A Dark Echo of Christian Martrydom

 

Throughout millennia, suffering and sacrifice have always been respected. For example, Simeon the Stylite lived on ever increasingly high pillars alone in the desert to devote himself to G-d. Hindus have a long tradition of torturing their body to advance the strength of their soul. Buddhists have similar traditions of starving themselves to death. (though that’s controversial in Buddhism.)* Shia Islam seems to focus on flagellation and hitting yourself on the head with a sword (Grisly imagery contained in this link.

In animistic traditions, the Cheyenne and Crow tribe practiced a ritual known as the sundance where they pierce their skin and attach themselves to a tall pole. The list goes on; sacrificing your bodily health to attain spiritual prowess is a pretty normal thing.

Personally, I’ve always found the more grisly sacrifices offered up to a higher religious goal a little disturbing. But regardless of personal feelings, such practices are so universal that they illuminate a fundamental human reality. People have long associated suffering with holiness and holiness is part of every culture. I propose that the modern leftist obsession with victimhood is a continuation of the human inclination to make suffering holy. What’s more, there is an odd echo of Christianity in the leftist worship of victimhood. 

Jesus Christ was the absolute personification of innocent victimhood and the ultimate in sacrifice. It is no coincidence that following him were untold numbers of martyrs. But people under the sway of the leftist echo of Christianity, confuse victimhood with holiness. If they are a victim, they become more beautiful and nobler. That’s a large part (and a largely unspoken part) of what constitutes identity politics.

Dostoevsky saw a version of this yearning to be a righteous victim in his Book, The Brothers Karamazov. The Brother Ivan pointedly observes that Katerina Ivanovna’s love for his brother, Dmitri, emerges out of a sort of victimhood pride.

And the more he insults you, the more you love him—that’s your ‘laceration.’ You love him just as he is; you love him for insulting you. If he reformed, you’d give him up at once and cease to love him. But you need him so as to contemplate continually your heroic fidelity and to reproach him for infidelity. And it all comes from your pride. Oh, there’s a great deal of humiliation and self-abasement about it, but it all comes from pride.”

Katerina Ivanovna wants to abase herself in order to feel that she is a more a victim and thus, holier than others. This was always a thing but lately, it’s been picking up,

Take the wave of fake hate crimes that are going on in America at the moment. It reminds me of the fake miracle-workers in Europe during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Traditionally, these hucksters would manufacture fake religious artifacts and makeup stories about divine intervention in order to fool religious people. But those flim-flam men and women understood that there was a deeply venerated religion to imitate. You won’t find many Buddhist hucksters in the Europe Middle Ages for example but they’re always a few of them in Buddhist countries.

The veneration of victimhood creates a demand for victims just as the devotion of the divine creates a demand for miracles. This is why college campuses are the main incubator of hate crime hoaxes. They are the most fervent of believers in the holiness of victimhood.

The people themselves who commit the fake hate crimes might be sociopaths indifferent to lying or they might have an unhealthy compulsion to hurt themselves and perhaps worst of all, they might have a perverse idea of what holiness is. Though it must be said that they can be all three.

https://youtu.be/LjZqI6QvUyc?t=346

I suspect that the true believers are the most destructive of the hucksters. They view themselves as actually being holy victims but feel stiffed when people don’t hate them for their minority status. So even as they falsify stories, they believe that they are actually holy in some sense. The lie is justified because it serves a greater and nobler truth. It reminds me of a lyric about mental illness and religion by Johnny Cash.**

Have you come here for forgiveness?

Have you come to raise the dead?

Have you come here to play Jesus

To the lepers in your head?

Dr. Bastiat and I have politely disagreed about the nature of third motivation in the Jussie Smollet case. Dr. Bastiat thinks that Jussie did it in order to obtain more money and fame. I think that while self-promotion was part of his motivation, I think he has an unhealthy spiritual malady where he needs to feel that he is a suffering victim. He wants to play a black Jesus to the Trump voters in his head to paraphrase the late Johny Cash.

Dr. Bastiat also brilliantly noticed this celebration of victimhood in American pop-culture.

My wife and daughters enjoy reality TV shows in which contestants sing and dance in front of judges, attempting to win a prize. Like most competitive endeavors on TV now, from golf to the Olympics, the program includes a brief personal story about each contestant, so you can get to know the competitors a bit. This generally includes a statement by the competitor, in which he/she will explain why they think they should win.

