The Naturalization of Vice and the Falsification of the Good
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October 2, 2020If you had told my father in 1965 that someday within his lifetime pornographers would be lionized as champions of the 1st amendment while the Knights of Columbus would be vilified by a United States senator (and now VP candidate) as a dangerous right-wing front group for hate-filled bigots, he would have thought you were bonkers. But here we are. It is the result of a historical process of change that some philosophers call “the falsification of the good” which is just a fancy way of saying that what we are witnessing is a grand reversal of values where the traditionally understood notion of the moral good is now viewed as evil, and the evil, good. This, of course, has tremendous implications for our culture, but also for our politics, which are currently both toxic and vicious. For as Andrew Breitbart has pointed out, politics is downstream of culture, and if this is true, (I think it is), then the falsification of the good in our culture is exactly why our electoral politics is corroded as well.
How did this falsification of the good happen? In the grand scheme of things, it did not take long, about 30 years, for abortion (to cite one example) to evolve from a grave moral evil, to a tolerated evil, to a necessary evil, to a positive good, to a fundamental human right, to a quasi-religious Sacrament of human liberation. Meanwhile, in that very same short time frame you see our social view of Christianity evolve from “the backbone of our civilization” to a “benign personal choice” to a form of repressive fascism. And so one wonders if there wasn’t something brewing below the surface all along that just went unnoticed, like a fire in a false ceiling, before bursting out into the open when grandma opened the attic door to retrieve her collection of gnome Hummels.
At the risk of being too breezy and superficial I think we need to begin with a quick reading of the early 20th century wherein we see a shift from analyzing our behaviors through a moral lens - - yes, even through the lens of that antiquated thing called “sin” - - toward a psychoanalytic analysis of our actions. Developed in a largely atheistic register, psychoanalysis was born in a view of human nature that saw us as nothing more than trousered apes with big brains whose social constructions were invented in order to tame our wayward and wandering genitals, as well as our penchant for deep depression caused by this taming. From a strictly biological perspective this view is largely correct I think, and, therefore, psychoanalytic thinkers did develop some sound techniques and insights into why we do some of the self-destructive, and just plain crazy, stuff that we do - - like cheering for Notre Dame, reading Dan Brown, and eating Scrapple.
However, the upshot of this was to naturalize our moral vices as nothing more than the behavioral and emotional echo of our simian roots, giving them no more significance in our analysis of human nature than the fact that men still have two nipples. The goal shifted from overcoming our vices through religious devotion and ascetical effort to “taming” our vices so that they do not cause social harm and thus allow us to function with one another socially. Gone was the idea that our vices were somehow morally “wrong”. They were now viewed as ingrained and inbred aspects of our nature, and it was therefore only a matter of time before people began to get the idea that maybe it was our repressive social mechanisms that needed adjusting and not our vices. And once that shift happened, the jig was up and the modern quest for “rights” veered from the laudable causes associated with fighting the residual effects of our simian tribalism (racism, xenophobia, misogyny), to the “liberation” of our simian libidos manifested in the transgressing of the ever-moving-line of social/sexual taboos. And any group (especially religious groups) who remained opposed to this struggle for the rights of my monkey genitals to free range at will was branded as fascist and oppressive.
Bonobos: yes. St. Paul: no.
Sadly, all of this had an effect on the churches as well, with post-war religiosity shifting into a decidedly therapeutic mode that gave a wink and a nod to the antiquated notion of sin, all the while turning a blind eye to our “small vices”. But most of us do not have “large vices” - - e.g. killing dogs, mutilating squirrels, raping my neighbors, an so on - - which meant that since we were now dismissing our small vices as “no big deal” that none of us viewed ourselves as having any real vices at all. So Catholics stopped going to confession on the presumption that all that matters is that I am “a good person”. It wasn’t too long before they stopped going to Church at all, realizing that one can be a good person, thus narrowly defined, without all of the annoying ecclesiastical apparatus.
Sin: out. Oprah: in.
But the problem is even deeper than this when one considers as well that this attitude also had an effect on those traditional folks who did still believe in sin. We are all children of our culture and whether we want to admit it or not this new therapeutic approach influenced our attitudes toward our vices in a decidedly latitudinarian and lax direction. We might still say that we “believe in sin” and we might also still say “I am a sinner,” but our actions speak loudly of a casual nonchalance towards our vices that renders any real progress in the spiritual life impossible. And thus even “religiously observant” conservative Christians are indistinguishable from their secular neighbors in terms of their behaviors and lifestyle. My vices become part of “who I am” that require no change and, indeed, make a moral demand on others for “tolerance” and “understanding.”
Carmelites: out. James Martin: in.
