Rituals of Indifferent Cruelty: First Thoughts on The Hunger Games, the City of Omelas, & Harry Potter

I recently finished The Hunger Games trilogy, & think it requires some comment. I’m aware of why some critics think the books deeply flawed from a moral perspective, yet I find the story provocative in the best sort of way. The 3^rd book was a literary letdown, as many have already noted, but I found the resolution satisfying nonetheless. It seems that one of the questions I have wrestled with is whether or not I can dislike the main protagonist of a series, yet find her both convincing & effective as a character. My biggest struggle concerns the suitability of the series for my 7^th grader, whose friends—some of them younger than her—have read the series & seen the film. She is thus exposed to the Team Peeta talk that the media machine spins out. But how prepared is she for the types of discussions we will have about redemptive violence, scapegoating, just war theory, & the other topics I think need addressing? 

Likewise, the question of the literary presentation of ambiguous characters like Katniss requires attention. When young readers will so quickly identify with her, does it make sense for an author whose intended audience is teens to have such a character involved in the murder of innocent people, even if in the service of a greater good? I remember the boy in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road asking his father if they were the good guys, seeking some assurance that they had not departed from the proper path. That story was for a more mature audience, one hopefully better able to negotiate the horrors revealed in it. As an adult, I can appreciate how ruined a person Katniss becomes as a result of what happens to her & the resulting choices she makes, & see The Hunger Games as a realistic portrayal of how violence spins out of control & destroys everyone in its path. But in the consumer culture these books (& film) inhabit, where the characters become catch phrases, how likely is it young readers will be able to appreciate some of the subtleties in the story?

I’ll start with some familiar topics I teach at Xavier & have written on previously. Check some of my earlier posts at the Emeth Society blog for more details on Peter Singer. Please be aware that I will ramble, as I am trying to find my thoughts on these troubling questions.

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In 1973 Ursula Le Guin published “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” a story I stumbled upon years ago in a moral philosophy anthology. The premise is simple & elegant: the shining, prosperous city of Omelas, filled with happy & cultured citizens, requires for its continued success the suffering of a single child, locked in darkness & misery in a basement closet. Here is Le Guin’s description:

In a basement under one of the beautiful public buildings of Omelas, or perhaps in the cellar of one of its spacious private homes, there is a room. It has one locked door, and no window. A little light seeps in dustily between cracks in the boards, secondhand from a cobwebbed window somewhere across the cellar. In one corner of the little room a couple of mops, with stiff, clotted, foul-smelling heads stand near a rusty bucket. The floor is dirt, a little damp to the touch, as cellar dirt usually is. The room is about three paces long and two wide: a mere broom closet or disused tool room. In the room a child is sitting. It could be a boy or a girl. It looks about six, but actually is nearly ten. It is feeble-minded. Perhaps it was born defective, or perhaps it has become imbecile through fear, malnutrition, and neglect. It picks its nose and occasionally fumbles vaguely with its toes or genitals, as it sits hunched in the corner farthest from the bucket and the two mops. It is afraid of the mops. It finds them horrible. It shuts its eyes, but it knows the mops are still standing there; and the door is locked; and nobody will come. The door is always locked; and nobody ever comes, except that sometimes–the child has no understanding of time or interval–sometimes the door rattles terribly and opens, and a person, or several people, are there. One of them may come in and kick the child to make it stand up. The others never come close, but peer in at it with frightened, disgusted eyes. The food bowl and the water jug are hastily filled, the door is locked, the eyes disappear. The people at the door never say anything, but the child, who has not always lived in the tool room, and can remember sunlight and its mother’s voice, sometimes speaks. “I will be good,” it says. “Please let me out. I will be good!” They never answer. The child used to scream for help at night, and cry a good deal, but now it only makes a kind of whining, “eh-haa, eh-haa,” and it speaks less and less often. It is so thin there are no calves to its legs; its belly protrudes; it lives on a half-bowl of corn meal and grease a day. It is naked. Its buttocks and thighs are a mass of festered sores, as it sits in its own excrement continually.

Despite the discomfort such a spectacle causes the citizens of Omelas, they all know there is nothing they can do to alleviate the suffering of the child. As we are told,“they all understand that their happiness, the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of their children, the wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of their harvest and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child’s abominable misery.” None of these people are outwardly cruel, in the normal usage of the term. None visit the child to torment it or add to its sufferings. None publish tracts on why the child should suffer, on why it deserves its fate. And they all feel the necessary sorrow such a reality should provoke. But they can not aid the child, or seek any change at all, if they wish to preserve their status quo:

They feel disgust, which they had thought themselves superior to. They feel anger, outrage, impotence, despite all the explanations. They would like to do something for the child. But there is nothing they can do. If the child were brought up into the sunlight out of that vile place, if it were cleaned and fed and comforted, that would be a good thing indeed; but if it were done, in that day and hour all the prosperity and beauty and delight of Omelas would wither and be destroyed. Those are the terms. To exchange all the goodness and grace of every life in Omelas for that single, small improvement: to throw away the happiness of thousands for the chance of the happiness of one: that would be to let guilt within the walls indeed.

The title of the story refers to those who can, for one reason or another, no longer live with such a bargain. These people leave Omelas for no one knows where: The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelas.

This story appears in, among other places, the section of an anthology covering utilitarianism in its different forms, & is used by the editors to raise the question of how much suffering is acceptable when great benefit or happiness results. I like using the story with my Seniors, as it nicely complements Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” which they read in their English classes, & encourages consideration of the deals we make in society to benefit ourselves but which harm others. I usually warn them not to dismiss the scenario as too fantastic, & ask them why I think this. Some raise the issues of sweat shops or corporate greed, while others discuss how we treat animals to feed ourselves. A few mention abortion. I try to draw attention to what must occur in Omelas for this economy to function as well as it does, namely, the complete dehumanization of the child & the ability to justify its suffering, which leads to the further dehumanization of those offering justification. Such justification is always necessary, & the citizens of Omelas are well-trained in offering it, especially as they must find a way to live with themselves in the face of such wretchedness:

Often the young people go home in tears, or in a tearless rage, when they have seen the child and faced this terrible paradox. They may brood over it for weeks or years. But as time goes on they begin to realize that even if the child could be released, it would not get much good of its freedom: a little vague pleasure of warmth and food, no doubt, but little more. It is too degraded and imbecile to know any real joy. It has been afraid too long ever to be free of fear. Its habits are too uncouth for it to respond to humane treatment. Indeed, after so long it would probably be wretched without walls about it to protect it, and darkness for its eyes, and its own excrement to sit in. Their tears at the bitter injustice dry when they begin to perceive the terrible justice of reality, and to accept it. . .

Yet there is another dimension to this tale that brings to my mind The Hunger Games & what it portrays, a dimension that should warn the reader not to read Le Guin’s story as a simplistic fable. And to consider the very real modern & contemporary societies where analogous horrors have been & continue to be perpetrated in one form or another.

. . . Yet it is their tears and anger, the trying of their generosity and the acceptance of their helplessness, which are perhaps the true source of the splendor of their lives. Theirs is no vapid, irresponsible happiness. They know that they, like the child, are not free. They know compassion. It is the existence of the child, and their knowledge of its existence, that makes possible the nobility of their architecture, the poignancy of their music, the profundity of their science. It is because of the child that they are so gentle with children. They know that if the wretched one were not there sniveling in the dark, the other one, the flute-player, could make no joyful music as the young riders line up in their beauty for the race in the sunlight of the first morning of summer.

“They know compassion.” And nobility, poignancy, profundity. In short, things which make any society “civilized.” “They” are not uncouth barbarians, but the most cultured of people, those with whom we like to identify ourselves. Yet their compassion, & the compassion of all societies that engages in rationalizations for its moral barbarity, falls well short of the full demands love places on us, the “suffering-with” the wounded & vulnerable other in our midst that the gospel calls us to. Their compassion is one that ultimately kills. This thought occurs to me every time I hear the bioethicist Peter Singer of Princeton University speak about compassion & his desire to alleviate suffering by offering a thoroughly rational ethical theory, one freed from the stains of emotion, not to mention all hints of teleology & religious faith. When covering his work some of my students openly wonder how he can speak of compassion & the elimination of suffering while claiming that there is little ethical difference between killing a snail & a day-old infant. The personhood theory he espouses alongside his updated version of utilitarianism would be of great use in Omelas, I think. Distinguishing between a human being & a human person based on cognitive capacities is a clever move for anyone interested in justifying the mistreatment, including the death, of those considered expendable because they are burdensome. Abortion rights advocates like this approach for obvious reasons, as do medical ethicists seeking to justify infanticide by calling it post-birth abortion. What is so worrisome, I try to convey to them, is how dehumanizing others desensitizes us to not only their dignity as persons, but to our own humanity. CS Lewis noted how our mistreatment of others makes it easier & more satisfying to continue mistreating them, just as acting in a loving manner ultimately makes it easier to love. He knew Aristotle & St. Thomas, & wrote compellingly not only about growth in the virtues & vices, but also about the abolition of man, the process by which we gradually surrender the moral sensibilities that provide the foundations for civilized life. Bl. John Paul II spoke of the culture of death that emerges out of this abolition, a culture that has little difficulty in speaking of compassion while pursuing its exact opposite. Even the most perverse societies, like that of Omelas, have their cultured devotees of compassion, justice, peace, etc., who openly weep at injustice & suffering, so long as it is the right type. In a weird sort of parallelism, the daily cruelties visited upon the vulnerable produce in the abusers a kind of psychic energy enabling not only their tears, but also their cultural achievements. I have no reason to doubt that Peter Singer is a fine father to his daughters, that medical ethicists justifying infanticide are fine employees & upstanding citizens. Hitler was very nice to his secretaries; as Traudl Junge recounts in her account of her life serving Hitler, he was like a father to her, & she appreciated his many kindnesses. The cruelties he visited upon his enemies, like those rationalized by advocates of personhood theory & the continued suffering of the child in Omelas, often seem completely divorced from genuine hatred. And they are considered necessary, just, required for social harmony. The cruelties are rationalized, shown to be necessary if we wish to be truly humane. Theories are developed showing how logically necessary it is to perform the rituals of cruelty. As is the case with the citizens of Panem.

