OliveTapenade
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User ID: 1729
OliveTapenade
18d ago
I'm inclined to think of Romans 3 and Romans 12.
3:8:
And why not say (as some people slander us by saying that we say), "Let us do evil so that good may come"? Their condemnation is deserved!
And 12:17-21:
Do not repay anyone evil for evil, but take thought for what is noble in the sight of all. If it is possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all. Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, "Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord." No, "if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads." Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.
I can sense that some criticism of Aella, or this defense of public shaming, is going to come from a perspective informed by Christian morality. So I feel it is worth the reminder that this sort of consequentialism is directly and explicitly condemned.
I disapprove of Aella's behaviour. But the command is clear: do not do evil that good may come, and do not repay evil for evil.
OliveTapenade
18d ago
I'm not sure I have a lot to say here. I disapprove of Aella's life choices. I think she made poor decisions, particularly from a moral perspective. But I also very much disapprove of bullying and online cruelty, and she's no doubt entirely correct that a lot of cowardly troglodytes lashed out at her. I can hold all these positions at the same time. Aella made bad choices, but she should not have been bullied over them. I hope that getting off the internet is good for her.
I don't know, it just seems like a pretty straightforward situation to me. I don't approve of immoral means being used, even in the service of goals I might ultimately agree with. Promiscuity is bad, but internet hate is also bad. They are all bad at once.
For what it's worth I was aware of Aella only secondhand, by way of rationalists occasionally mentioning or citing her. I have no particular strong opinion of her. I think she conducted her sexual life badly, but then I think that about an awful lot of people. I think that about Scott Alexander himself. It's all much the same error. None of it licenses other people to attack them in this disorganised way.
OliveTapenade
25d ago
Chesterton was a localist and a distributist - his political views strongly tend towards small government. He criticises both capitalists and socialists for concentrating property in the hands of the few who can then wield arbitrary power over individual citizens. As an ethical matter, I think Chesterton is also conspicuously opposed to bullies. He presents himself as a champion of the ordinary, no-longer-free Englishman who craves a return to ancient liberties.
I would say that MAGA involves a centralisation of power in a single office, or more properly a single man, and that man is grossly intemperate and vengeful. I'd guess that Chesterton would see Trump as akin to one of the more demagogic kings of England, vicious in his lusts, but nonetheless opposed to the suffocating bureaucratic-parliamentary class that the common man sees as a more direct enemy.
In his Short History of England, Chesterton writes that "the case for despotism is democratic". I suspect he would see Trump as a 'democratic despot' along these lines, and Chesterton's observation that "[despotism's] cruelty to the strong is kindness to the weak" might enable him to regard some of Trump's excesses with a measure of sympathy, even if the man himself remains a despot. Thus, still in Short History:
This conviction, as brilliantly expounded by Bolingbroke, had many aspects; perhaps the most practical was the point that one of the virtues of a despot is distance. It is "the little tyrant of the fields" that poisons human life. The thesis involved the truism that a good king is not only a good thing, but perhaps the best thing. But it also involved the paradox that even a bad king is a good king, for his oppression weakens the nobility and relieves the pressure on the populace. If he is a tyrant he chiefly tortures the torturers; and though Nero's murder of his own mother was hardly perhaps a gain to his soul, it was no great loss to his empire.
Naturally I do not think Chesterton would be at all sympathetic to the American left, especially as that left has become increasingly institutionalised and regulatory. I am sure he would see that as a thicket of weeds choking the natural liberty of the people. That is simple an instance of The Servile State.
So I can see Chesterton having a kind of, if not affection precisely, at least understanding of Trump, as a kind of poetic expression of the American genius. So perhaps Trump is a Nero figure - someone whose own soul is perhaps contemptible, but whose effect, insofar as it weakens America's de facto 'nobility', is good.
I am not sure how far he'd go with that in practical terms, though, because Chesterton's distributism was very much concerned with the real distribution of property, and as much as Trump has symbolically offended an elite class, he has done very little to remedy the actual concentration of property in America.
I offered via Chesterton a kind of qualified defense of despotism, but I am bound also to mention his description of the same in Heretics:
Next to a genuine republic, the most democratic thing in the world is a hereditary despotism. I mean a despotism in which there is absolutely no trace whatever of any nonsense about intellect or special fitness for the post. Rational despotism—that is, selective despotism—is always a curse to mankind, because with that you have the ordinary man misunderstood and misgoverned by some prig who has no brotherly respect for him at all. But irrational despotism is always democratic, because it is the ordinary man enthroned. The worst form of slavery is that which is called Caesarism, or the choice of some bold or brilliant man as despot because he is suitable. For that means that men choose a representative, not because he represents them, but because he does not. Men trust an ordinary man like George III or William IV. because they are themselves ordinary men and understand him. Men trust an ordinary man because they trust themselves. But men trust a great man because they do not trust themselves. And hence the worship of great men always appears in times of weakness and cowardice; we never hear of great men until the time when all other men are small.
(This leads him on to a defense of 'hereditary despotism', i.e. monarchy.)
If we interpret MAGA as a type of Caesarism, which I think is about as reasonable a comparison as is available to us, I think this gives us a look at some of Chesterton's attitudes towards that. The worship of great men always appears in times of weakness and cowardice.