Do they say, “I’ve worked really hard at this, and I hope that my hard work will be adequate to win this competition?” No. They engage in competitive victimhood and self-sacrifice: “So my Mom overdosed when I was 13 and one of her sister’s boyfriends started beating me up so I lived under an overpass and sold my body to make money to buy insulin for my baby brother while I practiced my singing by volunteering in the local children’s hospital and singing to the babies in the NICU. Gosh, I love those kids.” The singing competition matters, but the self-sacrifice rivalry is where the most vicious competition happens. It may seem odd, competing at being non-competitive, but this is how you gain the upper hand in modern America.

The emotional incontinence of the left is partly explained by this reverence. I was working a blue collar job the night Trump got elected. Everyone there was like, “Huh. I didn’t think that would happen.” Then, even the Hillary Clinton supporters, moved on with their lives. This was not at all the case with the educated classes. On the AMU, a group voice chat with fellow Ricochet members, the nurses and the people who worked in law offices told me a story after story of glorious suffering. (It was like they were serving me a large schadenfreude cake frosted with a schadenfreude topping with schadenfreude sprinkles.) But my moral weaknesses aside, those on the left feel it necessary to demonstrate their suffering. It used to be considered good manners to stoically resign yourself to a political loss. But higher education did a fairly good job of ending that.

My living in China for a few years seems to support my theory that this veneration of the suffering victim is an echo of Christianity. The Chinese feel no guilt for being strong. They feel slighted that they were bullied by other countries for so long. The pain of the Tibetan and Uighyur minorities mean little not only to the Communist Government but to the average Han (majority Chinese ethnicity). There is an inferiority/superiority complex that China has with Japan and America but they don’t present themselves as hapless victims. They don’t want to be victims; they want to be strong.

This also perfectly explains why lefties hate black and gay conservatives and why they are indifferent to Ayan Hirsi Ali. This is why Israel gets no points for being gay-friendly. Gays cease to become holy when they aren’t victimized. When people reject the victimhood narrative, they are apostates from the religion of victimhood and holy suffering. This is also why the hundreds of millions of people who are well fed because of capitalism don’t matter to leftists. There isn’t any holiness in steadily improving your lot in life. In fact, wanting to have a nice car and a nice house and health care plan with extra options in case something goes south is indecent. It detracts from your victimhood and therefore your holiness.

The veneration of the suffering victim is the real reason that socialists hate capitalism. Capitalism may help the poor but it does it in a way that doesn’t have much to do with spiritual development. Because victims are holy, socialists have to make capitalism unholy by saying that it makes the rich richer by making the poor poorer. If uplifting the poor were the main motivation of socialists, they would be some version of free-marketers. Literally, every society that has made their poor population not poor has had some version of a free market economy. It may be a free market economy with less taxation or more taxation or less regulation or more regulation but it has always been a freeish market. This central fact of human history means nothing to them but the spiritual appeal of the victim means everything.

Everything in the present is an echo of what came before. I am an echo of my mother and father’s genetic makeup and my writing is an echo of what I have read before. The tradition of American democracy and liberty are a golden echo of the Scottish and English enlightenments.

But sometimes echoes become distorted and garbled and what was once a beautiful composition becomes a jarring and malaphonic cacophony. Think of the Nazis playing Mozart or Beethoven in their rallies. We should recognize that the modern leftist view of victimhood is a dark echo of Christianity rooted in the darker parts of our nature that worship suffering for suffering’s sake.

* Buddhism has a concept called the Middle Way which many people interpret as being against the mortification of the flesh.

**I’ve been informed that the original song was written by U2 and not Johny Cash. In my defense, the Johny Cash version was better.

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  1. Arahant Member
    Arahant
    @Arahant

    The Reticulator (View Comment):
    So our own U.S. Constitution is encouraging people to play the victim.

    I think there is a big difference here.

    • #61
  2. The Reticulator Member
    The Reticulator
    @TheReticulator

    Arahant (View Comment):

    The Reticulator (View Comment):
    So our own U.S. Constitution is encouraging people to play the victim.

    I think there is a big difference here.

    You mean aside from the fact that my grievances are genuine, and theirs are fake?  

