The body a protection against sin: the example of Michael Scott

Michael Scott wants to be a bad man but his body won’t let him. In season 6 of the Office (US) Michael found out his girlfriend was married and then kept on seeing her. When his friends and coworkers called him out on it he became self-righteous and hardened his heart, dismissing his friends’ objections because “I deserve to be happy,” and “if Stanley can do it why can’t I?”. And he bragged at the office about what he was doing! saying “I take what I want.”  Michael even met her husband face-to-face, shook his hand, and did not repent.

But when he went to meet her for sex at a motel, the guilt overwhelmed him and prevented him from following through, and he broke up with her through a text message.

This episode revealed that Michael is a very bad man. But, one might reply, he repented at the end! Yes, but his will was to go on sleeping with this man’s wife. He resisted being convicted about it and planned in cold blood to do it again. It was only his body that prevented him. Michael is emotionally sensitive, in fact childishly so, and in this situation his emotions got the better of him and defeated his will.

Emotions are an affair of the body. That should be uncontroversial today: it is taken for granted in psychology and medicine. It was known in the middle ages as well—represented by the scheme of four personality types, based on a predominance of one of four types of fluids in the body. E.g. a ‘bloody’ personality (sanguine) was lively, energetic, quick-tempered, and generally happy. We also know from our own experience how much our emotions are determined by physical factors like how much sleep we’ve had or what we’ve eaten.

It is a cliché to talk about the spirit being corrupted or led into sin by the flesh. But it is also an old Christian idea that the flesh can be corrupted by the spirit. This is obvious when you think of the fallen angels—they had no flesh to corrupt them, they fell through pride, an entirely spiritual sin.

There is a sermon in Old English from the tenth century, preserved in the Vercelli Book, that has a scene of the body and soul being brought before Christ at the Last Judgment. The body stand and accuses the soul, saying “you led me into sin!” It says roughly, “I prevented you from sin, and limited the damage you could do, by making you sleepy, hungry, and so on — but you made me sin anyway, and now I will be damned and suffer forever because of you!”

Michael illustrates just this situation. His will is bad, but his body prevented him from carrying out his will.

This also shows the importance of formation of character, in the sense of habits and the training of the right emotional responses.  Lewis once said that he would rather play cards with a man who was a skeptic about ethics but was taught that “a gentleman doesn’t cheat” than with a man who believes cheating is wrong but had no such upbringing. We want the emotions to guide and help the will make the right choices—which is precisely what happened to Michael.

In this vein it also shows the poverty of modern utilitarian or contractual schemes of ethics. A modern might say that adultery is wrong because it is a breach of trust, and so he would condemn Michael’s action in the abstract. But this is in a context where people are raised in general to have no shame and to adopt a pose of self-righteous entitlement about their own choices. In particular people are not taught to be ashamed of lying, divorcing a spouse, fornicating, and are bombarded with art forms that show sympathetic people engaging in adultery and all kinds of banditry. And you expect this quasi-contractual moral obligation not to commit adultery to have any force?

But Michael shows that this is a very inadequate account of ethics! Because even with all his self-righteousness and attempts to steel himself up to do what’s wrong, his human nature rebelled against it. Ethics are not just an arbitrary set of intellectually-defined duties! They are not like the rules of the road, which you have to learn but could in principle be totally different. Ethics flow from our human nature. And because they are part of our nature they even make themselves felt in our body when we do something wrong — if we have not been artificially divorced from our nature.

Adultery is not just a violation of a contract. Adultery goes against our human nature. As when we eat something we can’t digest and our gut vomits it up, so with adultery. Our conscience cannot digest adultery, and so our nature rebels against it!

The difference over provision for the poor

Men of the political Left make it their slogan: “we need to provide for the poor”. They claim to be the party of compassion and of charity towards one’s neighbour, and label men of the Right cold-hearted, selfish, etc. A lot of this is simply dishonest—Leftist ‘concern for the poor’ is very often simply a cover for destruction, especially destruction of freedom and of the family. But for the sake of argument let’s take their words at face value.

