The American social landscape is painfully pocked with overconfidence and denials of public truth. The denials of both police and protester violence, denials of the legitimacy of the 2020 presidential election, and the championing of “gender-affirming care” for children are examples of invincible obliviousness. In instances such as these the problems are not even recognized as problems by some, things requiring examination and thus open to better or worse responses. They are simply asserted not to be real.
This is being perpetrated by people that in many ways could hardly be more different from each other. There are those who claim adherence to truth and assert that facts leave no room for people’s feelings as well as those who assert the science has spoken and that the present, simply because it is the present, overrules prior claims and norms. Two wildly different mentalities are united in their refusal to reckon with reality. A pervasive moral blindness darkens our shared world and in it hopelessness grows like a cancer.
One of the most tragic aspects of this blindness is the intractability of ideology. There is faith of a sort on display in these denials and affirmations but it isn’t commendable for being that. Not all faith is good or substantive: faith’s quality depends upon its object. And this faith is the sort that lashes itself to a millstone and insists its sinking is a mark of its righteousness.
Interestingly, this is often accompanied by a posture of pessimism that exhorts people to act even as it resigns itself to despair. This is evident in those who are invested in reformation and the demands of justice exhibit a sense of hopeless futility regarding those goals, of which Robin DiAngelo’s claim that whites will always be racist is one example.
Freddie deBoer has criticized this tendency in progressives who have entrapped themselves within a fatalistic outlook. He decries
the tendency within the left to see the structural injustices of the world as inherent and immutable, so baked into the cake of the current context, history, the United States of America, etc., that they will always exist. The stain of injustice can never be rubbed out.
Certainly the problems downstream from American chattel slavery and white supremacy persist to the present, but substantive change has been made with regard to these issues. But note also that the problems of this specific history are not reducible to “the problems of race,” for while these things mutually implicate each other, they are not equivalent.
Contrary to the assumptions motivating such thinkers and their adherents, conditions such as white privilege are in fact mutable. They are subject to change, to subversion, and to defeat, and this is observable within the history of the last sixty years. To assert this isn’t to claim that bigotry or unjust advantages and disadvantages no longer exist. It is simply to recognize, gratefully, that conditions are not the same as they once were and that this is good. And hope that such change is possible is a necessary precondition for working towards these ends.
This is an instance of a larger problem, one that devastates moral imagination and the possibility of meaningful action. Any purely deterministic view will foster the very effects it describes as inevitable once it is accepted as true. The inevitable becomes so when it is presumed to already be incapable of change. This cultivates hopelessness but also a type of sentimentality for those whose privilege protects them from the consequences of those injustices, whose political involvement tends to be limited to the consumption of news and use of social media. This sentimentality demands no real action apart from shame. It supplies a frisson of indignance, enjoyable in itself but also useful as a badge of one’s moral superiority. But such anger, when it isn’t channeled into concrete intervention or isn’t generative of strategy or hope, is only performative. It is of little value to real people undergoing real suffering.
The type of despair exemplified by such privileged liberals as well as the conservatives who stew in and stoke outrage is a luxury, one which doesn’t serve the interests of truth and justice. There is, furthermore, an element of conservatism ironically concealed within such a stance that goes recognized by those most susceptible to it.
Does a conservative stance as such necessarily aim to discourage the attempts at change or improvement? No, but this is its characteristic damage, the deformity peculiar to its form. When a thing goes wrong it will do so in certain ways that are owed to its essence and its form. Anything that is is a fallen thing, enveloped within a world astray from the ways it was created to be, warped by Sin—the power holding the world in thrall— and by sins—the actions and structures which flow out of creatures' participation in Sin's dominance. All things, therefore, have characteristic damage, deformations that sabotage their own purpose. Every good thing is susceptible to it, so wise, vigilant attention for that characteristic damage is necessary as it is from here that many deleterious consequences arise. Characteristic damage always reveals something about that thing.
At its best, conservatism presents the unfashionable critique that present circumstances, for all their evils, may be better than an unintentionally worse future brought about through brash, hasty resolutions that fail to reckon with our proclivities towards folly. At its worst it enshrines an illusory past and opposes substantive change. The fear of unleashing a greater hypothetical problem in the effort to cure the present's ills cannot but reinforce the status quo to some extent.
But enthusiasm for change can obscure the need for diligent consideration of the potential consequences of our actions. Political judgment must always interrogate history in order to examine precedents if it is to responsibly act. History offers numerous examples of human fallenness sabotaging good intentions or creating vast, new problems by failing to reckon adequately with a smaller one. Attentiveness to history does not entail believing the past is superior to the present, but it does resist the illusion that the present is superior to any other possible arrangement or that it was inevitable. Any conservative impulse that would be Christian may not pretend the present is without flaws, even terrible wrongs, as it cautions against the possible consequences of any proposed change.
