I am not, as a rule, a devil-take-the-hindmost kind of guy. I have the protuberant compassion that is common among modern men, although I differ from liberals in that I do not think I would be a better man if my compassion were more protuberant than it is. In fact, I think I would very likely be a better man if I were less susceptible to sympathetic suffering. By sympathetic suffering, I mean the disposition to mildly suffer when I am made conscious of the acute suffering of someone else.
I have often thought that regular attendance at public hangings would do me good, if circumstances allowed it, as an antidote to harden my heart and make me a better man.
I believe all ancient peoples understood that when protuberant compassion grows beyond some limit, it is the enemy of justice. I expect these sensible folk would be amazed and horrified to learn that many modern men who are not confined in lunatic asylums nowadays use the word justice to mean protuberant—indeed tumorous—compassion. When they demand “justice” for some unhappy wretch, or some miserable pariah-people, these swollen carbuncles of compassion ask us to feel the pain of these wretches and pariahs, and to entirely overlook their character.
This is, of course, liberalism in a nutshell. Tumorous compassion masquerading as justice. The great political philosopher Kenneth Minogue nailed it in The Liberal Mind (1969)
“Compassion and a disposition to relieve the suffering of others can hardly serve to distinguish liberalism, for these emotions may be found among men and women everywhere. There is, however, an important difference between goodwill and compassion in the ordinary concrete situations of everyday life and these emotions erected into a principle of politics. For liberalism is goodwill turned doctrinaire . . .”
When goodwill turns doctrinaire, all suffering at once become evil. What is more, as Minogue makes clear, when goodwill turns doctrinaire, all suffering is packaged into stereotypes. This is because the great suffering with which liberals ask us to sympathize is always the distant suffering of an ideal type. It is, for example, the suffering of saintly slaves on an imaginary but hellish plantation, a way down south on Red River in Louisiana. Thus was the “suffering situation” famously stereotyped by Harriet Beecher Stowe.
As Minogue put it, in 1969!
“Politics proceeds by stereotypes, and intellectually is a matter of hunting down the victims and the oppressors.”
Victims are all who suffer, and who because they suffer deserve our sympathy. Oppressors are the fiends who cause this suffering, and who moreover derive profit and pleasure from it.
It should not surprise us that liberals of a spiritual bent sympathize with the suffering of the damned in Hell. The suffering of the damned is by all accounts very severe, and because the damned are very distant, they are in the accounts of liberals very pitiful and deserving of our sympathy. Imagine it is your beloved brother, they say, or your son or spouse! And what is more, imagine that God in his cruelty cut these wretches off within a whisker of being saved!
It doesn’t bear thinking about. And that is, of course, why the liberals demand that you think about it.
* * * * *
Life is absurd when there are no consequences because, in a life with no consequences, all decisions are meaningless. In the course of our recent debate over salvation and damnation, a parody of Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” has run through my head. The point of that poem is of course given in its last three lines
“Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.”
“All the difference,” not no difference whatsoever! Here is the parody of the opening stanza of Frost’s poem that has run through my head:
“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And grateful it no difference made,
I tarried not at this crossroads
But plunged down one road confident
That both roads lead to the same end.”
In his “Psalm of Life,” the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow famously declared, “Life is real! Life is earnest!” He meant that crossroads are real, not fake. Crossroads are real and the hourglass of your life is running down, so you must tarry to ponder, but not too long.
The clock is ticking and there is no summer school.
Where compassion is infinite, meaning shrinks to zero because every crossroads is fake, there is no clock, and summer school never closes. Lewis Carroll described the absurdity of such a world with the story of the “Caucus-race” in Wonderland. I’ve copied the story below for those who do not know it.
I will first say, for those who are interested, that the name “Caucus-race” has always puzzled me. Caucus is an Americanism that denotes an unofficial meeting of conspirators before an official meeting, normally political, as when a cabal of criminal congressmen “caucus” before a vote and decide how to conspire to their own advantage. My guess is that Carroll used the phrase “Caucus-race” to mean a fake race without competition.
In any case, here is the story. The Dodo is the Universalists’ God.
“‘What I was going to say,’ said the Dodo in an offended tone, ‘was, that the best thing to get us dry would be a Caucus-race.’
‘What is a Caucus-race?’ said Alice; not that she much wanted to know, but the Dodo had paused as if it thought that somebody ought to speak, and no one else seemed inclined to say anything.
‘Why,’ said the Dodo, ‘the best way to explain it is to do it.’ (And as you might like to try the thing yourself, some winter day, I will tell you how the Dodo managed it.)
First it marked out a race-course, in a sort of circle, (‘the exact shape doesn’t matter,’ it said,) and then all the party were placed along the course, here and there. There was no ‘One, two, three, and away,’ but they began running when they liked, and left off when they liked, so that it was not easy to know when the race was over. However, when they had been running half-an-hour or so, and were quite dry again, the Dodo suddenly called out, ‘The race is over!’ and they all crowded round it, panting, and asking, ‘But who has won?’
This question the Dodo could not answer without a great deal of thought, and it sat for a long time with one finger pressed upon its forehead, (the position in which you usually see Shakespeare, in the pictures of him,) while the rest waited in silence. At last the Dodo said, “Everybody has won, and all must have prizes.”
As I said, the Dodo is the Universalists’ God.
The Orthosphere 
“Life is absurd when there are no consequences because, in a life with no consequences, all decisions are meaningless.”
That is a strawman position that no one has been arguing.
“The clock is ticking and there is no summer school.”
Is it? Isn’t there? My college class has a beginning and an end. Redos are limited by having a new intake of students to deal with and confusion would reign. God, however, in principle, has no such limitations.
The Hindu attitude, I think it is, is that the sinner’s punishment is to continually be reborn until he has earned the reward of stepping off the cycle of death and rebirth. That seems reasonable.
Consequences there should be, but if the consequences are having one’s house nuclear bombed for letting the grass too long, then the punishment is so disproportionate that it is ridiculous and unjust.
The Dodo Footrace Rectified
And the losers of the footrace were strung up by their thumbs and had their intestines eaten by an eagle only to regenerate the next day where it all happened again for all eternity. The losers said to the Dodo, “So, you made us and entered us in this race without our consent. And, since you are omniscient, you knew even as you were creating us, which of us would stumble and which of us would be the victor before we were even born, yet you went ahead and made us anyway. And then you set an arbitrary time limit, despite telling us that we should ask you to “forgive our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.” And you said, “Well, it wouldn’t be much of a competition without arbitrary rules. The rules for all games are, when you come down to it, arbitrary.” So, this was all some kind of game? For whose benefit was it played? For you and the victors? Did you not foretell that most would lose and their misery never cease because, you know, the school district didn’t make funds available for summer school, things being more impecunious in heaven than is commonly thought? They have time and money restrictions like the rest of us.
