Anger, Envy, and Riots

07-12-2020Weekly Reflection

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. George Santayana -“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
–George Orwell 1984

Catholic philosopher Edward Feser recently reflected on his blog about the distinction between anger and envy: Envy is often mistaken for anger at injustice, because both can issue in hatred. But the hatred that issues from a desire for justice is righteous, whereas the hatred that issues from envy is wicked. How can we know the difference? One telltale sign is the object of one’s hatred. Is it what a person does? Or the person himself? Aquinas writes: It is lawful to hate the sin in one's brother, and whatever pertains to the defect of Divine justice, but we cannot hate our brother's nature and grace without sin. (Summa theologiae II-II.34.3)

We are familiar with the well-known phrase: hate the sin and love the sinner. We might flinch at the word “hate” especially since the word is often bandied about for nefarious political agendas and/or used to silence just criticism of those agendas. The Gospel uses this word with respect to the allegiance we ought to owe to Christ: Unless you hate your father, wife, mother, brother, sister, you cannot be my disciple. Luke 14:26 St. Luke uses the Greek verb miseo, which means to hate, detest.

More to the point of the current unrest in our country Feser goes on: It is righteous anger we see expressed in grand documents like Frederick Douglass’s “What to a Slave is the Fourth of July?,” which attacks the injustice of slavery, and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” which attacks the injustice of segregation. Douglass and King are very hard on the people they are criticizing, and rightly so. But they evince no hatred at all for the people themselves, nor for their country. (Emphasis added) Rather, they call on their countrymen consistently to apply ideals they all share, namely those of the Declaration and Constitution. They seek, not to harm anyone, but rather to secure justice for those who are being harmed. They deliver stern and well-deserved moral criticism, but criticism that is magnanimous, appeals to reason, and is aimed at restoring fellowship with the people they are criticizing.

Some of what is going on around us today is also motivated by righteous anger at injustice. But some of it, a lot of it is clearly motivated by envy and its daughters, like tares among the wheat. The “cancel culture” that aims to destroy reputations and render people unemployable, the destruction of the property and businesses of people who had nothing to do with the injustice protested against, the push to remove police protection from everyone, the insistence on defaming one’s country and one’s fellow citizens as rotten to the core, the cruel refusal of any forgiveness, the relentless resort to intimidation rather than rational argumentation – all of that evinces hatred for persons of the kind that is typical of envy. It involves grave sins against charity and piety. It merely adds injustice to injustice. Here is how we know, then, whether we are dealing with righteous anger or envy: Righteous anger is directed primarily at actions, envy is directed primarily at people. Righteous anger can be abated, envy is pitiless. Righteous anger seeks to restore the right order of things, envy seeks to tear down, especially by defamation. Righteous anger evinces love of one’s brother, parents, fellow citizens, country, or God, whereas envy evinces hatred of one or more of these. Righteous anger can be motivated by charity and piety, but envy is contrary to these virtues. St. Thomas lists the children of envy as follows: "hatred, tale-bearing, detraction, joy at our neighbor's misfortunes, and grief at our neighbor’s prosperity."

The organizers of the riots, and physical attacks on people, the destruction of businesses and public property have admitted to be Marxist/Communist- inspired agitators who seek political power and control above all. Surrendering to this has entered the canons of an ever-evolving political correctness, which itself comes from Marxism.

The notion of political correctness came into use among Communists in the 1930s as a semi-humorous reminder (“Comrade, your statement is factually incorrect.” “Yes, it is. But it is politically correct.”) that the Party’s interest is to be treated as a reality that ranks above reality itself. Because all progressives, Communists included, claim to be about creating new human realities, they are perpetually at war against nature’s laws and limits.(For example, it is a characteristic of doctrinaire socialism and communism to be enemies of the nuclear family) But since reality does not yield, progressives end up pretending that they themselves embody those new realities. Hence, any progressive movement’s nominal goal eventually ends up being subordinated to the urgent, all-important question of the movement’s own power. Because that power is insecure as long as others are able to question the truth of what the progressives say about themselves and the world, progressive movements end up struggling not so much to create the promised new realities as to force people to speak and act as if these were real: as if what is correct politically—i.e., what thoughts serve the party’s interest—were correct factually….

Here’s an example: …Big Brother’s agent, having berated the hapless Winston for preferring his own views to society’s dictates, finished breaking his spirit by holding up four fingers and demanding that Winston acknowledge seeing five … (Angelo Codevilla, The Rise of Political Correctness,” https://claremontreviewofbooks.com/the-rise-of-political-correctness)

There is in our country a willed- amnesia about the evil of Marxism and its children, because the history of Marxism is purposely not remembered or taught. On the contrary churches, schools, and universities are being used as indoctrination-centers for the Marxist-vision as something good, which in reality is all about power, terror, and totalitarian control. Many (most?) millennials are in complete ignorance of Marxism’s brutal record of injustice and repression. But it’s not just the young. Too many Catholics, including clergy and religious, have traded in the Catholic religion for a political religion, to which, it is demanded, the Church must bow down to in her practice and doctrine
Pope Pius XI’s in his encyclical on Atheistic Communism, Divini Redemptoris, points out communism’s intrinsically evil nature totally incompatible with the Catholic faith and Catholic social doctrine. http://www.vatican.va/content/pius-xi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_19370319_divini-redemptoris.html

Alexander Solzhenitsyn who knew Marxism, Lenin, and its terror first hand reflected on the nature of revolution and terror considering the French Revolution. He said: That revolution brings out instincts of primordial barbarism, the sinister forces of envy, greed, and hatred – this even its contemporaries could see all too well. They paid a terrible enough price for the mass psychosis of the day, when merely moderate behavior, or even the perception of such, already appeared to be a crime… people have learned from their own misfortunes that revolutions demolish the organic structures of society, disrupt the natural flow of life, destroy the best elements of the population and give free rein to the worst; that a revolution never brings prosperity to a nation, but benefits only a few shameless opportunists while to the country as a whole it heralds countless deaths, widespread impoverishment, and, in the gravest cases, a long-lasting degeneration of the people.

(Solzhenitsyn made the above-remarks at an address at the dedication of a memorial to the Vendée-uprising Lucs-sur-Boulogne, France 25 September 1993 The Vendee uprising involved Catholic resistance to the French Revolution and its terror-tactics and the government anti-church with its subservient clergy. See also https://www.catholic.com/encyclopedia/martyrs-of-the-paris-commune)

Venerable Pope Pius XII also reminded the Church seventy years ago about characteristics of this phenomenon: The Press all too often vulgarly reviles religious feeling, while it does not hesitate to spread the most shameful obscenities, agitating and with incalculable harm leading into vice tender childhood and betrayed youth. By means of false promises a people is deceived and provoked to hatred, rivalry and rebellion, especially when the hereditary faith, the only relief in this earthly exile, is successfully torn from its heart. Disturbances, riots and revolts are organized and fomented in continuing series, which prepare for the ruin of the economy and cause irreparable harm to the common good. (On a Program for Combatting Atheistic Propaganda) March 12, 1950

Our Lady of Fatima pointed out that Russia would spread its errors everywhere and the poison of those errors did not collapse with the Soviet Union. They go on. They are being perpetrated as the answer to the spiritual – cultural void of Western godlessness, materialism, hedonism, and decadence, which caused the former communist Whittaker Chambers to believe that the West would be defeated by communism not militarily but by filling the void of the West’s rejection of God and true religion. This project can and will be defeated by the triumph of the Immaculate Heart of Our Lady but there must be prayer, penance, and spiritual renewal through the hands of the Blessed Virgin. Let us be part of this renewal.