More bitter still is the thought that those who are, in Edwards’s terms, in need of justice, are, in contemporary terms, damaged, imperfectly humanized, across the divide. The fact is that in this generation, change in the lives of the poor and the undefended is change for the worse, again for the worse, always for the worse.
If serious efforts at rectification were being made, would this be true? If serious solutions were being attempted, would not someone hold them to the standard of their effect, and suggest a reconsideration?
While Calvinists spoke of an elect, Leninists and suchlike have spoken of an elite. The two words come from the same root and mean the same thing. Their elect were unknowable, chosen by God in a manner assumed to be consistent with his tendency to scorn the hierarchies and overturn the judgments of this world. Our elites are simply, one way or another, advantaged. Those of us who have shared advantage know how little it assures, or that it assures nothing, or that it is a positive threat to one’s moral soundness, attended as it is with so many encouragements to complacency and insensitivity. I have not yet found a Puritan whose Calvinism was so decayed or so poorly comprehended that he or she would say to another soul, I am within the circle of the elect and you are outside it. But translated into the terms of contemporary understanding, and into the terms of my narrative, that is what that woman said to that man.
A small thing, foolishness, bad manners. I run the risk of being ungenerous in taking this woman so much to task, and there is a whiff of snobbery in my own scorn for her pretensions. I accept the justice of all this, yet I persist.
The American salvation myth and the Stalinist salvation myth have in common the idea that the great body of the culture is a vast repository of destructive notions and impulses, that certain people rise out of the mass in the process of understanding and rejecting all that is retrograde, and that, for those people, there is never any use for, nor even any possibility of, conversation on equal terms with those who remain behind. The history of elites is brutal and terrible. When the impact of scientific and industrial and political elites finally becomes clear — and it has been devastating in every part of the world — it will become clear also that people picked at random off the street would probably have made better decisions. It would be wonderful if there were a visible elect, a true elite, who could lead us out of our bondage, out of our wilderness. But we are not so favored. Our zealots seem to assume they do provide such leadership — that if one cannot embrace their solutions it is surely because one is indifferent to great problems, or complicit in them. This is a manifestation of their presumption of legitimacy that I find especially disturbing, not least because their solutions then become the issue while the reality of the problems is forgotten, except by the police, the courts, the coroners.
If there is any descriptive value in the definition of morality I offered above, its great feature is autonomy. Tacitus admired the morality of the Germans, Calvin admired the morality of Seneca and Cicero — anyone who considers the question knows that morality can take any number of forms, that it can exist in many degrees of refinement and so on. We all distinguish instantly between a moral lapse and a difference of standards. Whatever else it is, morality is a covenant with oneself, which can only be imposed and enforced by oneself. Society can honor these covenants or not. Historically, it seems that repression often encourages them. The great antidote to morality is cynicism, which is nothing more than an understanding of how arbitrary morality is, how unpredictable and unenforceable, how insecurely grounded in self-interest. It appears to me that even very thoughtful people discover what terms they have made with themselves only as they live, which prohibitions are conditional, which absolute, and so on. So in this great matter of moral soundness or rigor or whatever, we are as great mysteries to ourselves as we are to one another. It should not be that way, of course. The human condition has an amazing wrongness about it. But if it is agreed that we are in this respect mysterious, then we should certainly abandon easy formulas of judgment. If it is true that morality is a form of autonomy, then social conditioning is more likely to discourage than to enhance it.
If, putting out of consideration the inwardness of people, and putting aside the uniqueness of the terms in which everyone’s relations with the world are negotiated, and excluding the very prevalent desire of people to align themselves with what they take to be right, and ignoring the fact that people have ideas and convictions for which they cannot find words, we choose to believe all the errors of our past are stored in the minds of those who use language we have declared to embody those errors, then we make the less sophisticated tiers of the society the problem and the enemy, and effectively exonerate ourselves. We know what they mean better than they do, so we only listen to hear them condemn themselves. In the name of justice we commit a very crude injustice. We alienate a majority of our people, and exclude them from a conversation of the most pressing importance to them, having nothing but our smugness to justify the presumption.
We must find a better model to proceed from.
This is John Calvin glossing the text “Love thy neighbor”:
Here, therefore, let us stand fast: our life shall best conform to God’s will and the prescriptions of the law when it is in every respect most fruitful for our brethren … It is very clear that we keep the commandments not by loving ourselves but by loving God and neighbor; that he lives the best and holiest life who lives and strives for himself as little as he can, and that no one lives in a worse or more evil manner than he who lives and strives for himself alone, and thinks about and seeks only his own advantage.
Here is John Calvin answering the question “Who is our neighbor?”
It is the common habit of mankind that the more closely men are bound together by the ties of kinship, of acquaintanceship, or of neighborhood, the more responsibilities for one another they share. This does not offend God; for his providence, as it were, leads us to it. But I say: we ought to embrace the whole human race without exception in a single feeling of love; here there is no distinction between barbarian and Greek, worthy and unworthy, friend and enemy, since all should be contemplated in God, not in themselves. When we turn aside from such contemplation, it is no wonder we become entangled in many errors. Therefore, if we rightly direct our love, we must first turn our eyes not to man, the sight of whom would more often engender hate than love, but to God, who bids us extend to all men the love we bear to him, that this may be an unchanging principle: Whatever the character of the man, we must yet love him because we love God.
No one is so contemptible or worthless “but the Lord shows him to be one to whom he has deigned to give the beauty of his image.” This is the theological basis for Jonathan Edwards’s wonderful definition of “justice.”
Whatever confronts us, it is not a resurgence of Puritanism. If we must look to our past to account for our present circumstances, perhaps we might ponder the impulse long established in it to disparage, to cheapen and deface, and to falsify, which has made a valuable inheritance worthless. Anyone who considers the profound wealth and continuing good fortune of this country must wonder, how do we make so little of so much? Now, I think, we are making little of the language of social conscience and of the traditions of activism and reform. We are losing and destroying what means we have had to do justice to one another, to confer benefit upon one another, to assure one another a worthy condition of life. If Jonathan Edwards were here, he would certainly call that a sin. I am hard pressed to think of a better word.