May 2, 2025

One more on empathy, perhaps the most important of the lot, certainly the darkest. I promise a return to the light next week. Last week we dealt with the rejection of empathy, a line of thought that begins as tragedy with Nietzsche and ends as farce with Musk and his hydrophobic DOGES. It might seem that the opposite of empathy is cold indifference. But there is a lot worse on the conscience of the human race. Indifference is, after all, convenient, protective. Not having to care, not having to feel guilty for not caring: that is an understandable calculation of advantage. But what drives both people and institutions to cruelty, a cruelty that is unnecessary, that procures no advantage? We have mentioned the theory of the Marquis de Sade that human nature is innately cruel, that we enjoy inflicting pain, both physical and mental. It is above and beyond any utilitarian “profit.” We are naturally sadistic, he said, and we want to exclaim that this maligns the animal world until we think of a cat with a mouse. Freud said we are driven by the pleasure principle, Nietzsche said by the will to power. But the two drives act in concert: the cruelty of the will to power is sexualized. We get off on inflicting pain.

Nietzsche saw this in his first book, The Birth of Tragedy (1873), not flinching from the truth that the sublime art of Greek tragedy emerged from the festivals of Dionysus, festivals that, to put it mildly, did not exist to celebrate “family values”:

In nearly every case these festivals centered in extravagant sexual licentiousness, whose waves overwhelmed all family life and its venerable traditions; the most savage natural instincts were unleashed, including even that horrible mixture of sensuality and cruelty which has always seemed to me the real “witches’ brew.” (39)

Nietzsche goes on to say, however, that the Greeks, unlike the Christians, did not repudiate “natural instincts”: rather, they mastered them through the form-giving discipline that he called the Apollonian. There are varying forms of such mastery. On perhaps the lowest level, the sexualized power drive can be rendered harmless by being rechanneled into fantasy: hence the role-playing witches’ brew of BDSM. Fifty Shades of Gray is said to be execrably written—but there is a reason that it became one of the best-selling books in the history of publishing. The problem with BDSM, as the plot of that novel dramatizes, is the huge one of “consent.” When it is ignored, it turns into the demonic monstrousness of Jeffrey Epstein. When it is handled badly, it leads to the kind of unholy mess that Neil Gaiman finds himself in, whatever his intentions. But to say that these fantasies are a perverted niche of no interest to “normal” people is to lie.

And yet few creative writers have wanted to descend into that darkness. A major exception is Goethe. Each of the two parts of Goethe’s Faust has a Walpurgisnacht, in other words an orgy, one medieval, one pagan. Goethe has to do more hinting than showing, but the hints are pretty heavy. The, ahem, climactic chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses, “Nighttown,” takes place in a whorehouse in which, fueled by alcohol, the return of the repressed takes place, and, among other things, the protagonist Leopold Bloom submits to the attentions of a dominatrix. Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow includes the S&M fantasies of the Nazis, including a notorious shit-eating episode. More recently, there are Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho and Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers. There are also two experimental novels by Samuel R. Delany, Equinox and Hogg. The first could be described as a retelling of the Faust legend entirely as a Walpurgisnacht. The second was inspired, if that is the word, by the drunken account of a self-described “rape artist,” someone hired to rape ex-girlfriends or enemies. These two books could not be published for many years, and the reader is warned: they are courageously honest, which means they are almost unbearable.

What are such works trying to tell us? That the urges of erotic domination and surrender are part of the human imagination, part of human sexuality. I know that some people will disagree with this, siding with Freud, who condemns such fantasies and practices as “perversions,” as “unnatural,” by which he means headed away from reproduction and family, which he defines as “natural.” But others will affirm that Eros is a spectrum, and that the ultraviolet end of the spectrum, so to speak, is not beautiful or “nice,” and yet is part of who we are. Whether this derives from dominance behavior in the realm of animal instinct does not in the end matter. It is moral responsibility, or irresponsibility, that makes the difference between harmless spice-of-life fantasy and the demonic victimization of other human beings. What we can’t do is make the issue go away, for one of the themes of the present discussion is that denial makes the unconscious turn demonic.