If we are Christians then we cannot avoid that we have an obligation towards the poor, because God said so. And so the Left can very easily appeal to the Christian conscience by claiming that they take seriously “we need to provide for the poor”. And if it is true that men of the Right don’t care about the poor then this is a serious problem.

Jay Richards, an economist, explained how as an undergraduate he came to think that all Christians should be Marxists:

Premise 1. God cares about the poor.

Premise 2. God expects us to care about the poor.

Premise 3. Marx cares about the poor.

Conclusion: Christians should be Marxists.

(The Dalai Lama illustrates this syllogism. He has said that he considers himself a Marxist because Marx evaluates the economy morally and cares about the poor.)

Is the claim of the Left to have a monopoly on care for the poor of any force?

Well the Left certainly talk about caring for the poor. And the Right, perhaps, say less about it. But I think most men of the Right, especially Christians, would agree that “we need to provide for the poor”. (Among secular conservatives and libertarians there are some who express no moral obligation to the poor.)

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Christians on the Left and on the Right would both agree with the statement “we need to provide for the poor”.

The difference comes from the definition of PROVIDE FOR and POOR.

Start with POOR. The Left characteristically define ‘poor’ in relative terms—based on inequality. E.g. those whose income falls below the average. This does not define ‘poor’ based on an objective measure of living standard, but against a set of expectations for a given society. Being ‘poor’ is compatible with having ample food, a television, air conditioning, etc. Using this relative method, the amount of poverty in any time or place is arbitrary—it depends entirely on how broadly you want to apply it.

The Right are willing to define ‘poor’ in objective terms. There are objective measures of poverty which are obvious, unmistakeable, and were part of common sense until recently. E.g. infant mortality, danger of starvation. By this definition most people through most of human history have been poor—they were in immediate danger of starvation and few of their children would survive to reproduce.

The great thing (politically) about the Leftist definition is that you can use it no matter what the circumstances. In the West there is practically no poverty, in absolute terms. In fact the relative poor are so amply fed and so fertile out-reproducing all other income classes. Their biggest killer is not starvation but addiction—diabetes, heart disease, alcoholism, drug abuse, these are the bane of the ‘poor’ in the West. And they are not problems of material poverty! Quite the opposite.

But the Left can still use relief of the ‘poor’ as a justification because there is inequality of income in the West. Really it is an appeal to envy. As long as there are people who cannot have what the richest few have, they can claim to be ‘poor’ and therefore to have the moral high ground when they use the force of law to steal income, etc.

One wonders then, if a society of high infant mortality and starvation but where everyone had the same income, would pass the Leftist test and be a society that had eliminated poverty.

But this difference over definition makes it obvious why men of the Right talk less about the poor. Poverty is simply not a problem in the West, not on any significant scale. Where people in the West are actually in danger of starvation or their children are dying, it is because of extraordinary circumstances which are not amenable to a general solution.

Now on to PROVIDE FOR. The Left accomplish their purposes by defining this ambiguous term in a specific way: ‘provide for’ means to redistribute income by force from the rich to the poor. There are other ways to state this, but that is what it always comes down to.

On the Right I would say ‘provide for’ is left more potentially open to interpretation. The point is that Christians are obliged to provide for the poor but how best to do that will depend on the circumstances involved, and cannot necessarily be defined in advance. Families, friends, churches, businesses, self-help associations, these are all actors who have a more primary responsibility for helping the poor than the government, because they are closer to the person and more likely to know their situation and how to help. And those things cannot be predicted or reduced to a formula. Men of the Right will sometimes say that the government should take from the rich and give to the poor, but that is not the go-to answer to everything.

Consider how useful the Christian conscience of “providing for the poor” becomes when you define the terms in the Leftist way! You can use it to justify any amount of government expansion and of redistribution from rich to poor. As long as there are income differences you can claim poverty relief. And you can expand the government without limit to do it. It feeds on everyone’s envy and short-term self-interest.

