Some Other Force at Work

Of Bullhorns and Beliefs

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I happened across campus yesterday during a "pro-Palestinian" rally of some sort, which seemed to be calling for a triumph of intimidation, though none was taking place at the moment other than the kind a bullhorn produces.  Our administration at McGill has been commendably quick to resist the sort of thing that Concordia has been dealing with, where the police had to be called in to protect Jewish students.

Anyway, it put me in mind of an experience on the streets of Manhattan a couple of weeks ago. I was standing at a corner, waiting for the light to change, when I saw a hand reaching up behind my head to rip a poster off the lamp post. I put up my own hand to challenge the poster jihadist. He immediately pushed me and started spitting threats to "break my face." I leaned toward him a little (it doesn't do to be too intimidated) and pointed out that it was neither his poster nor his lamp post, and asked him why he would treat images of missing children that way.

He first explained that it was my lucky day, because Allah had decided that he should not break my face, though he made it clear that he was considering defying Allah on that point. He then asserted that these pictures of missing Israeli infants—they were not, of course, pictures of the brutally massacred infants, which are too gruesome to post—were being used as "justification for the genocide of my people."

Since he was in no mood for reason, I did not try to reason with him. I made some remark to the effect that his logic and his behaviour belied any claim to justice, and walked on. When he had, as I presume, finished tearing off the poster, he ran after me, still breathing out threats and rebuking me for presuming to lecture him on morality, after all I/we had done to his people. I wondered whether he had mistaken me for a member of Hamas.

What a contrast this made with a conversation I had on the same street, just moments earlier, with a Jewish law scholar whom I had met in a colloquium. We spoke not about atrocities and war in the Middle East, though that was on our minds, but about the rising tide in America of what I had referred to in the colloquium as the demonic. As dark as that matter is, and as unusual in professional circles to be discussing it at all, our impromptu dialogue was a search for mutual understanding.

And now? Here I was, on the very anniversary of Kristallnacht, passing between one pro-Hamas rally (for such it really is) on campus and another happening simultaneously just off campus, on Sherbrooke Street.

As Providence would have it, I had just left a classroom where I had been lecturing on Walker Percy's 1987 novel, The Thanatos Syndrome, touching on topics prepared before 7 October. I will share just a little of that, though to make proper sense of it requires a much larger discussion of the book than I can offer here. 

Given the present kairos, however, I want first to say something to fellow Montrealers, who have been witnessing signs locally of an impending Kristallnacht—a Molotov cocktail tossed at a Jewish building, bullets in Jewish school doors, amplified prayers that Allah would eliminate every Jew from the face of the earth, the mob scene at Concordia, the antisemitic outpourings of fellow academics, and that sort of thing. Where are your voices, particularly you religious leaders, crying out against this? Are you perplexed or are you intimidated? If you can't bring yourselves to speak out in public, perhaps you could at least sit down in private with Percy in hand, who will help you address confusion or cowardice.  

Percy, as I told my students, points out a number of warning signs that a society is in serious trouble, that its levees are failing and that it is about to be overwhelmed by the floodwaters of moral chaos and by the rise of a techno-tyranny that restores order by deception and force. Though the story is set in Louisiana, in the deep background lies the Weimar Republic, which gave way to the Nazi regime half a century earlier.

Among those warning signs are, first, an increasing shallowness of faith, even among those who purport still to believe in the fundaments on which our civilization, with its now-fading respect for human dignity and rights, for liberty and responsibility, was built: belief in a good Creator and a good creation, in the imago dei and a disastrous fall; in the marvel of the incarnation and a real redemption. These, of course, are the very things in which critical German scholarship, before the Great War and the ensuing Weimar delirium, told us we cannot and must not believe, or at least not in any literal sense.

Believing in them only in some uncertain metaphorical sense, however, produces a poisonous concoction of scientism and romanticism, mixed in roughly equal parts. And this in turn produces, as Percy contends, a divided self, both collectively and individually: a self given, on the one hand, to an uncritical faith in the idol we now call the Science; and, on the other, to a decadent sentimentalism, hence to manipulation through false claims on our compassion. Do we not see this divided self everywhere? Do we not suffer daily from its erratic, schizoid behaviour? Have our universities themselves not fallen prey to it?

Second, our shallow and unstable belief system, though it still shows traces of the old creed and sometimes of the old certainty, passes inevitably to open unbelief. We pride ourselves on our secularity, meaning that we don't speak publicly of God any more, not even at the Cenotaph, and we don't order our affairs by any reference to created order, thus falling into hopeless muddles on all fronts. (The reason why Muslims despise us as infidels is that we are infidels, even by our own lights, never mind theirs.) Or we pride ourselves on our sensitivity, our inclusivity, our tenderness, our determination to make society safe semper et ubique. (How's that going? How will it go when people are in charge who don’t share these sentiments?)  

Third, having nothing to say about created order or the commandments of God, we become utilitarians. On the moral level, we have nothing more to say than that an act is good insofar as it tends toward an end we think will yield some advantage—increasing our pleasure or power or protection—and that an act is bad insofar as it fails to do so. We have no moral compass but the satisfaction of our shifting and conflicted desires. Utilitarianism opens the door to all sorts of evil because it eliminates the very idea of evil. Nothing is evil, nothing is verboten, so long as it achieves the end in view.

Fourth, in this moral desert words begin to lose their meaning. Compassion, for example, comes to mean eliminating suffering rather than "suffering with," so it is often the sufferer herself who must be eliminated. Or the right to "security of the person" comes to mean the right to kill yourself and to have a doctor or nurse help you do so. Putting the two together, it soon means that someone else may decide for you whether and when you should be dispatched. Many other examples could be given. Even the words “man and woman” have lost their meaning.