Not all cruelty is overtly erotic. Covertly is another matter. To be precise, people who practice gratuitous cruelty get excited by it, and that excitement easily becomes erotically charged, while at other times the erotic tendency is submerged. What drives cruelty? One obvious possibility is revenge. In the first great work of literature in the Western tradition, the Iliad, Achilles is driven by revenge from start to finish. Literally from the start: the first work in the text is “Rage!” Sing of rage, the poet asks the Muse, the rage of Achilles who is driven to seek revenge upon his commander Agamemnon and the whole Achaean army for shaming him by taking away his war prize, the irony being that this revenge, which takes the form of a refusal to fight, leads to the death of Patroclus, the one he loves most—for which he then needs to take further revenge. Not content merely to slay his enemy Hector, Achilles needs to humiliate him by mutilating his corpse, drilling holes through the ankles, tying a cord, and dragging the body behind his chariot, all of this in front of Hector’s parents. The night after Patroklus’s funeral, Achilles can’t sleep. After tossing and turning, he finally gives up, gets up, and makes himself feel better by dragging the body around some more. The gods finally decide, understandably, that this is getting borderline abnormal, and send a messenger telling him to stop.

The endless cruelty of revenge and counter-revenge drives genocidal conflicts such as those, within my lifetime, in Northern Ireland, Rwanda, and the Middle East. Threaten their loved ones, and normally mild people can become monsters of cruelty. Odysseus and Telemachus not only cut down the suitors ruthlessly for invading their home, but also hang the maidservants who slept with them. They cut off the nose, ears, genitals, hands, and feet of the evil goatherd Melanthios. We are horrified to hear of soldiers in Vietnam who made souvenirs out of the severed thumbs of Vietcong, but the savagery is revenge for the terror with which the soldiers had to live. Yet the line between the cruelty of revenge and erotic cruelty is thin. It is commonplace in war for soldiers to “rape, pillage, and plunder.” Raping the women and even the children of the enemy is a way of hurting the enemy, true, but the fact is that violence is arousing in itself. One of the nightmares of human life is familial abuse, including sexual abuse. It is well known that abusers have usually been abused themselves. Instead of this arousing their compassion, it arouses feelings of revenge. Abusers are seeking revenge for their abused childhood, sometimes on everyone in sight, the notorious example being Donald Trump, whose father was a kind of monster. By this point, Trump, intoxicated by power, is utterly out of control. He is not even thinking about governing. Everything he does now is a form of getting back at someone.

The cruelty of revenge is relatively rational, weird as that may sound. I am cruel because someone wronged me, hurt me or those I love, and I will make them pay. But such relatively understandable cruelty gives way to more irrational impulses to hurt precisely those who have not been hurtful. Above all, cruelty is drawn to target the innocent. What is behind such perversity? As the title of an article by Amanda Marcotte points out, "MAGA's War on Empathy Exposes Misogynist Fears." Marcotte observes that “Empathy is seen as a "feminine" emotion by both the atheistic techbro right and the Christian nationalist right. Both firmly agree that femininity is the root of all evil.” After the Episcopalian minster Mariann Budde spoke out against Trump’s cruelty during his inauguration ceremony, the right wing, including the Christian right wing, went, to use an apt metaphor, ballistic:

Pastor Joe Rigney, author of The Sin of Empathy: Compassion and Its Counterfeits" also lambasted Budde for daring to speak back to Trump. He wrote that she displayed "the man-eating weed of Humanistic Mercy" that was "enabled by the feminist denial of the complementary design and callings of men and women." He's fine with women having empathy inside the home, for family members. But, in leadership roles, "empathy is a liability, not an asset." He's also called it "pathological feminine empathy" to defend LGBTQ people and immigrants.

Marcotte’s word “fears” is worth lingering on. Its implication is that cruel behavior is often a kind of masculine protest, an exaggeration of male posturing into nastiness. There is an even deeper implication: insecure men are angry at women for tempting them—not sexually, but emotionally. Women’s gentleness and compassion awaken the repressed gentleness and compassion within men themselves—and the men become furious. They find themselves secretly drawn to all that effeminate love stuff, and react against it as against a mortal danger.