Defeatism, then, has no viable future, but identifies something that must be taken into account by a critically realistic politics. And it is at this point of impasse between political traditions and the anthropologies they assume that the Christian gospel provides resources for judgment and action. The gospel reframes the problem by situating the conditions of change’s possibility within the problem of human folly as it is confronted and defeated by Jesus Christ. Inevitability is not a Christian posture. It’s a species of certainty that defies humility and presumes an omniscient view of what is to be. It implicitly claims the world has not changed due to the accomplishment of Jesus Christ’s mission, that the immutable laws of cause and effect are more determinative of the world than his renewing rule.
Inevitability obtains apart from God’s intervention in Christ. Futility is the human inheritance in Adam (Ephesians 4:17) as it follows the course of a world enslaved to the powers of Sin and Death (Ephesians 2:2). But that adamantine inevitability has been interrupted by the Son’s assumption of our nature in order to annul the hopeless course that would otherwise prevail. True futility is only possible where and when human beings spurn the gift of the Spirit of Christ.
But, crucially, to locate substantive hope in the victory of Jesus Christ isn’t to assert an absence of limits on human ability. Human beings are finite and that finitude presents itself in various limitations and weaknesses across all human persons. If pessimism is a decadent luxury of those with little to lose and a characteristic deformation of conservative thought, can its opposite be a characteristic deformation as well?
If so, then the problem is not simply the abstract matter of whether or not change is theoretically possible. It’s also a matter of change’s requirements and whether or not political subjects can recognize and organize themselves to reckon adequately with them. This is a real and a difficult problem as there is no dependable self-correction intrinsic to human beings. The problem of fallenness, that is, complicates any desire to effect such change. Substantive hope must reckon with the fact that human beings are not only capable of acting against their own self-interest but that they routinely do so.
Unfortunately this is just as routinely ignored or denied. Nathan Robinson, for example, writes with regard to the modest goals of many leftists, "Can we not manage these things? We can't really be that fallen.” The denial of fallenness may seem to resonate with deBoer’s belief that change is possible. But it’s also naive as it not only underestimates the ruinous effects of sin but also ignores the overabundance of evidence to the contrary. It shows that this is a posture of faith.
Which means that faith isn’t materially ruled out of this conundrum. What can Christian faith offer to it? It will agree with deBoer that the final outcome of this society's or this individual’s movement towards what is right isn’t predetermined. But it will also assert that “we are always in the wrong", as W. H. Auden observed. What we all share is that all of us are wrong. Even when we choose or love what is right we are still wrong in some way: wrong in our views of ourselves, wrong in our other commitments that contradict this right, wrong in the means we employ to secure it. The movement of anyone within this class, “the wrong,” towards the good and true isn’t assured by any metanarrative logic. It requires strenuous, sacrificial effort to take root.
Reactionary positions err when they assert that human nature precludes change, but a more optimistic anthropology also errs in denying the extent and profundity of the human compulsion to sin. This failure to reckon with the inborn human impulse to not only err but to subvert and damage themselves illustrates the necessity of pessimism regarding the plausibility of change.
Theodor Adorno held that societal progress of a sort was possible but that it was always nestled within the growth of brutality as well. It was not sufficient therefore to focus undue attention on progress because doing so would mean suppressing the truth of the evil that enabled it or was made possible by it. He demanded that the contradictions inherent in “progress” be honestly set forth through thick accounts of history’s course and of the specific moral strides made within it as a way of keeping the rhetoric of progress accountable to truth. The faith that confesses Jesus Christ was crucified under Pontius Pilate insists upon the same thing.
Pessimism, then, is necessary insofar as it insists that improvement is arduous. It is never as simple as desiring to do good, as the intention and outcome are not guaranteed due to the divided subjectivity of all human beings and the degradation of our faculties in the present, fallen age (Romans 7:7-25). A pessimism that is disciplined by the gospel will permit us to be honest about the difficulty of any given endeavor but will simultaneously confess that what is impossible with humankind is possible with God (Luke 18:27). Hope dwells within this tension.
Such a pessimism challenges the assumption that awareness of a wrong is sufficient to overcome it. The complex of wrongs that characterize the present context should be sufficient to prove this, but it is a truth human beings are prone to suppress from their consciousness, whatever the historical period they inhabit. The intransigence that obstructs justice and truth isn’t the fault solely of reactionaries or of progressives but even of us who would portray ourselves as more sane than either.
