But he that sows lies in the end shall not lack of a harvest, and soon he may rest from toil indeed, while others reap and sow in his stead.
— J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion
Part of what resistance will look like for Christians in the coming days is principled pushback against the Left’s defacement of language. We need to remember that the assault on language an isn’t an accidental maneuver; for whoever owns language, owns truth.
Practically, this will mean rescuing and rehabilitating key terms currently being held hostage by tyrants, activists, and ideologues.
Compassion is one such term.
Better Under Glass
As a noun, compassion carries a fairly straightforward definition, which is to feel a sense of pity or sympathy towards someone else’s suffering. So far so good. The controversy starts to emerges in its adjectival form, in other words, what does it look like to do compassion? Do we deal only with the symptoms of suffering or try to address root causes? Do we limit our compassion only to those means which the culture, or even the sufferer, feels are compassionate? What if they only lead to greater suffering down the road? Do we have a category of compassion which temporarily allows for suffering as part of long-term restoration?
I raise these questions not because I have answers to them all, but to bring awareness to the complexity of compassion; especially at a time where The Compassionate Response™ seems more concerned about preserving its image than about actually helping people. This“performance compassion” needs to be addressed head on. If we have to exclude certain questions because of an a priori commitment to a certain image, the only service we’re really providing at the end of the day is to ourselves.
When I was young, I once made the mistake of using a relative’s “show towels” to dry off after a shower. Show towels, for those who don’t know, aren’t like regular towels. They do not (apparently) have drying properties; nor will not keep you warm. Their only function is to serve as an accent color to a bathroom’s color palette. You know, if you’re into that kind of thing.
Show towels are the Left’s compassion.
They aren’t actually interested in the real-world impact of their ideas. Like a less-then-scrupulous antique’s dealer, the Left’s momentum thrives on the theoretical value of ideas. This is why they love to champion sprawling, complex causes (i.e. climate change, racism, the war in Ukraine) that are difficult to define or hammer out actual solutions to. Because these issues are so fraught with ditches, with the potential to lose cultural capital lurking around every bend, inoffensive tokens of solidarity will do just fine. Paper straws and flags provide the dual benefit of not costing us anything, while at the same time signifing to anyone who might be interested that we are members of the inner ring — the ones who really care about justice.
An illustration might help here.
Several years ago, a sea of tents sprung up in one of our city’s local parks. Many “homeless advocates” immediately sprung up to defend the occupier’s seizure of public space and to remind neighbors and city officials that their duty wasto let them do whatever they wanted. It was — you guessed it — The Compassionate Response™.
The situation played out predictably. Assaults, overdoses, and what I’ll call the collateral damage of indolence became commonplace. In response, the mayor took a holiday, the police hummed-and-hawed, the virtue brigade held their ground (remotely of course), while nearby neighbors shivered and suffered. Not only were there zero benefits from admitting a tent city — including the inhabitants — but the misery of everyone in proximity was exponentially multiplied.
There’a much we could say here but the point is to illustrate that the Left is happy to stand behind lies, even when they hurt people, if it allows them to maintain their image and the illusion of righteousness.
I want us to spend a few minutes getting to know the Left. Not because he’s the kind of person you want to get to know, but because he’s the kind of person you’ll want to call crime-stoppers on the moment you find him creepin’ round your back stairs. He’s cunning, calculating, and an amazingly efficient home-wrecker.
If Christians want to know why the Left acts the way it does, we need to understand their assumptions about identity, authority, and responsibility.
Identity
Every age has had its darkness and its dangers. The task of the Christian is not to whine about the moment in which he or she lives but to understand its problems and respond appropriately to them.
— Carl Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self
The first thing to know about the Left is that it isn’t the domain of a particular leader, political party, or ideology. In fact much like the Galactic Empire, it’s expression has undergone a variety of evolutions throughout history. If we were to highlight a single motive to unite their regime, it would be their resent of the divine — “Let us break their chains,” they cry, “and free ourselves from slavery to God” (Psalm 2:3). The un-deifying of the world has remained the Left’s constant and eternal magnum opus across time and space.
The good news is that it’s a project doomed to fail. The bad news is that a normal life is difficult when there’s a dragon thrashing in its death throes right where you’re trying to live it.
The Left begins and ends with the assumption that we are not the product of intelligence but of accident; identity, therefore, is an individual and arbitrary construct. As materialism and secularism have invaded the psyche of the West, so also has the impression that life is ultimately meaningless. Traditional institutions that told us otherwise were just tools to control social behavior and must now be abandoned in the pursuit of total autonomy.
To an extent, the Left was right here — unhitching from what I’ll call traditional beliefs and institutions did free us. Unfortunately, it was the kind of freedom that a fish might feel upon being “freed” from the constraints of water, or that a skydiver might feel upon being “freed” from the constraints of his parachute. It is a freedom that seeks to free us from our duty to God to others, and so a freedom that ultimately leads to dislocation and death.
The Left, of course, was never actually interested in liberating anyone. What it was, and is, interested in doing is severing individuals from anything which might hinder their indoctrination during 16 years in the public education system. It is during this time that a child’s uncanny sense of isolation will be affirmed, nourished, weaponized, and eventually set loose to join the ranks of adults who have no idea who they’re supposed to be or what they’re supposed to be doing.
And who are hopping mad about both.