Long before the present wave of misogyny, Flanner O’Connor dramatized this in the ending of her short story “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” In the last scene, the protagonist, a grandmother, is facing a serial killer who calls himself the Misfit. Through what O’Connor clearly sees as divine grace softening the heart of a woman whom we have hitherto seen as a thoroughgoing narcissist, the grandmother suddenly reaches out to touch the Misfit, saying, “Why, you’re one of my own children.” The Misfit instantly shoots her, the text says, as if she were a poisonous snake, a reversal of the snake of Eden whose temptation was the will to power. That kind of love is a danger to him, precisely because it tempts him. The Misfit, who is highly intelligent, sums up his mode of consciousness in a single devastating line: “No pleasure but meanness.” Women, and, as we shall see, children, provoke the meanness of sadistic men, not through any fault of their own but precisely because they are innocent, and also helpless victims, being unable to fight back, which arouses such men to fury. A strong, worthy foe they could respect, but innocence and peacefulness demoralize them. Instead of being moved to pity, they are enraged, because to feel pity is to become the same kind of contemptible weakling that their victim is.

Arguably the most notorious misogynist in literature is Iago in Shakespeare’s Othello. Iago successfully tempts Othello into believing that he must take revenge by killing Desdemona, drawing on Othello’s non-Christian upbringing in a “shame culture” in which it is an obligation to take revenge if one’s honor is violated, or else one is “shamed.” Yet possibly the most poignant moment of the play occurs when Othello says, “But oh, the pity of it, the pity of it, Iago.” Iago makes a remark about, well, then, you must not care about your manhood, whereupon Othello instantly screams, “I’ll chop her into messes! Cuckold me!” Iago’s motives are a famous Shakespearean conundrum. In his soliloquies, he keeps saying he is plotting against Othello out of revenge. But revenge for what? His pretexts are so flimsy—such as that Othello is sleeping with his wife Emilia—that it is obvious that Iago cannot himself really believe them, but uses them to distract himself from confronting the strange fact that he himself does not really know why he has a compulsion to destroy Othello. In a marginal note, Coleridge put his finger on something important when he spoke of Iago’s “motiveless malignancy.” Actually, he is more or less quoting Iago’s wife Emilia, who tells Desdemona that men are not jealous for a cause, but are jealous because they are jealous.

Coleridge’s remark expands beyond criticism of the play itself into an ongoing debate about the nature of evil. Just as I have written in a previous newsletter about rational and irrational love, so there is rational and irrational evil Rational evil has a cause, even if it is a mistaken one. Irrational evil is sometimes described as a corruption of the will rather than an intellectual error—but what does that mean? The will is driven by desire, and therefore it too has an object, something it hopes to gain, even if the desire is utterly unrealistic. Truly irrational evil, however, by definition, is not driven by any motive—not by desire, not even by the will to power. It is simply Other, incomprehensible, and its perpetrator is Other, an alien, unknowable. This alien Otherness elicits a terror so deep that it has to be called archetypal. An enemy driven by hatred, revenge, greed, lust, or power is, even if despicable, a fellow human being. There is, however strangely, a feeling of connection, maybe even of communication—of empathy—because we all understand those feelings. But the Other remains demonic because our mental categories cannot process it. It is, therefore, transcendent, something that breaks in from outside the framework of reality as we know it. In Christian terms, that is Satan. Oddly, the Christian tradition does not do well at representing such absolute evil. Milton’s Satan is a tragic hero, with whom we cannot help but sympathize even as we condemn him. Dante’s Satan is a Disney theme-park robot stuck in the ice and weeping at the bottom of the world. In a sense, as Jung loudly complains, Christianity does not believe in this kind of evil: the doctrine is that evil is a privatio boni, a mere absence of the good. But Jung has been down into the depths and knows of the terror of Otherness.

Because he has been in the depths, he has had an intimation of a dirty secret, so to speak: the secret connection between Satan and God, absolute evil and absolute good. God is supposed to be absolute empathy, what we could call Empathy-itself, playing off of Paul Tillich’s Heideggerean definition of God as Being-itself. But after a point, that smacks of wish-fulfilment, of the human need to put a human face on God. If God is truly transcendent, he too is wholly Other, which has indeed been one way of defining him. As such he is no comfort: it is a terrible thing to fall into the hands of the living God. God is “the holy,” as Rudolf Otto described it: a mysterium tremendum, a numinous mystery, the experience of which produces a paradoxical union of wonder and fear. Jung has been the only thinker bold enough to admit the obvious: that God as an “absolutely Other” is beyond good and evil. What’s more, the descriptions of God and Satan as Other are identical. They are an equation. God and Satan are paradoxically the twin faces of a single phenomenon, dark, sublime, and terrible. The Book of Job comes close to this realization. The tormenting of Job is a collaboration between God and Satan. When Job complains, God appears in a whirlwind and tells Job to shut up because he is indeed absolutely Other and beyond Job’s comprehension. Such a God is cruel as we are “cruel” to insects: we exterminate them, not for moral reasons but because they are inconvenient. Jung scandalized people by writing a book called Answer to Job which argued that God’s cruelty to Job could only be explained by his having a shadow side of which he was only intermittently conscious, symbolized by Satan. When God “forgets,” Satan slips off the leash and goes on another rampage.