As Collins describes this nation & its inhabitants, there is little reason to consider Panem, its capital a shining city of prosperity, as the dark haunt of bloodthirsty ghouls. The bread-&-circuses theme is carefully announced & illustrated, hearkening us back to ancient Rome & its taste for murderous entertainments, & some of the characters we meet from there are indeed bizarre & callous. But apart from President Snow, who literally reeks of blood (why he does is explained in the 3^rd book), we do not see anyone with horns or a pitchfork. The people there have the same concerns & fears as we do, & rightly worry about the social chaos that rebellion can cause. Of course Panem is also bathed in the blood of the innocent, & its citizens revel in all the rituals attached to the Hunger Games themselves. But ask any of them if their enjoyment of these rituals suggests a warped moral sense or a taste for cruelty, & you’ll be able to count the blank stares. Just as most of the citizens of Omelas consider themselves & their society just; just as Peter Singer & all the other contemporary merchants of death raise the flag of compassion on the graves of their victims. They are able to do this with a straight face because they fail to see those victims as victims, as real persons deserving anything like real compassion.  Thus their growing indifference to the suffering they glamorize, & their increasing capacity to perfect the language & rituals by which they justify & routinize their cruelty.

Suzanne Collins’ real contribution in her trilogy, however, has less to do with how she paints the bad guys & more to do with how the good guys emulate them. Apart from Peeta, who among the good guys is tortured by the violence they are forced into? Katniss is difficult to read, at least after only one reading of the series. She is sympathetic & heroic, cold & calculating all at once. And she becomes a seasoned killer. Above all, she is ruined by what happens to her & the subsequent choices she makes, & this is where Collins achieves something JK Rowling does not in the Harry Potter books. There, good & evil are more easily distinguishable. While Draco Malfoy encourages some sympathy, how many other Slytherins or Death Eaters are more than one-dimensional characters, wholly bent on evil? Severus Snape is the one great literary character in the series, a man of no little complexity who repels & attracts at the same time, & Dumbledore develops greater depth when we learn of his adolescent desire for power & how this led to tragedy, for him & others. But fighting against the bad guys never seems to affect the good guys all that much. Harry is haunted by the loss of his parents & his godfather, but does he ever wrestle with using unforgivable curses (unsuccessfully, I have to add)? Fortunately for him, he doesn’t actually kill anybody, especialy innocents, at least that we can see. (Is that right? Apart from Voldemort, does Harry actually kill anyone? I can’t recall.) As dark as the series got in the last 2 books, it is remarkably staid in its violence when contrasted with Collins’ trilogy, & we are never encouraged to reflect on the person Harry is forced to become as a result of his involvement in the war against Voldemort, because he doesn’t really change all that much. We cheer him on as he hunts horcruxes & pushes aside one attempt after another to thwart him, but the chief difficulty he faces is procedural, not moral: How can he find & destroy horcruxes, & then kill their maker? Because of this, most of the violence in the Harry Potter series is unremarkable. Characters we like die at the hands of the wicked, & characters we like kill the wicked, but the moral stakes are much lower than those in The Hunger Games trilogy. Again, Katniss is shattered not only by her losses, for, like Harry, she loses family members, but most of all by her own actions. Her final act of killing does seem to indicate a moral awareness of some depth, but by that point she is so deeply implicated in the very acts she is fighting against that it seems hollow. The laughter of President Snow is telling. Does he see what Katniss has become?

This is a tremendous risk for Collins. Teen readers are not often called upon to exercise the type of discernment required by these books, & I suspect that most readers, even adults, will likely miss the invitation to lament the cruelties we compassionate, cultured people too often justify & celebrate. Many readers have complained about how the 3^rd book was a disappointment, for one reason or another. They especially don’t like how the characters develop. Perhaps they want the same assurances JK Rowling gave, the nice wrap up, an epilog in which normality reigns & where our heroes can grow old in peace after vanquishing their foes. What Suzanne Collins refuses to do is allow any touch of normality for a protagonist forced to endure not only the barbarity of the rituals of a modern panem et circenses government strategy, but her own growing indifference to the use of scapegoating & violence as a strategy to defeat the bad guys. For this Collins should be thanked, not chastised, as some reviewers shocked by the presence of such violence do. Whether or not you like the books, or think them fit reading for teens or adults, there is in them an invitation to reflect upon not only the horrors of war & our capacity to turn murder into reality TV, but upon the price all have to pay for the violence we too often endorse as the only means of achieving peace & justice.

—Anthony DiStefano

Impressions of Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life”

This is not really a formal review, as I’m not sure how to go about one of those. For more on the film, including links to a bunch of formal reviews, go to the “The Tree of Life” page on the main Emeth Society site. Link here.

There’s little doubt that Terrence Malick loves the Grand Gesture. If it’s 4^th & 12, he’s going for it; bottom of the 9^th, no outs, down by a run with a man on 1^st, he’s not looking to advance the runner.  He’s swinging for the fences. Remember Kevin Costner’s character in “Tin Cup,” & what he does at the 18^th hole every round? That’s Malick. And God bless him for it. When “The New World” washed over me the first time I saw it, I knew that here was a filmmaker who didn’t care what the cool kids were saying about him, or what kind of movies they wanted to see. He was thinking Big, & trying to adapt his chosen medium to his large ambitions. Andrei Tarkovsky, the legendary Russian director, knew this approach well, & articulated it perhaps better than any other recent artist. This from Sculpting in Time:

By means of art man takes over reality through a subjective experience. In science man’s knowledge of the world makes its way up an endless staircase & is successively replaced by new knowledge, with one discovery often enough being disproved by the next for the sake of a particular objective truth. An artistic discovery occurs each time as a new & unique image of the world, a hieroglyph of absolute truth. It appears as a revelation, as a momentary, passionate wish to grasp intuitively & at a stroke all the laws of this world—its beauty & ugliness, its compassion & cruelty, its infinity & its limitations. The artist expresses these things by creating the image, sui generis detector of the absolute. Through the image is sustained an awareness of the infinite: the eternal within the finite, the spiritual within matter, the limitless given form.

Forgive me if I take this as the best review yet of “The Tree of Life,” but it seems to capture the heart of the film, & without the histrionics present in so many of the reviews I’ve read. Certainly there are few who make, review, or watch films today who speak like this, at least without a cynical sneer curling their lip. Some of those latter folks spilled their sneers onto paper, with predictable results: “Massive pretensions—hubris—playing God—disingenuous posturing.” I hope Malick gets a kick out of those reviews. Perhaps they sting, & perhaps the expository demon within him, one which is lurking in the breast of many a great artist, is roaring its outrage. But I like to think that he appreciates that many of these reviewers who squawk their incomprehension are too busy reviewing several others films to fulfill their professional obligations to think twice about his film. I also like to think that Malick is a fan of Pixar, & recalls with fondness the words of that archcritic Anton Ego after his confidence was shattered by a culinary revelation:

In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little, yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talents, new creations. The new needs friends. Last night, I experienced something new; an extraordinary meal from a singularly unexpected source. To say that both the meal and its maker have challenged my preconceptions about fine cooking, is a gross understatement. They have rocked me to my core. 

Change food to film, & you’re on to something. Not that critics can’t dislike a film by Terrence Malick, or that they all produce bits of tedious sameness as they move from film to film. I don’t envy the critic, & am grateful I don’t have to write a formal review of “The Tree of Life.” Having read over a dozen reviews in the last few days, I’m deeply impressed with many of the insights from reviewers, even those with whom I disagree or not named Tarkovsky.

Yes, I recommend the film. Five stars, two thumbs up, big smiley face, road sign saying “See this film,” whatever device we use to indicate approval, I bestow that. I still need to see the film again a few times to figure some things out, which is a plus; how many films have you seen that you can say, “I’ve seen it twice, it rocked me each time, & I gotta see it again”? What remains fuzzy to me is the ending. Much of the discussion among reviewer concerns whether or not it “works.” Heck, I’m not even sure what’s going on, so I’ll prescind from evaluating its success. But I don’t think it is a vision of the afterlife, a glimpse of heaven. It does appear to be a scene of reconciliation, however. Maybe, maybe not. I’d also like to pay much closer attention to the score. This is, after all, a Malick film, & he understands as well as anyone how integral music is to the tale being told.

This last point deserves some mention, as a number of reviewers seem to think they’re evaluating an essay or, worse, a homily, & glide too easily past incidentals like the music score. Thus they read the film in terms of a spiritualistic, new age soup with a feel-goody god hiding out in the clouds above, leaving everybody down below to do as they will. Did they really not listen to the music? Did they not think that the choice of the “Agnus Dei” from Berlioz’s “Requiem” near the very end of the film was important? Agnus Dei, qui tollit peccata mundi. . .: what might those words mean, I wonder? Perhaps the film could have been paused & a clip of the director inserted, announcing that what we have in this piece is. . . . Oh, never mind. The point is, a film is not an editorial, essay, manifesto, catechism, etc. The tools required to watch attentively are different from those needed to read St. Thomas. Flannery O’Connor had a lot to say about this, & had the hard experience of people with wooden literary sensibilities blustering their way through reviews of her novels & stories. Here’s what she said:

“We hear a great deal about humility being required to lower oneself, but it requires an equal humility and a real love of the truth to raise oneself and by hard labor to acquire higher standards. And this is certainly the obligation of the Catholic. It is his obligation in all the disciplines of life but most particularly in those on which he presumes to pass judgment. Ignorance is excusable when it is borne like a cross, but when it is wielded like an ax, and with moral indignation, then it becomes something else indeed. We reflect the Church in everything we do, and those who can see clearly that our judgment is false in matters of art cannot be blamed for suspecting our judgment in matters of religion.”

