By Kevin D. Williamson
Tuesday, October 06, 2020
In the 1980s, the belief that God was inflicting a
horrible, deadly disease on people as a punishment for their sins and to make
an example of them was the kind of thing trafficked in by the Reverend Jerry
Falwell and other low-rent bigots of that kind. Today, it is an idea put
forward by, among others, Maureen Dowd of the New York Times and the
comedy writers of Saturday Night Live.
About 700,000 people in the United States have died of
AIDS since the beginning of the ongoing epidemic some 40 years ago; COVID-19,
which has been with us less than one year, has killed more than 200,000
Americans, and it is not unlikely that it will outpace, perhaps even far
outpace, AIDS in its body count, though it is possible that new treatments or a
vaccine will prevent that. One of the people suffering from COVID-19 is a
74-year-old man who is, for the moment, president of these United States. “In a
moment that feels biblical,” Dowd writes in her invariably banal New York
Times column, “the implacable virus has come to his door.” Imagine having
written that about, say, Michel Foucault in 1982 or Freddie Mercury in 1987.
Saturday Night Live reveled in Trump’s being shown
up by a partnership of “science and karma,” which is a strange pairing. Alec
Baldwin, who frequently appears as Trump on the sketch show (it is his
second-best performance in the role of a New York City–based Republican),
explained that it was all in good fun, because the White House had insisted
that the president was in no real danger and — get this! — Alec Baldwin
apparently now takes statements from the Trump administration at face value.
That’s no less silly and contradictory than “science and karma” (whatever you
think of karma, it is not scientific), but the writers of SNL
don’t take such propositions any more seriously than Maureen Dowd does the
adjective “biblical,” which she seems to take as a synonym for “poetic” or
“ironic.”
About that karma: Westerners cut off from Christianity —
and, hence, cut off from the main stream of Western civilization — have an
especial weak spot for vaguely understood Eastern concepts. Karma may be the
most abused of them, but zen is in the running, too: When I was living in
Manhattan, I used a very good housekeeping service that called itself Zen Home
Cleaning. I doubt very much that Japan has a Benedictine Maid Service or that
China has a Carmelite Laundry. (Trappist brewers, though.) The culturally
deracinated may not entirely understand the nature of their predicament, but
they cast about instinctively for a paradigm within which to organize their
prejudices and sensibilities, and so sundry exotic spiritualisms come into
fashion because they provide the illusion of an organizing principle without
all that yucky “Thou shalt not!”
Christianity has suffered many insults in the West, but
none so great as that inflicted upon Buddhism, an intellectually and
spiritually sophisticated religion reduced by the aspirations of the
middle-class middlebrow to a style of interior decoration. Walk through an
affluent neighborhood in Austin or Palo Alto and see how often the Buddha
himself appears as a garden gnome, usually in a yard with one of those signs
reading: “In This House, We Believe Love
Is Love, Science Is Real, Black Lives Matter, No Human Is Illegal . . .
.” The little Buddha in the shrubbery is not the Buddha but an advertisement
reading, “In This House, We Are
Star-Bellied Sneetches!” It is a marker of self-satisfied self-regard,
one that — like any item advertising the tolerance, kindness, or empathy
of its owner — tends to be displayed by the most vicious and vindictive kind of
person.
Zen is a category of housewares on Amazon, and karma
is how American cowards say, “He had it coming.”
No one would think of entering into a serious dispute in
science or engineering with no preparation or education (oh, almost no
one), but most people feel perfectly at ease shoving their ignorant little
noses into religious, ethical, or political issues with which they have no real
familiarity, one of the many unfortunate consequences of generalizing from
democratic procedure to a more general ethos of equality in
democratic mass culture. And so political commentators end up writing and
talking like sophomore humanities majors who become fascinated by the evocative
words in “Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle” or “General Relativity”
without understanding very much about the actual concepts associated with those
magical-sounding phrases, clumsily wielding ideas that are too heavy for them
to handle.
In the matter of Trump’s coronavirus infection, this
brand of willful moral illiteracy finds its full expression in essays such as
Dan Kois’s offering in Slate, “How Should We Feel About the Suffering of
This Man?” Kois, a human “Coexist”
bumper-sticker of a writer, slaps together a half-assed manifesto for hate,
and he recruits the usual assortment of sympathetic victims to gussy up his own
well-off-white-guy hatred in borrowed robes of victimhood: “The summer of
2016,” he writes, “was the summer of learning to hate Donald Trump: for his
racism, for his horrific treatment of women, for his cozying up to dictators,
and—undergirding it all—for the possibility, however remote, that he could take
all these qualities into the White House.” This is an example of self-righteous
hatred, which says: I don’t hate for my own sake but hate selflessly, on
behalf of the deserving.