The modern horror tradition has done much better than Christianity at evoking the primal terror of the epiphany of absolute evil, especially the tradition of H.P. Lovecraft, who remains the greatest of all horror writers because he can, at his best, evoke the absolute terror that transcendent evil elicits, better, really, than the monsters in the history of traditional romance. Grendel and Grendel’s mother in Beowulf are frightening, but are humanized enough that modern fantasy has seen repeated attempts to retell the story from their point of view. They are really Cain-like rather than Satanic figures. The dragon is closer to being truly Other, and the accidental way in which he is awakened resembles the way that demonic Otherness is accidentally aroused in horror tales. In the horror film tradition, The Exorcist and the original Alien films perhaps best capture the sense of an assault by the truly unknowable. The Lord of the Rings is, in part, a representation of how evil as Otherness may possess human beings, who begin in the process to become less human and more demonic. Gollum, Saruman, and Sauron represent a line of devolution from the human towards the utterly demonic. It is no accident that Sauron is never portrayed directly.

Sometimes sadists deliberately play the role of the demonic Other in order to frighten and demoralize their victims. Many comic book supervillains are melodramatic hams whose over-the-top rhetoric and behavior are mocked by the hero. But sometimes they are genuinely possessed—not by something supernatural but by something coming out of the collective unconscious. When possessed, they are genuinely not themselves. Having lived with an afflicted parent, I can attest that people gripped by the unconscious during a psychotic episode may actually undergo physical changes: they speak in a voice that is not their own; their laugh is a witch’s cackle. The transformation from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde is real. In other cases the change may be purely mental, yet the person we knew is no longer there. These days, such possessions are becoming almost commonplace as people witness family members and friends being sucked into various cults and conspiracy theories. When finally apprehended, Iago tries to play the tough guy. He is dragged off the stage ranting, “Demand me nothing. What you know you know,” but that refusal may be a bluff. Once again, he seems genuinely not to know why he has a violent hatred of Othello. He is the grip of something.

I know this is not a cheerful topic for a newsletter, in this of all moments. On a daily basis, all of us are faced with the decision of how much we can bear to be conscious of the sheer evil that is abroad everywhere. At what point must we begin ignoring the news in the interests of self-preservation? At the same time, we feel responsible, for the votes that were crucial for Trump’s election were from “low information voters,” people who were ignorant of how evil Trump and his minions really are, and we know that quite a lot of their ignorance was willful. They were willing not to know so that Trump could deliver what they wanted of him without their having to face the cruelty of the means by which he would achieve those ends. See no evil. It is quite easy to do in the bubble universes created by Fox News and social media. I can only say that it is necessary to understand the darkness in order to know what to do about it. Indeed, it is necessary in order to know that there is something that can be done, and I believe there is. There is something that goes with us into the valley of the shadow, even if not everybody is willing to call it God.

I said, two newsletters back, that our discussion of empathy would revolve around images of the suffering of children. Women have gained at least some power in our society, though right-wingers would like to deprive them of it. Children, however, are helpless victims, not despite their vulnerability and innocence but precisely because of it. There is an extraordinary lineage of interlinked creative and philosophical works at whose heart is the image of child sacrifice as the ultimate image of barbaric nihilism—yet at the same time insisting that, in a darkly hidden and complicated way, that we are all complicit in it. And, worst of all, that some of us get off on it. While we alluded to Iphigenia and Isaac last week, not to mention Christ, the word “lineage” is appropriate for this week’s examples, because they form a kind of genealogical chart.