Again, I have little quarrel with those who do not like “The Tree of Life.” But they should be able to articulate why they dislike it without criticizing it for not being the kind of film they think is needed. Criticize the film that’s there, not one that Malick should have made. As the playwright always says, if a Message is what you want, use Western Union.

Here’s where the issue of whether or not “The Tree of Life” is a “religious” or “Christian” film comes up. Somewhere I read that this was the most Christian film since “The Passion of the Christ.” Of course, others (see my comments on the review in the First Things blog by a Mr. Collins) go the other way, looking for the God Who Is Not There. My friend Rodney Howsare had an interesting take on the film after we saw it a few weeks ago, suggesting that it might be seen as a kind of answer to the new atheists. Not that it is an explicitly Christian film, or engages in any kind of apologetics that cries out “Ah ha! Got you there, Richard Dawkins; answer that, you Godless reductionist.” No, an impressionistic collage of images, words, & music appeals to us differently than even a more straightforward narrative film, so due caution is necessary when bringing up Christianity & atheism here. What Howsare meant was something broader, something like what Flannery O’Connor meant when she wrote:

“. . . if the writer believes that our life is & will remain essentially mysterious, if he looks upon us as beings existing in a created order to whose laws we freely respond, then what he sees on the surface will be of interest to him only as he can go through it into an experience of mystery itself.”

If a Christian film is one that leads us to a deeper recognition that our lives can only be understood properly in the context of the creation & sustaining of our world by the God celebrated in Berlioz’s “Requiem,” then, yes, this qualifies as a Christian film. When a film, or any work of art, is able to pierce the surface of our lives by its portrayal of our love, longing, & loss, & yields an experience of mystery which invites us to contemplate not only creation but he who takes away the sins of the world, what other kind of film can it be? The very structure of “The Tree of Life” says more than any of its characters, & while the many voiceovers are important clues as to how we should understand the film, we shouldn’t make the mistake of taking these in isolation from the rest of the film. To the new atheist dogma that we inhabit a planet intended by no one in a universe lacking meaning, “The Tree of Life” does counter with the best of knockdown punches by portraying the truth the Psalmist first uttered so long ago, & continues to proclaim among us:

O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is thy name in all the earth! Thou whose glory above the heavens is chanted 2 by the mouth of babes and infants, thou hast founded a bulwark because of thy foes, to still the enemy and the avenger. 3 When I look at thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars which thou hast established; 4 what is man that thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that thou dost care for him? 5 Yet thou hast made him little less than God, and dost crown him with glory and honor. 6 Thou hast given him dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet, 7 all sheep and oxen, and also the beasts of the field, 8 the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the sea. 9 O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is thy name in all the earth!  

The heavens indeed are telling of the glory of God, & we can see & hear that glory in the lives of one, rather ordinary family in 1950’s Waco, Texas, as well as across our own street & in our own home.  He who has ears to hear. . . .

Here are some comments on 2 reviews I didn’t much like, for reasons I spell out. 

The first link is to the review from James Bowman. One reason I like his reviews (usually) is because he can be surly & crotchety, required characteristics if one is to be a movie critic.  Go here:

http://www.jamesbowman.net/reviewDetail.asp?pubID=2103

The other review cited in the following comments is from the First Things blog.  Go here for the review:

http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2011/06/tree-of-life-yields-little-fruit

My impression is that Bowman wrote his review quickly & impatiently, as if he were bothered by having to waste his time with another Malick film (cf. his earlier reviews of “The Thin Red Line” & “The New World,” which sound a lot like his review of “The Tree of Life”). I wonder if his dislike of Malick led him to take shortcuts.  When discussing the nature/grace voiceover, for instance, he quotes not the film itself, but the trailer for the film.  This is significant, for the trailer goes: “There are two ways through life, the way of nature & the way of grace.”  In the film, however, it goes: “The nuns taught us there are two ways through life. . . .” Bowman’s flippant response (“Really? It’s always seemed to me that most people follow both at different times”) should have been unnecessary, as the film actually demonstrates this very point. “Father. Mother,” Jack notes at one point. “Always you wrestle inside me. Always you will.” Later Jack paraphrases St. Paul’s famous lines in Romans 7: “I can’t do what I want. That which I do I hate.” Seems that there is a recognition here of the tensions inherent in a life pursuing grace, something Bowman missed. This is an important miss, as well, given the family drama that resides at the heart of the film’s (loose) narrative.

Related to this is Bowman’s too-quick dismissal of the claim that “no one who lives by the way of grace ever comes to a bad end.” “Absurd,” he declares. I’d agree, if this claim were actually meant to be taken literally as a blanket statement.  It’s not, however, & on this point Bowman is not alone in missing something important about “The Tree of Life.” Kevin Collins in his review in the First Things blog badly misses many things, perhaps most importantly the nature of “Christian art.” For Collins this seems to mean something that explicitly evangelizes, or is at least openly Christological. He chastises Malick for not making a film that is openly & clearly Christian, as if such a thing requires rather clear catechesis of some sort. He goes as far to say that Malick gives us an impersonal god & new age spiritualism. C’mon; isn’t this a wearisome bit of nonsense, that Catholics especially should be able to avoid? For goodness’ sake, read Maritain or St. Thomas; read the essays & letters of Flannery O’Connor.  To both Collins & Bowman, who have different concerns but make similar misjudgments, I think an appropriate question is: Does the quote from Job at the outset of the film, & the nature of so many of the voiceovers, not suggest that the Old Testament wisdom literature is the appropriate context for evaluating Malick’s film? This tradition contains many lines like the one Bowman claims is absurd. Consider Psalm 1. The 1st 3 verses say:

1 Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers; 2 but his delight is in the law of the LORD, and on his law he meditates day and night. 3 He is like a tree planted by streams of water, that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither. In all that he does, he prospers. 

“Whatever he does prospers.” Whatever he does.  Really? How many just men have taken a beating like Job? Any how many have watched the wicked prosper? The wisdom tradition is filled with contrast statements like this. Taken by themselves, as absolute statements of what is always the case, I’ll join Bowman & say “Absurd.” But they’re not taken by themselves. The Psalms alone contain any number of statements to the effect that the wicked prosper& the just are trampled underfoot & come to a bad end. “Bad end” must be taken in a particular way, however. The Church reads Psalm 1 as Christological; Christ is the just man who prospers.  He’s also nailed to a cross. The fuller context of the wisdom writings includes the Gospels. Yet this doesn’t mean that an artist can’t treat wisdom themes apart from the fullness of Christian truth. Art is not theology. Here’s Maureen Mullarky on this topic:

“Art is an instrument thoroughly of this world; it is not revelation and has no theology. It is poorly suited to the spiritual burdens laid upon it. Artists themselves are not up to the task of defining or divining the Kingdom. In his small gem of a book The Responsibility of the Artist, Maritain defines the artist as ‘a man using Art.’ He is bound, like any other artisan, to the perfection of the work of his hands: ‘Art by itself tends to the good of the work, not to the good of man. The first responsibility of the artist is toward his work.’”

In other words, the artist is free to look at life in any number of ways.  In a film, even one as ambitious & far-ranging as “The Tree of Life,” it’s silly to demand a catechetical lesson or a fully-worked out theology intended to please the theologians among us. It would be like criticizing the film “Amadeus” because Salieri has a childish, quid pro quo view of God & no one criticizes & corrects his theology. The artist takes people as they are, & tries to do justice to what Joseph Conrad called “felt life.” And the felt life of this film is life in Waco, Texas, with an ordinary family going to church, saying prayers, taking sacraments. Collins is unimpressed by all this, & criticizes the wishy-washy religiosity that the Catechism of the Catholic Church would surely correct if given a chance. So much for felt life, for attending to things like context. The Christian artist will artfully weave into the story or film elements that are consistent with the faith of the Church, but these will not always rest on the work’s surface. And hopefully he will be able to trust his audience to pay attention to things like setting, locality, etc. Utinam sit, apparently. For more on this, cf. the Blog page & my entries on Flannery O’Connor.

Salieri is an appropriate reference here, as Mr. O’Brien (Brad Pitt) seems to think like him. His understanding of God is close to that of Job’s advisers & Salieri. He expects life, & God, to work on his terms. When his plant closes & he loses his job, he complains: “I never missed a day of work. I tithed.” This is a central strand in the film, of course, whose drama is set in motion by the death of Jack’s brother at age 19. Bad things happen to good people, even those who do their job well, who pay their taxes, who follow the way of grace. There is, as Job discovered, no “answer” to this. Malick treats this with the highest respect, & dramatizes the whole sweep of creation in order to frame the story of the O’Brien family. In other words, death & tragedy are brought into dialogue with creation, & the viewer is thus forced to ask difficult questions about how we understand ourselves as mortal creatures who inhabit a world dangling in the heavens.  This follows the pattern of the Old Testament, in a way; the creation narratives took their final shape, we’re told, only after the tragedy of the Babylonian Exile.  The experience of death, then, leads to the contemplation of origins. It is neither absurd nor pretentious to use images, narrative, & music to dramatize this pattern. Nor is it subChristian or new age-y.

—Anthony DiStefano

Love, Suffering, & the Defeat of Death: Why Voldemort & Peter Singer Understand Nothing

“The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death.”

