Closed System

 The other day, I found myself in a conversation with a very conservative Catholic. I kept worrying I would out myself somehow as a secular liberal. But somehow instead I kept being taken for a Protestant. 

In reality, I don't consider myself as a member of either camp. If anything, I aspire to live up to Graham Greene's dictum to be a Catholic in a Protestant country and a Protestant in a Catholic one. But I guess in this conversation, I was in Catholic country, and so I kept finding myself putting a gentle word in for Luther. 

I was like: "well, one way of seeing what Luther was trying to say..."

I kept thinking we would arrive at some sort of "live and let live" posture. I kept suggesting various off-ramps that could allow us all to be right. "Well, maybe there are multiple paths to the truth...." and that sort of thing. 

She would have none of it. Apparently, she was of that turn of mind that Anatole France attributes to one character, in his Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard—the sort "who was never in the least disarmed by the moderation of an adversary—quite the contrary!"

I am forever making this mistake. I always think that some tactical admission of a weakness on my side of the argument will inspire my opponent to reciprocate with some equal concession on theirs—and so we can make peace and meet in the middle.

It seldom works out that way. Instead, the other side is often all the more emboldened and convinced of their righteousness by my admission—for why else would I confess some vulnerability in my argument if I were not in the wrong? 

So it was in this conversation. She was not content with my tentative offer to meet her half-way. She must be 100% in the right. She "must lay on all the blows, and take none," as William Hazlitt once wrote of Cobbett. 

This is why I ought to learn to apply Hazlitt's standards of decisiveness in verbal argument—not to waste so much time "anticipat[ing] objections lest [I] should be thought to be blinded by a childish partiality," as Hazlitt describes a certain weakness of character in debate. 

I ought to just say what I think and stick to it, rather than coming up with arguments for my opponent, to Hazlitt's point, since apparently I can be sure the other side will not do the same. 

But what was my side in this debate? 

When we got going, we seemed to be talking about Christian virtue ethics. 

I thought to myself: "Josh, you have a divinity degree. You can hold your own in any conversation about Christian ethics." 

So I started in on how I always related to the theological problem of the seeming "impossibility" of living up to the moral teaching of the Gospels. I mean, Jesus literally at one point commands us to "Be perfect." But the doctrine of original sin also reminds us we are most imperfect. So what is to be done? 

This question—which I thought gave me a foothold in Catholic theology—I think in fact only served to out me as a crypto-Protestant.

Realizing I was giving this impression, I stumbled on: "Of course, I don't agree with the extreme Augustinian or Calvinist or Lutheran take that the Gospel ethic is so exacting that it merely serves to remind us of our fallen nature and our utter dependence on divine grace. I think the Gospel ethic must be there because we are meant to try to live up to it, in some way... But how?"

I thought this was an innocent enough question. I wasn't saying there was no solution to this problem for the Catholic virtue ethicist—I just wanted to know what it might be. 

But even my posing the question apparently showed that I was starting off on the wrong foot. I was being a schismatic and a heretic. I was informed that I was trying to use reason unassisted by divine grace, which of course would lead me astray. I needed to start by cultivating the theological virtue of humility. 

Specifically, I needed to humble myself through obedience to the Church. I needed to assume that they were right axiomatically. Then, having learned humility and obedience to the dictates of the Magisterium, I might thereby make myself more receptive to divine grace.* Which would lead me to charity. 

Slowly, I was informed—with the help of divine grace—I would start to desire the very forms of sanctification and self-abnegation commanded in the Sermon on the Mount that presently seem to me impossible and like a total negation of the self. 

But—how, if I do not use my reason at the front end—am I supposed to know ahead of time which of the denominations or religions I am supposed to humble myself before and accept with implicit obedience, since they are all clamoring for my faith? 

This is perhaps why so many Catholic integralists yearn for the "lost unity" of the medieval "ages of faith." There was no other game in town—at least not in Europe. 

This, doubtless, is why my interlocutor was still so mad at the "schismatics" of the Protestant Reformation. They introduced the possibility of choice. (And the etymology of "heresy" is said to come from the Greek for "choice.")

But suppose I pick the Catholic Church on a lottery system and humble myself before its teachings on faith. Why is it that so many people who have supposedly done the same seem to make so little progress toward fulfillment of the principles of the Sermon on the Mount? 

