Long ago, C.S. Lewis’ Uncle Screwtape made an observation of some value, albeit not wholly unproblematic:
The grand problem is that of “unselfishness”. Note, once again, the admirable work of our Philological Arm in substituting the negative unselfishness for the Enemy’s positive Charity. Thanks to this you can, from the very outset, teach a man to surrender benefits not that others may be happy in having them but that he may be unselfish in forgoing them. That is a great point gained. Another great help, where the parties concerned are male and female, is the divergence of view about Unselfishness which we have built up between the sexes. A woman means by Unselfishness chiefly taking trouble for others; a man means not giving trouble to others. As a result, a woman who is quite far gone in the Enemy’s service will make a nuisance of herself on a larger scale than any man except those whom Our Father has dominated completely; and, conversely, a man will live long in the Enemy’s camp before he undertakes as much spontaneous work to please others as a quite ordinary woman may do every day. Thus while the woman thinks of doing good offices and the man of respecting other people’s rights, each sex, without any obvious unreason, can and does regard the other as radically selfish.
I’m not particularly interested in going to the mat for Lewis’ contentions about the gender-relatedness of these two forms of unselfishness, but do think these two forms of unselfishness do, in fact, exist and do, in fact, sometimes clash for the reason he states. Some people think primarily in terms of not giving trouble to others and some think primarily in terms of taking trouble for others. Both have their merits and depending on the culture, both may serve as healthy counterweights to the other. I, for one, have moments where I appreciate this kind of friendship, for instance:
But, as the hilarious character of Ron Swanson also demonstrates, his philosophy also has insane and destructive consequences and no normal human can really live that way.
We need each other.
And in America in the Age of MAGA we are already, to again quote Screwtape, already crowding that side of the boat that is already nearly gunwale under in our mad devotion to not giving trouble others (by which we mean “abandoning the weak to their fate”). Our problem as Americans is not, by and large, an excess of love and responsibility for our neighbor.
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel is reputed to have said, “We may not be guilty, but we are responsible”.
I think this profound. A narcissistic and shame-based ethos, rooted in fear, always assumes that a call to take responsibility for the good of others is an accusation of guilt. So when there is, for instance, a mass school shooting, people motivated by love and a desire for the Common Good say, “We have got to find a way to make this stop, for the love of God!” while the Gun Cultist’s first, last, and only response is “Don’t blame me!”
This is also why the MAGA Cult responds to any call to deal with historic evils that reverberate down through history by denouncing it as “woke” and reflexively rejects all demands to respect the common good.
Meanwhile, love takes responsibility, even when it bears no blame for the evil. This is the supreme lesson of the cross, where he who bore no responsibility for the sin of the world became sin for us out of nothing but love. Narcissistic selfishness, trapped in fear and shame, rejects every call to responsibility as an accusation of guilt. And paradoxically, the rejection of responsibility often winds up incurring real guilt as the narcissist refuses even those acts they really do owe others not in charity, but in justice.
But Christ take upon himself all the guilty of every responsibility-shirking sociopathic narcissist on earth and turns it, not to retribution, but blessing. We are commanded to join him on the cross in that work.
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One Response
This reminds me of an exchange I had with the author of “The Latin Right” blog a while back. I pointed out a story on how the then recently enacted abortion bans had resulted in the deaths of women with complications with their pregnancy, as a result of the situation is being set up so that any intervention is being delayed until the risk of death is imminent, even if it was predictable.
Now, I don’t expect or demand that someone who constantly advocates for abortion bans will suddenly turn on a dime and flip on that position. But I do think that a normal person’s reaction would be to say something along the lines of: “You know what? That was an unintended outcome, so we should do something about that”, and open up to the possibility of amending the law or creating clearer state guidelines to reduce those types of incidents.
Of course, instead of that, he went straight to blaming the doctors for the incidents, ingnoring the fact that doctors are not rogue agents that just do whatever they want; instead, they follow the instructions given to them by their legal department. What we’re seeing, is just the logical end result of what happens when doctors and clinics face a greater legal liabily by providing an abortion than they would by just letting the woman die.
Nevertheless, the point you brought up is the one that he completely failed to grasp: that even if you want to argue that these incidents are not the state’s fault of enacting these laws, its still the state’s responsibility. If anything, you could argue that protecting their constituents is their whole reason for existing, not just virtue signaling to their particular in-group.
Because if you’re going advocate for “pro-life” legislation and then ignore the consequences of such laws, then that’s all this is to you: a virtue signaling game. Then again, one of his more recent articles is all about disregarding people’s lived experiences, so its pretty much on-brand.