Harry read the words slowly, as though he would have only one chance to take in the meaning, & he read the last of them aloud.

“‘The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death’ . . .”  A horrible thought came to him, & with it a kind of panic.  “Isn’t that a Death Eater idea?  Why is that there?”

“It doesn’t mean defeating death in the way the Death Eaters mean it, Harry,” said Hermione, her voice gentle.  “It means . . . you know . . . living beyond death.  Living after death.” —Harry Potter & the Deathly Hallows, CH 16
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I’m not sure if Voldemort would assert that bestiality & contracepted incestuous sex are morally acceptable behavior, or that there is little ethical difference between killing a snail & a day-old infant, but he does seem to have something in common with the bad boy of bioethics, Peter Singer, who does say such things.  Both the Dark Lord of the Harry Potter franchise & the Australian philosopher now residing at Princeton University have their problems with suffering, not only thinking it allied with the greatest of evils, but also obsessed with trying to render it powerless through dark magic, in Voldemort’s case, or eliminate it as much as possible through the strange logic of personhood theory & preference utilitarianism, in Singer’s.  Readers of the Harry Potter series know that Voldemort’s fear of suffering & death lead him to mutilate his soul through the creation of multiple Horcruxes, which requires multiple acts of murder; we also know that while he did extend his life through such acts, it was not much of a life, & his goal of conquering death altogether was futile.  Rooting for such an obvious villain is difficult, even if his goal is shared by others (see the philosopher’s stone, which, according to the first book, was created by a guy who appears to have been decent).  Readers of Peter Singer, however, are a mixed bunch, some applauding his openness to redefining personhood & rejecting the idea that all human beings have dignity, while the rest of us see him as something of a childish ghoul, trying to shock everyone in the room with his “bold” proclamations (“Sex with your sister, or dog, is wrong?  Why?  Who says so?  And what’s so special about defective infants that we should legally protect their lives?”) while placing a target on the backs of growing numbers of vulnerable members of society.  Singer’s philosophy, however, like Voldemort’s, insofar as he has one, is rooted in the attempt to diminish & ultimately render unnecessary human suffering.  While Singer doesn’t seem (yet) to have embraced the posthumanist wish of achieving earthly immortality through biotechnological means, he does want to help those with defective infants or intellectually disabled parents & spouses eliminate their suffering, & the suffering of their wards, by being able to eliminate them, in the name of compassion.
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“You do not seek to kill me, Dumbledore” called Voldemort. . . .  Above such brutality, are you?”

“We both know that there are other ways of destroying a man, Tom,” Dumbledore said calmly. . . .  Merely taking your life would not satisfy me, I admit—”

“There is nothing worse than death, Dumbledore!” snarled Voldemort.

“You are quite wrong,” said Dumbledore. . . .  Indeed, your failure to understand that there are things much worse than death has always been your greatest weakness—” —Harry Potter & the Order of the Phoenix, CH 36
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This passage nicely reveals the motivation behind Voldemort’s plotting & planning; his entire operation, so to speak, is called forth to wage war not against Harry Potter, Dumbledore, & the Ministry of Magic, but against death itself.  Mortality, & the suffering inevitably attached to it, is his greatest foe.  This is what separates Harry from Voldemort; he feels for those who suffer & die.  He is moved by compassion, by pain & loss, by witnessing the wanton destruction caused by Voldemort & his allies.  This marks him as human, a quality Voldemort sacrificed long ago, & Dumbledore reminds Harry that there is nothing odd about the pain he suffers:

“There is no shame in what you are feeling, Harry,” said Dumbledore’s voice.  “On the contrary . . . the fact that you can feel pain like this is your greatest strength. . . .  Harry, suffering like this proves that you are still a man!  This pain is part of being human—”

And this is directly related to his capacity to love, the one trait which best defines Harry. This proves decisive in the series, as is spelled out in the 7th book, when Harry makes the choice at Shell Cottage to finally trust Dumbledore & stop obsessing over Hallows & turn his attentions back to finding Horcruxes.  This is something Voldemort can’t even begin to understand, to his eventual ruin.

Despite all the criticisms, including from Catholics concerned about a glorifying of a gnostic elitism (I’ll have a post on this soon) in the Harry Potter series, JK Rowling said in an interview that the main theme of the books is death, not magic.  Alan Jacobs’ perceptive reviews of Harry Potter draw attention to the question of the use of technology in pursuit of certain goods, as Voldemort & the Death Eaters seek to achieve immortality through the use of the Dark Arts.  Harry’s puzzlement when reading the words cited above on a tombstone is caused by his painful experience of their pursuits, which include the murder of his parents.  And these pursuits are in important ways strikingly similar to those of Peter Singer, posthumanists, & others devoted to the elimination of the vulnerabilty of being human.
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Ralph Wood, in Flannery O’Connor & the Christ-Haunted South, has this to say in a section dealing with O’Connor’s suffering from the fatal illness that claimed her at age 39:

“Rather than fearing God as our ancestors did, we now fear death; & so our scientific projects & materialist greed are driven by a massive dread of extinction.  Hence our own personal desire to die quickly & cheaply, preferably during our sleep, & without bother to anyone else.  We do not trust our families to help us die, & we do not want to make a painful preparation for death.”

This quote recalls Singer’s attempts to redefine the human person & the ethical ties that bind us to one another.  It also reminds me of a comment my mother made to me a few years ago, one which saddened me then & motivates me now.  “I don’t want to be a burden to you,” she said, repeating words that are likely common among the elderly who are losing their capacities for independence.  “Mom, I was a burden to you for a long time,” I think I said.  And, in many ways, still am.  I was at one point a sort of parasite, really, an image Annie Dillard capitalizes on in describing how unborn children look from a certain point of view.  And I wasn’t feeding or clothing myself, helping with the mortgage, taking myself to baseball games or the doctor’s office.  The first words I, like every other person, uttered through screams, cries, & grunts were “I NEED!  GIVEGIVEGIVE!”  My vocabulary may have grown through the years, but how many of can say we have ever outgrown those first sentiments?  She answered me, again & again, without condition, & loving gratitude suggests that when our roles are reversed, respect for the 4th commandment is the path of wisdom.  A gratitude, moreover, which expresses itself in showing her love, patience, & tolerance of her growing incapacity, & in helping her to feel that she is anything but a burden.  Exactly what she showed me.

“Blessed Burden” is the title of a Hummel print I bought from an antique shop shortly after our first child was born, & it depicts a young girl carrying a lamb in a basket.  Cute, in a smushy, Hummel kind of way, but also true.  For folks like Singer, these two words are always at odds, “blessed” locked into a fierce adversarial relationship with “burden.”  This always makes me wonder about Singer the father, not to mention husband, son, & so on.  I like to imagine that Singer is a far better father etc. than he is an ethicist, that his life is vastly more reasonable & human than his thought, that he recognizes, at a deep level, that the demands we inevitably place on one another are no excuse for defining the most vulnerable among us out of personhood, & that these natural demands should call forth from us patience, empathy, & love that might otherwise remain dormant.  That these virtues, & not our “rational capacities,” much less the ability to enjoy a pleasurable, suffering-free, independent life, make us human.  Singer’s lack of insight about the human condition is especially troubling, as that patience, empathy, & love do not often sit on the surface of most people’s lives, just waiting to be effortlessly spilled out when others we choose to favor need them, but must gradually take form through the practices associated with life among other vulnerable people.  No wonder Singer & other utilitarians reject Aristotle; it’s not just because his thought is teleological, but because his emphasis on the development of virtue makes stringent demands on us, &, when refined by St. Thomas, make it impossible for us to hide behind the human being/human person distinction Singer favors.  One could paraphrase Chesterton on Christianity here: Aristotle is not rejected because he’s been tried & found wanting; he hasn’t been tried at all.  The formation of virtuous habits is hard work, & becomes much harder when charity, the “greatest of these,” is added to the mix.  Just as Voldemort scoffs at the weakness of others as he seeks to achieve an invulnerability for himself, Singer’s impulse is to turn us away from the inevitabilities of suffering & mortality, including the invitation we ourselves must eventually extend to others to care for us when we are most in need & thus helping them toward a more virtuous life.  My children are “burdens” to my wife & I now, as they were when they were yet unborn, & as they will remain till we depart them & this life.  And we will increasingly become burdens to them. To treat this as unnatural, something to be conquered in the name of “compassion” or personal autonomy, is childish, reflecting an immaturity we expect from spoiled, brattish children who invite a kick in the rear.  That we reward this kind of petulance with accolades, chairs in bioethics, & disciples is a commentary on ourselves that should frighten all but the most callous, as Voldemort should frighten every reader who witnesses his disregard for others, &, ultimately, for all that once made him human.

What Wood calls a “massive dread of extinction” fuels the freakish fringes of biotechnology today, giving birth to posthumanism & its calls to treat death as a disease to be conquered through new technologies that will enable us to live on past the deterioration of our bodies.  It is an ancient dread, & is by no means unnatural.  How we respond to it, however, defines us & the world we build.  Was it Peter Berger who defined culture as “all the little flags we fly in defiance of death”?  How about the art of Mozart, Bergman, Monet et al. as differing ways of celebrating our mortality by trying to appreciate & understand it better, leading not to a raging against its insistent presence among us, but to the recognition that Tolkien’s elves had that death is best seen as a gift, a blessing that frees us from the ravages of time & the temptation merely to persist?  What kind of life does Voldemort really have, after all?  What would his immortality look like?  The vicious man, Aristotle said, can never be happy, as his ingrained habits prevent anything like the moderation of one’s passions that is required for genuine happiness.  There is a direct correlation between Voldemort’s murderous behavior & his grasping for immortality.  “Nothing is worse than death!” is the dirge of a ruined human being who knows nothing about himself or anything else, a lack that finally betrays him & leads to his ruin.  Dumbledore utters the most powerful words in the entire series when he spells out for the not-quite-dead Harry the truth about Voldemort:

“You were the seventh Horcrux, Harry, the Horcrux he never meant to make.  He had rendered his soul so unstable that it broke apart when he committed those acts of unspeakable evil, the murder of your parents, the attempted killing of a child.  But what escaped from that room was even less than he knew.  He left more than his body behind.  He left part of himself latched to you, the would-be victim who had survived.