    • #62
  3. Midget Faded Rattlesnake Member
    Midget Faded Rattlesnake
    @Midge

    Bob Thompson (View Comment):

    Midget Faded Rattlesnake (View Comment):

    Your own account of how you worked hard, and the obstacles you overcame, might, of course, be tremendously self-serving — even bogus, if you’re the type of person who believes in inventing backstories for yourself as long as you don’t get caught. But it’s better than nothing.

    I agree the emphasis on self-sacrifice in “hard work and sacrifice”, as well as the American love (again, shared by Americans on both side of the aisle) for stories of redemption, goes with Christian culture.

    I try to relate to this but I find it difficult. I can remember and describe living conditions of my childhood (austere) while I was growing up but I never can recall having any sense of being required to work any harder than anyone else or sacrificing anything.

    I think you’re relating to it just fine, if not on the sacrifice angle, then on how you have and were expected to work harder than others have:

    I don’t think I ever worked anywhere near as hard as I could have. I don’t remember ever thinking someone else had something of value that I should have. I don’t recall ever thinking about others’ workplace performance in terms of ethnicity, sex, sexual orientation, or religion. Almost any critical commentary I spew regarding individuals today, if comparative at all with my own life experience, will be about how easy things are today having so much just handed over, not about how hard I had to work and the sacrifices I made, which were not. Do you realize how much value is dispense to receivers who have expended no effort at all?

    If you say that others have had it easier compared to you, the logical implication is you had it harder compared to them.

    That said, a lot of what you’re saying makes sense: It sounds like you grew up in austere but stable conditions, around people you could fit in with, where such challenges as you did face were simply… normal. And that’s a very good thing. It sounds like you had a respectable, though not comfortable, background. I suspect that what’s off-putting and “emotionally incontinent” about many modern sob stories is that they’re not stories of respectability — that they may not even try to be stories of respectability.

    Back in Victorian times, when the Salvation Army rescued young country girls who had gone to London to seek one fortune and… er… instead found another… stories of these girls’ redemption, which the Salvation Army delighted in as stories of Christ’s redemptive power, disgusted and outraged many respectable people. Respectable people weren’t disgusted because the girls had been redeemed, or had overcome so much — no, all that was fine. What was disgusting was the immodesty of describing the circumstances they overcame in lurid terms. The Salvation Army faced the predicament, though, that avoiding saying anything the least bit lurid about what the girls, with God’s grace, had overcome (often, prostitution starting in childhood, with subsequent abuse, drug abuse, the works) would so severely understate these girls’ struggle that respectable people would be left wondering why to make so much fuss over redemption with so little sense of what it was from.

    Reticence is its own virtue, and one of the ways it’s virtuous is that it minimize one’s own struggles to spare others the gory details. Reticence is at odds, though, with telling the whole story of escape from squalor through hard work and sacrifice. An austere background, even if it were very harsh, but still stable, respectable and not at all squalid, is, honestly, a more moral background to talk about, a background  less “emotionally incontinent” to hear about when people do set reticence aside.

    (As for my own background, yes, my besetting worry in my formative years was why wasn’t I working harder? Why wasn’t I pushing myself just a little more, and especially wasn’t I working steadier? The short of it is that though my other circumstances were pretty stable my body wasn’t, and nobody, not even me, knew how unstable it was. My maintaining the appearance of steady work would mean working far harder on some days than others. And I had no inkling of how big the difference was at the time, only in retrospect, so I learned in retrospect that having little “sense of being required to work any harder than anyone else” might not tell the whole story, even a story that’s happening to your own self.)

    • #63
  4. The Reticulator Member
    The Reticulator
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    Midget Faded Rattlesnake (View Comment):

    Back in Victorian times, when the Salvation Army rescued young country girls who had gone to London to seek one fortune and… er… instead found another… stories of these girls’ redemption, which the Salvation Army delighted in as stories of Christ’s redemptive power, disgusted and outraged many respectable people. Respectable people weren’t disgusted because the girls had been redeemed, or had overcome so much — no, all that was fine. What was disgusting was the immodesty of describing the circumstances they overcame in lurid terms. The Salvation Army faced the predicament, though, that avoiding saying anything the least bit lurid about what the girls, with God’s grace, had overcome (often, prostitution started in childhood, with subsequent abuse, drug abuse, the works) would so severely understate these girls’ struggle that respectable people would be left wondering why to make so much fuss over redemption with so little sense of what it was from.