I have been working on an essay arguing that the bad man cannot be happy. His unhappiness will be exactly in proportion to his badness and his happiness to his goodness. The defects of character that permitted him to murder his girlfriend who refused to get an abortion, for instance, will forestall any ability to have a harmonious relationship with anyone else. Being dragged off to prison is not really necessary to make sure he suffers, but moral imbeciles are so morally stupid that having the threat of such punishment might be all that is stopping him from acting in this manner. One man in Florida raped a woman and then cut her limbs off. He was later released into the community. His neighbors petitioned the police to have him removed but they said they could not. Personally, I think execution would be what he deserves, maybe after having his limbs removed in the same manner he removed hers. At the very least, he should go to jail and remain there at the very least to protect the community from him. I admit that this particular example has me feeling particularly vindictive.
True. It is a reductio ad absurdum of arguments that are often made in favor of universalism – or that such arguments implicitly presuppose. If universalism is true, our acts cannot finally matter one way or another, and so are meaningless, because we are all bound for heaven no matter what we do or do not do.
The same goes for materialist determinism and naïve predestinarianism, for that matter.
No universalist – or materialistic determinist, or naïve predestinarian – need make such arguments explicitly, in order for them to be operant in play implicitly.
Excursus: I do not by any means in the foregoing to imply that either Catholic or Calvinist predestinarianism are naïve, or indeed false. Because why? *Because they are neither of them naïve.*
No freedom → no consequences → no meaning. And vice versa: no meaning → no consequences → no freedom.
And, no freedom → no actuality.
For meaning, substitute nomological character (licit or illicit), morality (virtuous or wicked), aesthetic value (beautiful or ugly), passion (lovely or painful), intelligibility (logical or not, confused or not, noisy or … signiferous …) and so on ad libitum. I take meaning to be as William James described it: the phenomenal character in experience of some prior act: the “what it is like” to suffer that act (together, by implication, with all its merely causal mundane sequelae) in a given circumstance.
In practice, we encounter value, meaning, consequences, freedom, and actuality at every turn; for, that is what it is like to be. Ergo, &c.
This is to suppose that true graduation – to whatever – is not quite possible; that true finality, of anything – and, thus, complete ontological definiteness, thus true being – is not quite possible. And this is to suppose that true facticity of our acts – true finality, thus true *teleology,* and thus cosmic order of such acts – is a will o’ the wisp. Everything then reduces to chaotic flopping about, forever: the Democritean clinamen.
In the clinamen, it is not possible to act, let alone to plan to act, or to deliberate upon right action (which, in the clinamen, is a will o’ the wisp). In the clinamen, it’s always summer school; just always stuff happening, for no reason, and with no intelligible consequences for our future happiness or beatitude. So, party on!
Not that partying on is anything of the sort that Richard Cocks would want to do for more than an hour or two, God help us all, and forbid. But many are the newly minted undergraduates – and 55 year olds utterly at sea in the present marital and sexual chaos – who would relish the prospect. How delicious would it be, to be let off all hooks forever, and all deadlines deleted? Pretty goddamn nice.
But, antithetical to worlds per se.
So, the entire structure of reality, meaning, teleology, and being depends on eternal damnation and never-ending screaming torment by a loving God. But, only after you die because of reasons. It seems like all nativity scenes and crucifixes should be replaced with gas torches and recorded shrieks and moaning given its centrality to the faith. You do indeed make atheism start to look attractive. Better that the world had never existed than that. What’s the punishment for unconverting people?
The soundtrack with scriptural authority would be “weeping (or wailing) and gnashing of teeth.” Hell seem to be more like a funeral than a torture chamber.
What is a crucifix, though?
Good point. Though, you’re dead in three days rather than suffering for all eternity. I don’t think we take eternal suffering seriously enough because as finite beings we can’t comprehend it.
No. That’s a misconstruction of my argument; indeed, turns it on its head. The structure of reality does not hang on damnation. It’s the other way round: given the entire structure of reality, meaning, freedom, actuality, teleology, and being, damnation is something that free creatures can choose for themselves, and that some indeed do choose for themselves (there being infinitely many more ways to err, fail and fall than not); and however much God their loving Father would that they had decided otherwise, it is *ontologically impossible* for him to overturn their free decisions, because he can’t create a free being that is not free anymore than he can create a circle that is not a circle.
It would be more accurate then to say that the structure of reality hangs on creaturely freedom. No freedom → no actual beings → no world such as we find it → no us.
The Crucifix hangs in churches and Christian homes as a sign that our loving Father has provided us in and by the Passion of his Son a way for us to *avoid* the damnation to which otherwise we would all (according to classical Christian eschatology) have been incorrigibly doomed.
If universalism were true, the Incarnation and Passion would have been unnecessary, and the Fall – together with all the evil consequences thereof – would have been neither here nor there, because in the end *everyone* would get to enjoy infinite bliss after a merely finite period of something less, no matter how much evil they had done, and no matter what they had decided to make of themselves. There would in that case be no point to contrition, repentance, or amendment of life. Indeed, there would be no point to considerations of virtue or vice, to morality, to justice, or to law.
You’re really good at this deconversion thing. What would you estimate your success rate to be so far?
I’ve converted quite a few souls here. Have not heard of any whom I have deconverted.
Contrition and repentance and amendment of life would be necessary under either scenarios.
If you know you are going to get to heaven eventually no matter what you ever do in the meantime, then no particular moment of decision either for virtue or vice ever presents itself as particularly pressing. The decision then need never be made. So, even if contrition, repentance and conversion of life were necessary to get into heaven even on universalism – a condition of entry to blessedness which I grant, arguendo – there would *never* be any particular urgency about getting on with holiness of life, so long as profane life was tolerably pleasant. Which, Hell may be, for those who prefer vice, inasmuch as Hell is the acme of vice.
This was in fact rather my point in suggesting that the reason the damned are in Hell forever is that their moral wits are so wrecked by sin that *they don’t want blessedness* – can’t conceive it as a good, but only as something not good, mutatis mutandis. Only thus could any mind end up deciding that “non serviam” was better than the alternative, all things considered.
On this notion, the damned *prefer* damnation to blessedness, and *their settled preference is the reason they never want to get out of Hell,* so that – in virtue of their own repeated choice to stay there (or, rather, to stay out of Heaven) – they never do get out of Hell. *And they like that result.*
For context, read The Great Divorce, by Lewis.
