In Dostoyevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan, the intellectual brother, famously asks Alyosha, the religious brother, this question:

“Tell me frankly, I challenge you—answer me. Imagine you are granted the task of designing the structure of human destiny so that it would end in the happiness, peace and contentment of all mankind, but to achieve that end it is necessary, absolutely unavoidable, for you first to torture one tiny child to death—the little girl who beat her breast with her little fist, for instance—and found the edifice on her unavenged tears, would you consent to be the architect on those conditions?”

“No, I wouldn’t,” Alyosha replies. He is one of the two saintly characters in Dostoyevsky’s canon. Is he right?

His answer is the one Ivan wants. Ivan is deeply troubled by cruelty, especially when children are the victims. He has earlier related to his brother the heart-wrenching story of the suffering little girl he refers to in his question. Is the tortured agony of just one single child a price too high to pay for the lasting happiness of all mankind?

The Jewish diarist Anne Frank, before she was taken by the Nazis to die at the age of sixteen in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, wrote: “In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart.” Was she right?

It is comfortable for us to believe that our fellow human beings are good, kind, merciful. Our language expects it. The word “humane” means it is human to be merciful. But is it?

On October 7, 2023, an invading crowd of Hamas terrorists broke into Israel from the Gaza Strip and set about torturing and killing men, women, and children. Why? Because they were Jewish citizens of the Jewish state of Israel and the invaders wanted them to suffer and die. To serve this cause, one man shut a living babe-in-arms in a heated oven. The tiny child, set down on the red-hot element, was slowly grilled and roasted to death.

The fact of the atrocity must be reported in the simplest terms because the suffering of the baby defies description. There can be no adequate words for it in any language.

Yet millions of people are thrilled by what he did. They are delighted by all the atrocities and gloat over the baby in the oven. One woman joked in a video on Instagram:

“Each time I come across the story of the baby that was put in the oven I wonder if they put salt pepper, did they add thyme, and what [fat] did they roast it in? And what were the side dishes? You don’t ask yourself the question? The side dish to this baby leg was just a classic plate of fries with ketchup and mayonnaise. And we marinated it in salt, thyme, and a barbecue sauce, and paprika. Not bad! I think it’s a rather nice menu!”

In America, Britain, Western Europe, Australia, Hamas admirers have rallied in crowds of hundreds of thousands to celebrate what their heroes did that day. “Kill the Jews,” they roar. “Kill the Jews,” their placards demand. In Washington, D.C., New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Sydney, they howl for the genocide of the Jews. Why? Because “the Jews are genocidal colonialists,” they pretend. “The Jews murder civilians, children, babies,” they lie.

In fact, mass murder and extreme cruelty are not at all untypical of human behavior. For millennia, when armies conquered cities they slew all the inhabitants with fire and sword. Kings and noblemen, east and west, had torture chambers in their castles and never lacked torturers. For centuries in Eastern Europe, Jews of all ages were murdered in pogroms.

About eighty years ago, millions of Jews—babies, toddlers, schoolkids, teenagers and adults—were shut in gas-chambers and gassed to death by the Nazis for no reason but they were Jews. The Jews call that genocidal event in their history the Holocaust. When the world got to know about it after Germany’s defeat in 1945, good people swore, “Never again.”

But even as they swore, mass murder was being perpetrated in Communist Russia—had been since the revolution.

Ten years before the Holocaust began, when Hitler was beginning to rise to power in 1932 and 1933, Stalin deliberately starved millions of Ukrainian peasants to death. Some devoured their own babies. (But—historians say—they preferred to swap their children for a neighbor’s rather than eat their own.) In the Great Terror of 1936 to 1938, about two million people, many of them loyal members of the Communist Party, were executed or sent to hellish labor camps by Stalin’s orders.

In all Communist countries—China, Cuba, Cambodia, North Korea, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (the pre-Communist setting of Joseph Conrad’s story Heart of Darkness) —the people are ruled by fear; torture is routine and massacre common. Mass killings are frequent in almost all African countries, particularly in Chad, Sudan, Somalia, Zimbabwe, Burundi, Mozambique, Mali, Nigeria. Villagers, farmers, are slaughtered by the dozen or the hundreds at a time by governments, or tribal foes, or terrorist bands of religious fanatics. Photos can be found on the internet of Nigerian Christian children and babies lying charred and dead on the ashes of bonfires beside the corpses of their mothers and fathers. The worst bloodbath was in Rwanda in 1994 when for three months, April to June, Hutus killed Tutsis. Some 800,000 Tutsis, including babies, were murdered by their neighbors in an attempted genocide.

