Suffering Gerson

How did I miss an opportunity to discuss this again? Ross:

It isn't necessarily the policy substance: Gerson may be right about PEPFAR and Tom Coburn completely wrong. It's the style of argument, which invariably casts opponents of any humanitarian program Gerson supports as un-Christian, uncharitable and inhumane - or as this particular op-ed puts it, "rigid, stingy and indifferent to human suffering."

In a nutshell, the reason why I take such a contemptuous joy in beating on Gerson is this insistence of his on depriving anyone of the right to any joy other than the kind he feels in relieving -- or, what's really worrisome, in fantasizing about relieving -- human suffering. Gerson paints his enemies as "rigid, stingy, and indifferent to human suffering," as if there was some kind of moral equivalence between stinginess and indifference to human suffering, as if anyone who doesn't leap into action the instant the human suffering Bat-signal lights up the night simply doesn't care about people who suffer.

That posture betokens an attitude about suffering just as intellectually truncated and emotionally haywire as the one Gerson pins on anyone who begs to differ with him. Gerson cares about human suffering with a not only rigid but hyperbolic, hyperventilating, manic, and obsessive fanaticism. This eminently unreasonable and unreasoning will to help is guaranteed to obliterate, and desires to obliterate, the line between religious or cultural or social responsibility and political duty. Whenever the exercise of political power becomes necessary to some supra-political end, tyranny is afoot. When that end is a utopian end, like the impossible-to-realize elimination of upsetting human suffering, political power is inevitably chained and collared by scientific power. Deliberation becomes morally offensive; only deeds will do. The science of perceiving the spectacle of suffering, capable of bearing witness to an entire world of human discomfort, is meant to trigger instantaneous and unquestioning collective action.

What amount of mitigated pain can ever be enough for Gerson? When will his own suffering servitude end? What quantum of relief will relieve his own fevered estate? These are questions that Gerson can only contemplate as forms of creative impoverishment, morally stingy acts of intellectual obtuseness. It's one thing to cry that the Lord will provide. It's another to demand that America do so. One of the precious few accomplishments of modern liberalism has been to free the practice of politics from the boundless, overflowing passions of people certain that their desires are justified by unshakable foundational truths. Such passions are of great importance to a culture, but they are toxic when introduced into a free government. This may be a dilemma, but Gerson's would-be solution is a disaster.

Comments

[Oblomov]

Well-crafted, engaging critique such as this is what has made me a regular reader of your blog.