J.D. Vance's famous conversion certainly doesn't seem to have made him visibly less power-hungry and evil and insufferable. Quite the contrary. Those concentric circles of the "ordo amoris" he's always talking about don't seem to have gotten any wider over time. 

I am informed that love to a Christian means something very different from what love would mean to a pagan or a Greek (like me, presumably). 

So perhaps when J.D. Vance sends asylum-seekers to torture prisons, and then snottily defends the practice on social media, that is an expression of a distinctly Christian form of love that is simply categorically different from and unrecognizable to any non-Christian version of the same concept. 

So too, Pete Hegseth's expression of his Christian love apparently takes the form of massacring schoolchildren and blasting boats full of Trinidadian and Venezuelan fishermen out of the water—and then streaming the moments of their final agony for the delectation of his social media followers. 

As the New York Times reports today, this same mass-murderer then had the temerity to "w[ea]ve religious language and Christian themes throughout his address" today to a group of gathered soldiers. 

I am reminded of Robert Tressell's observation, in his great book The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, about "The anti-Christs who went about singing hymns, making long prayers and crying Lord, Lord, but never doing the things which He said, who were known by their words to be unbelievers and infidels, unfaithful to the Master they pretended to serve, their lives being passed in deliberate and systematic disregard of His teachings and Commandments."

Another character cites as an example, elsewhere in the novel, a local vicar who sounds a great deal like our own Secretary of Defense or Vice President: 

"The vicar teaches that the way to deal with those that injure us is to have them put into prison, or—if they belong to some other country—to take guns and knives and murder them, and burn their houses. So you see the vicar doesn’t really believe or do any of the things that Jesus said: he only pretends."

What about, for instance, all the people one knows who seem to convert—and then go on to hurt themselves and the people around them? 

I am told that what looks like "death-to-self" to me, in my unregenerate state, is—to the person who has received grace—really the discovery of their true self. What looks to me from the outside like a turning away from their family and loved ones is really, for them, a growing closer to God. 

It should be clear enough by now that we are in the presence of an unfalsifiable position. I have been defined from the outset as not possessing the intellectual equipment to understand the true teaching, because I am operating with mere "human reason unaided by divine grace." 

Okay, then. I could be wrong; they could be right. Even they seem to agree that I'll never know one way or the other. 

This, let it be noted, has always been the watchword of what Arthur Koestler called a "closed system of thought." It has a ready-made answer for everything. As Koestler pointed out, the Freudian could always dismiss any objections to the Freudian system on the grounds that it proceeded from "repression." The Marxist can dismiss any non-Marxist objections because they must be shaped by class interest. 

So too, the conservative Catholic can answer any question or doubt with the rejoinder: "well, that's just because you're thinking with human reason, not with divine grace..."

Indeed, "Catholicism" is the third example of the canonical closed system, alongside Freudianism and Marxism, that Koestler cites in the passage I was thinking of. He defines a "closed system" as one that "refuses to be modified by newly observed facts but has sufficiently elastic defenses to neutralize their impact." 

The result, he goes on, is that "disagreements which in the normal world are settled by argument, become in the all-or-nothing atmosphere of the closed system acts of treason, heresy, and schism." 

It also accounts for the curious tone that my debate with this interlocutor took on. Koestler describes it well. Writing of the "initiate of the closed system," Koestler writes: "In discussion with pagans [...] he is calm, paternal, and impressive. His superiority, his self-assurance, his radiance of sincere belief [...] create a peculiar relationship[....] It is the relationship between the guru and the pupil." 

I might find all of this conservative Catholic dialectic somewhat more plausible, again, if I noticed any empirical correlation between religious conversion and visibly more "loving" behavior. Instead, the inverse seems to be true. 

In the second Trump administration, Catholic integralists and Protestant fanatics are closer than they've ever been to having complete control of the state. And their reign has coincided with the rise of the most sneeringly profane and crassly spiteful behavior from elected officials in modern memory. 

But perhaps, again, that's just my unregenerate eyes deceiving me, and that Chistian love, unlike that impoverished pagan or Greek "love" that I know by the same name—takes the form of disappearing refugees—including, let it be noted, Christian refugees fleeing religious persecution—to secret dungeons in Eswatini and El Salvador and Equatorial Guinea. 

