One of the more chilling passages C. S. Lewis ever wrote comes in The Great Divorce in which he imagines Napoleon in Hell. The excerpt below is a conversation between the narrator and one of Hell's residents:
"The nearest of those old ones is Napoleon. We know that because two chaps made the journey to see him. They'd started long before I came, of course, but I was there when they came back. About fifteen thousand years of our time it took them. We've picked out the house by now. Just a little pin prick of light and nothing else near it for millions of miles."
"But they got there?"
"That's right. He'd built himself a huge house all in the Empire style-rows of windows flaming with light, though it only shows as a pin prick from where I live."
"Did they see Napoleon?"
"That's right. They went up and looked through one of the windows. Napoleon was there all right."
"What was he doing?"
"Walking up and down-up and down all the time-left-right, left-right-never stopping for a moment. The two chaps watched him for about a year and he never rested. And muttering to himself all the time. 'It was Soult's fault. It was Ney's fault. It was Josephine's fault. It was the fault of the Russians. It was the fault of the English.' Like that all the time. Never stopped for a moment. A little, fat man and he looked kind of tired. But he didn't seem able to stop it."
From the vibrations I gathered that the bus was still moving, but there was now nothing to be seen from the windows which confirmed this -nothing but grey void above and below. "Then the town will go on spreading indefinitely?" I said. "That's right," said the Intelligent Man.
The picture of Hell presented by Lewis, here and in other parts of his work, is a picture in which God turns people over to their own desires and hatreds. Cut off from God, they soon find themselves cut off from others. They can't even stand to be around anyone else. So they move further and further away from one another, all the time becoming smaller, more lost, more bitter.
The hatred of others implied in Lewis's account of Hell is something with us today as well. Indeed, recent events have surfaced that hatred in particularly dark and ugly ways. Consider the appalling reaction to the murder of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson occurring across the political spectrum, with figures on both the left and right offering various versions of "I'm not condoning murder, but."
In this reckoning, Thompson, either as a powerful member of the healthcare industry in particular or simply as a member of "the elite" is rendered an enemy—and if he is an enemy, he apparently ceases to be human. This, I wish I didn't have to say, is a monstrous account of what it is to be human and of what we owe to our neighbors.
To be sure, American healthcare is often cruel and dystopian. My mother and I experienced it firsthand when my dad's insurance kept attempting to get out of paying for his care after a traumatic brain injury left him disabled. Yet the reasons for that cruelty are complex and laying them at the feet of any one man, even one as powerful as Thompson, is itself cruel, not least of all to his family and friends who all seem to recall him as a kind and generous man.
What's more, the fact that we have a cruel and dystopian system has precisely zero relevance to the question of whether or not vigilante killing of healthcare industry workers is ever justifiable. This is a thing that should not need saying.
Even if we granted, purely for sake of argument, that the suffering caused by our healthcare system is a morally equivalent form of evil to what was done to Thompson, that still only addresses half the problem: You'd need to demonstrate that the forms of evil are equivalent and that such evil is best answered with unaccountable, vigilante-style retribution done outside the rule of law.
This is the point I am stuck on, I think. Even if one simply and uncritically accepted the claim that Thompson was a villain, it still does not follow that what was done to him was defensible or should be understood sympathetically or should somehow be contextualized in such a way that it looks anything less than deeply evil and reprehensible.
I have had a hard time ignoring these reactions since first beginning to see them pop up in media and online. I think there are two reasons.
One is rather obvious: It is now Advent and we are now slowly and patiently passing through a season of preparation as we await our King Jesus who, we are promised, will bring peace. I wonder if we still want it. The Christ who is coming is not a respecter of persons. He does not treat "our" side indulgently while showing devastating severity with our enemies. He does not think the purpose of politics is simply to reward friends and punish enemies, with no regard for law or morality. He judges with justice and justice, we remember, is blind. Do the politicians and media figures so glibly speaking about Thompson's killing actually want justice? Do we? Do we want peace on those terms, I wonder?
There is a second and lesser reason I have been wondering about such things as well. I am reading Martin Luther King Jr's final book, Where Do We Go From Here: Chaos or Community? and it has made me think that Dr. King would have much to say about our sick response to Thompson's murder.
What is striking about this final text of King's is that it does represent a more radical King, as many have said. It is a King most Americans do not know as well. Certainly it is a King many would find discomforting. But the nature of this "radicalism" is itself striking: The breadth of King's moral critique expands, certainly, but the underlying moral vision that defines that critique seems remarkably consistent.
This final book was written in late 1967, two years after the passing of the Voting Rights Act and less than one year before King's assassination. What has shifted for King in the time between the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, and 1967 is not his methods or even necessarily his goal.
What shifted was, as I said, the breadth of his critique. In his account, the passing of the Voting Rights Act created a "problem" of sorts for the Civil Rights Movement because the movement had coalesced around resisting relatively obvious forms of evil and injustice which were also blatantly unconstitutional and largely confined to the south. So the first steps of the Civil Rights Movement, on King's account, were largely aimed at ending the specific geographically constrained and unconstitutional evils of the Jim Crow south.
