Jesus’ only advice to the adulterous woman in danger of
being stoned was to go and sin no more, a thing easy to say but hard, in the
absence of the grace of God, to do.
“Then Jesus straightened
up and asked her, “Woman, where are your accusers? Has no one condemned you?
“No
one, Lord,” she answered. “Then neither do
I condemn you,” Jesus declared. “Now go and sin no
more.”
We happen to live in an age where smut of one kind or
another, pornography or politics – don’t titter; the two have much in common – are
in the air we breathe, and there are some refreshing signs that the ubiquity of
both may be becoming tedious and off-putting to thoughtful young folk, about whom it is tritely said “they are the future.” In the post-modern age – whatever that
means -- bumper-sticker wisdom of this kind has become a substitute for
thought, a sort of mental daydreaming.
Thinking is laborious work. But in a time in which it has
become so easy to get along without thought, to drift in the stream – or,
better, to rent the thoughts of others -- thoughtlessness becomes fatal. Not
for nothing did G. K. Chesterton say that even a dead thing can float with the
current, but it takes a living thing to swim upstream against the current. Much
later, contemplating the evil of death camps in a Hitlerized Germany, the
philosopher Hanna Arendt disappointed nearly everyone by tagging the perfidies
of Heinrich Himmler as a certain indication of the “banality of evil.”
Evil… banal?
Evil is not less evil by being banal. Even Satan, it is
said, knows how to clothe himself as an angel of light. We may take that as a
metaphor, but everyone knows, in the marrow of his bones, that real evil needs
the permission of the will to operate in the world, and how better to anesthetize
the will than by presenting evil as
good, clothed in the purist light. White sapphire may be a diamond; a lump
of coal can never be mistaken for a diamond. And it is only sleepers or the
inattentive that fall through manholes.
There is a difference between the liberty of the person –
the old fashion notion that people should not be obstructed when they are
innocently going about the business of being their potty old selves – and the
libertine anarchism of the Marquis de Sade, which leans heavily on the corruption of
others, moral, spiritual and political – yes, political.
Drawing from nature, always red in tooth and claw, and
unwilling to fall back upon a classical view of man and God, whom the materialistic
philosopher must banish from his mind and the public square, de Sade reasoned that the order
of nature, which destroys old forms to create new realities, was the only possible
model for morality. To put it in the plainest terms, power must displace
morality because in nature power is all in all.
The Marquis de Sade was, French philosopher Albert Camus
reminds us in The Rebel, a highly sophisticated political
thinker, the father of what we may call postmodern nihilism. We are
his children, willing or not.
Any arc of history that begins with birth control and ends
with late term abortion and the selling of baby parts to doctors, banal though
it may seem to the sellers and buyers, is a de Sadian rainbow over the pit of
Hell. Far from swimming against the current of his day, de Sade IS the current
of postmodern, political moral anarchy.
Crime and murder in nature, the real natural order of things, was
for him – and some of us – a mantle of divinity and a sign of ultimate
liberation. In a heaven empty of divinity, “human crime,” as de Sade put it, “continues
to be man’s answer to divine crime.”
For “men like gods” – Caligula, de Sade or, moving towards
the postmodern world, Hitler, Stalin and Mao – crime and murder are
indispensable tools in our postmodern political tool box. Stalin is reputed to
have said, possibly about the famine he created in Ukraine, “If only one man dies of hunger, that is a
tragedy. If millions die, that’s only statistics.” Dostoevsky described
in a single line the arc of postmodern murder and crime in the blood drenched
20th century: “Without God, all things are possible.” Crime and murder, once thought immoral,
become in the postmodern vision the highest form of morality. Not only art but
an inverted, inartistic morality apes nature.
That is what moral anarchists in our own day – one thinks of
ANTIFA and other like groups – mean when they set fire to a church to protest
the indignities of history.
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