoping that their souls will be saved.

But treating either Euston or Russian murderers as victims would show a lack of both prejudice and discrimination where they are badly needed.