This is a fairly common kind of thinking for the Left: On
Friday, Jacobin founder Bhaskar Sunkara wrote: “I think killing little
Romanov children was justified.” The socialist dream dies hard: The killers
lionized by Sunkara and likeminded American leftists were incompetent but persistent
executioners, who shot the Romanov family but failed to kill the two teenage
girls, whom they then attempted but failed to kill with bayonets, finally
shooting them at point-blank range. The executioners, as Edvard Radzinsky put
it in The Last Czar, “had no fear of heaven.” And so it is with their
epigones.
Sunkara’s chef’s kiss to child murder came in the context
of a discussion of Trump’s illness. His interlocutor, Alex Colston, wrote:
“Obviously, you should want the bastard to die. How is that controversial. [sic]
. . . Maybe justice demands more than being sentimental about Trump’s humanity
when he bears significant responsibility for over 200,000 deaths.” And, if that
is not categorical enough: “I hope he dies, and so far as we are wishing, I
hope he realizes the country wants him dead.” Note, again, the cowardly
recruiting of “the country” to the cause of private hatred.
(I suppose I must go ahead and note here that Sunkara is
a sometime contributor to the New York Times, which published some
frothing and foaming calls for your favorite correspondent to be fired and
shunned for the purported harshness of my political views, and that Colston
labors at Basic Books, which shortly thereafter offered to acquire a book from
me and then backed down under internal criticism. My shocking view is that
children should not be murdered for political purposes, or other
purposes.)
Kois, in his Slate essay, brings up the issue of reciprocity.
Some people, including the president’s political rivals, have comported
themselves with at least some degree of grace and decency during his sickness.
“Would Trump have behaved similarly under similar circumstances?” Kois asks.
“It’s hard to imagine.” It is not hard to imagine, but it is impossible
to believe. It is harder still, apparently, to understand that this is
irrelevant — unless you see the world more or less the same way Trump does.
Because Trump is an emotionally stunted and
intellectually immature man, reciprocity is his moral North Star, because
reciprocity is simply another way of asking, “What’s in it for me?” Trump in
fact frequently and explicitly frames his moral outlook in terms of
reciprocity: If they’re nice to me, then I’ll be nice to them. He famously said
of federal coronavirus aid to the states: “It’s a two-way street. They have to
treat us well also.” His tweets are full of “treated me very well” and “treated
me very badly” — he’ll use “us” if he’s feeling particularly presidential — and
he once went so far as to say “reciprocity” is his “favorite word.”
The evolutionary biologists tell us we are evolved to
practice and expect reciprocal altruism. We have that in common with fruit
flies and baboons. What is unique to us is the ability to transcend the narrow
narcissism of self-interest, including the narcissism of collective
self-interest. But that has to be learned.
Trump isn’t a self-consciously wicked man. He isn’t the
Marquis de Sade — he’s a child, and, like all children who have not been
taught, he believes that if a certain course of action benefits him, then it is
good, and if it causes him discomfort, it is bad. (And what is true of Trump is
true of Trumpism, which insists that the president’s dishonesty and cruelty are
virtuous.) That was what Trump was telling us when he was mocking John McCain
for his time spent as a prisoner of war: McCain’s ordeal — which he himself
could have relieved at any time with no expense to anything other than his
honor — caused him terrible suffering, inflicting on him injuries from which he
never fully recovered. Trump evaded service when his nation called, inventing
some transparent horsepucky about bone spurs. McCain spent years being tortured
and confined, and Trump spent his pre-bankruptcy years spreading his inherited
wealth around New York in Eighties Playboy style — and, from Trump’s
point of view, this incontrovertibly demonstrates the rightness of his course
of action. How could McCain have been doing the right thing if it cost him so
much?
From that point of view, Trump embraces fundamentally the
same moral philosophy as Kois, Sunkara, Colston, et al., in which “justice” —
or “karma” — means “I get what I want,” including, as Kois so directly puts it,
suffering for those whom one hates.
There is an alternative approach, that we might extend
the grace and love we would have for ourselves and our families not only to the
stranger and the rival but to the enemy, that we would bless them that curse us
and pray for them that despitefully use us, even those who persecute us, from
whom no reciprocity can reasonably be expected. That we would not reserve grace
and charity for those who deserve it and return it but instead extend it
without hesitation to those who don’t. This requires something more than what
Colston dismisses as “sentimentality.” It requires a radically different way of
thinking about how to be a human being, one that cannot be learned from the New
York Times.
Among the many desirable qualities of such an approach is
that it would distinguish us from the baboons.
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