Unlovable Monsters, Social Security, and the Future of Christian Love
So any programme to overcome violence must contain at least two objectives: (1) build […] ordered democratic polities; (2) try to make their benefits spread as wide as possible, e.g., by preventing the formation of desperate, excluded groups; particularly young men. — Charles Taylor, A Secular Age
Ezra Klein, working the n + 1 meme, says the following:
Yang does not suggest that there was really a way to save Cho, as the essay faces up to the fact that Cho was, from what we can tell, a deeply unpleasant, unlikable, person. What Yang does suggest is that there are many people not entirely dissimilar from Cho, folks who aren’t sociopaths, but who’ve been twisted by rejection, and who now carry wounds and grudges that make continuing marginalization a certainty — it is the only rational choice on the part of society.
Yang’s is not a prescriptive piece, and there’s no five-point plan for ending this alienation and despair. The essay, though beautifully done, is remarkable not for its perceptiveness so much as its honesty. Not a word of it comes as a surprise. It’s more a series of truths that you knew, but were shying away from, because their implications were too saddening and unsettling to admit. We can separate ourselves from Cho’s crimes by understanding them as an interplay of mental illness and personal aberration, but we know of others who share his despair, and most of us know we want little to do with their worlds, because once trapped, we will never escape.
The ‘rational’ conclusion to draw from this is the establishment of public management regimes that administer preemptive therapeutics to ‘at risk’ cases throughout the country and on condition of admission. But this practical little exercise in dystopia won’t go to the root of the problem, as Ezra and a lot of other smart people commenting on this know. Will religion?
For Taylor, at least, there are two root/radical options: “totally overcoming the religious dimension in our existence,” or “the Gospel picture of a Christian counter-violence”:
…some non-religious theory, like modern humanism, doesn’t really do the trick. The religious forms seem to reconstitute themselves. So we would have to fight for a real, thoroughgoing disenchantment, a total escape from religion. [But] the religious dimension is inescapable.
Thus we can point to the Gospel picture of a Christian counter-violence: a transformation of the energy which ususally goes into scapegoat purification; transformation which reaches to overcome the fear of violence not by becoming lord of it, by directing it as an annihilating force against evil, but which aims rather to overcome fear by offering oneself to it; responding with love and forgiveness, thereby tapping a source of goodness, and healing.
Beyond channeling Dostoyevski’s Spanish-Inquisitor story, Taylor points toward something seemingly at profound odds with the current culture: loving those of us among us who seem, by all earthly evidence, unlovable. Some pomos among us think this is simply a matter of accrediting their radical otherness, but other pomos realize the situation is a little more serious. There may be, as Nietzsche understood, simply no reason to love particular people, even masses of people, without a divine command to do so. And even if you don’t agree, you’re faced with the daunting task of somehow enforcing your opinion without simply deepening the violence and dissipating the love.
The tension here plays up what Taylor himself recognizes in quoting Peguy:
Morality was invented by sickly people. Christian life was invented by Jesus Christ.
Namely, that Christianity deepened the divine commands by supervening them. The old law was suddenly ‘fulfilled’ — not replaced, but revealed as a true but partial prefiguration of the full truth. The Christian left — from Saint-Simon and Comte and Proudhon through Wilde and into the present day — has always longed to make the transformative character of Christ definitive for man as the path whereby the subjectivity of self-love could become the intersubjectivity of collective love. But powerful elements on the right as well as the left have wanted, since the beginning, to deny the Jewishness of Jesus, the better to elevate the Son at the expense of the Father. A tremendous transgressive ethos, coming from all sides, has long maintained internal pressure on the authority of Christianity; ascetic Protestants have sought direct, unmediated communion with Christ and God, voluptuous Protestants a far less mediated physical communion with one another, and late bourgeois erotic Christians of several denominations a way to define divinity by love among any human beings rather than the other way around. In all instances the push has been democratizing and equalizing.
I mention all this because it seems to me the security challenge posed by the radically unlovable — deeply intensified nowadays by technological asymmetries in favor of offensive weaponry and the cultural pressures of freedom under equality — presses secularists and faithful alike toward a grim recognition that curing our society of the problem is impossible and coping alone is an option. As a result, it seems to me that a therapy of pragmatic spirituality, combining the ‘erotic transcendence’ of secular humanism and the ‘creative personality’ of counter-Jewish Christianity, will become increasingly popular as the stricter disciplines of both atheism and theism seem to fail both a social cost-benefit analysis and the nervous stirrings of the democratic soul. So rather than Cho and his ilk pushing us toward an intensifying showdown between godless and godly solutions to the problem of the unlovable, I expect our reaction to the monsters in our midst to actually strengthen the therapeutic logic so prevalent today. The very terms of that logic make it impossible to assess the successful outcomes it might generate in terms of good or bad.
If I read that last paragraph correctly, you’re arguing that “radical” atheism and theism both fail the democratic test, because each denies legitimacy to and seeks to eradicate the other. The therapeutic gospel, by encouraging everyone to seek his own flavor of coping mechanism, spiritual or secular-erotic as the case may be, will rush in to fill up the void.
And this certainly seems to be the case, on the face of it. When I made an abrupt turn to Catholicism, the general line among my secular friends was that it was a fine thing “if it brought me comfort”, a sincere sentiment of acceptance on their part which nevertheless set my teeth on edge, because it defined the whole conversion away as a coping mechanism. Only with my hardcore atheist friends was I able to get into a substantive discussion of the process.