“And his knowledge remained woefully incomplete, Harry!  That which Voldemort does not value, he takes no trouble to comprehend.  Of house-elves & children’s tales, of love, loyalty, & innocence, Voldemort knows & understands nothing.  Nothing.  That they all have a power beyond his own, a power beyond the reach of any magic, is a truth he has never grasped.”

Change the words of that last paragraph slightly & you have insight into where Peter Singer fails as an ethicist.  Of the weak & vulnerable among us, of sacrificial love, loyalty to those in our care, & the innocence that sees other human persons as bearing the greatest of gifts, God’s own image & likeness, Singer knows & understands nothing. His truncated view of reason, which denies to the cosmos & to its human inhabitants any telos & any Creator, & which seeks cause to eliminate the natural ties that bind us sons & daughters of Adam & Eve together, falls flat before the deeper reason (the “deeper magic” that Aslan speaks of in Narnia, & which JK Rowling illustrates in the Potter books) informed by love, a reason which accepts the suffering of others, &, ultimately, our own.

—Anthony DiStefano

Kneeling Before the God of Bargains: Lucy Pevensie, Antonio Salieri, & Bearing the Cross

When CS Lewis’s mother died, the young Jack didn’t throw away his belief in God, but he did look at God much differently.  This must be a capricious God, he thought, one who refuses to honor the quid pro quo arrangement he is expected to play along with.  I ask, & since you are a good God, & one with the power to grant my wish, you give, in return for a service I provide.  Such a view is hardly new or original.  In one form or another this assumption has fueled religious belief & ritual since there have been such things.  It is typical for children to see God in this way, & it is not surprising that the young Lewis should expect God to cure his mother. It is, however, a problem when such a view of God remains in place after childhood. Recall the beginning of Lucy Pevensie’s conversation with Aslan in Prince Caspian when she first encounters him in the woods, some time after their last meeting.

“Aslan,” said Lucy, “you’re bigger.”
“That is because you are older, little one,” answered he.
“Not because you are?”
“I am not. But every year you grow, you will find me bigger.”

That, at least, is the hope.  As we mature, our childish ideas of God develop with us.  God should begin to become far more complicated than the Great Being who gives when we ask, whatever we ask.  That such growth doesn’t always occur is revealed in myriad ways, not least when people blame God for the suffering & pain that so often dominates our attention.  We often seem to assume that as long as we play by the rules we lay down—be a good person, most importantly, maybe add the religious requirements of going to church, saying prayers—God will cancel the requirement that we carry our cross.  This may sound flippant on my part; I have never lost a spouse or child, or seen my world wiped away by a natural disaster. But reading the responses to tragedies in recent years, especially the tsunami in 2004, one can’t help but notice not only the barely suppressed glee at how we religious believers must be speechless in the face of such suffering (since we have apparently never considered suffering as any kind of problem), but also the assumption that nobody deserves such suffering. There still lingers, even in the minds of unbelievers, this ancient notion that God is required to behave himself by observing all the social niceties & protect us from pain.  When he doesn’t—when mothers die of cancer, when children suffer barbaric treatment at the hands of parents or masters, when thousands upon thousands suffer at the hands of nature or dictators—we find it all too natural to accuse him of being either powerless, arbitrary, or simply cruel.  Like the young CS Lewis or Ivan Karamazov, we don’t deny God so much as “return our ticket” & refuse to accept his claims upon us, as the price of admission into such a world is too steep.

Lucy Pevensie is a sharp little girl, precisely because of her great love for Aslan. She is able to discern things her older siblings can’t.  Thus, the scene mentioned above shows her theological instincts in full bloom.  She finds Aslan bigger, for she has grown in her capacities to see more of him.  Lewis also grew beyond his childhood notions of God.  For me the best theological writing in all his writings is in Book 4 of Mere Christianity when Lewis discusses the inevitable price of conversion.  The suffering of tin men being spoilt as they gradually become real men is an inspired metaphor, despite the criticism that such a metaphor reflects an inadequate understanding of the relationship between nature & grace. Describing the process of bearing the cross is open to multiple descriptions, metaphors, & stories; what remains important is recognizing its need.  And to do this requires us to cast aside the childhood notion that Lewis did, that Ivan Karamazov could not, & that Antonio Salieri in Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus is ultimately ruined by.  His idea of God is very small indeed, & leads to a war he can not win as he tries to destroy the man whom God has bestowed his favor upon.

The historical Salieri

Near the beginning of the play (Act 1, Scene 2) Salieri describes the bargain he made with God when he was sixteen, one which sets the stage for the events to come.  This God, seen every Sunday at Mass, was

“staring at the world with dealer’s eyes.  Tradesmen had put up there.  Those eyes made bargains, real & irreversible.  ‘You give me so—I’ll give you so!  No more.  No less!”  The night before I left Legnano forever, I went to see Him, & made a bargain with Him myself!  I was a sober sixteen, filled with a desperate sense of right.  I knelt before the God of Bargains, & I prayed through the moldering plaster with all my soul.  ”Signore, let me be a composer!  Grant me sufficient fame to enjoy it.  In return, I will live with virtue.  I will strive to better the lot of my fellows.  And I will honor You with much music all the days of my life!’  As I said Amen, I saw His eyes flare.  [As ‘God’] ‘Bene. Go forth, Antonio.  Serve Me & mankind, & you will be blessed!’ . . . ‘Grazie!’ I called back. ‘I am Your servant for life!'”

Thus begins Salieri’s road to a musical career, & to final ruin.  Shaffer’s play, & the film based on it, shows the fruits of such an imagined bargain.  When Mozart appears in Vienna, Salieri gradually realizes his significance.  Such sublime music as Mozart composes, with an apparent ease that shocks Salieri as much as the music itself, clearly demonstrates that God has betrayed Salieri by giving Mozart, a crude brat without the capacity to appreciate his great fortune, the great gift Salieri demanded for himself.  The speech that follows his recognition that the God of Bargains has reneged reveals the confusion & rage of a soul tormented by its own inability or unwillingness to see God as bigger than its own desires:

“‘Grazie, Signore! You gave me the desire to serve You—which most men do not have—then saw to it that the service was shameful in the ears of the server.  Grazie! You gave me the desire to praise You—which most men do not feel—then made me mute.  Grazie tante! You put into me the perception of the Incomparable—which most men never know!—then ensured that I would know myself forever mediocre.”

He recounts his long hours of labor so that “I might hear Your Voice!” Now, he does hear it, “and it says only one name:  MOZART! . . .  Spiteful, sniggering, conceited, infantine Mozart—who has never worked one minute to help another man!” Echoing many throughout the ages who wonder why & how God gives his gifts so promiscuously to artists whose character leaves much to be desired, Salieri rages that Mozart is chosen by God to be his sole conduit.  “And my sole reward—my sublime privilege—is to be the sole man alive in this time who shall clearly recognize Your Incarnation!  Grazie e grazie ancora!”

Andrew May in a 2005 production of Amadeus

Then comes the declaration of war.  Such statements, I imagine, must come in different forms, sometimes explicitly & with great heat, sometimes more quietly & with resigned determination.  For the purposes of a play, Salieri must announce his intentions, as these create the dramatic tension:

“So be it!  From this time we are enemies, You & I!  I’ll not accept it from you—do you hear? . . .  They say God is not mocked.  I tell You, Man is not mocked! . . .  You are the Enemy!  I name Thee now—Nemico Eterno! And this I swear: To my last breath I shall block You on earth, as far as I am able!  What use, after all, is Man, if not to teach God His lessons?”

The play & film are thus concerned with Salieri’s plot against the God of Bargains who has deceived & now mocks him through the voice of Mozart.  Every note of Mozart’s music professes God’s rejection of Salieri.  Mozart becomes a means to achieve Salieri’s revenge.  Behind the sophisticated façade of a Viennese court composer lies a child who made demands of God & becomes petulant when those demands are not met.  Salieri attributes his admitted mediocrity, & Mozart’s great skill, to God’s spite.  This is Salieri’s world; he resides at its center, as does every child in its own mind.  Anything that happens, happens to him.  God is simply a very powerful, though capricious, Instrument by which we receive our heart’s delight.  Thus we have need of prayers, sacrifices, virtues, etc. to placate him.  Everything is oriented toward our getting exactly what we want.  The question of what we should want is a question we should all grow into; to fail to ask that question reveals a failure to understand the cross, Christ’s & our own.  It is to remain in a childish world of our own imagining.

Lucy Pevensie is much better prepared for all that happens in her many adventures in Narnia & elsewhere.  She grows up in ways Salieri refuses.  Aslan is able to guide her, even through her doubts & difficulties.  Though a child, she models the beginnings of a mature faith, one that eventually requires no imagined bargains & is thus able to withstand the trials & sufferings life brings, along with the required bearing of our cross.  Amadeus is not only great theater & cinema, but an entertaining illustration of a common set of theological errors we often hang onto from childhood, when they are more excusable.

