Talking about almost any issue can mean talking about other people’s faults, at least by implication. You can have impersonal arguments about ideas or information. Once you move from the abstract to the application, and begin talking about things in which human beings choose how to act — as when you try to say what’s going wrong in the world — you almost always find yourself criticizing others.
Arguing About Poverty
You see the same dynamic at work almost every time in arguments about the origin of poverty. People on the left favor explanations based on systems. Involved in those systems are people whose choices enforce them and perpetuate them, who act in, and rationalize, their own self-interest, against others’ interests. People on the right favor explanations based on personal choices. People make those choices.
Eventually an argument about poverty comes to claims about whose personal actions affect it, which includes at least implicit moral judgments. You may talk about “the greedy one percent” or “the irresponsible poor,” but your readers can put real people’s names to your categories. You almost certainly did so when you were writing.
You can have impersonal arguments about ideas or information. Once you move from the abstract to the application, and begin talking about things in which human beings choose how to act —as when you try to say what’s going wrong in the world—you almost always find yourself criticizing others.
There’s no way around this, if you take up certain topics. What do we do?
Try only to criticize people you could possibly be, in other circumstances. Try not to write on any temptation you haven’t felt, or sin you haven’t committed, at least by analogy. Try to write from the inside, to see and feel what they see and feel. In other words, apply the Golden Rule to our speech.
We Know the Same Temptations
As it happens, there are few if any temptations or sins we don’t know personally, or can know from those we do know that are of the same sort as the ones we don’t know. Nothing human is alien to us, including every sin.
C. S. Lewis dealt with this in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy. He does that in the opening of chapter VII, after he’s talked in the previous chapter about the sodomy (his word) practiced at his public school. Readers, he writes, may complain that he’s a religious writer yet he talked about sodomy “without one word on the heinousness of the sin.” (My thanks to the writer Mark Shea for reminding me of this passage.)
Lewis explains: “There are two reasons. One you shall hear before this chapter ends. The other is that, as I have said, the sin in question is one of the two (gambling is the other) which I have never been tempted to commit. I will not indulge in futile philippics against enemies I never met in battle.”
He added in a rueful parenthetical note: “‘This means, then, that all the other vices you have so largely written about…’ Well, yes, it does, and more’s the pity.”
But he almost certainly had felt the same temptation. He felt it by analogy, directed to a different object, but he probably knew it well. He had felt the same desires that led some of his school peers into homosexual relationships: the desire for sex itself, but also for intimacy, comfort, security, adventure, status, and other things (mostly good things) people want. He could, without much mental effort, have put himself in his peers’ place and said whatever he would have had to say, as he did about temptations he knew.
Try not to write on any temptation you haven’t felt, or sin you haven’t committed, at least by analogy.
And with some sympathy for those who succumbed to the temptation. He would know, if only by analogy, how strong it could be. He would know how easily one could fall into it. His writing on it would therefore be all the more insightful, because he would be making a judgement from the inside, of himself and his own life. He might speak hard against it, but as someone who could be in the dock himself.
Thinking With Sympathy
What I think Lewis really meant is that he wasn’t going to make a point of condemning the sins he had never been tempted to commit. That seems to me a wise policy.
Christian discourse for the last thirty or more years has been corrupted by an obsession with homosexuality, partly because it roused people to anger (and to giving money). The same people rarely dealt with easy divorce, contraception, or adultery, because those hit too close to home. They could isolate and “other” the homosexual person. Thinking of him as someone who felt the same kinds of temptations they did would have moderated and deepened their thinking and speech, and helped them say any critical words in a way homosexual people might hear.
Thinking about others’ sins this way will bear another fruit, beyond writing more deeply. It will often undermine your favored story.
You may want to say that the irresponsible poor make themselves poor, but you have to start thinking about why they’re irresponsible, and if in fact they are. You will have to remember the times you acted irresponsibly or were tempted to do so. You may see the ways in which your own good fortune shielded you from the consequences of your irresponsible behavior. And you may well find that what seems to you in your affluence to be irresponsible is quite rational.
Almost always, I think, you will find that the matter has many more dimensions than you realized. Sympathy should lead you to reject your old narrative and come to something closer to the truth, and maybe to wisdom.
David Mills is the Senior Editor (US) of The Catholic Herald.
Areas of Catholic Herald business are still recovering post-pandemic.
However, we are reaching out to the Catholic community and readership, that has been so loyal to the Catholic Herald. Please join us on our 135 year mission by supporting us.
We are raising £250,000 to safeguard the Herald as a world-leading voice in Catholic journalism and teaching.
We have been a bold and influential voice in the church since 1888, standing up for traditional Catholic culture and values. Please consider donating.