But your analysis seems to locate the therapeutic gospel at a sort of midway point between atheism and theism. Isn’t it more accurate to view the therapeutic as implicitly atheist—since it recognizes no higher authority than the self—but as a form of “soft atheism” that can tolerate and even embrace spritual forms for pragmatic reasons?
But there are limits to anyone’s tolerance. The question is, how “radically unlovable” does the other guy have to be before soft atheism flips over into hard atheism and we start rooting out the Transcendent in earnest?
— AndyHartzell · Jan 15, 07:52 PM · #
Well I know from my Walker Percy that the best way to cure a case of the “Underground Man Blues” is a girlfriend. I don’t mean to make light of this topic, but maybe if he had just gotten laid or a girlfriend he wouldn’t have done those things? Is that really such a crazy idea? Yes, if we was a psychopath, it means he probably was beyond hope (which is depressing enough), but for the “marginalized” I think a girlfriend is in order. Easier said than done, I know.
— John · Jan 15, 11:58 PM · #
Andy, your post-conversion experience is not shocking and your recognition that limits to tolerance exist is right on. But the ‘therapeutic gospel’ as you so neatly put it strikes me as essentially NOT atheist but pantheist. Read Tocqueville on religion for an uncomfortable look at both how easy it is for democratic souls to turn to pantheist mysticism AND how qualified Tocqueville himself is about the possible depths of religious faith after the big switchover out of the aristocratic age.
John, yeah, easier said than done. Even for an aristocratic soul. Maybe especially.
— James · Jan 16, 03:56 AM · #
John you are right and only an overwrought intellectual could fail to see the real problem of violence in young men: they are not married and with a family.
With a family (of his own) a young man turns to … thoughts of advancement for his children. Now this does not erase violence but severely circumscribes it as any violence risks the man’s offspring. And their success in life. Darwin? Ring any bells.
This likely explains for example MUCH of the variance between first generation immigrants (who bring their family with them) and the children (who are priced out of affordable family formation by the wealth demands of the marriage market in modern industrialized countries).
You see this pattern over and over again, and it’s fairly obvious: first generation Pakistanis and Mexicans in London and Los Angeles have very very low rates of violence; their children very high rates (often exceeding the native white population by a comfortable margin, controlling for income and education).
Duh. The younger generation is priced out of marriage and family. What the heck do they have to lose?
Or look at the Black Community. DURING Segregation, illegitimacy was higher than Whites but by about 8% or so, still quite low. Now illegitimacy is the norm and a two-parent family in inner city Black Communities (it is quite different of course for Suburban Blacks) is rarer than Hen’s teeth. Nationwide the Black illegitamacy rate approaches 70% and it is supposed to be around 90% in the inner city. It is common for a young woman with three kids to have three different fathers for them (this pattern btw is being replicated by lower-income whites as well at an increasing rate).
What is the net result? Young men who have a pattern of trying to impregnate as many women as possible, uncertain of the paternity of any one child, and abandoning all involvement in favor of dead end jobs as low-end gangsters. The actual expected income of being a low-end gangster is quite low, compared to say a car mechanic or plumber or carpenter. And the risks higher. Either there is a sexual selection process ongoing (women in inner cities prefer the gangsta to the plumber) or little motivation (why bother since there is no family to support) or perhaps both?
At any result, under Jim Crow segregation, places like South Central LA were far less violent and dangerous than they are now, when Blacks are treated as equal citizens under the law and Civil Rights groups carefully monitor police.
This suggests that neither Atheism nor Religion have much effect (inner City Black Communites lack for neither Churches nor un-believers, nor Mosques either). Neither the Nation of Islam (religious) nor Black Panthers (atheists) had much effect one way or the other.
Rather it is a family which gives a man an investment in society, the need to protect it, in order to maximize his reproductive activity.
— Jim Rockford · Jan 16, 07:23 AM · #
Interesting, Jim, although I’m hesitant to reduce everything to the Darwinian paradigm (and James, my first comment was partly tongue-in-cheek: the female characters that come into the lives of the male protagonists in Walker Percy’s novels are usually indicative of Marcel’s intersubjectivity, and of course, Percy was a Catholic, so the intersubjective love was always a reflection of something transcendent—but you know this). Indeed, I think religion does have an important role to play in helping the marginalized “cope.” However, I was looking through a psychopathy textbook I have from an old forensic psychology class I took and found this interesting passage from an article by David Cooke on “Cross-Cultural Aspects of Psychopathy”:
“A central explanatory construct in cross-cultural psychology is the ‘individualistic-collectivist’ dimension….Individualistic cultures emphasize competiveness and self-confidence; independence from others is encouraged, and temporary short-lived relationships are common. By way of contrast, within collectivist cultures an individual’s contribution and subservience to the social group are emphasized, the acceptance of authority is paramount, and continuous and stable relationships are common…Extreme manifestations of the behavior though to be characteristic of individualistic societies can be regarded as elements of the syndrome of psychopathy. It may be argued, on the one hand, that within individualistic societies cultural transmmission is likely to enhance grandiosity, glibness, and superficiality; promiscuity, multiple marital relationships, and a lack of responsibility for others will also flourish. On the other hand, cultural transmission within collectivist societies will bear down on self-expression and promote stable family and group relationships. It has been argued not only that competitiveness inherent in individualistic societies produces higher rates of criminal behavior, but also that competitiveness leads to an increased use of Machiavellian behavior—in particular, an increase in the use of deceptive, manipulative, and parasitic behavior…”
One cannot diminish the power of cultural norms to influence an individual’s behavior, whether it be Cho, Anton Chigurh, or Gordon Gekko. Which is to say why I’m a big fan of Alasdair MacIntyre.
— John · Jan 16, 09:24 PM · #