Sadly, even those of us who still go to Confession on a regular basis see this dynamic of “my vices are really no big deal” at work in our lives. For example, one of my main vices is that I have a short-fused annoyance factor with other people due to the presence in my soul of the vice of impatience at a level that borders on the maniacal. I remember once going to confession and confessing this sin (especially toward my long-suffering wife) and then went out to the pew to pray my three, largely distracted by dreams of supper, Hail Mary’s. My wife, who was also waiting to go to Confession, proceeded to take a rosary out of her purse and began to pray. A rosary! That is at least 15 minutes! Ugh. I gave her the annoying “Psst!” and she looked at me whereupon I stuck out my thumb and gestured for her to get going into the confessional. Which she, flustered and a bit angry, proceeded to do. Now, if I were truly sorry for my sins I would have gone right back into the box and said: “Forgive me Father for I have sinned, it has been exactly thirty-seven seconds since my last Confession.”
It is healthy, I think, to see such humor in our foibles, lest we become scrupulous egotists. But only to an extent, and only insofar as such self-deprecating humor doesn’t become a kind of paradoxical egotism in its own right as it wraps sinfulness in the shiny tinfoil of a false humility. Because it is precisely the boring repetitiousness of our sins that can make us insouciant toward them and, therefore, open us up to even greater evils, as our selfish stupidity initiates a downward entropy in our spiritual faculties.
The entropy of sin is in all of us which is why there are no such things as “unimportant sins.” And quite often we are actually spiritually worse persons than we think we are owing to the fact that the conditions of our affluent, bourgeois lives afford us a zone of comfort wherein being “nice to the nice” is easy. And as beings with a spiritual calling we are either trending upward toward God, or trending downward toward our gut or our crotch or our veins. There is no stasis.
In other words, despite how channelized our sins become - - and thus increasingly appearing as “natural” to us - - the dulling of the mind and the weakening of the moral will do not happen by accident and are the terminal product of the accumulated weight of the small compromises we make every day with supposedly “harmless” evils. Many great evils - - both private and social - - begin in this way, like an avalanche that starts as a small two-foot fissure in the snowpack that ends up burying an entire town. Great evils have been perpetrated by nominally good people who have allowed themselves in culpable ways to be manipulated by the illusions and deceptions of sin into doing things, often horrible and grotesque things, which they would not normally do. Things which they later look back on and say, “Good Lord, what was I thinking?”
It is precisely because most people are “good” in the conventional sense of wanting good things for themselves and others, that they can be led into very destructive ideas and practices if evil is packaged as an attractive counterfeit. Even the sketchy serpent in Genesis had to first convince Eve that eating that dang piece of fruit was a “good thing” that she “ought” to desire despite what mean ol’ God said. God is a buzzkill and the world gives us liberating shiny things. And for most of us, as it was for Adam and Eve, that choice is a no-brainer.
And Satan is the consummate weaver of deception. He knows nobody wants to be Hitler. You have to start small and build up to that through a series of clever commercials during the Super Bowl. That is why the best lies are lies that have an element of truth in them, and the best illusions are those that are not utterly fantastical, just as the best counterfeit $20 bill is one that looks shockingly close to the original. I can fool the clerk at the store with a well-made fake $20, but ain’t nobody gonna sell me squat if I hand over monopoly money.
Nobody is immune from this process. We are all prone to the counterfeits that create the falsification of the good and its inversion into its opposite. Augustine may have been overly pessimistic, but his insight into the pervasiveness of the libido dominandi in all of us should give us pause. And it should remind us that the only palliative for our condition is the balm of truth, for it is only truth that can shatter the deceptions, illusions and counterfeit goods that can lead us into some very great evils.
Thus, in an age such as ours, where the counterfeit simulacrum of the good is made ever more seductive by the balkanized world of our digital devotionals, the need for truth-tellers is greater than ever. But where are they?
The Church should be that beacon of clarity in times such as ours where truth has become a casualty of the naturalization of vice. But it isn’t. I am all for a pastoral approach that is gentle, compassionate, and merciful. Very few people will respond positively to a finger-wagging moralizer in the pulpit or the confessional. So please do not misunderstand my point.
I am arguing against a tendency in the modern Church to be embarrassed by the hard truths of the faith and to be constantly soft-peddling the demands of the Gospel through an “I’m Ok, you’re ok” therapeutic. The popular hymn “All are Welcome” does indeed embody a deep truth. However, it is also obnoxious and pernicious insofar as it is largely used as an expression of a trite and puerile spirituality of bourgeois comfort.
To go back to my experience of going to confession, nothing angers me more than to have the priest tell me that what I have confessed is no big deal and to go easier on myself. It angers me because I am not going to confession merely for absolution, but because I seek sanctity and ever-increasing closeness to Christ. Especially since, at age 61, I will most likely be dead soon. Scrupulosity is a real thing. But trust me when I tell you I am no “scrupie.” I am in need of a serious sacramental challenge to grow and to struggle, not to wallow in how “normal” I am. And, I suspect, most Americans are not scrupulous either and so a pastoral strategy that treats us as if we are is both empirically false and spiritually deadening.
We need prophets. We need holy men and women. We need the truth of Jesus Christ. But when most of your episcopate is made up of managerial class bores you aren’t going to get anything but anodyne spiritual bromides.
We need a Church that will challenge and stretch us. Are we as a laity up for that? I think we are. In fact, I think we are begging for it.