    Reticence is its own virtue, and one of the ways it’s virtuous is that it minimize one’s own struggles to spare others the gory details.

    You’re reminding me of something I heard on the radio back in the 80s. It was a religious talk program, and the guest was recounting how he had been such a bad person before he was saved.  When he got through his list (and there wasn’t anything really disgusting or outrageous about it) the host, who apparently had been reading my mind, said, “Why, that wasn’t so bad!” The guest got defensive and said, “Oh, yes, it was. I was bad!”  Well, in a good theological sense he was, but it seems that there was a certain level of overt badness that he needed in order to establish his cred in that environment, and it was questionable whether he had it. 

    • #64
  5. Bob Thompson Member
    Bob Thompson
    @BobThompson

    Henry Castaigne:

    Personally, I’ve always found the more grisly sacrifices offered up to a higher religious goal a little disturbing. But regardless of personal feelings, such practices are so universal that they illuminate a fundamental human reality. People have long associated suffering with holiness and holiness is part of every culture. I propose that the modern leftist obsession with victimhood is a continuation of the human inclination to make suffering holy. What’s more, there is an odd echo of Christianity in the leftist worship of victimhood. 

     

    In the process of returning as promised I stopped on this passage. I had just been reflecting on Hillary Clinton’s portrayal as victim from the time she was defeated in the election by Donald Trump. That portrayal has not been accompanied by any sacrifice or redemption, at least not publicly visible. Is Clinton occupying the space reserved for the ‘holy suffering’? In contrast, where does this place Trump? I haven’t seen him try to play the victim, although he undoubtedly has tweeted several times about the harassment related to Russian election interference. But sacrifice and maybe redemption have been part of his life in the presidency. Most of his behaviors that many Americans reviled have not been exhibited since his election and he has certainly sacrificed his personal life in an effort to preserve America’s standing as the leader among the countries of the world. During the campaign, in response to a reporter’s question about why he was seeking the presidency, he said (paraphrased) ‘something is really wrong in Washington and somebody has to do something’. That has been interesting to watch, for sure.

    • #65
  6. Jerry Giordano (Arizona Patrio… Member
    Jerry Giordano (Arizona Patrio…
    @ArizonaPatriot

    The Reticulator (View Comment):

    The First Amendment states:

    Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

    Note the bolded words.

    So our own U.S. Constitution is encouraging people to play the victim. Maybe we should quit worrying about victimology as a general, abstract concept, and instead address the merits of each grievance and proposed redress.

    I think that the reason we are objecting to victimology is that the Left, as a philosophical matter, has adopted the view that suffering is ipso facto proof of an injustice that automatically gives rise to a legitimate grievance.  The refuse to consider the merits of each grievance, if the person with the grievance is in one of their favored identity groups.

    • #66
  7. Jerry Giordano (Arizona Patrio… Member
    Jerry Giordano (Arizona Patrio…
    @ArizonaPatriot

    Midget Faded Rattlesnake (View Comment):

    Back in Victorian times, when the Salvation Army rescued young country girls who had gone to London to seek one fortune and… er… instead found another… stories of these girls’ redemption, which the Salvation Army delighted in as stories of Christ’s redemptive power, disgusted and outraged many respectable people. Respectable people weren’t disgusted because the girls had been redeemed, or had overcome so much — no, all that was fine. What was disgusting was the immodesty of describing the circumstances they overcame in lurid terms. The Salvation Army faced the predicament, though, that avoiding saying anything the least bit lurid about what the girls, with God’s grace, had overcome (often, prostitution starting in childhood, with subsequent abuse, drug abuse, the works) would so severely understate these girls’ struggle that respectable people would be left wondering why to make so much fuss over redemption with so little sense of what it was from.

    I think that things have changed in the church today, or at least in the Evangelical churches and culture of which I am a part.  If I may insert a bit of levity that illustrates the modern view — this is comedian Brad Stine, and the clip is less than 2 minutes long:

     

    • #67
  8. SkipSul Inactive
    SkipSul
    @skipsul

    Midget Faded Rattlesnake (View Comment):
    What was disgusting was the immodesty of describing the circumstances they overcame in lurid terms. The Salvation Army faced the predicament, though, that avoiding saying anything the least bit lurid about what the girls, with God’s grace, had overcome (often, prostitution starting in childhood, with subsequent abuse, drug abuse, the works) would so severely understate these girls’ struggle that respectable people would be left wondering why to make so much fuss over redemption with so little sense of what it was from.