If you'll pardon a long quote, one of the next passages of Heretics strikes me as particularly apposite:
Everything in our age has, when carefully examined, this fundamentally undemocratic quality. In religion and morals we should admit, in the abstract, that the sins of the educated classes were as great as, or perhaps greater than, the sins of the poor and ignorant. But in practice the great difference between the mediaeval ethics and ours is that ours concentrate attention on the sins which are the sins of the ignorant, and practically deny that the sins which are the sins of the educated are sins at all. We are always talking about the sin of intemperate drinking, because it is quite obvious that the poor have it more than the rich. But we are always denying that there is any such thing as the sin of pride, because it would be quite obvious that the rich have it more than the poor. We are always ready to make a saint or prophet of the educated man who goes into cottages to give a little kindly advice to the uneducated. But the medieval idea of a saint or prophet was something quite different. The mediaeval saint or prophet was an uneducated man who walked into grand houses to give a little kindly advice to the educated. The old tyrants had enough insolence to despoil the poor, but they had not enough insolence to preach to them. It was the gentleman who oppressed the slums; but it was the slums that admonished the gentleman. And just as we are undemocratic in faith and morals, so we are, by the very nature of our attitude in such matters, undemocratic in the tone of our practical politics. It is a sufficient proof that we are not an essentially democratic state that we are always wondering what we shall do with the poor. If we were democrats, we should be wondering what the poor will do with us. With us the governing class is always saying to itself, “What laws shall we make?” In a purely democratic state it would be always saying, “What laws can we obey?” A purely democratic state perhaps there has never been. But even the feudal ages were in practice thus far democratic, that every feudal potentate knew that any laws which he made would in all probability return upon himself. His feathers might be cut off for breaking a sumptuary law. His head might be cut off for high treason. But the modern laws are almost always laws made to affect the governed class, but not the governing. We have public-house licensing laws, but not sumptuary laws. That is to say, we have laws against the festivity and hospitality of the poor, but no laws against the festivity and hospitality of the rich. We have laws against blasphemy—that is, against a kind of coarse and offensive speaking in which nobody but a rough and obscure man would be likely to indulge. But we have no laws against heresy—that is, against the intellectual poisoning of the whole people, in which only a prosperous and prominent man would be likely to be successful. The evil of aristocracy is not that it necessarily leads to the infliction of bad things or the suffering of sad ones; the evil of aristocracy is that it places everything in the hands of a class of people who can always inflict what they can never suffer. Whether what they inflict is, in their intention, good or bad, they become equally frivolous. The case against the governing class of modern England is not in the least that it is selfish; if you like, you may call the English oligarchs too fantastically unselfish. The case against them simply is that when they legislate for all men, they always omit themselves.
I think you can trace from this the Chestertonian criticism of the academic left and the bureaucratic state, and insofar as MAGA is opposed to that, they and Chesterton have a common enemy.
But Chesterton was never good at biting his tongue and making common cause against a common enemy - to H. G. Wells' great frustration - and I can't see him joining or supporting a movement that, by his own lights, is weak and cowardly.
OliveTapenade
27d ago
They did see that, though? I'm not sure what world you live in if you think Chesterton wasn't living through the decline and destabilisation of the systems that he thought were essential for civilised society. He explicitly thinks English society is increasingly run by a cabal of vicious, anti-human elites and is therefore sinking back into barbarism.
So I am pretty confident that he wouldn't end up like MAGA.
He did get desperate a few times - I believe he once visited Italy and said nice things about Mussolini - but on the whole, I don't see the resemblance.
OliveTapenade
27d ago
I question to what extent those people even are thought leaders in the context of MAGA or the modern Republican base. It's hard to see Burke or Chesterton approving of the kind of reckless destabilisation that you get with Trump, no matter how far you stretch the analogy.
To my mind they're just totally different ideologies. There are always some differences between the way a movement's elite conceives of its mission and the way the masses do, but I think this is far enough that it's fair to say there is no meaningful resemblance.
OliveTapenade
27d ago
Im sorry, but i dont see how anyone could reasonably engage with the work of current conservative thought leaders like Victor Davis Hansen or Thomas Sowell, past leaders like Limbaugh, Brietbart, and Buckley, or old lions like CS Lewis, GK Chesterton, Rudyard Kipling, Douglas, Burke, Smith, Et Al. and come away with the impression they lack "ideology, vision and a moral compass"
Those people do, certainly, but none of those people seem remotely represented by what currently calls itself the conservative movement in the United States. Limbaugh, maybe.
But if I compare MAGA to, well, Lewis, Chesterton, Kipling, Burke, or even old Adam Smith, I doubt you will find much ideological overlap, if any at all.
OliveTapenade
28d ago
That was the joke, surely?
OliveTapenade
29d ago
This also matches, for what it's worth, personal experience of Ethiopian Orthodox churches - humble, friendly, and they take very good care of their places of worship. I have nothing but positive things to say about them, and their attitude towards non-Ethiopian churches, at least in the West, is very gracious.
It seems pretty easy to me to say that the cruelty is bad and then just... leave it there? There's no need to go any further or give it any more thought than that.
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