Do you value the Due Process as a personal virtue?
We should spend time contemplating the Due Process as a personal virtue.
Often times we associate the due process with legal systems, where decisions of are reached in a court setting. However, the heart of the concept is centered around reserving judgement until both evidence and arguments have been presented.
People are quick to join in with the outrage mobs, seeking to destroy anything and everything they disagree with, without checks and balances. People claim they are interested in justice, although they may qualify justice as “social,” but many problems arise.
Just because you claim interest in justice, doesn’t make it reality. Just because you have a narrative worked out, doesn’t mean that such a narrative matches reality. Just because you have rationalized the guilt of others, doesn’t make them guilty.
The due process is not just about waiting for evidence, its about waiting for different arguments regarding evidence.
There are masses in our world who modify justice with the term social, and they do not see the pathology in doing so. With moral conviction, they present information that they have been given as evidence for their claims. Yet, this evidence is often connected to partial reality. Hence we find the root of the problem, and also the beauty of the due process.
Having partial evidence is not enough, one needs have a complete understanding of why certain things exist. There are causes and effects in reality. Without the due process, people see effects they don’t like, and they attribute causes for them, although an assumed cause may not be the actual cause. They then force their will on others, to try to stop the causes. However, often times they are mistaken in what they assume the cause for certain effects to be.
People will rationalize their thoughts about certain phenomena in the world. As GK Chesterton suggests in his work Orthodoxy, people are dangerous when they have moral conviction about a rationalization which is inaccurate. In fact, there are a few Chesterton quotes from Orthodoxy which come to mind:
“The lunatic’s theory explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way” - GK Chesterton
“Nevertheless [the lunatic] is wrong. But if we attempt to trace his error in exact terms, we shall not find it quite so easy as we had supposed. Perhaps the nearest we can get to expressing it is to say this: that his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle. A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large. In the same way the insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one, but it is not so large. A bullet is quite as round as the world, but it is not the world. There is such a thing as a narrow universality; there is such a thing as a small and cramped eternity; you may see it in many modern religions” - GK Chesterton
When dealing with the cultural chaos of our world, we should realize that the many of the outrage-people (I am tempted by the term outrage-operators) do believe they are rationalized. They see certain pieces of the evidence, and create a rationalization for such. However, their rationalizations are small. They are incomplete. They fall short of the complexity of reality.
Sure there are dishonest people directing the mobs from the top, but many in the masses are tragically misled because they have been fed either an intellectually dishonest or an intellectual deficient rationalization for our world.
Nicodemus appreciated the virtue of Due Process.
When many think of Pharisees, they tend to think of villains in the New Testament. But Nicodemus was hardly a villain. Not only was he one of the few followers of Christ to participate in taking Jesus’ body down from the cross, he was also one of the societal elites who took up for Jesus against the will of the mob (Check out John 7:40-52)
The outrage mob judged Jesus guilty without strong evidence, but Nicodemus reminded them doing such was wrong.
The mob mentality tried to play the identity politics card, but doing such was a weak escape. They knew they could not make a strong case against Jesus, but they could make a weak case that sounded true.
In John 7:40-52, some of the religious leaders are trying to discredit Jesus and pass a guilty judgement upon Him without having a hearing. However, some of the religious leaders, such as Nicodemus, realized how chaotic this was, and called out their peers on their foul play.
So what did the outrage based people do, when they knew they couldn’t win in a hearing setting? They made this case: “are you from Galilee too? Search and see that no prophet arises from Galilee”
They are playing identity politics. It is a weak case. The problem is that while their argument is true in technicality, it is not true in sentiment, not relevant to the matter at hand, and not true to reality. Whether or not the claim “no prophet arises from Galilee” was true in the past has no bearing at all on the legitimacy of Jesus, or even Nicodemus.
This is what the people do today, typically those who qualify justice with linguistic modifiers such as “social.” They can’t make strong arguments, so they demonize strong arguments. They make a weak argument that is true in technicality while false in reality, but use the weak argument as an excuse to disregard the due process. In their logic, there is a rationalization, therefore there is no need for debate.
If we are to move our culture away from chaos, we must appreciate the Due Process.
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- J. Dylan Proctor