The damned are as it were condemning themselves to order nothing but Big Macs, forever, because they like Big Macs and when they order Big Macs they always get exactly what they expect and are never disappointed. The blessed, on the other hand, get to sample all sorts of good food … including Big Macs.
In respect to which, consider the dwarves convicted in their rebellion – not just against Aslan, but against *anyone but themselves* – in the last chapters of The Last Battle, who in tasting it find the Heavenly Banquet horrid, disgusting; it is to them just horse shit, and – what is far worse – an insult to their dignity. Lewis has in that passage perfectly illustrated my argument about the self-imposed and thus incorrigible predicament of the perfectly selfish damned.
Your emphasis on freedom implies the ability to change our mind.
Yes; and the freedom not to do so; the freedom, i.e., to decide irrevocably (as at one’s wedding, to marriage or the priesthood, or to the royal office). The valence of the Christian notion that at death our choice for Heaven or for Hell is sealed forever is that we have the power to choose, and that this power entails the power to choose irrevocably.
We do not after all enjoy the power to choose about going to the corner store yesterday differently than in point of sempiternally changeless fact we did then choose. Why should the permanent choice of Hell or of Heaven be different?
Choose life or choose death at the moment of ultimate decision one way or the other: which shall it be? Death being what it is – namely, permanent – the choice of death is, what the hell do you know, permanent.
I console myself with the Tradition (big t) that at the moment of death, God gives us all one last chance to choose him over our own disordered wants. The deathbed testimonies of convicted Satanists – horrible to contemplate – suggest that, for most of us, the choice for Heaven will win hands down. So, I hope confidently that I shall meet again all my ancestors in Heaven … and that, when the final choice comes, by which I doom myself, I shall doom myself to life everlasting in Heaven, despite whatever ordure of sin still at that moment covers and inwardly pollutes me.
I write all the foregoing with no little reluctance, as a sympathetic reader of Origen, and as what I hope turns out in the end to be a nice guy. I want everyone to be OK in the end. But I cannot but accept that some will not want to be OK in the end, and so won’t be … *and that that is OK with them.* I don’t know how to be nicer to them, than to agree that what they will should turn out for them to be so … and to preach to them that it shan’t really be OK in fact, but rather only in their deluded ruined wits, so that they should properly decide otherwise.
Which ruined wits are after all dispositive for them, as so likewise for any of us, God help us, all.
Which help the Holy Ghost does in fact give us all, since the Ascension. If we should want it, NB.
If it’s a choice, than it’s not an error or a failure. Errors and failures are the result of incompetence, and really nobody deserves to go to hell for incompetence – you aren’t really responsible for your disabilities.
So let’s say damnation is a choice; that is certainly the more interesting option. Some people choose hell, why might that be? Are they stupid? If so, then we are back to incompetence. Are they masochists? Then they aren’t really suffering. Perhaps they just have different values.
Great comment, a.morphous; thanks for your perspective, utterly unlike those of any of our usual commentariat. I am happy that you are still reading here.
Why not? What, is it not possible for a choice to be either good or bad, less good or less bad? If not, then what’s the worry about our choices? If all choices are simply OK, then what’s the point of choices to begin with?
A good point. We are not responsible for the sins of Adam, Eve, or for that matter of Satan. Still we have no option but to cope with the causal consequences of their sins, such as our own deformed wits, our own deformed wills toward sin.
But what you are really saying here is that nobody should be considered responsible for choices he made, despite all that. The Christian presupposition is that we should all be considered responsible for choices we made, despite all that.
Which, after all, makes causal sense. We do what we do, and what follows thereupon, whether for good or for ill, does indeed follow. On causal integrity, where’s the escape from that, either for the Christian or for any other person?
If per contra we suppose – against all experience – that nobody should be held responsible for his choices, well then, all bets are off, as being all unintelligible to begin with. So that experience per se is then unintelligible to begin with. But that’s a non-starter.
I think you missed my point. If someone makes a choice, then some kind of rational expectation of value is involved (that’s what we mean by “choice”). If I am buying a car and need to choose between a Toyota or Ford or Tesla, I will make that choice based on various expectations of satisfaction, that the choice will bring me pleasure or utility. I might be wrong about those expectations, eg maybe I choose on the basis of how sexy it looks when I would be better off paying attention to reliability or milage or whatever. But still, if I’m making a choice, it is on some basis. Nobody deliberately chooses things that they think are bad for them.
So why would people choose hell? Either they have some peculiar preferences, or they are just too stupid to know their own interests.
I don’t think I said that? I did I guess say that if people are too stupid to understand the consequences of their choices, they aren’t really responsible for them. But the interesting question is why people make bad choices when they do know the consequences.
If you were wrong in your expectations of the values of different options, then, *precisely,* you would have committed:
Sin at bottom is a mystery, and cannot be understood, *because* it is suboptimal. You write:
Now in a way this is perfectly true, and all serious moral philosophers have said so; but only as a bit rewritten:
The bad things people choose are not wholly bad, of course, or there would be no reason to opt for them whatever. They confer some goodness. It’s just that they are bad, all things properly considered. E.g., successfully robbing a bank confers the good of some cash, and an adrenaline rush. Still it is a terribly bad thing to do – even if the robbery is successful, so that the crime does seem to pay – for, it corrupts the wits and so misdirects the will of the robber (leading him perhaps to suppose that, since he seems to be good at robbing banks, he would do well to keep at it).
Should the robber be treated as culpable for his bad decisions? Should he, that is, be understood as responsible for them? Should he be treated as a free moral agent, rather than a robot? Evidently he should; for, if he is a robot, then he didn’t rob the bank in the first place, because there is nothing to him; rather, his causal antecedents robbed the bank, and it makes no more sense to hold him culpable for the robbery than it does to blame the pebble for rolling down the mountain after an earthquake.
The robber does actually exist, and did actually make the decisions needed – millions of them (as any coder would attest) – to rob the bank. So, because he does actually exist, he *cannot* be a robot.
The crazy thing – the irrational thing, i.e., and thus the thing about sin that it is logically impossible to understand – is that people deliberately choose things *that they know for certain are bad for them, mutatis mutandis.* They do it *again and again.* Viz., meth. As you say, “the interesting question is why people make bad choices when they do know the consequences.”
