The Darkness of a "Politics of Tenderness"

This post flows out of yesterday's reflections about the moral vulnerabilities of humanism (e.g., the French Revolution) and ideologies of solidarity (e.g., communism). 

To be clear, I'm not trying to deploy a "bothsidesism" argument, comparing religious political violence in history with atheistic political violence. Most of my posts are written three months out, so I can only imagine writing today what sort of comments I received yesterday. I'll wait three months to find out! It's possible a humanist reader of yesterday's post would say, "You lament 17,000 deaths during the French Revolution. Do we want to tally up the deaths caused by the wars of religion throughout history?" 

My point yesterday wasn't to deny the deaths associated with religious violence. Although I do find the arguments made by William Cavanaugh in his The Myth of Religious Violence worth considering when we look at "wars of religion" in history. My point was, rather, to make the observation that humanism, as a moral and political movement, is vulnerable to violence, the same way religion is vulnerable to violence. Because history is clear: political and moral ideologies promoting "equality" and "solidarity" have been engines of mass murder in the modern world. 

This brings me to one of Flannery O'Connor's most provocative and widely-cited quotes:

“If other ages felt less, they saw more, even though they saw with the blind, prophetical, unsentimental eye of acceptance, which is to say, of faith. In the absence of this faith now, we govern by tenderness. It is a tenderness which, long cut off from the person of Christ, is wrapped in theory. When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror. It ends in forced-labor camps and in the fumes of the gas chamber.”

I can completely understand how a critic of religion would have some issues with this quote. As I said above, the temptation is to tally up and compare historical body counts. But my interest in O'Connor's quote is the point I raised yesterday. Specifically, a "politics of tenderness," as we observed in France, Russia and China, really did lead to terror. Calls to equality and solidarity--a politics of tenderness--murdered tens of millions of people.

O'Connor's diagnosis about why this happens is that "tenderness" becomes a "theory," a political ideology. And ideologies are dangerous because they divorce tenderness from humanity. When humanism becomes a political ideology the human is extracted and all we are left with is an -ism. And -isms are dangerous. 

When tenderness becomes a Cause tenderness becomes a very dangerous thing. When tenderness becomes the Revolution the body count starts to rise.

Here's my point. Something needs to protect the human within humanism. As tens of millions of dead bodies testify, humanism itself cannot do this. Consequently, the human needs to be inserted into humanism and protected from humanism by something exterior to humanism. In this, I think O'Connor is correct, that the human is established and preserved by a connection with its Source, protecting it from the dark temptations inherent within a politics of tenderness.