—Anthony DiStefano

Jeff McMahan, Hippos Eating Crocs, & the Suffering Caused by Utilitarians

It’s that time in the semester when I cover Peter Singer, whom I’ve commented on several times in various posts.  This year I’m doing it in an Ethics course for Seniors, which I took over for a retiring colleague, though I normally spend some time on Singer, personhood theory, & related issues in my Philosophy course. Great fun, especially after the material on Social Darwinism & eugenics. In Ethics we make a quick romp through utilitarianism & then consider contemporary attempts to defend or revise it.  Singer fits perfectly here, as his attempt to update the theory with what he calls “preference utilitarianism” has made some waves, especially how he applies it in cases regarding infants, the elderly, & those suffering from a variety of cognitive disabilities.  The students are often, predictably, unsettled by what he says.  I tell them that Singer is hoping to, among other things, shock people by his statements, partly in order to get their attention, & partly to encourage us to discard any semblance of genuine compassion, traditionally understood.  So when he claims that there is no real difference between killing a snail & killing a day-old infant, since neither have genuine desires that can be thwarted, & that it would have been wrong for someone to have killed any of his children when they were infants not because of what those children were, but simply because he & his wife had the desire that they live. . . .  Ah, well, moral insanity has its logic & its appeal.  I still think the best comment on this is from GK Chesterton, whom I quoted in a blog entry on Singer.  Scroll down this page for that entry; here’s the appropriate quote:

“If you argue with a madman, it is extremely probable that you will get the worst of it; for in many ways his mind moves all the quicker for not being delayed by the things that go with good judgement. He is not hampered by a sense of humour or by charity, or by the dumb certainties of experience. He is the more logical for losing certain sane affections. Indeed, the common phrase for insanity is in this respect a misleading one. The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.”

Very nice, & to the point.  Reason is Singer’s mantra, though a castrated form, one divorced from Pascal’s recognition that while reason is necessary to think well, it is hardly sufficient. Other things, according to Pascal, will always intrude. Freud knew this as well, though he developed different conclusions than did Pascal. Both recognized that it is rather comical to base one’s life on the confidence that we are completely in control of our reason. At any rate, the Singer brand of utilitarian logic is increasingly on display by someone pretending to do serious thought; again, at the risk of being overly self-referential, check out my blog entry below on “miserabilism,” that absurd extension of the Philosophy of Eeyore that is making its way into print these days.  Here’s yet another example, from the opinion page of the Times.  According to Jeff McMahan, a philosopher at Rutgers, it’s time for us to deal decisively with the pesky problem of carnivores.  Not just humans who enjoy cheeseburgers or chicken caesar salads. McMahan’s piece is no simple screed against enjoying a double-double from In-N-Out Burger or wearing Cole Haans.  No, he’s after bigger game, namely, lions & tigers & bears.  Because they devour other animals in order to survive & have, unlike humans, no vegan options, they produce massive amounts of suffering.  And, as every utilitarian, classical or contemporary, knows, suffering must be stopped, or at least mitigated as much as possible.  And since Mufasa, Tigger, & Yogi can not be reasoned with to eat soy-based products & whatnot, a more radical solution is necessary: gradual forced extinction of carnivores.  We can help with that, wisely, gently, & over time. Having bigger brains gives us certain responsibilities, including easing the pain of giraffes, salmon, & the hordes of other animals & insects whose right to happiness is routinely ignored by hungry predators.  Go here for the story, entitled “The Meat Eaters.”

Just a little love bite?  While this seems like territorial behavior, hippos have been known to eat other animals, &, on occasion, other hippos

Now we’re getting to the real cruelty. . .

The fact that there are favorable responses to the Times piece suggests many things, none of them pretty.  Likewise, some of the responses suggest people who have a bad taste in their mouths, but can’t quite say why.  Apparently they lack either the conceptual resources to understand the shell game being played on them & the ability to articulate that they are being conned. The fact that there are people who write this kind of thing & are given the title “philosopher” is even more distressing.  I imagine Dr. McMahan will have to contact the movie studios to encourage them to stop making films with sympathetic carnivores in leading roles before his proposals can be seriously entertained, since, as Newman pointed out, we can not believe what we can not imagine being true.  Shape the imagination & the desire of a child, & he’s yours. Every respectable advertiser & movie executive knows this, not to mention Aristotle. Think of the horror of all those children being exposed to cuddly lil’ lions etc. & not being instructed on Bentham, Mill, & Singer.  And, I have to wonder, what about the fish? Remember Coral, & the suffering that selfish barracuda caused poor Marlin in Finding Nemo?  This qualifies as predation, & I wonder if McMahan is as concerned about Nemo & his numerous brothers & sisters who never had at a chance to experience freedom as he is about Bambi.  And, getting more serious, what about those primates like chimpanzees that have an apparently vicious streak that leads them occasionally to tear apart & eat each other as part of violent takeovers of territory?  This qualifies as the inflicting of suffering, doesn’t it?  But you have to be careful with animals like chimps if you’re a utilitarian, since they are increasingly seen as “persons” by the personhood theorists like Singer.  McMahan also has a gig at Princeton, where Singer teaches.  Does he, too, embrace personhood theory?  If so, how will he propose we deal with those chimps?  And what about all the birds that feed on little animals?  The insects & their predatory ways?  Spiders, snakes, digger wasps?  Or the many viruses that are living things? Do they not have responsibilities & rights? Oh, the horror. . . . Yes, I’m being ridiculous, but I didn’t start this mess.  Proposals like McMahan’s will extend in numerous directions, intended or not.  Singer has attempted to avoid the madness implied in his thought by saying, yes, while some animals do in fact qualify as persons, most don’t.  In a book review he once helpfully noted that while bestiality seldom harms the animal partner, the chicken is in fact choked by the act of male penetration (stop laughing), so there is a morality involved here.  We can, & must, make careful distinctions between the many different species of animals, which McMahan recognizes. But once we target the elimination of suffering as our principal ethical goal, can we ever stop?  Will reason allow it?

The mean bald eagle, unversed in Mill, preparing to inflict suffering

What about this guy?  That ain’t a hug.

Really, though, McMahan does quote Isaiah early on; he could also have quoted St. Paul in Romans 8 on how creation is eagerly awaiting its redemption.  Yes, many of us believe animal predation is somehow a consequence of the corruption resulting from the fall, & we do look forward to when lambs are no longer slaughtered & eaten by wolves, lions, etc.  I don’t want to be flippant here.  But c’mon.  Isn’t enough enough already?  A dog is a pig is a boy or whatever, fly-swatting as murder, save the whales but who cares about the unborn children, ridiculous signage (see below).  All this further illustrates Dostoevsky’s “Without God, anything is permissible,”along with Nietzsche’s fears of how nihilism will produce moronic attempts to create meaning, along with attempts at moral philosophy that are painfully indifferent to the facts. Has Prof. McMahan any background in ecology to speak so confidently of the forced extinction of scores of species of animals?  He seems aware of possible difficulties here, & he does try to temper his enthusiasm a bit.  But I wonder if he has ever considered that his position embraces the very kind of speciesist imperialism that contemporary utilitarians so love to disparage?  I can imagine animals everywhere thinking, “Who the hell does he think he is?”  Or, more to the point for the slippery-slopers, has he thought through to the obvious conclusion to his brand of thinking that, since humans cause great suffering to many species, our own included, we should be the first to go? See the miserabilists for that bit of logical clarity. Yes, by all means, Professor, & all you utilitarians pursuing reason, suffering must stop.  You, the personhood crowd, & the miserabilists can all help by discovering a sense of humour, charity, & the dumb certainties of experience, not to mention common sense, that which in the real world helps people not to adopt theories which insult all of what GKC listed above.  Along with a measure of true compassion, exercised on the truly vulnerable among us, those fellows like Singer have targeted for merciful deaths. Or, at least, come clean & tell us this is all a big joke, a way of making the Times & bloggers like me look silly & keeping unqualified people who know their lack in teaching positions with tenure & impressive titles.  But Singer has repeated shown how humorless contemporary utilitarians can be, so I’m not optimistic that any of these folks have a sense of humor.  If Prof. McMahan is joking, may he accept my sincere apologies.

At any rate, here’s the last paragraph of the editorial in the Times to give you a bit of a flavor:

Here, then, is where matters stand thus far.  It would be good to prevent the vast suffering and countless violent deaths caused by predation.  There is therefore one reason to think that it would be instrumentally good if  predatory animal species were to become extinct and be replaced by new herbivorous species, provided that this could occur without ecological upheaval involving more harm than would be prevented by the end of predation.  The claim that existing animal species are sacred or irreplaceable is subverted by the moral irrelevance of the criteria for individuating animal species.  I am therefore inclined to embrace the heretical conclusion that we have reason to desire the extinction of all carnivorous species, and I await the usual fate of heretics when this article is opened to comment.

This does sound tongue-in-cheek, doesn’t it?  I can imagine a couple of friends of mine, after a couple bourbons on a late Saturday night, deciding to scam the gullible by this kind of thing.  What to say if McMahan is actually serious?  How about:  “What a hero!  Awaiting the stake, as the more orthodox human carnivores stoke the fire.  The courage of our noble intellectuals, bravely voicing their contrararian views in the face of massive, crushing opposition, blah blah blah.”  But please.  Charity alone prevents me from saying something cheeky & preposterous like “Pass me another steak, Professor; &, while you’re at it, a crocodile for my hippopotamus.”

Yes we can.  It’s about time.  It’s about change.

“We Are All Terminal”: Miserabilism & the Abolition of Man

Sigmund Freud was not known for his timidity in assessing the impact of his intellectual contributions.  He ranked his achievements at the very top of the short list of scientific discoveries that reshaped the way people thought about themselves & the world they lived in.  In particular, he saw his work as part of the tradition of those who supposedly knocked Man off his pedestal, such as Darwin, who showed us our animal origins, & Copernicus, who showed us that we do not reside at the center of the universe.  Freud believed he had further shown that we are not masters of our own house, that we are driven by hidden impulses that mock our belief that we can exercise control over ourselves through reason.