They could not keep making such crazy decisions if their wits were not addled somehow before they even approached the decision about the next hit. We conclude that their wits must be addled. The Christian ascribes that addlement at root to Original Sin: we are all more or less addled because we inherit, live in and must therefore conform ourselves to a world that has long been morally deformed by suboptimal decisions on the part of essentially all its previous members.
You’ll be relieved to learn that traditional Catholic doctrine insists that men can be culpable only for sins *that they knew beforehand are wrong.* Invincible ignorance – ignorance of moral reality that they had not the moral or intellectual equipment to surmount at the time they did badly wrong – excuses them from mortal sin, and thus from damnation.
Now, it is interesting to consider the ontological possibility that our chthonic, systematic, endemic moral addlement, which perdures in us as a character of our very physiology, and thus as a factor of all our moral deliberations even after we have been washed clean of Original Sin in baptism – the term for it is concupiscence – is a sort of invincible ignorance.
There is after all no way under heaven that we can stop being concupiscent. To do that would be like willing to breathe water. As creatures of a Fallen world, we are incorrigibly subject to temptation. There is no way out of it. Even Jesus felt it, despite his Original Sinlessness.
The meth addict knows that meth is bad for him withal, but he knows also that the bonus of the next hit far, far outweighs his addled evaluation of the far more abstract and less ponderable – less right now suffered – long term consequences for him thereof. So he takes the hit. His wits are addled by his addiction, just as those of the successful bank robber were addled by the success of his robbery. He’s responsible for the sin of the hit: he’s the one who actually does it. But if as addled he is not compos mentis, and thus not culpable, why then – on traditional Catholic doctrine – he is not for it damnable.
Is he culpable, as addled?
Maybe not. Indeed, how could he be?
In that chink in justice inexorable, which cannot under heaven be gainsayed except at risk of cosmic causal incoherence and thus dissolution, is perhaps the immense room for infinite divine mercy in respect to what comes to us of this cosmos after it has wound down altogether, and is completely over. Jesus has after all suffered all that the meth addict has suffered, so he knows the territory. He knows how warped and sick it is.
Indeed you did not, and I apologize for putting words into your mouth. I should rather have written something like, “But the implication of what you have said here (whether or not you meant to imply it) is that …”
A last thought: A.morphous, as has so often been the case over the years you have been here a loyal adversary. Responding to you has taught me some good stuff. Namely, the eschatological sequelae of the difference between responsibility and culpability. I hope you always read here and challenge us, our own MacDuff.
I know goddamn well that, if Satan should show up and start to ruin things here below in a really unprecedented, obvious way, why you could be counted on to stand with us in our phalanx against him. You are a good egg, is why.
David Bentley Hart stirred some controversy a few years ago with That All Shall Be Saved. An edited version of his afterword to the Greek edition is here. I’m surprised that references to Hart (who is quite a bully) did not crop up in this broader discussion.
I mentioned Hart a day or two ago on the “Does God Inflate Grades?” thread — along with another thoughtful and well-read writer, “Turmarion,” who has also written extensively on universalism:
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/condemned-to-salvation-considering-universalism-with-david-bentley-hart/
FWIW. In general, I think that if one means to engage an issue seriously, then it’s best to focus on answering the strongest and most carefully stated arguments on the other side.
Almost every doctrine on earth has been subtly advocated my men who are smarter and more eloquent than I am, so focusing on “answering the strongest and most carefully stated arguments in their favor” is beyond my powers and time-budget. Feminists will tell you that you cannot reject feminism until you have read one hundred of their horrible books, and when you finish those hundred books, they will say you must read one hundred more. Hart is a very gifted writer and a wily polemicist, and I haven’t the patience or skill to unpluck his Gordian knot. Life is short, the clock is ticking, and much erudite nonsense must be summarily rejected as flat wrong.
D.B. Hart is simply wrong about universalism being the original Christian belief. The original belief, the one that we find witnessed to in the New Testament, is that judgment is final and permanent (so you’d better repent now while you still can). That some theologians in the second and third century toyed with the idea of universalism is of little consequence. By the fourth century, the church had perceived the danger that universalism posed to the integrity of the gospel, and took steps to squash it. The church doesn’t survive by some permanent principle of infallibility; it survives by the principle of “live and learn”.
When I have time, I will dig through some old notes for ironic quotes from the 19th century United States observing that the churches of the Universalists were often empty. Any church that preaches universalism is essentially telling its members to sleep in on Sunday morning. That’s why some Americans (like Orestes Brownson, who was a Universalist minister for a while) decided that universalism was really a plot to destroy Christianity. Theology aside, it is simply bad psychology to suppose that humans will continue to worship a universalist god out of gratitude for his infinite mercy. If an old millionaire gives his children their inheritance while he is still living, he will very soon thereafter see much less of his children. Universalism is a creed that destroys itself by discarding incentives.
In the same spirit I just mentioned of engaging with the best arguments on the other side, I would recommend that anyone meaning to criticize “liberalism” try to come to grips with what actual liberals would say they believe, particularly the liberals who have given these issues the most careful thought. What this post calls “liberalism in a nutshell,” I think, is what most liberal philosophers, and the best liberal commentators, would easily swat away as mere caricatures, not at all accurate descriptions of their moral and political claims.
The philosophical tradition that includes the likes of John Stuart Mill, Isaiah Berlin, John Rawls and their followers is not, in its advocates’ view, an appeal to compassion at the expense of justice. I’m not a moral philosopher myself, but I’ve had plenty of liberal professors in the course of my humanities education, so I’ve been exposed to this stuff many times — and as best I can tell it’s a set of arguments that themselves are aimed at justice, but also take the premise that justice is not always correctly defined or assessed. The Salem “witches” allegedly were dealt justice, for instance. Would anyone today claim that that’s what actually happened at Salem? The judges themselves, and the government of colonial Massachusetts, were already climbing down, asking forgiveness and paying compensation within ten or fifteen years of the witch trials. The more sophisticated liberal argument, as I understand it, isn’t that justice is unimportant, but that what conservatives call “justice” is often really a rush to judgment, a kind of overreactive panic resembling the Salem witch panic (though usually to a lesser degree, fortunately).
If Salem seems too remote, consider a contemporary case: a bunch of guys in middle age who had good opportunities in life, perhaps even made lots of money, but then are found variously living in squalor, low-functioning, beating their wives or girlfriends, in trouble with the law, or generally acting poorly and, in a number of cases, committing suicide. Just men of weak or poor character, right? Their struggles are merely their just deserts? Well, but then it turns out that what they have in common is that they were all in the NFL and all played football for many years, including in their youths when their brains were still developing — and we now know that the large majority of former players whose brains have been examined post-mortem have had a kind of brain damage called “chronic traumatic encephalopathy.”
