This chapter returns to the idea of harmonic justice, suggesting its association with tyranny, an association formally legible in intolerance for deviations from form. The happiness it promises is undone by Blackstone's ambivalent and shifting position on slavery and the uses his text served in America. Blackstone's reach is demonstrated through a reading of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, where the children of enslaved people learn to read from the Commentaries as Lee celebrates Blackstone's claims for liberty as a fundamental value of the English common law. But the irony inherent in this argument is as cruel as the cruel optimism Blackstone inspired. The novel inspires not racial justice, but complacent acceptance of glacially slow change, in which gradualism cloaks the most brutal racism. Difference here is represented as deformity and deformity is erased by the end of the novel, replaced with a false sense of ease and comfort.
Christian climate care: Slow change, modesty and eco‐theo‐citizenship