Christian theology can contribute to this problem by simultaneously affirming three things. First, that fallenness is very real, both pervasive and ruinous. We are not as we should be, and we do not have the resources or the willingness in ourselves to cure it. Calvinism’s characteristic damage can too easily and conveniently obscure its moral insight into the human predicament. The reconciliation and healing of the painful divide in the core of our being must come from outside of ourselves because our being itself is damaged, warped, and ill. A naive overconfidence in human ability will achieve little substantial good because it will contribute to its own undermining and, just as bad, will fail to recognize it.
But second, it also affirms that our fallenness is not the final determiner of history. It insists that help from outside is not only available but desirous of our restoration. That this Helper has decisively defeated the evil that conspires against us for our ruin. That this Helper not only wants to set right what has gone wrong, but also desires to lavish us with embarrassingly superabundant rewards. This Helper has secured just this future, and set those who will join him in motion to mediate the goodness he is in himself.
Third, it will insist that the faith, hope, and love of the gospel bursts the confines of any conservative or progressive agenda. These wineskins cannot contain the priorities or the imperatives of the Kingdom of God. The Spirit of Christ is no respecter of factions or ideology: he impels believers to deterritorialize and spurn simple, popular options in order to obey their Lord’s commands. Christians may sing that this world is not their home but in a viciously polarized and scantily catechized climate such as ours they have to trust the One that went out of his way to minister to the Samaritan woman (John 4: 4-30), who commended a benevolent Samaritan as an exemplar of true neighborliness (Luke 10:25-37), and, crucially, who emphasized Elijah’s service to a Gentile widow to the outrage of his Nazarene audience (Luke 4:24-30) will complicate their views on and responses to most every issue much more than any ossified partisan position would allow. In all of these instances Jesus transgressed popular boundaries of right. But he also refused more elite conceptions of what was good, right, and clean in healing and in permitting his disciples to pluck grain on the Sabbath (Matthew 12:1-14; Luke 6:1-11, 13:10-17, 14:1-6; John 5:2-17), and in rejecting scrupulous purification customs (Matthew 15:1-20, Mark 7:1-23).
Furthermore, his acts of forgiveness provoked rage from every segment of Jewish society. It was always overlooked that forgiveness necessarily entailed wrongdoing on the part of the one forgiven, but their senses of self and of justice were so bound up with hatred of these wrongdoers that they often could not reckon with their own failings. Our pilgrimage as disciples will likewise necessitate a political homelessness, at least as regards established parties.
Christian theology, when it is true to its object, can witness to both impossibility and possibility by insisting that humankind’s recalcitrance to goodness and truth isn’t a temporary impediment but a permanent aspect of any and every human problem. We are not simply finite: we are morally injured and impaired. Moral corruption isn’t an occasional accident of human nature, but a persistent feature of the fallen economy. There is no point in time at which we will surmount the problem of self-alienation and the compulsion to act against our best interests and we help nothing and no one by denying this.
Fallen human subjects cannot look to achievements that have been made in the past as sure signs of an inevitable victory in the future. The fallenness of the human race teaches us to temper our optimism with a sober realism that neither our opponents or ourselves are ever fully right, fully willing to own our wrongs, fully willing to pay the necessary price to right the wrong that demands rectification. The repression of this truth guarantees we will forget that we are all participants in the structures that render sin so easy to commit and easy to become hardened within. We will become cruel and unforgiving. We will become dehumanized in our demands for a perfection that is only partial and even then cannot be achieved. Pessimism is both a liability and an asset, depending upon which type of presumption is being viewed through the lens of Christology.
As such, the moral progress that has been made in our or any other society, such as it is, does not bear witness to an intrinsic orientation towards the right or a basic reformability to human nature. It is a testament to the God who has not abandoned his rebellious creatures and invites them to participate in his mission of rescuing his creation. Human fallenness sets the stage for his gracious intervention and sets in relief the lavish generosity he has made manifest in Jesus Christ.
Any valid hope that will endure the vicious absurdity of the world we inhabit and would persevere with justice must admit the truth: we really are that fallen. But it must at the very same time announce its dialectical counterpart: by the grace of God the impossible becomes possible. We do not need to believe our world is either the worst or the best of all possible worlds: it’s simply the one that is, the one in which we have been given to act.
Christians must neither overestimate our ability to overcome that which is self-defeating and perverse within us nor underestimate the opportunities available to us to contribute to the common good, as God will only ever utilize creatures of compromised wills and morals for the furtherance of his good purposes. We must forgo the luxury of pessimism even as we affirm the gracious pessimism of the gospel.
Ian Olson is a grad student living with his wife and children in Wisconsin.
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