Oops! Maybe, then, our moral judgments, like those of the Salem judges, were a bit premature. CTE is something we didn’t know about before. (God, however, knows every detail of such things. Does God perhaps factor it into his final judgments on these persons? Even if their premature deaths caught them at an inopportune moment? Is God, as I would hope, a football fan?) These, I think, are the kinds of issues liberals would say they’re trying to take seriously, and to factor into considerations of “justice,” while conservatives ignore them.
This is because the great suffering with which liberals ask us to sympathize is always the distant suffering of an ideal type. It is, for example, the suffering of saintly slaves on an imaginary but hellish plantation, a way down south on Red River in Louisiana. Thus was the “suffering situation” famously stereotyped by Harriet Beecher Stowe.
I don’t understand this. Obviously, contemporary liberals aren’t focused on antebellum slaves, but on living people they consider to be victims in the present day (currently, for instance, Palestinians, Ukrainians, war refugees and asylum-seekers, as well as various alleged domestic victims). A defense of slavery as having been “stereotyped” is never going to sound remotely persuasive. It was not a “stereotype” that slave families were sometimes broken up when their members were sold away, or that slaves were beaten and whipped for doing such just and sensible things as trying to escape. HB Stowe published a large companion volume to Uncle Tom’s Cabin aimed at documenting those and other such practices as entirely factual. It wasn’t a “stereotype” that black Americans were legally held as property, and were “so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect” — that was a statement from no less an authority than the US Supreme Court. Liberals didn’t make it up. So it’s a bit too late to try to vindicate slavery or rescue the reputations of the slaveholders; we can argue that some, perhaps, redeemed themselves in other pursuits and shouldn’t have their statues taken down, but dismissing as stereotypes even arguments against slavery just makes the liberals’ point.
As I said, life is short and liberal gasbags are extremely long winded. Not just liberal gasbags, but liberals do have a habit of publishing very long love letters to themselves. The tern liberal has more than one definition, but I’ll stand by my definition with Minogue as my authority. They seek power by expressing compassion for distant stereotypes. They are not charitable towards me, so why should I be charitable towards them? As Minogue says, they have the normal, rather small, quotient of humanitarian compassion; their distinction is to rhetorically magnify that compassion, and to build from it a system of social control.
Your examples seem to prove my point that liberals love to whip up compassion for distant stereotypes. Witch trials! That was, let me count, four hundred years ago! Slavery! One hundred and fifty! The Damned! Well, we’re still working on that one.
Liberals remind me of Mormons in their assurance that one more telling of the mythology will bring the sinners ’round, and then we will be marching arm in arm to Zion. Do you understand that we have had this dreck pushed down our throats since infancy? We have read enough love letters by liberals to themselves. We know liberal mythology frontward and backward.
Well, you brought up slavery, not me. I suggested a more present-day case. As to Salem, sorry, but no, I am not making the liberal “gasbag” argument because, first, I’m not a liberal gasbag, and second, my point was not about “compassion” — it was about justice and how imperfect our conceptions of it can be. That obviously is still true today. We can get both our facts and our standards wrong. What’s interesting about CTE is that it was first diagnosed in 2002, more than a full century after the rise of organized football. Meanwhile, the disorders caused by such brain injuries would have been seen as character defects. That’s a current but also very old story; mental illnesses in general were not recognized as illnesses, unwilled conditions, until relatively recent times, which totally scrambled judgments directed against the mentally ill. Not just led to less compassion for them (though that too), but damaged the whole cause of trying to bring justice to the world.
Does that matter? I would think it would be of special concern to anyone who puts a particularly high value on justice, since injustice defeats justice and undercuts the standards its advocates seek to apply. Again, as I understand it, one of the liberal arguments (among the more thoughtful liberals) is not that justice is unimportant — if anything, liberal rhetoric seems full of demands for justice — but that we should avoid being too sure we know all about everything already and have it all nailed down. There might be factors in play that we don’t recognize or fully understand yet. And even more so should we be careful about claiming to know the mind of God, as the Salem judges did, as the Southern slaveholders did in defense of their system of organized kidnapping, and as other groups continue to do right up this moment. Those wrong judgments harm the cause not only of justice but of belief in God.
“Feminists will tell you that you cannot reject feminism until you have read one hundred of their horrible books, and when you finish those hundred books, they will say you must read one hundred more. … We know liberal mythology frontward and backward.”
Right, the “mythology” — which is NOT knowing the best arguments, but quite the contrary. I don’t think we need to read a hundred books, or even any one specific book; it’s just a question of choosing to find and answer better arguments rather than poorer ones. You can probably get the gist of the better arguments from one well-chosen Substack essay.
But, of course, you’re not required to! You can go ahead and focus on weaker arguments if you like. I just don’t see what that achieves, except maybe some kind of tribal signaling. It just enables both sides to easily swat away arguments from the other on the grounds that their actual views have been misrepresented. If the concern is that liberalism is an effort to “seek power,” the solution would seem to involve more and better debate — because if opponents are just talking past each other, then there’s no hindrance to the more powerful just outright winning. And in the Western world, at present, that does not seem to be conservatives.
They are not charitable towards me, so why should I be charitable towards them?
I’m not saying you should be. There was this weird hippie freak who did, though. Fortunately, somebody heard his nonsense and wrote it down to warn us against him: Luke 6:27-31.
I am not a medical man, but I will venture the guess that CTE has as much to do with legal torts as it does with medical science. If the owners of NFL franchises did not have deep pockets, there would be no CTE. If the violent hulks who excel at football were not disproportionately inclined to clobber their girlfriends, there would be no CTE. I do not deny that there are serious occupational hazards for men who butt heads for a living, but this does not change the fact that CTE is a “cultural construct” that confers additional privileges on a highly privileged class of men.
Life takes its toll on every man. The nature of the toll taken on any particular man depends on his particular life. What makes this injustice? Work on an assembly line is very boring, with a result that many assembly-line workers become very dull dogs with serious drinking problems. If they were glamorous figures with the money to hire smart lawyers and “expert witnesses,” I am sure we would have BIA (Boredom Induced Alcoholism) and a slew of lucrative torts. Injustice against classes of humanity is an invention of liberal mythology (and sharp lawyers).