The Hamas terrorists’ cruelty to the harmless is not exceptional, nor is their pleasure in it. Gleefully they killed some 1,400 men, women, and children. They tied up their victims and burned them; raped them; hacked off breasts and limbs; took hostages; dragged naked, broken-limbed, blood-drenched, gang-raped young women through the streets to be laughed at and spat on by fellow invaders and their women and children. One of the murderers seized the cell phone of a victim and called his parents to boast excitedly that he had “killed ten Jews” with his “bare hands”, inviting Mom and Dad to be proud of him, to praise him. This they did, lavishly. Like almost all the parents and teachers of Gaza, in obedience to their elected Hamas rulers they raised their children to hate and kill Jews.

Is the world shocked? No. In addition to the Hamas admirers who rally with placards and the flag of an imaginary country called Palestine to celebrate the great deeds of their heroes, there are esteemed sages and experts on ethics who want Israel wiped off the map and Jews off the planet. Numerous Hamas supporters and sympathizers are in positions of power. They dominate the United Nations and its sub-agencies; they head Amnesty International; they govern all but 6 of the 50 Islamic states, and China, Russia, Turkey, and Iran (whose theocratic government helped hatch the plan for the Hamas invasion); they influence Western governments, local councils, political parties, churches; they command urban police forces; they deliver judgment in lawcourts; they direct most American universities and state schools; they control an overwhelming majority of the propaganda media—T.V., radio, film and theater, national and local newspapers; in swarms they affect public opinion with murderous messages on social media— X, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram …

What do we learn about human nature when millions of people exult over Hamas’s torture and murder of Jews? Will the lesson break the belief of bien-pensants that “people are really good at heart”?

Let’s imagine no crowds cheered; the perpetrators killed themselves in remorse; the torturing to death of that one baby so appalled and outraged humanity that a final lasting age of “happiness, peace and contentment for all mankind” began. Is it worth the baby’s suffering?

Alyosha Karamazov is right: the answer is no.

 

Jillian Becker    April 29, 2024

***

This article was first published online in the December 2023 issue of New English Review under the title What Price Human Happiness?

John Daniel Davidson, who often writes interestingly about political issues, has an article at The Federalist in which he attributes the past success and greatness of America to Christianity, and the present decline of the country to the fading away of the faith.

The Federalist title of the article is: America’s Stunning Embrace Of Paganism Signals The End Of This Country As We Know It.

Here are some extracts from it in italics, each followed by my comment:

Recall that ancient pagans ascribed sacred or divine status to the here and now, to things or activities, even to human beings if they were powerful enough (like a pharaoh or a Roman emperor). 

Don’t Christians ascribe divine status – and superhuman powers – to a human being?

They rejected the notion of an omnipotent, transcendent God — and all that the existence of God would imply.

Who did? When? Even before the Roman Empire adopted Christianity as a state religion, some Greek and Roman philosophers had propounded the idea of a godhead as the genesis of the universe.

Western civilization and its accoutrements depend on Christianity, not just in the abstract but in practice. Liberalism relies on a source of vitality that does not originate from it and that it cannot replenish. That source is the Christian faith, in the absence of which we will revert to an older form of civilization, one in which power alone matters and the weak and the vulnerable count for nothing.

Christianity sent Western civilization into a long nightmarish sleep, or death. Why is the Renaissance called by that name – a re-birth? Why is the Enlightenment called by that name – the return of light after darkness? How did the weak and vulnerable fare in the  centuries between the fall of Rome in the West and the Age of Reason? Christians often do not choose to remember the centuries of the terrible Inquisition, its uncountable victims whom it impoverished, tortured,  burned to death at the stake.

What awaits us on the other side of Christendom, in other words, is a pagan dark age.

Worse than the Christian dark age behind us?

Here, in the second decade of the 21st century, we can say with some confidence that this dark age has begun. … The principles Americans have always asserted against this kind of moral and political tyranny — freedom of speech, equal protection under the law, government by consent of the governed — depend for their sustenance on the Christian faith, alive and active among the people, shaping their private and family lives as much as the social and political life of the nation.

The Christian faith fostered freedom of speech, equality under the law, government by consent of the governed? No. O Christian apologist, remember the Inquisition (the Papal one and the Spanish one); remember that Christians kept slaves; remember feudalism. It was the Enlightenment – the intellectual revolution against Christian tyranny – that  “fostered”  those ideas.

The classical liberal order, so long protected and preserved by the Christian civilization from which it sprang, is already being systematically destroyed and replaced with something new.

No, the classical liberal order “sprang” from the Enlightenment, not from Christianity. All the main Cristian churches opposed and punished liberalism, as they opposed free speech, scientific discovery, and tolerance for as long as they had the power to do so.