We may begin with the chapter titled “Snow” in one of the greatest novels of the 20^th century, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. In that chapter, Mann’s protagonist Hans Castorp gets lost in a snowstorm, in the midst of which, in extremity, he has what he calls a dream, although it is closer to a vision or a hallucination. Suddenly, in the midst of blinding white and cold, he is transported to a Mediterranean-like landscape filled with beautiful people—beautiful physically, yes, but, as Hans explains to himself at length, even more beautiful inwardly. He rhapsodizes about “the vast friendliness, the courteous honesty common to all these sunny people in their dealings with one another; he meant the gentle reverence, which, though hidden beneath smiles, they showed one another at every turn” (483). He particularly notes a young mother nursing a child: “And each person who passed offered her a special greeting” (483). However, eventually he passes behind the beautiful scene, goes backstage, as it were. This idyllic society rests upon, as its ground and basis, the following:

Two half-naked old women were busy at a ghastly chore among flickering braziers—their hair was gray and matted, their drooping witches’ breasts had tits as long as fingers. They were dismembering a child held above a basin, tearing it apart with their bare hands in savage silence—Hans Castorp could see pale blond hair dripping with blood. They devoured it piece by piece, the brittle little bones cracking in their mouths, blood dripping from their vile lips. He wanted to cover his eyes with his hands and could not. He wanted to flee and could not. They went on about their grisly work, but they had seen him now and shook bloody fists and damned him soundlessly with the filthiest, lewdest curses of his hometown dialect. (485)

In a snowstorm soliloquy, Hans interprets his dream-vision in a way that does not reduce it to personalistic neuroses. This tableau was not speaking of his sibling rivalry with his brother when he was 5, or some such:

We don’t form our dreams out of just our own souls. We dream anonymously and communally, though each in his own way. The great soul, of which we are just a little piece, dreams through us so to speak, dreams in our many different ways its own eternal, secret dream—about its youth, its hope, its joy, its peace, and its bloody feast. (485)

In his own leap of insight, Joseph Campbell finds the origin of this vision in the final two paragraphs of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, which likewise speaks of a “dream” that all of us should be able to have through “intuition,” of being

carried back to an ancient Greek existence. Walking under lofty Ionic colonnades, looking up toward a horizon that was cut off by pure and noble lines, finding reflections of his transfigured shape in the shining marble at his side, and all around him solemnly striding or delicately moving human beings… (144)

But to such a visitor, an “old Athenian” might say, “how much did this people have to suffer to become so beautiful!” (144). In terms of Nietzsche’s mythmaking, the nobility of the visual scene, whose patron deity is Apollo, lord of light, has been a hard-won victory over the dark, violent, and cruel energies of the Dionysian, which it has put down, but which still reside in creative tension with the Apollonian idyll. Campbell goes on to summarize Hans’s own interpretation of his dream,

epitomized in a term that he had first heard in his conversations with Naphtha and Settembrini, but now in a sense not known to either: Homo Dei. “Myth,” states Jung, is the revelation of a divine life in man, and so was this dream, for Hans. | It is Man, Hans thought, Homo Dei, who is the lord of both life and death: he alone is noble, not they. More noble than life is the piety of his heart; more noble than death, the freedom of his thought. And love, not reason, is stronger than death.” (645)

Homo Dei is a dangerous, Promethean dream, because it can so easily lead to what Jung called “inflation,” the ego puffed up by the promise that “Ye shall be as gods.” That is what Jung thought had happened to Nietzsche, whose vision of the Übermensch, the Superman, took him over, until in his final madness he identified himself with the god Dionysus. Yet it is also a way of speaking of the Eastern Orthodox doctrine of deification, which we examined recently, and of Blake’s identification of God and Man—not Man as the ego or natural self, but as the second self that the Romantics called the imagination.

However, if Campbell is correct that Mann had The Birth of Tragedy consciously or unconsciously in mind, in that case he has added one element: the child as symbol of the hidden suffering that is the ground of being.

I think it is possible, though perhaps not provable, that Mann at that point was simultaneously influenced by another writer: Dostoyevsky. The most famous part of The Brothers Karamazov is the Grand Inquisitor episode, which Ivan Karamazov claims he composed. In it, Christ returns, only to be told by the Grand Inquisitor that his services are no longer necessary. Christ wants to grant people freedom, but the people, the Inquisitor says, do not want freedom. Rather, they want “miracle, mystery, and authority,” which they are granted by a powerful authoritarian Church, and thus are happy. The Inquisitor is eloquent and persuasive: “miracle, mystery, and authority” are what MAGA types want in any age. But Christ will not debate, says not a word, and kisses the Inquisitor as he leaves. However, to Dostoyevsky’s credit, he refuses to leave the matter there. The Grand Inquisitor episode provides the standard Christian answer to the problem of theodicy, the problem of why God permits suffering, especially innocent suffering. He had to allow us free will or we would just be obedient puppets. We chose wrongly, and children have to suffer for it for the whole of human history.