To quote Robert Tressell again: "It was not necessary to call in the evidence of science, or to refer to the supposed inconsistencies, impossibilities, contradictions and absurdities contained in the Bible, in order to prove there was no truth in the Christian religion. All that was necessary was to look at the conduct of the individuals who were its votaries."

For the longest time, I essentially bought the hype of religious conservatives. I thought: "well, I may not agree with their theology, but at least they have principles; they have character; we can learn from them." 

Sadly, disgracefully, they turned out to be much straightforwardly and uncomplicatedly awful than I had thought. 

It seemed to me too simple and pat somehow—a product of that "childish partiality" Hazlitt warned the person of determination to not hasten to avoid too readily—to think that they really were just obnoxious Christo-fascists who despised the liberty of others and wanted to take away their freedom of choice. 

How wrong I was. 

I understand much better now the tactics of the religious conservative. Nearly always, it comes down to preying upon a genuine weakness or human suffering: a feeling of existential dread or despair, a sense that modern life is hollow or lacking in community and companionship. And then—hey presto—they simply posit that religious orthodoxy is the answer. 

And if we ask—how do we know? How does it solve any of those things? They say: "God is defined as the solution of those things. God is the source of all meaning." Q.E.D. 

There's no way out of the loop; though one could as easily magic any other solution into being by the same method. If I say that the meaning of my life is in the hoagie sandwich I ordered at the Wawa today in Zephyrhills, Florida, I could counter any schismatic heretic and doubter who questions my faith by saying I am defining the term hoagie sandwich to include the ultimate ground of meaning. 

Indeed, if the goal is simply to posit something that we want to be true: such as "life has meaning" or "morality has an ultimate normative basis," we could save a step by simply positing these things directly, instead of bringing in an extra entity, God, to establish both for us. (Indeed, according to the logical parsimony of Occam's Razor, we have no warrant not to do so.)

It's time to admit that there is something fundamentally predatory in this method of finding a genuine source of discontent in human life—loss, bereavement, emptiness, depression—and then saying "see? modern life and modern liberalism have no answers for you. They've let you down! Give up the attempt at human reason. Come back to Mother Church and learn to obey!"

To quote Arthur Koestler one last time: "There is something repulsive in the way the scholastic gloats over the difficulties of science—like a lecherous dotard wooing a girl disappointed by her young lover." 

Instead of giving up the free search for truth and despairing of "human reason unassisted by divine grace," I'd rather make the attempt—however hopeless—with Lord Byron's Prometheus, to "strengthen man with his own mind." 

But what, having rejected all this "Christian virtue ethics," is my own answer to the problem posed by the "impossibility" of the Gospel Ethic? It is not a Protestant answer; nor a Catholic one; it is the response of that "secular humanism" that our Secretary of Defense just went out of his way to demonize in his speech today to a roomful of American soldiers. 

It's the answer that says, the miraculous thing is not that we often fail to live up to our moral ideals—it's that human beings ever came up with them in the first place. 

As Erich Fromm once wrote: There is no reason to wonder why the record of history shows so much cruelty and destructiveness. If there is anything to be surprised at—and encouraged by—I believe it is the fact that the human race, in spite of all that has happened to men, has retained—and actually developed—such qualities as dignity, courage, decency, and kindness as we find them throughout history and in countless individuals today.  

Instead of dwelling on our "sinfulness," the real marvel is that humans ever thought of the ideals by which we regard our present state as fallen. As Stevie Smith once wrote of "Man"—"It is his virtue needs explaining, not his failing." 

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*I will quote without further comment another passage from Robert Tressell's novel: 

“Wot I mean,” said Slyme, “is that no man oughtn’t to marry till he’s saved up enough so as to ’ave some money in the bank; an’ another thing, I reckon a man oughtn’t to get married till ’e’s got an ’ouse of ’is own. [...]

“And even if it’s not possible,” Harlow continued, winking at the others, “what’s a man to do during the years he’s savin’ up?”

“Well, he must conquer hisself,” said Slyme, getting red.

“Conquer hisself is right!” said Harlow and the others laughed again.

“Of course if a man tried to conquer hisself by his own strength,” replied Slyme, “’e would be sure to fail, but when you’ve got the Grace of God in you it’s different.”

“Chuck it, fer Christ’s sake!” said Harlow in a tone of disgust. “We’ve only just ’ad our dinner!”