I make some effort to understand opinions I oppose, but I do not spend my life doing everything I can think of to convert myself to those opinions. Those who advocate opinions I reject naturally tell me I have not read enough books, or the right books, or the right books with the proper understanding, and they would have me studying their horrible “literature” in every spare minute if I let them have their way. I subscribe to a principle that I will call philosophical disgust. The essence of this principle is that every man intuitively knows when a line of reasoning is, for himself, a dead end. To pursue that line of reasoning any father is irrational.
Are you seriously arguing that Jesus was charitable towards the Pharisees? Was it just and charitable when he called them Children of the Father of Lies? Did he tell his disciples not to rush to judgment and perhaps study more carefully the latest books by the smartest Pharisees? I do not claim the wisdom of Jesus, so I try to keep a more temperate tongue in my head, but his example of polemic is decidedly on the ferocious side.
If theologians hadn’t invented this nonsense about an “all-loving God” in the first place, we wouldn’t have any problem with the torments of the damned. God in the Scriptures doesn’t love everybody, and neither should we. We are to love our neighbors (those near to us), our brethren (our fellow believers), and our “enemies” (best understood as fellow believers who have done us some minor wrong). Beyond that, a good healthy hate would do us a world of benefit.
We are to love … our “enemies” (best understood as fellow believers who have done us some minor wrong).
A strangely phrased verse, then, because the Greek word translated as enemies is “echthros,” which refers to active opposition, and explicitly (in several passages) to people who actively hate us. Certainly not fellow believers or slightly erring chums. It’s the same word as in the recurring passages that talk about making one’s enemies a footstool. (Which doesn’t mean crafting a footstool to give them as a nice gift. It means turning them into a footstool.) It’s also associated with Satan’s serpents and scorpions (Luke 10:19), with sons of the devil who oppose “all righteousness” (Acts 13:10), and with death, the last “enemy” to be destroyed: “eschatos echthros katargeō ho thanatos” (1 Cor. 15:26). If it was meant the way you’re saying, then the Gospels are radically unclear.
Further to that point about the echthros: there were perfectly serviceable terms in New Testament Greek for the concept you’re referring to — “fellow believers who have done us some minor wrong.” There’s the sinning brother (“adelphos hamartanō“) in Matt. 18:15, and, slightly stronger, the “opponent” (“antidiatithēmi“) in 2 Timothy 2:25. It’s very interesting, then, that the Gospel writers preserved echthros — active, hateful enemy — as Jesus’ preferred word for those we’re supposed to love. I’m not entirely sure what to make of that either, but denying what the text actually says is not the route to understanding it.
Life takes its toll on every man. The nature of the toll taken on any particular man depends on his particular life. What makes this injustice?
The injustice isn’t necessarily the toll taken. Or at least, that’s a separate question. It’s blaming people for things that aren’t their fault — for the results of conditions to which they did not give free and fully informed consent. If CTE is a cultural construct, it’s a damn clever one, because medical researchers have learned about it by autopsying brains in which the lesions and other damage are clearly visible. They show up in photographs! It’s not like “systemic racism” and other things liberals complain about that no one can see with the naked eye.
Are you seriously arguing that Jesus was charitable towards the Pharisees?
I didn’t argue anything. I cited Luke 6. I did not write Luke 6, nor decide to canonize it in Holy Scripture, so if you have an objection to it, your complaint is with upper management.
But I agree, Jesus could be a harsh polemicist on other occasions. It is quite interesting that on the one hand, he tells us to love the “echthros” (see my reply to G. Poulin), to return harshness with mildness, to let people steal from us — and then, on other occasions, he lets it rip against against folks who were themselves religiously faithful and were leading doctors and preachers of Jewish law. Perhaps it’s part of God’s grace to give us Merciful Jesus for the simps who want that, and Punitive Jesus for the angrier crowd. We get to pick and choose. 😉
You have put your finger on an essential difference between liberal and conservative thought. We do not give consent the tremendous moral weight that you do. I did not consent to the Law of Gravity, but my sticking (or falling) to earth is not an injustice. I am governed by innumerable laws to which I have not consented, some of then human, some natural, some divine. In the case under consideration, those football players were “culpably ignorant” of whatever medical science knew about head injuries at the time they played football. They saw the glamor, the gold, the girls. I’m not surprised that they did not swing round the medical library and take a look at the journals, but nothing but their own impetuosity (and perhaps stupidity) prevented them from doing this and understanding the risks as well as was possible at the time.
You have mistaken me for someone who speaks FOR liberals rather than ABOUT them. I consider myself a moderate centrist, but I try to do what I also teach my students, which is to take account of the best arguments on all sides of a given contested issue. I am therefore probably more sympathetic to liberal arguments than you are, but have also spent plenty of time arguing with liberals, and even more so with leftists, whom I think are frequently wrong about lots of things. My most often cited academic publications are mildly conservative protests against politically correct academic leftism. Granted, some of the citations are lefties denouncing me, but they still count to my credit. 🙂
It’s certainly possible to give consent less weight as a moral criterion than some liberals do, but it would make no sense to suggest that it’s a non-issue. Obviously, we’re in a very different moral position relative to things we agree to than to things we don’t agree to. If I’m a German who opposed Hitler, that’s quite different morally from being a German who supported Hitler. If I’m a 19th-century American who teamed up with William Lloyd Garrison, that’s worlds apart from being a teammate of John C. Calhoun’s. If moral distinctions like these don’t matter, then we’ve abandoned justice and moral judgment far more drastically than “liberalism” has ever urged us to do.
In the case of mental illness, I can’t see how we could plausibly say that anyone “consents” to have it, any more than they consent to having cancer. Certainly some organic mental illnesses are just there, irrespective of any choices the individual made in life. Any attempt to judge people justly must necessarily factor this in where it’s relevant. Otherwise, we’re not arguing for more justice, we’re arguing for more punishment and mistaking this for more justice. Justice, of course, doesn’t just mean making sure the guilty are punished; it also refers to freeing the innocent, vindicating the righteous and rewarding the good. I’m very much in favor of all those things too.
How could there be a word of difference between supporting Garrison or Calhoun? I thought your position was that God loves everyone, regardless of what they do. A conservative will value consent so long as it stays in its place. But it grossly distorts morality when it is given more weight than it deserves. We all have unchosen obligations, and it is morally wrong to repudiate these obligations because we have not consented to them. There are certainly forms of mental illness for which the madman bears no responsibility, but a drunkard, say, bears responsibility for insanity occasioned by drink. This is true even if he is entirely ignorant of the relevant physiology. A man who submits to repeated voluntary concussions for cash (and chicks) bears some responsibility for the sequel.
Why? Surely, the causal chain backwards from the Hitler supporter eventually touches something the Hitler supporter didn’t freely choose in an environment of rationality and full information.
