Jason Arday, Lindsay Clancy, and Our Guilty Sacrifices

by Tim Rosenberger

Morality is simply the attitude we adopt towards people whom we personally dislike.
—Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband

…consider that it is expedient for us, that one man should die…
—John 11:50 (AV)

What Wilde offered as a drawing-room jab perfectly captures our moment’s substitution of politics for morality. The moral vocabulary survives, guilt and mercy, standards and justice, but it no longer tracks deeds. It tracks the friend and the enemy. Wilde saw the costume. Caiaphas named the body underneath it. The Greek behind the translation’s “expedient,” sympherei, is “it profits.” Not that it is just that one man die, but that it is useful. This past month the same machine has turned beneath two bodies, a dead professor in London and a living mother in Massachusetts.

A man was found dead in south London on a Friday in August. Before his body was cold, two vigils had convened over it. The first calls him a martyr, gathers in Trafalgar Square, and names the coverage a racist witch hunt. The second calls him a fraud, the poster boy of a diversity racket too long protected. The two ceremonies believe themselves enemies. They are collaborators. Each needs him to mean. Neither can afford to see what he was, which is a person, guilty of specific things, destroyed by specific people, beyond accusation and defense alike.

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