The Darkness of a "Politics of Tenderness"
This post flows out of yesterday's reflections about the moral vulnerabilities of humanism (e.g., the French Revolution) and ideologies of solidarity (e.g., communism).
To be clear, I'm not trying to deploy a "bothsidesism" argument, comparing religious political violence in history with atheistic political violence. Most of my posts are written three months out, so I can only imagine writing today what sort of comments I received yesterday. I'll wait three months to find out! It's possible a humanist reader of yesterday's post would say, "You lament 17,000 deaths during the French Revolution. Do we want to tally up the deaths caused by the wars of religion throughout history?"
My point yesterday wasn't to deny the deaths associated with religious violence. Although I do find the arguments made by William Cavanaugh in his The Myth of Religious Violence worth considering when we look at "wars of religion" in history. My point was, rather, to make the observation that humanism, as a moral and political movement, is vulnerable to violence, the same way religion is vulnerable to violence. Because history is clear: political and moral ideologies promoting "equality" and "solidarity" have been engines of mass murder in the modern world.
This brings me to one of Flannery O'Connor's most provocative and widely-cited quotes:
“If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is a tenderness which, long cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.”
I can completely understand how a critic of religion would have some issues with this quote. As I said above, the temptation is to tally up and compare historical body counts. But my interest in O'Connor's quote is the point I raised yesterday. Specifically, a "politics of tenderness," as we observed in France, Russia and China, really did lead to terror. Calls to equality and solidarity--a politics of tenderness--murdered tens of millions of people.
O'Connor's diagnosis about why this happens is that "tenderness" becomes a "theory," a political ideology. And ideologies are dangerous because they divorce tenderness from humanity. When humanism becomes a political ideology the human is extracted and all we are left with is an -ism. And -isms are dangerous.
When tenderness becomes a Cause tenderness becomes a very dangerous thing. When tenderness becomes the Revolution the body count starts to rise.
Here's my point. Something needs to protect the human within humanism. As tens of millions of dead bodies testify, humanism itself cannot do this. Consequently, the human needs to be inserted into humanism and protected from humanism by something exterior to humanism. In this, I think O'Connor is correct, that the human is established and preserved by a connection with its Source, protecting it from the dark temptations inherent within a politics of tenderness.
On the one hand I appreciate the connection you are making when you say "Consequently, the human needs to be inserted into humanism and protected from humanism by something exterior to humanism." There appears to be a degree of profundity there, but when I thought about this more it made me think of, "I think, therefore I am". I could just as easily say, "I bleed, therefore I am". In a similar way replace "humanism" with any other "ism" and it would appear just as meaningful. So maybe I am not fully understanding what your point is. Are you simply saying that since we live in a humanistic society we thereby need to be protected from humanism? But again don't humans need to be protected from any "ism"? And if this is the case then it isn't really the "ism" that we need to be protected from but rather each other. To further make my point and to make an interesting linguistic connection to what you said, Adam was "inserted" into the Garden, and we see what came of that. I tend to think of "Revolutions" (especially since the industrial revolution) as simply a changing of the guard. The people in the gulag become the new leaders and the old leaders go to the gulag, all the while the technological machinery has to be maintained in order to keep the lights, water, and money flowing. Any "ism" and "revolution" has to contend with this. So perhaps the french and american revolutions possibly differed (even though they had identical ideologies) because the technological machinery that was present in each society were at different stages. But I don't know enough to go deeper into that (perhaps Ellul has more to say on this? http://www.newhumanityinstitute.org/pdf-articles/Jacques_Ellul-Autopsy_of_Revolution.pdf) and I am not at all inclined to think that the native americans appreciated a democratic white man over a regal one.