Spoilt Rotten, part 1

I finished, today, Spoilt Rotten: The Toxic Cult of Sentimentality by Theodore Dalrymple (real name: Anthony Daniels, though I will use his pen-name throughout these discussions).  Dalrymple is a well-traveled British psychologist who spent much of his career as a physician for the poor.  This is my third of Dalrymple's books, all of which I found to be very thought-provoking, insightful, witty, and well-written. In this book, Dalrymple seeks to show the destructive nature of a culture of sentimentality.  While I do not wish to recount his entire argument herein, I do want, in the next few posts, to look at some of the parts of the book that I found the most interesting.

In one section, Dalrymple (himself an atheist, I believe) lauds the Christian view of humanity over the Romantic view that dominates today:

The Christian view, that man was born imperfect but could and should strive in person towards perfection, was first challenged and then replaced by the Romantic view that mankind was born naturally good but was corrupted into badness by living in a bad society.  Thus the exhibition of vice became evidence of having been treated badly.  What had been deemed moral defect became victimhood whether conscious or not; and since mankind was born happy as well as good, unhappiness and suffering were likewise evidence of bad treatment and victimhood.  To restore men to their original and natural state of goodness and happiness, therefore, required social engineering on a huge scale.  It is not surprising that the Romantic revolution should have ushered in the era of massacre for ideological reasons.

The Christian view is much less sentimental than the secularist.  The secularist sees victims everywhere, hordes of suffering people who need rescue from injustice.  In these circumstances, it has become advantageous to claim victimhood for oneself - psychologically and sometimes financially - because to be a victim is to be a beneficiary of injustice.  This is why so many highly privileged people, who by the standards of all previously existing populations, lead lives of outstanding comfort, freedom and possibilities, claim the status of victim.   

 I find that I agree with Dalrymple far more than I disagree with him, and these two paragraphs are no exception.  I do wish, however, that Dalrymple shared the Orthodox faith with me, as I suspect Orthodoxy would provide an opportunity to take his thought into some different directions.

This paragraph presents, for instance, a perfect example of the intersection of Orthodox spirituality with culture.  The idea of declaring oneself a victim of sin and waiting for the help of others seems wholly incompatible with Orthodoxy.  This is not to suggest, of course, that legitimate claims to being a victim of the attacks of others do not exist; this is not about, say, abuse.  What this does concern is our own culpability in sin.

Elder Iakovos of Evia had an interesting analogy that he used to use regarding judgment of the sin of others.  If I remember this correctly, he explained that, if one were to take a rock and throw it at an unsuspecting dog, the dog would, more often than not, look at the rock and perhaps even bark at it.  This, the Elder explained, is what the demons do with men.  He takes one man, throws him at another, and the injured often takes out his anger and bitterness at the person, not the demon who encouraged him in sin.

Is not this, one might ask, an Orthodox Elder supporting a culture of victimization?  Could not every ill of society be blamed on the demons and our unfortunate subjection to them?

Such questions earn a response in the negative, without reservation.  Orthodoxy spirituality seeks to help us truly learn about ourselves, thus learning where we follow the obey the demons and where we follow and obey God.  Our goal is perfection; this perfection comes from God only when we work with him (or what we call "synergy").  Any Christian who lives life complaining that his sin is the result of his own victimization by demons would rightly be called deluded.

But how can we reconcile this with making excuses for others?  The rule of love causes us to leave judgment to God alone.  We may, indeed, condemn certain behavior, but while we are harsh with ourselves, we are merciful with others.  Why?  Because judgment causes us to condemn our own souls.  Judgement is a disease to a soul seeking purification.  This is why we can take someone who has fallen into a great life of sin and encourage them to visit the Church, go to Confession, pray, fast, etc...  We recognize the harm done them by sin, but we seek their aid in those thing, not their condemnation.

The problem with a society in which victimization is the standard for every person is that the end goal is far different from the end goal of the spiritual life.  In the spiritual life, we seek an end goal of perfection and love.  In society, we seek gifts from others.  In society, a culture of victimhood promotes ingratitude, anger, bitterness, resentment, laziness, antipathy, indifference... In the spiritual life as well as society, all of these things are dangerous.

What we end up with is a culture in which man does not seek to perfect himself but waits for society to be fixed by others until he deems action on his own life both worthwhile and necessary.  Elder Porphyrios used to say that, even in the worst places and in the worst of situations, sanctity was possible.  What Dalrymple and many others are noticing is that, largely because of a culture of victimization, virtues of any sort aren't even sought as being laudable.  Truly, this is a danger to our souls...