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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
September 12, 2004
Demonizing
I know very little of the subject I shall write about today a subject I dislike though I have been thinking about it through most of my life. It is this business of demonizing people. The glib view -- taught in our schools and increasingly enshrined in our laws -- is that you just don't do that to anybody under any circumstances. Like most of our contemporary beliefs it is a kind of parody of the Christian or Gospel teaching hate the sin but not the sinner though complicated today by the fact that sins (sodomy being an obvious example) have become part of some people's self-identification and therefore you can't hate the sin either. Moreover this glib or parody view -- which I call "post-Christian" and compare to the "post-Islamic" view on the other side of the world that is a degenerate parody of Islam -- leaves the people who hold it at a loss when faced with real incontestable evil. The Christian could say we should hate Hitler's sins including the crime of genocide but might nevertheless pray for his redemption. It would be a stretch for anyone shorter than a saint to actually do this but the possibility existed in theory. It did not preclude hatred but redirected that hatred towards its proper target. The "person" to hate was not Hitler himself but "the devil who made him do it". There is a whole Christian view of war that holds we can ride into battle without hating our enemy -- doing what is necessary to restore decency and defeat tyranny but doing it to vindicate right. We could even hang a man for his own good -- should that appear the only way to prevent him from continuing to commit terrible crimes. Though of course the main reason we hanged him was to protect innocent others -- in the days before abortion became legal and socially acceptable and therefore common when we believed the innocent needed greater protection than the guilty. (For who is more innocent than an unborn child?) A great advantage of this Christian worldview -- on which our State and nation were founded and which was once taught in our schools and upheld in law -- was its internal coherence. The greatest minds through twenty centuries had thought through the legal implications but more profoundly discovered layer behind layer of morality written into nature. There is a moral order in the world a law behind human law and indeed all the "great religions" allow that good is good and evil evil. Today none of this is possible for Christian or any other religious reasoning is ruled out of court and all judgements must stand or fall on "pure reason". Which is a problem because pure reason is no more apparent than God or the human soul. Which is to say absolutely obvious to the eyes of faith and otherwise invisible. The removal of the postulated God and human soul from public philosophy thus leaves a system of legal reasoning that makes no sense. We have in effect a worldview that makes "demonization" illegal but cannot acknowledge the defining demon. Meanwhile it invents new crimes and forgets old ones while flailing about in the de-oxygenated chamber of "pure reason". There were many random directions we could have gone after the supply of oxygen was cut off but the one we seem to have hit upon is to define "crime" as belief in the existence of crime itself. The worst human deed is now to demonize something -- a person group practice object whim or ... anything at all. Fortunately though our brains have shut down our limbs continue to act mostly by the old values as a matter of pure habit and we continue to demonize and even punish people for little oversights such as murdering one another or stealing things. But we have no reason to do this any more since we have no grounds on which to distinguish the values of the strictest psychopath from the values of the strictest saint. They're all the same in pure reason. Galileo said in defiance of a cosmology that could not explain the movement of the earth And yet it moves. Today real demonization is in motion -- against Americans against Christians against Jews and against non-Islamist Muslims -- gathering force both outside and inside the West. And we have no way to distinguish it from the casual ranting of some old drunken fool in a bar. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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