And the Right’s definition is bound to have less political appeal, because it does not offer a one-size-fits-all consistent to solution to every problem. The Leftist formula is to name a problem—say, unemployment—and then propose a solution based on redistributing income. The problem for the Right is that once the problem is named, you are stuck doing negative tasks—either denying there is a problem (which is not much fun) or criticizing the Leftist ‘solution’—and then you are caught by the fallacy which the Left capitalizes on: “something must be done; this is something; therefore we must do it”.

Nor does the Right’s definition have the appeal to envy.

Thus far I have confined the discussion to material poverty. This leaves out the other significant dimensions to providing for the poor. If one was interested one could define the Christian Right as “men who are motivated primarily to relieve non-material poverty”. This is perfectly illustrated by the plight of the ‘poor’ today, dying of diabetes and addiction: their problem is not material poverty, it is moral poverty, poverty of character, poverty of family. The breakup of families and unchecked bad habits are their bane. Those problems simply cannot be solved by the government—but the government can make them worse! In fact one wonders whether the welfare state is a kind of circular self-justifying institution: the welfare state creates poverty and then justifies its expansion to relieve poverty. And its expansion just creates more. Certainly the last century has seen the government working hard to create poverty in the best way possible, by destroying families. 

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Trying to put this in a more concise way:

The Left defines poverty in relative terms. As long as there is income difference, there is poverty.
The Right defines poverty in absolute terms. As long as basic needs are met, there is no (material) poverty. 

The Left defines provision in permanent, institutional terms. The government has to set things up so that nobody becomes, or remains, poor. 
The Right defines provision in personal, circumstantial terms. People are poor in diverse ways and for diverse reasons; consequently providing for a poor man depends on knowing his need and meeting it, which requires intimacy on the personal level.

The Leftist definition works so well politically because it appeals to men's envy and impatience. 

‘Taste’ is both subjective and objective

We all recognize that personal taste in art — defined broadly as anything made by man, like paintings, motion pictures, wine, buildings, shoes, and so on — is both subjective and objective. Subjective because different people like different things, and it doesn’t necessarily mean that one is wrong and the other right. But objective because sometimes things are just bad, and if someone doesn’t see that then it is a defect on his part — likewise if someone doesn’t see that a good thing is good.

How does this work?

I propose that there are two actions in evaluating works of art.

The first evaluation is an act of division: separating the good from the bad, the wheat from the chaff.

This is normally easy and obvious. Anyone with a basic receptivity to art should be able to recognize the difference — there can be a small grey area at the margin, but otherwise there should be widespread, spontaneous, non-controversial agreement.

Take for instance the Star Wars motion pictures. The act of separation is exceedingly easy. The films of the original trilogy are good; the films of the prequel trilogy are bad. The only grey area where there is any dispute is the third prequel film, Revenge of the Sith.

The second evaluation is an act of sorting: discriminating the merit of things already recognized to be good.

So with Star Wars, having dismissed the prequel trilogy we move on to discerning what is the relative quality, what are the particular achievements, what is special, about the original films.

In a word, we are trying to discover what makes them good and how good are they.

In this, personal taste in the usual sense has a large part to play — because any good thing is going to have many different qualities, and these qualities will speak to different people in different degrees, and different people will value these things more or less than others. So one person will say The Empire Strikes Back is the best of all the Star Wars films, because it is the most intense and emotional. I would say A New Hope is the best of all, because it is the most perfect, simple, and satisfying in conception.

Notice the difference between the two types of evaluation. The first evaluation is objective, the second is subjective.

In the first, contrary opinions have to be resolved. A thing cannot be both good and bad. If John says Chartres cathedral is good, and Jane says it is bad, one of them is wrong. It has to be that way. And so they can argue over it and try to persuade one another, and indeed they should, because the one who is wrong should be corrected. Jane needs to develop a better capacity for discerning good from bad.

