Hot Take: Righteous Cruelty Is Evil

Post-Christian Religiosity is a Terrible Curse

Religion today is not what it once was - we in the West now know it as an individual choice, something embarrassing to be brought into public affairs, definitely something to never ever bake into the law. 

Back in the day, religion wasn’t an option. It was just how the world was - to exist was to be an instance of God’s creation, to have your essence and purpose shaped and defined by His will. You didn’t have a separate existence that you could step into and out of, you didn’t somehow live outside of religion and then have the option to pick it up and put it down as you saw fit. Religion simply Was. 

But now traditional religion has receded, a choice among choices, and for many it’s an undesirable one. It carries legacies which we today see as ugly, and its attempts to shape our moral and social lives just leave us feeling frustrated and shameful. It hasn’t gone all the way away, though - its social form is still around, including and maybe even especially among people who most see themselves as radically breaking free.

Rather than seeing oneself as taking part in the great cosmic struggle between God and the Devil many now see themselves as taking part in the great social struggle between Liberation and Oppression. Rather than seeing one’s existence as being fundamentally secured and directed by God, we see our existence as secured and directed by our Social Categories. By “secured” I mean “a source of moral rights”. You don’t kill other people because you don’t kill God’s creation and we have a profound duty to honor God’s creation. Or, maybe, you kill people who have forsaken their God-given status as semi-divine beings, burning and butchering the heretics. 

Today, instead of that, you don’t kill some people because they are the precious oppressed, and you kill other people because they are the wretched oppressors. 

Some Israeli festival-goers were having a good time and then Hamas butchered them by the hundreds. Was this an atrocity? If you see a crime against humanity as a crime against God, then sure. If you see the dead as instances of social categories first and foremost, as instances of evil oppressive social categories in particular, then maybe not. They were Israelis, and to be an Israeli is to be an oppressor, and so to kill an Israeli is to kill an oppressor. Their individual terror and agony is a distraction. To exist as an Israeli is to be a proper target of righteous violence. You will die a terrible death, and thousands of miserable people will devote their lives to explaining why your terrible death was necessary and why actually wishing you hadn’t died is the real atrocity here. 

This isn’t to say anything about Israel’s response, or the situation in general. It’s just an invitation to look at the pain of those individuals who died, directly and without agenda. 

Ah, but don’t we have a divine cosmic social political duty to recognize and extirpate interlocking systems of oppression? Here, I think the rebirth of religion is especially clear - traditional religion had at its core a certain moral unity, one God and one path to righteousness and thousands of ways to be evil and fail. There are countless ways the absence of goodness manifests itself, but only one narrow road to heaven. One way to live and thousands of ways to die. 

But today this unity has reversed itself. Evil is a unity - straight, white, male, monogamous, christian, cisgender, American, able-bodied, etc.  - and Goodness is the diversity of oppressed identities beyond this oppressive unity. You can be outside of this unity by being feminine, by or by being queer, by being Muslim, or by being in a wheelchair, or by being all kinds of combinations of these. At its core, “diversity” isn’t really diverse! “Diversity” is the supposed unity of oppressed identities, the idea that to be queer means somehow to share the same elevated moral status (“oppressed”) as people who are Muslim, as people who are trans, etc.

When Hamas massacred attendees at a music festival, do you think there were more out queer people among the militants or among the festival attendees? Were the killers fighting for the liberation of trans people everywhere? 

If Hamas kidnapped you and slashed your throat on Facebook Live for everyone you love to see, would you gasp and gargle through your own blood to say “No, this is good! This is punching up! I hope they kill you all too!”

I don’t blank-check endorse Israel’s response to the attacks and I certainly don’t endorse Israel’s policies towards Palestinians. I don’t dismiss the pain and terror of Gaza inhabitants who now face an overwhelming war - which, for all of its awfulness, is also absolutely not a genocide. 

What I do want to do is call people like me to take a moment to, maybe, see themselves and their ideas from the outside, to bracket the ‘personal-is-political’ stuff and for just an instant and to see pain as pain. Which is hard! Because seeing pain as pain means seeing the pain you inflict and want to inflict as just that, pain, and as such seeing yourself as at least a little cruel.

My bold moral stance is that righteous cruelty is the absolute most evil way to be. The outbreak of war in the Middle East has shown many people to be righteously cruel, and it makes me feel disgusted and sad and afraid. 

Does me sharing these thoughts and feelings make you feel disgusted and angry at me? Do you want me to shut up and sit down? Is it good that I suffer the pain of being diminished? Does more pain for people like me mean more joy for people like you? 

What happened to you?