However we assess the impact of Freud & his attempt to challenge the role & efficacy of human reason, there is no denying that there has long been an ongoing attempt to do more than just dethrone humanity.  Created in God’s image, & the apex of God’s creative activity?  No chance, according to a long line of thinkers who want to show us just how low we can go.  As developments within bioethics, the animal rights movement, & the fringes of environmentalism illustrate, humans are increasingly seen as little more than flawed, trousered apes who suffer from delusions of grandeur & who, in the interests of other species & the planet itself, should consider voluntary extinction as a reasonable option.  The concept of speciesism is one attempt to reduce the stature of humans by challenging the traditional biblical teaching that humans are the only species to bear God’s image, & are thus the summit of the created order.  We need to own up to our mistake here, according to those who employ this idea; speciesism is similar to racism, an idea that must be shown the door in the interests of justice. This will lead us to reassess not only the grandeur of human nature, but also the status of other animal species, & will teach us what people like Peter Singer & growing numbers of folks in the animal rights movement already know, that other animals deserve to be considered as human persons (& that defective humans do not).  Two recent items illustrate the trend toward devaluing human life to the point where such life is considered a mistake needing to be rectified, sooner rather than later.  What has been termed “miserabilism” is pushing this trend closer to its logical conclusion, the active pursuit of death for the sake of other life on this planet & as an antidote to the sickness of human life, which is such a horror that one wonders why we continue to bear it.

Let’s start with the famous Dr. Jack Kevorkian (above, cheerfully demonstrating how his suicide machine works), who earned the title “Doctor Death” long before his career in euthanasia began (he earned the nickname because of his fascination as a med student with the moment a person dies; his fellow students, a bit weirded out by his morbidity, so christened him).  In a recent interview with CNN Kevorkian lamented not just the difficulties of life, but life itself:  “The single worst moment of my life  . . . was the moment I was born.”  While it is tempting to see such an assertion as a ridiculous reversion to teenaged angst & hardly appropriate for someone not 16 years old, Kevorkian seems to mean it.  Sort of, that is, because there is a well-known & widely available solution to his misery, one which he exercised on a whole lot of others.  He claims, however, that he is not yet ready to die, in part because of his mission to help others claim their right to kill themselves.  And not just patients with a terminal illness.  In concert with Dutch medical voices claiming that the right to suicide should belong to everyone, sick or healthy, for whatever reason, Kevorkian asks “What difference does it make if someone is terminal?  We are all terminal.”

Indeed we are.  Different conclusions can be reached from that truism, however.  The rather lighthearted biopic “You Don’t Know Jack,” which aired on HBO & starred Al Pacino as the man himself, took one approach to Kevorkian’s life & work, an approach typical of those who don’t want to think too clearly on what Kevorkian represents, but remain stuck in a simplistic “freedom to ___” loop, with “die” being inserted in the blank.  More to the point of who he is, I think, is Kevorkian’s interest in experimenting on people, some of them healthy.  In his book Prescription Medicide: The Goodness of Planned Death, the good doctor stated that his killing of “doomed persons,” several of whom were healthy at the time of their death, was “merely the first step” towards his greatest interest, “unfettered experimentation on human death,” or “obitiatry,” carried out on those about to die.  He has also proposed experimenting on a variety of otherwise healthy people, including death-row inmates, not to mention defective infants.

“We are all terminal”:  David Benatar, in his recent book Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence, seems to think we should actively pursue making this a reality.  A “fine” book, according to Peter Singer, who reviewed it for the NY Times online.  Here’s a sample from Singer’s review:

Here is a thought experiment to test our attitudes to this view. Most thoughtful people are extremely concerned about climate change. Some stop eating meat, or flying abroad on vacation, in order to reduce their carbon footprint. But the people who will be most severely harmed by climate change have not yet been conceived. If there were to be no future generations, there would be much less for us to feel to guilty about.

So why don’t we make ourselves the last generation on earth? If we would all agree to have ourselves sterilized then no sacrifices would be required — we could party our way into extinction!

Of course, it would be impossible to get agreement on universal sterilization, but just imagine that we could. Then is there anything wrong with this scenario? Even if we take a less pessimistic view of human existence than Benatar, we could still defend it, because it makes us better off — for one thing, we can get rid of all that guilt about what we are doing to future generations — and it doesn’t make anyone worse off, because there won’t be anyone else to be worse off.

Ah, the clear logic of the madman.  I hear Professor Digory Kirke from The Lion, the Witch, & the Wardrobe in the background, muttering “Logic! What do they teach in schools these days?”  There is so much to say about the absurdity of Singer’s words that one is tempted to move on; as Aristotle said, there is really no point in arguing with someone who wants to kill his mother.  I think it perhaps wiser to leave those words out there, & suggest that more people read P.D. James, The Children of Men, & Walker Percy, The Thanatos Syndrome.  Both novels consider the scenario of suicide-made-virtue, & present a more thoughtful response than Singer’s banal call to “party our way into extinction!”  Really?  Have a voluntary, mass extinction party?  With no coercion?  James’s book speaks directly to this point, with far greater realism & wisdom.  Kill ourselves off because “most thoughtful people” are apparently so wracked with guilt over their flight to Miami or the cheeseburger they ate for lunch that mass suicide must be the best solution?  One would like to believe that Singer is speaking with tongue firmly in cheek, but his work is typically so humorless, & his advocacy of death for growing numbers of people so firm, that comic touches seem beyond him.  Nothing works for Singer quite like an extreme solution, without subtlety or even an attempt at moderation, much less humor.  Complete human extinction in order not to oppress those not yet born?  Here’s a compassion that kills, this time ourselves.  All of us, if we want to be consistent.

At any rate, Benatar does take a decidedly negative approach to things, & miserabilism is a fitting term.  “The central idea of this book is that coming into existence is always a serious harm,” he informs the reader. And, “coming into existence is always bad for those who come into existence. In other words, although we may not be able to say of the never-existent that never existing is good for them, we can say of the existent that existence is bad for them.” Human life is such a miserable proposition that death, everyone’s death, is preferable.  All those unfulfilled desires; all the petty, brief moments of pleasure that delude us into thinking that life might be worth not ending; all the pain we cause others by bringing them into this vale of tears.  What do we get in return, but more heartache, more misery, more loss & longing that will never be satisfied?  Oy vey, why do we go on?

I’ll leave it to others to bother with the silly, simplistic utilitarianism that forms the basis of Benatar’s “philosophy.”  That anyone, anywhere can take such blathering seriously is beyond me, & I teach high school theology & philosophy classes, so I’m used to hearing howlers about this & that.  Perhaps it is true that only someone with a PhD could come up with this stuff.  Yet this utilitarianism also forms the basis of Peter Singer’s philosophy, & his influence continues to grow.  Combine this with the new breed of worshipers of The Planet, the more unhinged of whom are quite willing to call for the extinction of the only species that harms said Planet, & we have a potpourri of voices repeating the call for humanity to jump off a cliff.  Perhaps with a whale of a party before we all jump, but jump we all must.  We really are that bad.

An interesting contrast, of sorts, to this trend is found on the fringes of biotechnology.  Post- & transhumanism are parts of a movement that seeks to apply the benefits of technology to human enhancement, to help us to transcend the biological limitations we currently experience.  The hope is to build a stronger, more durable, & longer lasting version of ourselves, one that may in fact conquer the last enemy, death. While it may sound like science fiction to suggest that we need not die, some of these folks blame what they call “deathism,” the defeatist mentality that accepts death as a natural part of life, for our incredulity about this hope (Have you noticed all the neologisms?  Speciesism, miserabilism, deathism, medicide, obitiatry, post- & transhumanism; it’s enough to make you want to throw a dictionary at someone).  Some suggest that, since the human brain is similar to a supercomputer, we could develop the technology to upload & download ourselves (remember, we are our brains, & all the information stored therein) into various forms.  We could live virtually, perhaps, with the advantage of having back-up copies, or in a robot proxy.  No, really; you can’t just make this stuff up.  Associated with this desire is cryonics, the application of the medical technology of cryogenics that will enable humans, declared legally dead, to be frozen & revived at some point in the future.  Remember the legal wrangling over Ted Williams’ body after his death?  The story about his head being cracked (literally, as Alcor allows the option of freezing the entire body or only the head) by a careless technician?  Here in the Valley of the Sun we have the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, where Williams’ cracked & presumably repaired (how, I wonder?) head currently rests, & which is committed to this program (how would that be for a field trip?).  Check out the link for more information.  Look especially at the 28-minute documentary video, “The Limitless Future.” Wild stuff.

I see tanks of dead, frozen people; & maybe heads, too.

While this may seem at complete odds with the miserabilism of Benatar etc., there is a shared rejection of the Christian anthropology that values both human life & its natural limits, that asserts that we are created in the image of God & that every human life, imperfections & all, has value & dignity.  Human nature is inherently flexible to the transhumanist, so that what it means to be human will necessarily develop under the guidance of those pursuing the technological developments that will enable us to conquer our biological imperfections & limitations.  While those who challenge this teaching have begun to target the concept of human dignity, claiming that it is incoherent, one can see a long line of critics preparing the way for the developments I’ve addressed here.  Darwin & Freud may never have envisaged their work playing into the hands of the likes of Singer, Benatar, etc., though one can see the logical connections.  CS Lewis, in his The Abolition of Man, recognized in the fuzzy emotivism of his day the very things that appear in news stories today, & That Hideous Strength dramatizes what happens when powerful people committed to redefining humanity get a bit of power.  This dramatization is important, as Lewis knew.  Ideas have consequences, which require a measure of imagination to grasp.  This is why The Children of Men and The Thanatos Syndrome, along with That Hideous Strength, are more important contributions to this debate than anything a bioethicist could write; & to take the measure of Benatar’s fantasies, skip his turgid prose & read Dickens’ Hard Times, which reveals something of the heart of utilitarianism, as does, in just a few pages, Ursula Le Guin’s short story, “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas.”

