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Friday, December 31, 2004
Tension In The Chest
(This essay is best read as a coda to this one from yesterday.)
In sequel to yesterday's thoughts about loonies and the stresses they exert upon our society, your Curmudgeon had a long conversation with his colleague Pascal. As most such conversations do, it ranged widely, but one element of it struck home with particular force. Pascal cited a Judaic concept known by the Hebrew word tsedek: the moral obligation to maintain a balance between justice and charity.
As he set forth in this essay, by "justice" your Curmudgeon means the assessment of claims of wrongdoing, and by "charity" the extension of nominally unearned benefits to persons deemed to be "in need." Judaic thought holds these two to be in a healthful tension with one another: both are required of us, but neither must be permitted to gain ascendancy over the other. Though they are both good things, nevertheless, they compete. Moreover, either one can be perverted, and the easiest way of doing so is to push them beyond their proper sphere.
The loonies of yesterday's piece were illustrations of a perversion of our charitable sides. We have been instructed in stentorian tones that SUCH PERSONS DESERVE OUR COMPASSION AND FORBEARANCE. Indeed, in many places there are laws on the books to compel those things. By those lights, those loonies were entitled to exercise themselves as they did without penalty; indeed, it was "wrong" for Heather's hairstylist friend to be irritated by them, and for Heather and your Curmudgeon to write about them.
To which your Curmudgeon deposeth and sayeth:
The claim is usually couched in the language of compassion toward the less fortunate -- "less fortunate" in this instance meaning "compelled by some unspecified mechanism to wreak suffering upon undeserving others." It is to laugh.
In his monumental philosophical essay The Abolition Of Man, C. S. Lewis waxes eloquent about the ongoing attempt, through specious philosophy, to destroy "the Tao," the classical term for our apprehension of reality as it is presented to us -- our sense for that which is metaphysically inarguable. As part of his argument, Lewis notes that a great part of our grip on the Tao resides not in our conscious minds, but in our chests, where we feel magnanimity and righteous anger. He writes most vividly about the attempt to create, by twists of "education" in the modern style, a generation of "men without chests," for whom every issue is either purely intellectual or purely a matter of appetite. Here are the critical segments of his attack:
The Chinese also speak of a great thing (the greatest thing) called the Tao. It is the reality beyond all predicates, the abyss that was before the Creator Himself. It is Nature, it is the Way, the Road. It is the Way in which the universe goes on, the Way in which things everlastingly emerge, stilly and tranquilly, into space and time. It is also the Way which every man should tread in imitation of that cosmic and supercosmic progression, conforming all activities to that great exemplar. 'In ritual,' say the Analects, 'it is harmony with Nature that is prized.' The ancient Jews likewise praise the Law as being 'true.'[...snip...]
...It is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind if thing the universe is and to the kind of things we are. Those who know the Tao can hold that to call children delightful or old men venerable is not merely to record a psychological fact about our own parental or filial emotions, but to recognize a quality which demands a certain response from us whether we make it or not.
[...snip...]
Let us suppose for a moment that the harder virtues could really be theoretically justified with no appeal to objective value. It still remains true that no justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous. Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism....In battle it is not syllogisms that will keep the reluctant nerves and muscles to their post in the third hour of the bombardment....As the king governs by his executive, so Reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the 'spirited element.' The head rules the belly through the chest -- the seat, as Alanus tells us, of Magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. The Chest -- Magnanimity -- Sentiment -- these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man.
[...snip...]
And all the time -- such is the tragi-comedy of our situation -- we continue to clamour for those very qualities we are rendering impossible. You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more 'drive,' or 'dynamism,' or self-sacrifice, or 'creativity.' In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.
Lewis later gave this concept fictional form in his mighty fantasy That Hideous Strength.
Modern American society does not merely deride "the chest," as Lewis has characterized it; we've come dangerously near to amputating it.
The proper thing for someone to have done in the situation Heather's friend faced was to seize the miscreants by the most convenient handhold, pitch them bodily into the street, and tell them to return nevermore. It would at once have served justice -- the defense of the rights of the shopowner and her employees not to be harassed in the performance of their duties -- and charity -- those so treated would have been taught a valuable, perhaps unprecedented lesson in proper conduct in a public place. But the consequences of doing so would have ranged from lawsuits for damages to criminal charges of assault and battery. There was little chance that the proper course would have been adopted in those circumstances.
Yet, even were the weight of the law removed from the tableau, the likelihood of anyone behaving as your Curmudgeon has just prescribed would have been extremely low. The reason? We've been bludgeoned with cries for "compassion" and "tolerance" to such a degree that our natures are now split in two. The lobe in our chests that flares in anger at a recognizable injustice is being anesthetized or beaten dead, while the lobe that empathizes with unfortunate others is being trained to hypertrophy, to the point of complete dominance of all our responses regardless of context.
The phenomenon is social and developmental. It has the support of the most vociferous elements of our society, and is backed to a considerable extent by the statute law. It seeks to make each of us a reflexively self-sacrificial animal, ready to surrender his prerogatives and his sense of decency to any challenge, no matter what the context or the deportment of the challenger. And it is dragging us ever nearer to catastrophe.
There's much more to be said on the subject. One might say with some justice that it's the crux of our sociological discourse. But any constructive approach must begin with a frank recognition of Lewis's main contention: that there are values and standards that rise above personal preference, above legal pettifoggery, and above the opinions of others no matter how thunderously delivered, and that a decent civilization is not possible unless the overwhelming majority of men pledge themselves to their defense.
More anon.
Comments
I must disagree with your assessment (sp?) with regards to what kind of behavior which would occur upon encountering an individual who did not know how to behave properly. I have recently had a few encounters with some who pushed the limits of propriety, and while I was able to deal with the situation verbally, had it come to the physical, I may have held back due to legal repercussions.
There has been a general degredation in what I would term “proper” or perhaps “honorable” behavior over the years. The largest reason IMO is that there are no punishments available to deter the behavior, since laws are in place which keep some of us from enforcing the social contract. In previous generations, enforcing the social contract was not punished by legal means. In modern times, where everyone is a victim, trying to make people behave will land you in a world of trouble.
To make a long comment short, I disagree with your statement that if the legal repurcussions of enforcing a social contract were removed, or narrowly in this case of forcibly removing ill-behaving people from your place of business, nothing would change.
Posted by david on 01/06/2005 at 06:24 AM
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