Naive Idealists

During the Enlightenment, it became commonplace among the smart set to think of religion as a force for evil. They had good reason to think it. The 17th Century saw some of the worst violence and the worst kind of crimes committed in the belief that its perpetrators were fighting God's fight. But whatever was motivating these Christians to kill one another had nothing to do with genuine Christianity. This pathology that calls itself Christian derives from extreme forms of naive idealism.

Naive idealists hate the world as they find it and are committed to work toward the realization of an ideal world as they wish it would be. They believe in the righteousness of their cause, and they believe that any one who opposes them must be evil. And for this reason, they are a force in the world with enormous potential for causing horrific violence. Since for them evil is the force that prevents the world from conforming to their ideals about how it should be, they often become explosively angry, and this anger at the intractability of the world results in escalating levels of violence with each successive failure to force it conform. This is as much true of Islamic fundamentalists as it is of fervent Marxist revolutionaries. They see themselves as trying to rid the world of evil, but instead they become a force that promotes it.

Naive idealism as I speak of it here is a condition of profound alienation. It is an anti-human form of angelism that hates the world as it is and which cannot tolerate the presence of evil in it. Evil for naive idealists is a force that must be purged from the world, and they will do whatever it takes to get the job done. Inquisitions, witch trials, the French Terror, Stalin's and Mao's purges all derive from the kind of naive idealism of which I speak here. The worst crimes are perpetrated in the name of the highest ideals. Religious fanaticism of the Muslim or Christian type is all in the family with the fanaticism of the Hitler youth or the red guard in China during its cultural revolution in the sixties.  They might have different ideas about what the world would look like if it were cleansed of evil, but they are united in their obsession to purge it.  This is not a religious phenomenon; it is a psychological pathology that can garb itself in Christianity or Islam, but also in secular ideologies like Marxism and fascism.

What unites them is their world-hating mentality.  They may argue that they don't hate the world, but hate the evil that is in it.  But the distinction is irrelevant, because evil is inextricably embedded in the world as it is, and to attempt to destroy evil requires destroying the world.  Naive idealists are appalled at the intractable nature of evil and ugliness and want everything to be just so according to their utopian blueprint. It cannot happen.

Naive idealists always present their murderous causes in the most lofty of terms. Was John Brown wrong in his goals to abolish slavery? Of course, not. But he was an unhinged fanatic whose hatred of the evil of slavery made him more a force for evil than for good. Is abortion evil? I believe it to be a practice that is a symptom of our profound alienation as moderns and which dehumanizes everybody involved in it because of its barbaric dismissal of the rights of the most vulnerable and most dependent human life. The alienation of its promoters and defenders, as I see it, derives from a left-leaning naive idealism. But equally or even more dehumanizing is the hatred of fanatic, so-called "pro-lifers" who are among the most egregious exemplars of the naive idealism of which I speak. But abortion is a system of bloody violence all the way around no matter how strenuous the effort to sanitize it.

Is Islamo-fascism evil? Without a doubt. Does that mean that it should be purged from the world? The impulse to purge evil from the world, including the evil in fanatical Islam shares, in its evil. It's as if evil creates a system that involves both those who promote it and those who seek to exterminate it.  It's a closed system that locks both parties in an endless karmic loop where victory means becoming the evil one sought to purge. Like a parasite, evil just moves from one host to the other.

So the hatred naive idealists have for what they perceive as evil usually winds up sooner or later destroying themselves and a lot of innocents with them. We Americans are vulnerable in this sense. One of the great cliches among aspiring writers is their ambition to write the "great American novel." But it has already been written, and it's called Moby Dick. Ahab is the archetype of the American version of the naive idealism that is so deeply woven into our national character. Melville is our national prophet, and Ahab's story is our story now in the Middle East. Both stories are about how the hatred of evil and the desire to hunt it down and exterminate it make one profoundly complicit in the system of evil. Ahab does evil's work just as much as the evil he hates, and thinks he's doing God's work the whole time. And the final result is shipwreck.

Contrast this attitude toward evil with the gospel depiction of Jesus' confrontation with the woman caught in adultery whose Ahab-like accusers were about to stone her to death. Jesus' attitude is not one of liberal tolerance, but neither does he condemn. His attitude contrasts profoundly with those who were about to stone the woman, because whether they realized it or not, their desire to kill her made them just as much a part of the system as she was. There was a karmic loop in the making there that would have continued in perpetuity unless there could be an intervention from outside of it, and that's what Jesus' confrontation with the woman represented--not a condemnation, but the chance of liberation from the loop. And the story is so moving because she appeared to have accepted that chance. She understood what was being offered to her.

But the point is this, the only way you escape the loop is by being thrown a lifeline from a source outside of it. The person caught in the loop, of course, has to chose to use it to climb out. There's no forcing compliance. But it's not even a possibility unless such a lifeline is thrown. The task for the genuine Christian and for every person alive to the possibility of grace  is to throw lifelines, not to condemn or to force their will on those who are resistant to it.

That's my understanding of the meaning of original sin.  None of us if he lives in the real world is ever free from the influence of evil in it.  It's just there; it's not the whole story, but it's in the air like toxic fumes. We are all of us caught in the an all-but closed system, and we would eventually suffocate if something were not offered from outside, a lifeline which does not lift us out, but rather gives us some clean air to breathe and which strengthens us to live more effectively in a world full of toxins.  But I do believe that it's possible to create zones within the world that are relatively free from these toxins, both as individuals and in communities, but no one is ever free so long s he walks the earth.   That's why we need to throw them to one another and to be grateful when one is thrown to us.

The Middle East is a horrific mess right now. The Israelis and Palestinians are caught in such a loop, and now so are the Americans and the Islamo-fascists. It's the same old, same old story. But who is there now to throw us a lifeline?

Comments

[Walker Willingham]

Naive idealism seems an awfully soft appellation for what you are describing. Zealotry is the term that comes to my mind. But the connection of zealotry to its source in some perceived ideal is an important one to make, both for our understanding of it, and for creating the possibility of an intervention to break the karmic loop of which you write. Who indeed is there now to throw us a lifeline?