We all have unchosen obligations, and it is morally wrong to repudiate these obligations because we have not consented to them.
Yes, of course. But it would make zero sense to say that consent doesn’t matter at all. I routinely have students sitting in front of me in a classroom for up to a couple of hours at a time, even on pleasant spring days when many of them would probably prefer to be out and about. Why is that not only acceptable, but something I’m actually paid to do? Because they’ve consented — in fact, have actively sought and prepared — to join the university in the role of “student” and sit in classrooms for periods of time. Since I don’t take attendance or penalize them for absences (though I’m authorized to, and I do examine them on what’s covered in class), the voluntariness of their presence is even clearer.
Now, what if I had forced those same individuals into that room at gunpoint and were holding them there against their will? That would be morally, ethically and legally quite different. Police would bust down the doors to free them and would take me into custody. And rightly so.
The opposite of eliciting consent is forcing things on the non-consenting. That’s acceptable with children, up to a point, but it’s criminal misconduct in most cases if done to adults (especially if the thing being forced on them is more harmful than, say, a lesson on American literature). This has normally been true in every human society. Why? Because of a universal moral intuition that other people’s autonomy and agency should, in general, be respected, and that this is one of our moral duties. Why are “liberty” and the “consent of the governed” key phrases in the Declaration of Independence? The American Founders evidently considered these concepts rather highly important, even worth going to war over.
A man who submits to repeated voluntary concussions for cash (and chicks) bears some responsibility for the sequel.
Some, but a brain injury is always at least a mitigating circumstance. It won’t fully excuse everything it causes, but probably every court in the world recognizes that any serious attempt to do justice must at least take due account of it if it’s known.
How could there be a word of difference between supporting Garrison or Calhoun? I thought your position was that God loves everyone, regardless of what they do.
Very odd question. One of them (Calhoun) actively fought for a system that was founded on kidnapping, involved the buying and selling of human beings, kept people in lifelong captivity at forced labor, and sometimes broke up families for profit. The other (Garrison) opposed this and worked to end it. Gosh, gee, yes, what’s the difference, let me see if I can remember it….. oh, right! One position is hugely immoral, and the other isn’t. (Also, one was a shocking violation of America’s professed commitment to liberty and consent, as was frequently pointed out at the time.)
How God’s involvement would make that unclear, I have no idea. God loved John C. Calhoun; God pours out grace and mercy on the undeserving — who include, Christianity teaches, all of us. Did God love Calhoun’s politics, though? I very much doubt it. Have you never known people who detested each other’s ideas, or their actions or life choices, but still loved and were devoted to each other? I have. If human beings can manage that trick, obviously God can too.
But God is also a God of justice — no denying that — which was why, as Lincoln put it, God was prepared to see to it that “all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk,” and “every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword.” Why were the slaves “bondsmen”? Why was their toil “unrequited”? Because they had not consented. It was an important consideration for Lincoln too, that liberal squish. 😉
Perhaps you’re mixing up these matters with the universalism issue. That’s a different question, which has to do with what happens to the John C. Calhouns of the world after death, notwithstanding whether their actions in life were praiseworthy or not. A doctrine of God’s continuing forgiveness even beyond death is not a claim that God approves of what the forgiven people did in life. Just the opposite: it’s the evil they did in life that triggers the need for that forgiveness.
Consent is important in its place. Your example of the students reminds us that there are degrees of consent. No offense, but I daresay most of your students acquiesce, which is really consent under heavy pressure. They do not actually want to take your class, or even go to college, but they were born into a society that makes college a requirement for non-menial, non-manual employment. When you look closely, a lot of consent is consent to one of thos Mafia-like offers that you can’t refuse.
You have told us that God’s infinite mercy does not draw the line at kidnappers or slavedrivers. You have told us that God does not punish immorality. Are you saying here that he sometime frowns. This will not do. Liberal laxity and censoriousness always clash in this way. You say everyone is actually good, but then must find a way to send the bastards you hate to some sort of quasi-hell. I’ll call it God’s “time out.”
It seems that I’m not the opponent you’re looking for, so you’re trying to make me into that person through a kind of auto-complete, imputing to me the views you’d prefer to argue with even though I don’t hold them. I never said everyone is actually good. To the contrary, I take the Christian view that we are all Original Sinners and in need of redemption and unmerited grace. I did not say “God does not punish immorality.” I critiqued one theory of how God does that in the afterlife. How God ultimately “draws the lines,” none of us knows, but the traditional teachings about heaven and hell are self-contradictory, so I don’t think the particulars of that way can be right.
I did not say that brain-injured football players are “compelled” to anything. I said a brain injury is universally recognized as one mitigating factor. How it stacks up against other factors, mitigating or aggravating, is a complex analysis that varies with the individual case. That’s the thing about justice: it’s very case-specific and isn’t achieved just by announcing a couple of rigid categories. I drew no distinction between “victims” and the “evil,” and I certainly have no special affection for abusive former NFL players. I was strongly rooting for a murder conviction for O.J. Simpson, for instance, even though for all we know, he might have had CTE too. That doesn’t excuse beating people up or knifing them to death.
Anyone being judged is entitled to have his or her case considered as best we can in all its details, some of which might be mitigating but many of which might make the person look worse. (Astoundingly, O.J. Simpson’s own description of his actions in If I Did It manages to compound his guilt, not diminish it.) Interweaving justice with understanding and mercy in the most moral way in any given instance is extremely challenging, which is why it’s good that the being who does the final accounting is an infallible God with perfect information who approaches the human world with an abundance of love.
About consent, it’s true that we all consent to things under varying degrees of pressure; I myself am in that classroom with the students partly because I need to make a living. (The particular pressures on students you mention, though, are much less in evidence in the European system to which I happily escaped. I find the students generally of high quality — we accept only about one-third of applicants — yet I still hand out low grades now with what would have seemed like wild abandon at my US postings.) Even qualified consent, however, can usually be distinguished quite well from non-consent, coercion and fraud. Much of the criminal-justice system would collapse otherwise, as would all the world’s contracts, which must be consensual in order to be “contracts” at all. The entire economy depends on the premise that people are choosing to buy and sell things rather than being extorted. Consent is a core principle of human interaction, so yes, if you operate in the real world, making contracts, conducting business and favoring enforcement of laws, then you do give it a great deal of weight, and rightly so.