    Of course that practice of detailed testimonies has its own perils: they become their own currency with which to barter.  While the Victorians may well have been put off by such stories, in some denominations today you need to have a story like that to even be considered redeemed.  You don’t stand up at a revival meeting and give your testimony as “Well, I’ve come from dark places of doubt and had two cigarettes when I was 17” – there would be a real shame in giving such a testimony.  No, the greater the fall, the greater the redemption.  This is, of course, also terrible, for it conveys the notion that lifelong fidelity lacks the same worth – you cannot claim to know salvation because you’ve not known anything else.

    • #68
  9. SkipSul Inactive
    SkipSul
    @skipsul

    Jerry Giordano (Arizona Patrio… (View Comment):
    I think that things have changed in the church today, or at least in the Evangelical churches and culture of which I am a part. If I may insert a bit of levity that illustrates the modern view — this is comedian Brad Stine, and the clip is less than 2 minutes long:

    Very similar to what I’ve seen.

    It’s interesting by contrast in Orthodox Christianity – you’re not really encouraged to “give a testimony”, and in fact are encouraged to not do so except under special circumstances.  For one thing, all that stuff is in the past, you confessed it when you came into the church, and your personal past is something from which you are hopefully seeking healing – you don’t need to share that with other believers at large.  And for another it really can become a form of humble-bragging, which is (as I noted above) toxic in some circumstances – it can be a stumbling block for other believers and scandalize them, plus it so often sounds like bragging about what you did.

    The exceptions to this are limited to where such an accounting of yourself may actually aid others personally, and those revelations should be shared privately.  

    • #69
  10. Henry Castaigne Member
    Henry Castaigne
    @HenryCastaigne

    SkipSul (View Comment):

    And for another it really can become a form of humble-bragging, which is (as I noted above) toxic in some circumstances – it can be a stumbling block for other believers and scandalize them, plus it so often sounds like bragging about what you did.

    The exceptions to this are limited to where such an accounting of yourself may actually aid others personally, and those revelations should be shared privately.

     

    This sounds like a scene from a Cuckoo mental hospital dreamt up by Ken Kesey.

     

    Once, just one time that I can remember, four or five years back, did it go any different. The doctor had finished his spiel, and the nurse had opened right up with, “Now. Who will start? Let out those old secrets.” And she’d put all the Acutes in a trance by sitting there in silence for twenty minutes after the question, quiet as an electric alarm about to go off, waiting for somebody to start telling something about themselves. Her eyes swept back and forth over them as steady as a turning beacon. The day room was clamped silent for twenty long minutes, with all of the patients stunned where they sat. When twenty minutes had passed, she looked at her watch and said, “Am I to take it that there’s not a man among you that has committed some act that he has never admitted?” She reached in the basket for the log book. “Must we go over past history?”

    That triggered something, some acoustic device in the walls, rigged to turn on at just the sound of those words coming from her mouth. The Acutes stiffened. Their mouths opened in unison. Her sweeping eyes stopped on the first man along the wall.

    His mouth worked. “I robbed a cash register in a service station.”

    She moved to the next man. “I tried to take my little sister to bed.”

    Her eyes clicked to the next man; each one jumped like a shooting gallery target.

    “I – one time – wanted to take my brother to bed.”

    “I killed my cat when I was six. Oh, God forgive me, I stoned her to death and said my neighbor did it.”

    “I lied about trying. I did take my sister!”

    “So did I! So did I!” “And me! And me!”

    It was better than she’d dreamed. They were all shouting to outdo one another, going further and further, no way of stopping, telling things that wouldn’t ever let them look one another in the eye again. The nurse nodding at each confession and saying Yes, yes, yes.

     

    • #70
  11. Clifford A. Brown Member
    Clifford A. Brown
    @CliffordBrown

    Thanks to the post author for reminding me that this was a late blossoming post on the theme “Blooming Ideas!” Stop by the handy one stop source for themes to see some of the other great posts, or click through the current month and add your voice with a post.

     

    • #71
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