The Grand Inquisitor episode has to be read in tension with the chapter before it, usually titled “Rebellion,” although my David McDuff translation renders it as “Mutiny.” Dostoyevsky said that the original conception of The Brothers Karamazov was as a novel about children, and the “Rebellion” chapter consists of a tirade by Ivan to his brother Alyosha about the sufferings of children. He begins by saying that he could speak about human suffering in general, but adults have eaten the apple and know good and evil. Children, however…. “If they also suffer horribly on earth, it is, of course, for their fathers, they are punished for their fathers who have eaten the apple” (311). “And please take note,” Ivan says, “that people who are cruel, enslaved by passion, carnivorous, Karamozovian, are sometimes very fond of children” (311). He goes on to retail a ghastly catalogue of crimes against children that is still shocking to read, despite all the defenses of modern ironic detachment. In an uprising in Bulgaria, the Turks and Circassians nailed men to fences by their ears. And:

“Those Turks, by the way, even tormented children with voluptuous relish, from cutting them out of their mother’s wombs with a dagger to throwing the babes in the air and catching them on bayonets before their mothers’ eyes. The fact of it being before their mothers’ eyes constituted the principal delight. There was, however, one small scene that interested me a great deal. Imagine: a mother stands trembling with an infant in her arms, around her the Turks who have entered. They contrive a merry little act: they fondle the infant, laugh in order to amuse it, they succeed, the infant laughs. At that moment a Turk points a pistol at it, four inches from its face. The baby boy laughs joyfully, stretches out his little hands to grab the pistol, and suddenly the artist pulls the trigger right in his face and smashes his little head to smithereens…Artistic, isn’t it?” (311-12)

Well, war is war. Is that what we are going to say, even though such scenes have a resemblance to the nightmare accounts of what Hamas did to Israelis in Gaza? But the same sadistic treatment of children occurs in domestic life. Ivan cites a couple who abused their foster child, starving him, refusing even to let him share the slop of the pigs he cared for. Dostoyevsky understands full well the erotic element in the torture of children:

“And so here we have a cultured gentleman of progressive education and his lady wife flogging their own daughter, a babe of seven years, with the birch—I have a detailed account of it noted down. The dear papa is glad the twigs have knots in them, “it will sting more,” he says, and then he begins to “sting” his own daughter. I know for a certainty that there are floggers of a kind who grow excited with each blow to the point of voluptuous pleasure, quite literally voluptuous pleasure, increasingly with each consecutive blow, progressively.” (315)

Ivan is relentless:

“They beat her, flogged her, kicked her, themselves not knowing why…what is more they smeared her eyes, cheeks and mouth all over with faeces and compelled her to eat those faeces, and it was the mother, the mother who did the compelling.” (316)

His assessment is our point:

“It is the very unprotected aspect of these creatures that tempts the torturers, the angelic trustfulness of the child, which has nowhere to go and no one to turn to—this it is that excites the foul blood of the torturer. In every human being, of course, there lurks a beast, a beast of anger, a beast of voluptuous excitement derived from the cries of the tortured victim…” (316)

Why does God allow this? Why does God will that this should happen? People say that God must have a reason, that in the Big Picture, what Ivan calls the “grand harmony,” it will all be seen as justified. But Ivan says:

“I decline the offer of eternal harmony altogether. It is not worth one single tear of even one tortured little child…It is not worth it because its tears have remained unredeemed….But by what means, by what means will you redeem them?...Will you really do it by avenging them? But what use is vengeance to me, what use to me is hell for torturers, what can hell put right again, when those children have been tortured to death?” (320)

We finally arrive at the crucial moment:

“Tell me yourself directly, I challenge you—reply: imagine that you yourself are erecting the edifice of human fortune with the goal of, at the finale, making people happy, of at last giving them peace and quiet, but that in order to do it it would be necessary and unavoidable to torture to death only one tiny little creature, that same little child that beat its breast with its little fist, and on its unavenged tears to found that edifice, would you to agree to be the architect on those conditions, tell me and tell me truly?” (320)

