Enough value?

AVI linked to a review of How Not to Get Rich: The Financial Misadventures of Mark Twain. The last line is "but we can forgive a man a multitude of sins for giving us Huck and Jim."

And that's the issue these days, isn't it? If you value what the person did enough, you overlook the minor faults. And the major ones.

Literary critics born late enough to run no risk of being robbed by him applaud François Villon. Hollywood still loves Roman Polanski--some possibly because they're like him, but I'd guess more value his work enough to overlook his "failings." Similarly with Weinstein: until his habits became too public to ignore, his colleagues valued the work he did more than his "failings." Thomas Jefferson's work is no longer valued by many people (some of whom don't seem to understand it at all) enough to overlook his failings. (From the layout and operations of Monticello I suspect he had enough of a conscience that he wanted to look at his slaves as little as he could--beyond the crest of the hill, under the floor, behind a revolving serving door.)

The French Foreign Legion doesn't officially admit criminals, but the legend says it was an unofficial way to expunge your record by becoming a new and valuable person. How many times did a village put up with a jerk because he was invaluable in combat? On a more intimate note: "Why does she stay with him/he stay with her?"

God judges with perfect precision. We tend to put our thumbs on the scales when balancing value and failings. A few years ago the subject of OJ Simpson came up in a conversation I was eavesdropping on, and the older black man chid the younger ones--"We all know he did it." Maybe he didn't do much that's valuable, but he's our tribe.

Some of those Confederate statues were put up to honor the qualities the men (nominally) exemplified. (Some I gather were put up as warnings...) Quite a few people today look at the statue and say "I don't value anything he did." They do not honor courageous enemies, especially when the quarrel has been dead for generations. They have no reason to forgive anything. Not that they have much to forgive, since injuries were done to remote ancestors and not to them.

"Use every man after his desert, and who shall 'scape whipping?" When to judge, and when to let slide? I tend to put the bar far into the "actual harm" range, but that's a tendency and not an absolute rule...