Again, apologies for not holding the views you’re most keen to oppose. To borrow the immortal words of Sheriff Brody, if you want to attract more worthy opponents of that kind, you’re gonna need a bigger blog. 😉
“Original sinners” is an ambiguous phrase but I think it suggests that original sin is something everyone does. No one (except Adam and Eve) does original sin. We all possess it as a hereditary disposition, rather like I possess my grandpa’s old deer rifle. Now I could take that rifle and (after considerable cleaning) shoot someone. Or I could leave it in the closet, I suppose I could clean it and shoot a deer. Original sin is like that. It is a capacity for sin, indeed a disposition or inclination. But simply to possess original sin cannot be sinful (on your as well as my account) because it is hereditary and unchosen.
You are right to say that justice is “case specific,” since this is another way of saying that justice is something we do, or fail to do, to individual men and women. “Social justice” is an oxymoron because (pseudo) “justice” to some class of humanity necessarily entails real injustices to individuals in that class.
I can sympathize with your sense of being injured by mischaracterization, since I suffer similar injuries all the time. When a Liberal discovers I am a man of the Right, they immediately begin lecturing and condemning a stereotype of a man of the Right and not me. When traditional Catholics discover I am not one of them, they immediately begin denouncing me for some beastly heresy I do not understand. When I protest that I’m just an internet rando sharing my opinions (for free), I am mocked for making it all about me, thinking I am special, and giving weight to my own opinions. My philosophic cope is to remind myself that no one is as interested in my views as I am, and no one reads my words with the tender loving care that I do.
There is also a larger question of the relation of philosophy to polemic. Philosophy is something one does with a friend. Polemic is something one does with an enemy. It is often not easy to know which side of the line one is on. It is often strategic to jump back and forth over the line, or to make one’s interlocutor think the two of you are doing philosophy, while you yourself are doing polemic. As I say, this is all very complicated and I have as much desire as the next man to be just. But once a debate has clearly crossed the line and become polemic, one stops trying to be fair and just tries to win.
Talking about traditional Catholics, if I were actually agreeable and conformist, given my job and colleagues and near entire social crowd, I would be a born again Woketard, or at least super liberal, not a traditional Catholic. I am a right wing dissident in the spirit of JMSmith and Tom Bertonneau; hence my affiliation at the Orthosphere. Philosophers are necessarily heretics and potentially scapegoated and put to death. Ian might object to what he considers “mockery” but isn’t it fun to gang up on the stumbling block, the outrage, to vent one’s spleen? It certainly seems like it! You can call him names. The work of the devil! What a lot of rules there seem to be about how one must proceed. Presumably, the rules go out the window if the conclusions are agreeable.
Repeating the decisions of ecclesiastical councils does not a philosopher make. Jesus was a Jew and a heretic vis-a-vis traditional Judaism. It has been said that he wasn’t trying to start a new religion, just to reform Judaism. If I thought I couldn’t be wrong about philosophical questions I couldn’t be a philosopher anymore. I tell my students that I would be very disappointed to find myself writing exactly the same things in ten years time, so don’t be afraid to disagree with me because I plan to disagree with me at some point. As to picking and choosing what one likes, of course! In selecting traditional Catholicism to pledge one’s allegiance, one has picked and chosen along with the rest of us. Selecting evidence/reasons that supports one position is also unavoidable. If one has chosen traditional Catholicism, one musters arguments that traditional Catholicism is the way to go and anything else is the work of the devil.
You are right to point out that a conservative Christian academic is bound to be a natural contrarian in today’s university. You and I must not only now resist the peer pressure of our milieu, but we both earlier had to have the renegade spirit to apostatize from it. This disposition is bound to make us somewhat alarming to temperamental conservatives. When I talk to a temperamental conservative in real life, he will often be amazed to find a professor that agrees with him on so many points. But if I am not careful, I will sooner of later alarm him with an original speculation.
Surely, the causal chain backwards from the Hitler supporter eventually touches something the Hitler supporter didn’t freely choose…..
Not sure I get what you’re driving at, but if we believe that human beings are moral agents, then there’s no “causal chain” that compels someone to support Hitler rather than opposing him.
If we believe humans are moral agents, is there a causal chain that compels some punch-drunk ex running back to clobber his girlfriend? Look, we get it. The bad guys you like are victims of a bad environment. The bad guys you hate are evil.
JMSmith understood me just fine, as did Officer Krupke, one suspects.
I don’t understand what argument you are trying to make, especially now given how you responded.
I don’t understand what argument you are trying to make, especially now given how you responded.
I questioned what part of a “causal chain” would compel someone to support Adolf Hitler. That idea sounds like extreme liberal relativism and a complete suspending of moral judgment.
Social scientists used to talk about “plausibility structures.” The cool kids are probably using a new name, since that is the nature of social science, but the concept is important and easy to understand. We base our opinions on “data”–what is given. The “data” we are given is not random or representative, and it is very often intentionally tendentious. Let me filter your data, which is to say put me in control of your media, and I can make you support anything.
I’m glad we agree that that’s what you sound like and that you understood my point. How does that advance whatever argument you were trying to make, though?
Thanks for that comment. The doctrine of Original Sin makes much more sense to me now than it did when I was younger. I can look back on past events and relationships in my life and see them differently now, more clearly aware of the impact I was having on others and of how I could have done better for them. I can see how my own acts and decisions, even though not abusive and even when not overtly “bad,” were nonetheless focused on myself to a greater degree than I wish they had been. I can also see all kinds of ways in which I could have exerted myself more on behalf of others, but just didn’t. (Still don’t, not in all the ways I possibly could.) I can certainly see occasions when I could have been more tolerant and forgiving.
I take Original Sin to be the name for the human incapacity that generates these many little (and sometimes big) failures, that occludes at the time the more expansive moral vision that might come into focus when looking back after it’s too late. It’s what ensures that we won’t conduct ourselves as well as we could, certainly not reliably enough to keep the moral accounts from regularly sliding into arrears. A few saintly souls maybe come close to chronic goodness — I think my father did, for instance, in his long career as a low-paid special-ed teacher helping struggling kids — but even they are necessarily implicated in the world’s larger systems and arrangements, which still deliver significant harm. None of us is living as a citizen of the Kingdom of God, which I think is why the various parables and exhortations in the Gospels often sound shocking (and lead folks like G. Poulin in this thread to just deny what they’re saying): because they make clear that God sets standards that are literally out of this world, standards that earthly life is all about failing to meet. There’s a gap there that we cannot close. That gap is Original Sin, and there’s no solution to it apart from the unmerited grace of God.
@DrBill: I did not suggest that any “causal chain” compels anyone to take any particular ideological position. My position is the opposite of that.