Discriminating the good from the bad in art is a recognition of objective reality which, in principle, everyone should be capable of. It can be learned through teaching and through deliberate change of habits, but I suspect that the best way to improve is to become better oneself. A good man can comprehend both good and bad; a bad man cannot even comprehend bad.

In the second evaluation, contrary opinions do not have to be resolved. If my wife’s favourite Star Wars film is Empire, and mine is A New Hope, there is no contradiction and we do not need to argue about it. My wife perceives more perfectly the good in Empire, and I in A New Hope. What we can do is discuss our different judgements, not necessarily to persuade, but to try to reveal to the other what is the good which we perceive. Sometimes one can come to recognize what was not recognized before — and it is a beautiful thing, because it means you have become more adequate to perceive beauty.

In fact this latter task, communicating a perception of beauty to another, is what we are made for. Our subjective personal taste is actually a essential to the meaning of life. Because each of us is made to perceive, to praise, and to communicate a different glimmer of the glory of God. And since God is every perfection and every beauty, it means that every perfection and every beauty we perceive is the glory of God.

When one has a special love for a particular film, or a particular wine or building or meal, that is his unique character and destiny revealed. If he can communicate something of the beauty to another, he has done what he was created for — he has told the glory of God to the world.

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The twofold method of evaluation was inspired by C.S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism. A wonderful little book, less known among Lewis’s disciples than it should be. 

How to fund scholarship morally?

Reading a work of economic history written in the ‘60s, I was pleased to find this quaint story of how the author secured funding for the project:

This book grew out of a chance meeting with the late Dr Marcellus Kik at the Institute of Medieval Canon Law, Washington, D.C., in February 1964. Dr Kik had come to the Institute in the hope of finding some refence work dealing with the economic legislation of the medieval Church. Our joint search had no success, and this prompted Dr Kik to suggest that I might write such a work. … For this scheme Dr Kik secured the generous financial support of J. Howard Pew of Philadelphia.
(J. Gilchrist, The Church and Economic Activity in the Middle Ages (1969), vii)

Who was J. Howard Pew?

John Howard Pew (1882–1971) was an American philanthropist and president of Sunoco (Sun Oil Company). With his siblings, Pew was a co-founder of The Pew Charitable Trusts. J. Howard Pew also donated the funds for the J. Howard Pew Freedom Trust in 1957. Pew provided early funding to support Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts, working closely with Billy Graham and Harold Ockenga. Pew also donated to various other organizations, including the Foundation for Economic Education, American Liberty League and Barry Goldwater presidential campaign, 1964.
(Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._Howard_Pew)

Consider the great moral difference between securing funding for research in this fashion and getting it through SSHRC.

Here, an individual has freely chosen to give of his wealth to advance learning, and has given it to this project because, presumably, he thinks it is worth doing.

There, a committee is given authority to dispose of other men’s wealth, which has been coercively taken from them through taxation, and the committee has selected one thousand or so carefully tailored and frequently dishonest research proposals to which to assign this money.

Here, scholarship is connected to demand—this work can get done because someone thinks it worth enough to pay for it with his own money.

There, scholarship has no connection to demand—the work can get done because the government allocates X million dollars to ‘humanities funding’ and the SSHRC committee has to assign it somewhere.

Nobody spends his own money on the thing, and for many or most of these projects, nobody ever would.

Whatever we think about the value of scholarship, there is a great moral gulf between the two methods. And that moral difference, the difference in character of getting funding the one way versus getting it in the other, has to have an effect on the profession itself. For one, scholars are totally dependent on the government.

But above all a profession whose existence depends in no way on demand (in the sense of individuals choosing to pay for the product with their own money) must be prone to a sense of superiority and contempt for the masses. And the moreso, the more the masses resent having their money taken from them and given to scholars. Is there any question that this is endemic in academia?

The objects of scholars’ scorn are the very people to whom they ought to be grateful.