I’m sure you can fit this all into a culture war frame if you’d like to. Over time, an attitude has congealed that suggests that my perspective, the insistence that some things in the world are just broken and need to be understood in those terms, is inherently conservative. But I think it’s horseshit, personally. The left has never stood for pleasant fantasy or cheap idealism that occludes basic apprehension of the world as it actually exists. The socialist mantra is that a better world is possible, not that a perfect world is possible. And as time goes on my weariness with all of the various pleasant-and-false visions of our affairs grows and grows. I have no time for it anymore, no patience. The world is broken. We are obligated to cobble together the best life we can for everyone. Make material security wherever you can and comfort from there if you’re able. If you want to insist that saying there are limits to the possible is conservative, enjoy your dream world, but leave it out of my politics. The question is pre-political.
A friend recently linked to a Matthew Parris article that included perhaps the most horrifying use of Jesus saying, “The poor you will always have with you, but you will not always have me.” To summarize Parris’s use: “Stick with me, and forget about the poor and their disgusting self-pity. I’m your hero.” This, Parris insists, is the Jesus he prefers. In short, Parris sees bullshit martyrdom and would like to see it replaced with what can only be described as bullshit heroism. How he manages to squeeze in this line from Jesus with a straight face is beyond me. As I told my friend, some forms of stupidity deserve to be left alone.
While I can’t say exactly what Jesus meant, I can say that what deBoer is describing above is almost exactly what I imagine every time I hear or read that saying. I’m not claiming any strict adherence to any informed hermeneutics. I’m just saying that, experientially, whenever I think of genuine (i.e., difficult and rooted) forms of social justice, this line from Jesus pops into my head: “The poor you will always have with you.”
In C.S. Lewis’s essay “Why I Am Not a Pacifist,” he describes a certain “mode of thought” that “consists in assuming that the great permanent miseries in human life must be curable if only we can find the right cure; and it then proceeds by elimination and concludes that whatever is left, however unlikely to prove a cure, must nevertheless do so.” Nowadays, it seems like, rather than finding cures, most of us are content to label the disease that we think is causing all our problems. But, like deBoer, Lewis is skeptical of the “purity” and effectiveness of these broad brushes:
But I have received no assurance that anything we can do will eradicate suffering. I think the best results are obtained by people who work quietly away at limited objectives, such as the abolition of the slave trade, or prison reform, or factory acts, or tuberculosis, not by those who think they can achieve universal justice, or health, or peace. I think the art of life consists in tackling each immediate evil as well as we can. To avert or postpone one particular war by wise policy, or to render one particular campaign shorter by strength and skill or less terrible by mercy to the conquered and the civilians is more useful than all the proposals for universal peace that have ever been made; just as the dentist who can stop one toothache has deserved better of humanity than all the men who think they have some scheme for producing a perfectly healthy race.
As neither defeatists nor purists, “the art of life consists in tackling each immediate evil as well as we can.” That is not a copout, not some way to avoid real change. You don’t have to look very hard to find a hero who sets a very high bar for that phrase “as well as we can.” It includes everything from the smallest act of kindness to the biggest act of Congress to the ultimate act of sacrifice. It’s the project of every human being qua human being—because the poor, the troubled, the sick, the lonely, the grieving, the dying, the ever-broken you will always have with you.
It’s worth noting that deBoer places at the heart of MacFarquhar’s article “a profound, obviously-motivated incuriosity.” I think that “incuriosity” is a nearly perfect word for the problem he’s describing. It is a lack of any real desire to know. And you know what I think the opposite of incuriosity is? Incarnation:
The Coming
And God held in his hand
A small globe. Look he said.
The son looked. Far off,
As through water, he saw
A scorched land of fierce
Colour. The light burned
There; crusted buildings
Cast their shadows: a bright
Serpent, A river
Uncoiled itself, radiant
With slime.
On a bare
Hill a bare tree saddened
The sky. many People
Held out their thin arms
To it, as though waiting
For a vanished April
To return to its crossed
Boughs. The son watched
Them. Let me go there, he said.