Becoming Blind to Goodness

Saints Jean de Brébeuf, Isaac Jogues, and their companions were martyred by indigenous tribes. They died violent deaths for their faith.

I read My Battle Against Hitler by Dietrich Von Hildebrand recently. He's a fascinating figure because he was writing about Nazism in the 1920s, long before most would come to see that ideology as such a grave threat. As a Catholic, he saw how Nazism conflicted with the Faith in foundational ways. He further identified similar underlying concerns with socialism and Bolshevism. They all strip the individual of his humanity by materializing him into a utility of the state. Each man is denied his spiritual nature, and thus each ideology becomes highly reductionist in its treatment of individuals, thereby withholding from them the respect that is their due.

If we examine the direction of modern society today, we find that individualism is lauded (bordering on egocentricity), and on the surface, that seems vastly different from the hitherto mentioned ideologies. Yet, it too ignores man’s spiritual nature, which is where it overlaps with them.

C.S. Lewis was fond of noting that every person is immortal. Our decisions now will bear consequences on what our eternity looks like. When we lose this understanding of the nature of man, we expect the state to fulfill a deific role — for the state is the only god that a mortal creature would need. Only an immortal soul would need an eternal God.

If man is but a tool, then his inherent dignity is stripped and human life itself is deprived of its rightful value. When man is viewed as a utility for the ends of the state, China’s one-child policy becomes defensible, for example. At issue foundationally is whether we see the individual as spiritual or merely material.

The liberal individualism that dominates today posits that people are innately good, which is provably false. If we were such, then we wouldn't struggle with temptation. Doing what is right would be our easiest path, and that's often not the case. (Although, we have created societies to reward the good and punish evil, in order to create an environment where acting rightly is the easier path.) To acknowledge our inclination towards sin and then to struggle against that due to a recognition of a higher and objective good is to acknowledge a spiritual nature.

What constitutes good has become more obscured than most people realize, because we are graced with living in a heavily Westernized (and therefore Christianized) society. While mercy is considered a virtue in the West, it has been perceived as a character flaw elsewhere. While cannibalism and human sacrifice were condemned throughout Christendom, it was these practices that were practiced by entire tribes, which caused explorers to don the word “savages”. Those primitive peoples had come to consider such grotesque evils to be not just acceptable, but good. Many surrendered their own children in these practices to false gods.

I think it's naive to proclaim that we couldn't do such things. We do not want to think of ourselves that way. Yet, had we been born into those tribes, it is perfectly reasonable to assume we would have adopted some or all of those practices. Hence, we have much to be grateful for to the missionaries who spread Christ’s message around the world, many losing their lives to do so. So many martyrs like Fr. Jean de Brebeuf, S.J. and Fr. Gabriel Lalemant, S.J. died being tortured to death by primitive peoples, whom they sought to liberate and civilize.

Knowing that our grasp of what is good is so tenuous, the state of our current society becomes clearer. Many make worship of “tolerance” as the highest good because they live in denial of the very faith that set Christendom’s standards of goodness. They thus laud an ignorance of the good and celebrate their own failure to discern it (for they wouldn't want to be judgy).

Thus so many are trying to build society while blinded by ignorance. It’s so perverse that we saw parades throughout June in which people performed sexual actions before children. Those malefactors had decided that their actions were good, for their behavior encouraged wider acceptance (of the intolerable) and demanded tolerance. An ability to see the incorrigible rot at the core of our current societal pretensions is a necessary skill, lest we drown beneath the tide of modernity.