I suppose it’s too much to hope that the miserabilists all take their own advice, have the big party that Singer cheerfully proposes, & take care of business.  It’s also uncharitable, & I suppose that if these guys were on the hypothetical edge of the cliff, we’d have to try hard to talk them down.  One thing we must do is become clear about what we believe about human value & dignity, including why we should want to continue living, & how to think clearly about attempts to discard those beliefs.  We must continue to articulate & defend a sound Christian anthropology, through prayer & study.  Watch carefully, especially foolish politicians taken in by such nonsense, & do everything we can to keep them from the corridors of power.  And, most importantly, work tirelessly to foster a culture of life.  Easier said than done, but, as John Paul II said, “Fear not!”  The Way, the Truth, & the Life will always overcome death, along with its minions.

_________________________________________

Addendum: In “The Weight of Glory,” C.S. Lewis wrote that we need a strong spell to relieve us from the modern “evil enchantment of worldliness” which seeks to “convince us that the good of man is to be found on this earth.”  Earth can be made into heaven: this is the characteristic doctrine of the philosophies Lewis resists throughout his work.  From a different direction, Nietzsche wrote of the Last Man, the antithesis to his Übermensch.  While the Last Man is the result of the nihilism Nietzsche sees sweeping through modernity & is hardly the jovial type who celebrates the glories of modernity, there is, in his contentment with material comforts, a link with those convinced by the modern philosophies of worldliness.  Whether or not Christian, so many of the critics of modernity have been driven by a desire to encourage us toward a fuller appreciation of life.  In this they were similar to those whose philosophies they were criticizing.  At stake was life, & life to the full, & at issue was how to achieve it.  And the debate was not just about whether we were made for eternal life, to become full partakers of the divine nature & enjoy the Beatific Vision.  As Lewis & countless Christian writers always made clear, apart from a commitment to the next life, we could never fully enjoy this life; throw out heaven, you throw out earth, as well.

These were, apparently, the good old days.  The David Benatars & Jack Kevorkians urge us to abandon this goal.  Life itself is so tiresome as to be dispensable.  It’s as if we’re back in the dark days of late antiquity, when the pagan gods & multiple schemes for salvation were being emptied of their beauty & promise.  Then as now, what seems to be missing is gratitude, the loss of which is directly proportionate to one’s trust that the world is a herald of something that both transcends & explains it & ourselves.  That it is a gift.  A great gift, but ultimately one that invites us forward to greater gifts.  This produces in us a healthy dissatisfaction, a kind of homesickness that is leagues removed from the sulking of the likes of David Benatar et al., who show us the inevitable consequences of a modernism that promises us that which only God can provide.  When the modernist promises for worldly peace, prosperity, & paradise fail, where else can we turn but suicide?

I’ll finish with a couple from Chesterton.  In the first he is addressing the modernist, but his words help us to understand how only the Christian account of ourselves, which sees us as “kings in exile,” fallen from our rightful place, can prevent us from falling into the woe-is-us trap which is the result of the modernist’s misplaced trust.  In the second he discusses the task of the Church today, which, as always, is to fight against the trends toward despair & death.

“I had often called myself an optimist, to avoid the too evident blasphemy of pessimism.  But all the optimism of the age had been false & disheartening for this reason, that it had always been trying to prove that we fit in to the world.  The Christian optimism is based on the fact that we do not fit in to the world. . . .  The modern philosopher has told me again & again that I was in the right place, & I had still felt depressed even in acquiescence.  But I heard that I was in the wrong place, & my soul sang for joy, like a bird in spring.  I now knew why I could feel homesick at home.”

“The Church has the same task as it had at the beginning of the Dark Ages; to save all the light & liberty that can be saved, to resist the downward drag of the world, & to wait for better days.  So much a real Church would certainly do; but a real Church might be able to do more.  It might make its Dark Ages something more than a seed-time; it might make them the very reverse of dark.  It might present its more human ideal in such abrupt & attractive a contrast to the inhuman trend of the time, as to inspire men suddenly for one of the moral revolutions of history; so that men now living shall not taste of death until they have seen justice return.

We do not want, as the newspapers say, a Church that will move with the world.  We want a Church that will move the world.”

—Anthony DiStefano

On the failings of Christians

D.B. Hart’s book, reviewed in my first blog, does so many things well it’s easy to pass over some of them.  I mentioned briefly his discussion of how the redeemed can often act as if they weren’t, a point that came up in a class discussion recently about one of the reasons people give for being atheists.  “If the God you profess exists, why are so many of you so nasty?  Blaming Haitians for the earthquake that devastated their country, molesting boys & using the power of the Church to cover it up, etc. etc. etc.  Need we say more about the credibility of your God, the one who is making you ‘holy’?”  As I mentioned in that earlier post, C.S. Lewis does a nice job with this in the 4th Book of Mere Christianity.  I would add the following:

The question is not do Christians act badly, or do they act badly often.  Of course they do, just like adherents of other religions, & no religion at all.  And we should avoid playing the game of measuring who acts badly most often or with the most deadly consequences, as it it a fruitless one, often ending with name calling & the trivialization of suffering.  The pertinent questions here are whether or not Christianity can make good theological sense of this acting badly, & whether there are resources within its traditions & sacred texts to not only correct faulty understandings that make it possible to act badly & claim that one is acting appropriately, but also to lead sinners into closer conformity to Christ.  As Christians, we believe that the answer is yes to both questions.

“In Ictu Oculi” by Juan de Valdes Leal, 1672

The doctrine of original sin is, as it has always been, unpopular.  To some, it’s hateful nonsense.  Alan Jacobs’ fine book surveys the attitudes of opponents & defenders with his characteristic insight, & helps explain why even some Christians recoil from the doctrine.  I recall when a Catholic told me with certainty that, especially in light of Darwin, the Church needs to get rid of original sin.  I won’t take up its defense here, other than to say that any alternative explanation, Christian or otherwise, fails to be as comprehensive & logical.  The speculative secular meanderings through the unconscious, the mantras regarding the need for re- or better education (especially without the religion), or the fuzzy Pelagian exhortations don’t seem to explain much more than the depth of their advocates’ confusion.  As far as Eastern paths, I’ve never been able to accept the unreality of evil or the negative assessments of desire that feature so prominently.  The traditional Christian teaching on original sin explains as much as can be explained, keeping in mind that the kind of neat & tidy intellectual package sought by secularists to “explain evil” is little more than a fantasy.  One of the beauties of our faith is its ability to articulate, with intellectual breadth, poetic depth, & the necessary restraint, how & why the world we inhabit is at once filled with such beauty & such horror.  Only an account that takes seriously the world as created by God & despoiled by creatures rebelling against him can do justice to what we actually experience in not only the daily tragedies, small & great, that mark our world, but also in the darkness of our own hearts.  Likewise, only such an account can make any real sense of love, beauty, & Mozart.

“Temptation & Fall” by William Blake, 1808

Moreover, the resources of Christianity enable us to name & repent of the evil we do.  Christian life is, properly understood, self-correcting.  The priest who molests, the spouse who commits infidelity, the mean-spirited xenophobe, the defender of slavery, etc. etc.:  scripture & tradition indict them all.  Yes, it will often take some time for the Church to develop its understanding of natural law & biblical teaching on many issues, but, as Hart nicely illustrates in Atheist Delusions, the recognition of the morally problematic nature of an institution like slavery, however inchoate, is there early in Christian history.  The Holy Spirit will guide us into all truth, as Jesus says in John 16.  Not all at once, & our grasp of the full implications of that truth is seldom perfect.  Yet the wickedness & infidelities of Christians can not hide long from the bright light of unfolding revelation.  Excuses can be made, self-awareness shunned, but truth will out.  We have traveled a long way from St. Paul’s “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, male nor female, slave nor free. . .” to where we are today, but we can discern something of the distance by looking at the starting point in the 1st century.  There are no doubt those among us who believe that social, cultural, religious, political, ethnic, & gender distinctions allow us, or even force us, to see ourselves as superior to those different from us.  As Hart explains in his latest book, however, this sensibility, challenged by the growing Christian awareness of the implications of “in God’s image,” can no longer be taken for granted, even by unbelievers, & when we do detect signs of it in theory or practice we are much quicker to challenge it.

Finally, should we not expect that the Church will always be, in some sense, a “school for sinners”?  Did not Christ call those who are sick, some of us much worse than others?  The path to holiness is difficult for all of us, but, as Lewis notes in Book 3 of Mere Christianity, the “raw material” that some of us begin with is far more damaged than that of others.  “Don’t judge, lest you be judged”; this is not a plea for a false tolerance which looks the other way, but a command to be realistic about the battles every one of us is waging against those powers & principalities aiming to prevent our transformation, often by exploiting our raw material. These matters have been revisited numerous times throughout the history of the Church.  Perhaps the best place to learn how to think through them with the mind of the Church is in the anti-Donatist & anti-Pelagian writings of St. Augustine, the Doctor of Grace.  He knew a few things about the

recalcitrance of the human heart, even of the redeemed, & of the saving, healing grace of the Divine Physician.  His Confessions, though written before the great treatises against the Donatists & Pelagians, is, among other things, a monument to his growing recognition that the hope of any kind of moral perfection is rooted in a flawed understanding of human nature.  The seeds of his developed theology of original sin are here, along with thoughtful & provocative reflections on the Christian life that cast into sharp relief the obstacles to a life of faith, hope, & love.

—Anthony DiStefano