It was, after all, Christianity that united morality and religion, and without it, they will be separated once more.

The pre-Christian Greeks and Romans thought about morality, philosophized about ethics, established systems of law that were based on moral concepts, but – right! – their gods did not insist on human moral behavior, except towards the divinities themselves. However, Zoroastrianism and Judaism were moral religions before Christianity was invented. St. Paul was against any part of the Jewish law being preserved in his Christianity. He preached that Jesus Christ had superseded the law. After him, there were many other (comparatively short-lived) Christianities in the early centuries C.E. that passionately opposed the moral teachings of the Jews. After St. Paul’s time, Roman Catholic Christianity somewhat reluctantly began to adopt the moral law of Judaism in the second century of our common era.

The new paganism will not necessarily come with the outward trappings of the old, but it will be no less pagan for all that. It will be defined, as it always was, by the belief that nothing is true, everything is permitted.  [To prove this, he quotes a 9^th century Muslim:  “Hasan i-Sabbah, the ninth-century Arab warlord whose group gave us the word “assassins”, summed up the pagan ethos in his famous last words: Nothing is true, everything is permitted.”]

What Greek or Roman philosopher ever taught that “nothing is true”, or that “everything is permitted”? Roman law had much to do with moral right and wrong – and Roman law persisted, in modified form, in some Christian countries in modern times.

[T]he radical moral relativism we see everywhere today represents a thoroughly post-Christian worldview that is best understood as the return of paganism, which, as the Romans well understood, is fundamentally incompatible with the Christian faith. Christianity after all does not allow for such relativism but insists on hard definitions of truth and what is — and is not — sacred and divine.

What is the Christian “hard definition of truth”? When did the numerous Christian sects agree on what is and is not sacred and divine? If they had agreed, would there have been sects?

Without a national culture shaped by the Christian faith, without a majority consensus in favor of traditional Christian morality, America as we know it will come to an end. Instead of free citizens in a republic, we will be slaves in a pagan empire. 

Certainly we are being oppressed by the dictators of another religion – the secular religion of neo-Marxism aka “Wokeism”. Whether their rule is better or worse than that of the old dictators of pre-Enlightenment Christianity is a matter of judgment and opinion.

There was of course spiritual — demonic —power behind the pagan gods [!], but also real political power behind the pagan order. This order achieved its fullest expression in Rome, which eventually elevated emperors to the status of deities, embracing the diabolical idea that man himself creates the gods and therefore can become one.

“Man himself” did indeed invent the gods. Are there any other candidates claiming the invention? The man  from Tarsus who called himself Saul and later Paul created the Christian god from a man.

It is no accident that the worship of the Roman emperor as a god emerged at more or less the exact same historical moment as the Incarnation. Christianity, which proclaimed that God had become man, burst forth into a social world that was everywhere adopting the worship of a man-god, and its coming heralded the end of that world. 

Was the apotheosis of Augustus the inspiration for the apotheosis of Jesus?

… the Christian morality that made humanism possible.

Humanists are inclined to be atheists – usually (unfortunately and unnecessarily) atheists who favor the Left; the Socialist side of our main political division. The humanist principles of tolerance and mercy were surely held by some people long before Christianity began. They are always held by some human beings, including some Christians.

All of that will be swept away, replaced by an oppressive and violent sociopolitical order predicated on raw power, not principle.

As throughout history, including Christian history. And throughout most of the world at any time.

The prevalence of degrading superstition and the disfigurement of reason are hallmarks of the new pagan order, and today are everywhere visible in American society.

Christianity, like every other religion, is superstition, not reason.

Davidson is of course right that the free American Republic is under threat of extinction.

But was its success owed to Christianity?

The Framers of the Constitution were careful not to make special claims for the Christian religion above others. Although they mention “Nature’s God”, “the Supreme Judge of the World”, and “divine Providence”  in the Declaration of Independence, and “the Year of our Lord” in the Constitution, the values they wanted to enshrine were Enlightenment values: tolerance, reason, freedom of speech and conscience; government of, for, and by the people with no branch of it – legislative, executive, or judicial – having unrestricted power. Christians may fancy they discern an influence of their faith in that vision, but votaries of other religions and none have been no less appreciative of it – which is as the visionaries intended.

A resurgence of Christian faith now would be far more likely to intensify rather than reconcile division and conflict.

Isn’t Christian history a chronicle of internecine wars and persecution of sect by sect?

And – I ask you, Christians – didn’t your incarnated god reputedly say that he “came not to send peace, but a sword”?

 

Jillian Becker   April 2, 2024