In The Thanatos Syndrome Percy foresees the death cult that is our euthanasia regime. Carter v. Canada unleashed this cult in 2015. We are now well on our way to matching crimes committed by the Nazi doctors. (Robert Jay Lifton published his book by that title the year before Percy’s book appeared.) Deaths in Canada by state-sponsored murder/suicide reached more than 13,000 last year alone and the graph is climbing rapidly. If Percy is right that this is a certain sign of a culture's impending collapse, we are teetering on the very brink. And he is right, absolutely right.

Fifth, and most germane, Percy mentions another sign, which also appeared with neo-pagan Nazism, though it is much older than that: resurgent antisemitism. I say "resurgent" because it was very pronounced in the Enlightenment, has roots in Luther, and has tainted several forms of Christianity over the past millennium. And because it has deep roots in Islam, roots that are showing clearly at the moment. Yet hundreds of thousands are marching in solidarity with people like the man I encountered in Manhattan or that imam in Montreal to whose prayers I alluded, people who think genocide wicked if aimed at Palestinians—no genocide is, in fact, being so aimed—but righteous if directed at Jews.  

While genocide is a much-abused term these days, no one can be in the least doubt that what the Nazis engaged in was genocide, or that what Hamas is calling for (having already set a frightful example) is genocidal. So why are so many allying themselves with this sort of thing?  Why indeed, if not because in their own neo-pagan way they share the underlying antisemitism?

In The Thanatos Syndrome, Percy makes plain that a society committed to eugenics, given to aborting babies and to killing the elderly or infirm, must eventually come to killing Jews. One of his main characters, Fr Simon Smith, claims that it will go with us "as it did with the Germans." We start with euthanasia for supposedly "justifiable medical, psychiatric, and economic reasons." But we will not finish there. "In the end the majority always gets in trouble, needs a scapegoat, and gets rid of an unsubsumable minority.” The Jews are such a minority, perhaps the only truly unsubsumable minority.

Why is that? Percy doesn't develop this, but the answer is obvious enough. Because in a world where "words no longer signify," a world in which words "have been deprived of their meaning,” Jews remain a signifying sign. They sometimes don’t know it or don’t want it to be so. (Jews, too, can be quite stubbornly apostate, as we all know. They can even be eugenists, as certain prominent Jews and Israeli leaders are.)  But “salvation comes from the Jews,” as Fr Smith remarks. God has chosen them for that purpose, and the gifts and calling of God, as St Paul himself remarks, are irrevocable.

When words don’t signify, Jews, individually and collectively, still signify, whether they like it or not. By their very existence, they point with remarkable clarity to the fact of the Creator, to created order, to the covenants, to atonement, to the hope of redemption. They point to the commandments, to Torah, to which we no longer wish to be pointed because we do not intend to live by the word of God or seek the kingdom of God. We wish to create for ourselves a domain in which we may live according to rules of our own making, and ready remaking, a kingdom aptly signified by a cross that is twisting itself back into a circle.

Percy thinks that behind these developments "there is some other force at work." Law has not become lawless by accident. Words have not been deprived of their meaning because words are inherently unstable. They have been deprived of their meaning by a depriver, who depriving us of faith has deprived us also of reason—who has caused us to lose language and context and common sense.

In Fr Smith's words, which send us back to the opening chapters of Genesis: “The Great Prince, Satan, the Depriver, is here... It is not your fault that he, the Great Prince, is here. But you must resist him."

These words are spoken at the climax of the novel, spoken to people who have come to a Mass celebrating the refounding of Fr Smith’s precious hospice. "I hope you know what you are doing here,” says Fr Smith, much to their bewilderment. I wonder. Do we ourselves know? Do we really mean to resist? Is there still an ounce of St Simeon, his namesake, of or St Thomas More, the narrator’s namesake, left in us?

Today, in Quebec, such a Mass cannot be held because genuine hospices cannot be founded or refounded. Only what in the novel are called Qualitarian Centers can be founded—places that practice the "good death" that comes by way of suicide and murder, that “dispose of those neonates and euthanates who are entitled to the Right to Death provisions in the recent court decisions.”

In such a society it is no surprise to find a deepening dislike both for the unsubsumable Jew and (where such may be found) the unsubsumable Christian. Calls to break their faces, from the River to the Sea and from sea to sea, may be rejected, but those issuing the call are seldom subjected to the sanctions of law. Law is losing its meaning, because the gospel itself no longer signifies.

Do even "these signs of the Real Presence of Christ fail to signify?" asks Fr Smith. "Do you know what sort of struggle you are engaged in, or are you just going through the motions?"

Jesus put the same question when he said: “You are the salt of the earth; but if salt has lost its savour, how shall its saltiness be restored? It is no longer good for anything but to be thrown out and trodden under foot by men.”

If we are just going through the motions, we will not recognize, either in Canada's new death cult or in the tide of violent antisemitism currently flooding our campuses and streets, what is really at stake. We will not recognize that “other force” at work, that diabolical and demonic force that is depriving human life of meaning and human beings of their dignity and our culture of its vitality. We will not recognize the approaching Kristallnacht that came first to the Jew but will come also to the Greek. Nor we will take hope, as the novel invites us to, in the God who rejuvenates faith, who gives joy to our youth, who is capable of pulling us back from the brink.

We are facing a great test, suggests Fr Smith, a test like Job’s. He knows that the other force at work is no match for God. His parting advice is drawn from a vision of Mary purportedly received by teenagers in Medjugorje in 1981:

‘But you must not lose hope,’ she told the children. ‘Because if you keep hope and have a loving heart and do not secretly wish for the death of others, the Great Prince Satan will not succeed in destroying the world.’

I think it unlikely she was using a bullhorn. She didn’t need one. Nor does the true believer, who like Mary treasures the truth in her heart, and lives accordingly.

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