But once those had been credibly addressed as much as was possible, a rift emerged in the movement: Many within the movement, particularly the white northerners, felt that the movement had achieved all its goals. What more was there to do?
King disagreed: He looked at a host of injustices in America and thought the movement needed to turn its attention to those issues. He saw housing discrimination, for example, and severe poverty. He saw America fighting unnecessary wars and condemning her young men to death, severe injury, or life-changing trauma for no purpose. These, he thought, were the new objects that the Civil Rights Movement should address.
Crucially, he still felt that these new problems should be addressed via the same non-violent, non-identitarian means that the movement had used all along. Indeed, there was some sense in which the necessity of such means was stronger after the Voting Rights Act because it was through those means that the movement could not only call people toward supporting the abolition of specific and obvious injustices, but also to call people toward a truer and better way of living. Non-violence was necessary, King argued, because their revolution had to be built on hope and love, not hope and hate.
Indeed, King takes up the identitarian point at length in the second chapter of the book as he recounts interactions he had with Stokely Carmichael. First, King acknowledges the many reasons for why a kind of Black identitarian turn or even a striking and somewhat underdetermined slogan like "Black power" would resonate with Afro-Americans.
But he then pushes back, sharply defending the non-violent, non-identitarian approach he had always promoted in his parts of the movement:
Beneath all the satisfaction of a gratifying slogan, Black Power is a nihilistic philosophy born out of the conviction that the Negro can't win. It is, at bottom, the view that American society is so hopelessly corrupt and enmeshed in evil that there is no possibility of salvation from within. Although this thinking is understandable as a response to a white power structure that never completely committed itself to true equality for the Negro, and a die-hard mentality that sought to shut all windows and doors against the winds of change, it nonetheless carries the seeds of its own doom.
King then goes on to argue that non-violence is effective because it forces the purveyors of injustice to reckon with the humanity of those they oppress and that a non-violent, non-identitarian approach is necessary in any case because there was simply no realistic scenario in play in which a Black-only movement could secure the justice to which Afro-Americans were entitled. The movement had to be diverse, he said:
The Black Power movement of today, like the Garvey 'Back to Africa' movement of the 1920s, represents a dashing of hope, a conviction of the inability of the Negro to win and a belief in the infinitude of the ghetto. While there is much grounding in past experience for all these feelings, a revolution cannot succumb to any of them. Today's despair is a poor chisel to carve out tomorrow's justice. ...
Behind Black Power's legitimate and necessary concern for group unity and black identity lies the belief that there can be a separate black road to power and fulfillment. Few ideas are more unrealistic. There is no salvation for the Negro through isolation.
But what of power, some might ask? What of acquiring power in order to secure one's own standing against one's enemies. King addresses that too:
Some Black Power advocates consider an appeal to conscience irrelevant. A Black Power exponent said to me not long ago: "To hell with conscience and morality. We want power." But power and morality must go together, implementing, fulfilling and ennobling each other. In the quest for power I cannot bypass the concern for morality. I refuse to be driven to a Machiavellian cynicism with respect to power. Power at its best is the right use of strength. The words of Alfred the Great are still true: Power is never good unless he who has it is good."
A morally indifferent obsession with power and a willingness to use violence to obtain power or to punish one's enemies is foreign to the Christian tradition—which is why you can find a 20th century Afro-American pastor and a 9th century Saxon king saying the same thing.
What does all of this have to do with the above?
First, the sufferings and injustices experienced by King and his colleagues make the overwhelming majority of today's political injustices seem small by comparison. If King and his courageous colleagues in the Civil Rights Movement can shun vigilante violence as a means of political renewal, then I do not think it unreasonable to suggest that people justly angry about the failings of our healthcare system should do the same. Dr. King's argument above reminds us that even if it were morally admissible, which it isn't, vigilante violence virtually never achieves the stated goals of those who utilize it.
But there is a second point here, one that takes us back to Advent and the arrival of Christ and also connects to King's concerns, I think. Our moral ends are not defined by victory or defeat at any cost. The good life is not one defined by destroying one's enemies. Our health is not realized through isolation. Jesus calls us to a different way, and that way looks like forgiving, looks like mercy, looks like love humbling itself for the sake of reconciliation. (And when crimes are committed and need to be addressed, the better way looks like dealing with that evil through the rule of law, not vigilante violence.)
Consider the opening chapters of the Gospels: Jesus's birth brings both rich men from Arabia, and lowly shepherds from Israel. In time, Roman emperors and northern European pagans and north African professors will all worship him too, declaring him Lord.
The coming of Christ reminds us that there is a need we share with our enemies that links us to them, such that any pride or self-righteousness we might feel should be radically tempered, if not driven out altogether.
If you one day find yourself in Paradise with God, it will not be because you are a good person, but because Christ is a great savior. And what Christ is to you he can also be to your enemy, for your enemy's need is no greater than your own, and Christ's love for him is no less than his love for you. Consider: Jesus came to earth for your worst enemy. He gave up his life, being nailed to a cross, for your worst enemy. What do you think of that?
At Advent we anticipate Jesus, the bringer of peace. If there is something in us that recoils at the thought, it is precisely that something which will damn us, no matter what evils our enemies may have committed.