Two Types of Sorrow
Lorenzo Albacete † - When we feel sorry for the afflicted because they diverge from our notion of perfection, our sorrow is destructive.
O'Connor calls it "popular pity." She does not say we should not feel sorrow for someone's suffering. But she is asking us to examine what kind of sorrow we feel and what our notion of a solution is. She is saying that this "popular pity" has led to a loss in vision and the inability to see any good in suffering. Other ages, she says, were more used to the grotesque, and this somehow led them to see more because they saw with the eyes of faith.
She calls this faith the "blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance." Instead of faith, we have sentimentality, tenderness, and theory. If we have lost the ability to attach suffering to the person of the suffering Christ, then suffering becomes merely a problem to be fixed, a disfigurement to be removed. It is this impulse that leads to the gas chambers.
A phrase most often used by the purveyors of tenderness is "quality of life." This is a very dangerous concept. When we no longer see the goodness of the life of people who are totally helpless, totally dependent, and who may even be suffering, we feel that the only solution to their suffering is to put them to death. However understandable it is to want someone's suffering to end, our pity becomes evil when it has become detached from the source of tenderness, which is the person of Christ.
The insight that the medical establishment-the healthcare establishment as we know it today-is governed by false tenderness and is subsequently destroying lives is the subject of the futuristic novel The Thanatos Syndrome by Walker Percy. The particular incident around which the book is based is an experiment being done through a secret arrangement between members of a medical community and some people in the federal government in order to eliminate crime.
The scientists secretly put chemicals in the town's water supply that supposedly will reduce violence, greed, and other ills. And initially it works: human imperfection is indeed being eliminated, turning the town into an idyllic community.
The problem is that many other things are also disappearing the capacity for commitment, shock, and anger. The protagonist, Tom More, a psychiatrist and agnostic who has been in jail for selling prescription drugs, notices that something is going wrong, and he sets out to find out what.
Tom More is aided by a crazy old priest named Fr. Smith who lives on top of a tower watching for fires (a sly allusion to St. Simeon Stylites).
His bishop has assigned him to a parish, but he never shows up. Fr. Smith serves as the spokesperson for Percy's critique of contemporary society.
Percy purposely chooses a person who everyone considers insane, because he wants to show how the Church understands and responds to human imperfection and suffering and that this response is increasingly outside the mainstream "tender" response of contemporary healthcare.
"Tenderness" Leads to the Gas Chamber
Fr. Smith, in his explanation of what's disturbing him, echoes one of Percy's main critiques of today's culture. Percy says in one of his essays,
"Words have been deprived of their meaning. We have had a change of language, or rather a change of meaning of the same words." What is this "devaluation of language"? It's a bit like the devaluation of currency. The bill looks the same, but it's not worth as much. The words are the same, but they don't mean the same.
The meaning which words used to possess in the West-largely influenced by biblical faith-has been taken away, and we have lost the value of recognizing certain signs. Percy calls this an "evacuation of signs." Language-which is a system of signs—no longer mediates reality as it once did. In order to make language fit what O'Connor identified as a loss of vision-or faith-there is an attempt to redesign contemporary culture, to remake reality. And when this cannot be done, when some things like suffering and sin refuse to go away, then the tendency is to attempt to destroy the cause.
Along these lines, Percy brings up the example of the Jews. Somehow, the Jews refuse to go away, and they remain as a thorn in the side of many.
The priest says that the Jews have been persecuted because of the unique relationship of that people with God. And so every effort is made to secularize, to devalue that unique relationship. But when that effort fails, then the Holocaust follows.
This is what Fr. Smith tells Tom More. He gives his own example of a doctor he knew in Germany who was driven to tears by the suffering of children. The priest knew him before World War II, and, at the end of the war, he found that he was one of the head doctors in a concentration camp that used Jewish children for medical experiments in order to find out ways of helping other, presumably Aryan, children. The priest says, If you are a lover of Mankind in the abstract like Walt Whitman, who wished the best for Mankind, you will probably do no harm and might even write good poetry and give pleasure....
If you are a theorist of Mankind like Rousseau or Skinner, who believes he understands man's brain and in the solitariness of his study or laboratory writes books on the subject, you are also probably harmless and might even contribute to human knowledge....
But if you put the two together, a lover of Mankind and a theorist of Mankind, what you've got now is Robespierre or Stalin or Hitler and the Terror, and millions dead for the good of Mankind.
Note how this is the same point Flannery O'Connor makes when she says, "When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness [Christ], its logical outcome is terror." Both Percy and O'Connor believe this is clearly a satanic work. When Percy talks about words being deprived of their meaning, the priest talks about the Great Depriver who is warring against humanity.
At the end of The Thanatos Syndrome, when all the mysteries are solved and somehow this priest is able to put together a healthcare facility for those patients nobody wants, a Mass is held. All kinds of important people are there-journalists, medical doctors, politicians, and so forth-and the priest kind of staggers in (perhaps he has had a little drink beforehand) to say Mass. The following is part of his homily:
Listen to me dear physicians, dear brothers, dear Qualitarians, abortionists, euthanasists. Do you know why you are going to listen to me? Because every last one of you is a better person than I and you know it. Yet, you like me. Every last one of you knows me and what I am, a failed priest, an old drunk who's only fit to do one thing and to tell you one thing. You are good, kind, hardworking doctors but you like me nevertheless and I know that you will allow me to tell you one thing-no, ask one thing-no, beg one thing of you. Please do this one favor for me, dear doctors. If you have a patient, young or old, suffering, dying, afflicted, useless, born or unborn whom you for the best of reasons wish to put out of his misery, I beg only one thing of you, dear doctors. Please send him to us, don't kill them—we'll take them, all of them. Please send them to us. I swear to you, you will not be sorry.
We will all be happy about it. I promise you and I know you believe me, that we will take care of him, her—we will even call on you to help us take care of them-and you will not have to make such a decision. God will bless you for it and you will offend no one, except the great prince Satan who rules the world.
The mission of the faithful- those called to co-suffer with our fellow human beings—is summed up by this priest.
Italian. Spanish. French. Portuguese.
https://www.amazon.com/Cry-Heart-Suffering-Lorenzo-Albacete/dp/1639821260
