I expected to enjoy it as a good newspaper/legal drama, and I did, but somewhere along the way I became less interested in the plot than in the phrase that gives the movie its title. By the next morning, I was still turning it over in my mind.
Good grief .... is this such a relevant topic today!
Absence of malice.
There is something reassuring about the phrase. It sounds almost exonerating. Whatever happened, there was no hatred behind it, no calculated attempt to injure someone, no sinister motive lurking beneath the surface. In ordinary life we make this defense all the time, usually in less formal language. I didn't mean it that way. I wasn't trying to hurt anyone. I was only doing my job. I acted on what I knew at the time.
Those explanations matter. Motive matters. Surely there is a moral distinction between deliberately harming another person and causing harm that was neither intended nor anticipated. Our legal system recognizes that distinction, and so do most reasonable people. But Absence of Malice left me wondering whether we sometimes ask intention to carry more moral weight than it can bear.
One of the central tensions in the movie is the difference between something being accurate and something being true. A newspaper can print facts that are individually accurate and still create an impression that is substantially false. No quotation necessarily has to be invented and no fact deliberately fabricated. Selection, emphasis, placement, context and omission can do plenty of work on their own. The resulting story may survive a technical examination of its individual claims while failing to convey the truth of the person or event it supposedly describes.
That idea reaches well beyond journalism. Anyone who has lived long enough to accumulate a history could probably be portrayed rather convincingly as either admirable or contemptible by someone allowed to select the evidence. Both accounts might contain nothing but facts. Neither would necessarily be true.
This is where the title of the movie began to bother me.
Suppose the person constructing that incomplete picture genuinely means no harm. Suppose there is no personal vendetta, no hatred and no conscious desire to damage anyone. Suppose, further, that the person is operating within accepted professional standards and has every legal right to do what he or she is doing. At what point does the absence of a bad motive cease to answer the larger question of responsibility?
I have spent enough years in positions where decisions affect other people to know how complicated that question becomes in practice.
(In fact- my recent blogpost on Invidious has gone viral- picked up and re-posted by the Council of Educational Standards and Accountability (CESA). I was blown away from the emails from California, Texas, Georgia, North Carolina.... thanks again for the encouragement!)
Parents, teachers, coaches, pastors, employers, administrators and judges routinely make decisions with incomplete information. Often there is no luxury of waiting until every fact is known. Competing obligations have to be weighed, credibility has to be assessed, policies have to be interpreted, and consequences have to be considered even though many of those consequences cannot possibly be foreseen.
That is simply part of exercising authority. Refusing to decide is itself sometimes a decision with consequences.
Still, there is a temptation after a difficult outcome to retreat into intention: I meant well. I followed the procedure. I acted on the information available to me. I did not intend for this to happen. All of those statements may be completely sincere, and sometimes they may be the best explanation anyone can give. What they cannot do is make the consequences disappear.
Perhaps that is the distinction I have been trying to identify since watching the movie. The absence of malice tells us something important about the actor, but it does not necessarily tell us enough about the act. It may reduce culpability without eliminating responsibility. It may explain how something happened without settling whether what happened was right.
There is another difficulty with the phrase, particularly when I consider it from a Christian perspective. Absence of malice describes morality almost entirely by what is missing. I did not hate. I did not deceive intentionally. I did not seek another person's injury. That is certainly preferable to hatred, deception and cruelty, but Christianity sets a considerably more demanding standard than merely avoiding the deliberate infliction of harm.
The command is not simply to refrain from hating my neighbor but to love him. Truthfulness requires more than avoiding technically false statements. Mercy asks more of us than the absence of cruelty. The moral life described in Scripture is not primarily an empty space where the worst impulses have been successfully removed; it is supposed to be occupied by something positive—love, truth, justice, patience, mercy and concern for the good of another.
That makes absence an interesting word.
Maybe that is why the title has stayed with me. When the movie began, Absence of Malice sounded like a legal phrase, almost a defense. By the time it ended, I wasn't nearly as comfortable with it. The movie never required me to believe that everyone involved was evil or even badly motivated. In some ways that would have made the story much easier. What interested me was the possibility that people could operate inside legitimate institutions, follow defensible procedures, possess no conscious desire to injure anyone, and nevertheless participate in something terribly damaging.
That is a much more uncomfortable problem because it removes the villain.
And once the villain disappears, I can no longer keep the question safely at a distance.
I am left instead to consider my own decisions, my own confidence in what I think I know, the consequences I did not anticipate, and all those occasions when I meant no harm seemed like a sufficient defense.
Perhaps sometimes it is.
I am increasingly convinced, however, that the absence of malice and innocence are not quite the same thing.
SO if you will be patient and permit me a few posts about this, I want to mull on it together... ask some tough questions, bring in Billy Budd of all things... and then get your feedback.
But the theme will not change I suspect....
A person can be sincere, principled, courageous, consistent—and wrong.
Of course you knew there would be a song attached- it is on SoundCloud now, but will go live on Spotify on Oct. 23.
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