Of course they will blame who they’ve been taught to blame — patriarchy, capitalism, conservatism, “white-ness,” and everything to do with organized religion. In Lewis’ words, they will cease being those with grievances and gradually become those indistinguishable from their grievances. They will become a walking grievence. This is the state — the identity, if it can even be called that — of the modern self: isolated, resentful, and dangerously self-occupied.
In other words, exactly the kind of evangelists the Left requires to further its agenda.
When these embodied grievances are given positions of power, especially within agencies who trade in compassion (LTC homes, emergency shelters, welfare and disability services), behold the Grievances at work. They are shattered to discover that suffering people often resent being the object of compassion; that they are not interested in their tokenism or high ideals. They begin to resent the responsibilities and sacrifices required of them. They find they don’t have any answers to suffering apart from blaming the list of enemies (see above) they have been told to hate. They don’t know how to serve, listen, or love. They haven’t been taught the virtues of humility, diligence, or patience. They only know one thing, and that is how to be aggrieved. For the sake of image, they might call it activism.
This, by the way, is one of the main reasons why our health care system is crumbling and why throwing more money at it won’t help. The crisis we are dealing with is fundamentally a crisis of identity. Hospitals and clinics are now almost entirely staffed with people for whom no amount of time off, salary adjustments, or sympathy will ever be enough. They have been irreparably damaged by Leftist dogma and sadly will go on to damage those under their care.
Authority
Considering the Left’s emphasis on the individual, it shouldn’t surprise us that it despises any notion of hierarchy.
For the Left, “equality” reigns supreme.
Now, by equality they don’t simply mean that everyone should be treated with dignity and respect. We can all agree on that. By equality, they mean that everyone can, and therefore should, be able to do the same thing as everyone else — which as anyone who remotely understands the world knows, is pure nonsense. Nevertheless, like a warped Johnny Appleseed, the Left has taken it upon themselves to disperse their manic egalitarianism to the utmost nook and cranny of society.
Though the Left often speak in terms of bringing people together, what the “everyone’s a winner” system really results in is a constant power-play between neighbors, communities, and government. This also shouldn’t surprise us. If everyone’s truth, identity, and authority is no different than anyone else’s, you are left with a perpetual tug-of-war. Efforts towards any larger causes become impossible because no one has any conception of good beyond “I get what I want.”
The Left doesn’t hate ALL authority of course — just the ones that pose a threat to their own. When Canadian truckers assembled in Ottawa to protest state intrusion of their autonomy, they were villainized, disparage, maligned, and attacked. Who were these dirty truckers anyway? How dare they question the inner workings of compassionate enterprise?
And here we find ourselves back at the Left’s hatred of God.
They may permit individuals their private charms and deities, but to even suggest the existence of a “God over all” — a Being that looms over all plans and schemes — is a threat too massive to accept. How can anyone endure One who may, at any time, confuse our language, despoil our projects, and regard our loftiest acts of rebellion as the irrelevent frolic of backyard squirrels.
Guilt and Responsibility
Despite the Left’s fanatical preoccupation with the individual, oddly guilt is rarely determined at an individual level. Instead, it is measured by how many metric tons of privilege, patriarchy, and gender binary assumptions your particular group puts out in a year. If you’re a middle-aged white male, you might as well accept your role as the prime evil in the cosmos. If you’re a black, queer youth, you are the victim pea underneath the mattresses of oppression and nothing you say or do will ever be held against you in a court of law.
This is the compassion of the Left. It does not seek to punish people for what they have done, but for who they are.
This is the opposite of the Christian system, which condemns all humanity collectively under the curse of original sin. Though this might seem like a far worse fate, remember that being a descendant of the first Adam also qualifies you to receive forgiveness through the death and resurrection of the perfect man Jesus Christ — regardless of ethnicity, gender, or place within one’s socio-economic strata.
To try to accuse the Left of their guilt in promoting crimes against humanity — abortion, genital mutilation, assisted suicide, the legalization of hard drugs — is futile, as the entrenched magesterium has already declared such strategies to be just, true, and beyond dispute. For every objection they have a personal grievance, for every accusation they have a mangled excuse, for every argument they have layers and layers of righteous verbiage.
They are not interested in truth, or coherence, but only the furtherance of their agenda.
The End of the Matter
Trying to address the suffering and social decay around us with more social workers, more lies, more money, or more virtuous posturing will not fix the problem. Nor, on the other hand, will more laws, bureaucracy, or government control. We need to revisit the foundational problem — without which we will make no real headway on family, education, health, government, or anything else.
We must start with our alienation from God.
When David sinned against Bathsheba, it wasn’t from a calloused heart that he cried out “Against you (God) and you only have I sinned.” Rightly addressing our failures in relationships and our sins against sufferers begins with acknowledging our failure where it concerns the primary relationship: between us and our Creator.
When we do, we will find a Father unlike any other. Who doesn’t heap up guilt and condemnation, but freely offers us his mercy and forgiveness. Who doesn’t simply absolve us out of some sense of fatherly benevolence, but freely accepts our punishment on himself. It is grace — not guilt, not power, not image — that lies at the heart of compassion.
At the end of the day, the Left is not a compassionate system. It is a dysfunctional matrix of resent, hypocrisy, deceit, posturing, and cowardice. It’s adherents want no responsibility, no discussion, no questions, no dialogue, and no measurable criteria towards harmony. They will burn and call it building. They will kill and call it kindness.
True compassion begins with telling the truth.
Christians, let’s start here.