Whatever Dostoyevsky intended, the Grand Inquisitor episode does not exculpate God. To say that God has to allow all this suffering because people had to have free will, and they used it to choose demonic brutality is not good enough. Yes, we do choose it, or it chooses us. But God made us, and he is responsible for any design flaws that caused a supposedly perfect creation to willfully choose evil. Beyond that, one can only reiterate Ivan’s tirade. Even if the parents are demons by choice, why is it the innocent children who are punished for it?

The utopia bought with the torture of an innocent child is the “grand design” turned into a parable. Alyosha replies that he would not agree to it, and he is not the only one. In 1974, Ursula K. LeGuin published her own version of Dostoyevsky’s parable, although she claims she forgot it was Dostoyevski’s. “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” is a replay of Ivan’s parable, with one exception, captured in the title. There are those who walk away from Omelas, which is “Salem” spelled backward—away from peace, for “Salem” means “peace.” Would we walk away, or would we buy in? If Hans Castorp’s Homo Dei is truly an Übermensch, one who overcomes himself, he will overcome the temptation to torture children, either for pleasure or, worse perhaps, because of the ideology that the end justifies the means, which is really the message of every ideology whatsoever. Nor will he stop with negative self-restraint. He will try to awaken Jung’s blind Gnostic God to the shadow by which he, like his creatures, has become possessed. Perhaps we could imagine it as a completion of the Incarnation, in which God might learn a deeper empathy, an agape beyond agape, one that will not consent to hell on earth for children.

Ivan is not melodramatizing. I learned this in 1971, barely out of my teens, following in the newspapers the trial of a family, a mother and her teenaged children, who relentlessly tortured to death a 13-year-old girl named Sylvia Likens. The papers gave all the lurid details, which were startlingly like those of Ivan’s tale of the flogged girl, only more elaborate. I will not repeat them for fear that it will be simply “too much detail” for this newsletter. They are in a huge article on Wikipedia. But I knew them intimately. I read all the accounts, feeling guilty for my spellbound fascination and yet continuing to read. Not that it’s an excuse, but I was not the only one fascinated. The Sylvia Likens case has, unbelievably, been made into not one but two films. The second, in 2007, called An American Crime, starred Ellen Page, now Elliott Page. To my astonishment, the famous second-generation feminist Kate Millett published an In Cold Blood style book on the case in 1979, half documentary, half novelization, called The Basement. I read that too, with some admiration for her courage, amazed that other feminists were not accusing her of writing pornography. The mother who orchestrated the tortures went to prison but later got probation, and never apologized, saying that she could not remember any of it. She is probably telling the truth: she was possessed.

We cannot look, yet we cannot look away. All this week the news has prominently featured stories of immigrant children deported along with their mothers, even though the children themselves were born here and are legal. In the case of the mother deported to the Honduras, who had been in the United States seeking asylum, one child, a 4-year-old boy, has late-stage cancer and was packed off without his medications or a chance to consult with doctors. The response of Trump’s border czar, Tom Homon, was, “Having a U.S. citizen child after you enter the country illegally is not a get-out-of-jail-free card.” And what kind of card is it that Mr. Homon deals to the boy with cancer?

What has led to people like Homon having free rein? MAGA hatred of all immigrants, legal or illegal, a hatred that, to be fair, is shared by many respectable people beyond MAGA. And what has led to this wave of xenophobia and domestic racism? Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming” has proved prophetic. A rough beast has been born, and is roaming the country. People are being possessed en masse by the unconscious appearing as a demonic Other. Why is this happening, and what can be done about it?

The unconscious is not innately evil. It becomes demonic when it is split off, repressed, ignored. What, then, has produced a psychic split that has resulted in this terrifying return of the repressed? Trump’s first election in 2016 was a backlash to the neoliberal economics of the half century before it. Modernization and globalization led to the end of both livelihood and a dignified way of life for most of the 70% of Americans who did not become college-educated professionals. On top of that, deregulated laissez-faire capitalism in the Reagan 80’s and beyond led to extreme income inequality, fabulous wealth at the top and people struggling to pay their bills at the bottom. Both the 1% and the upper elite of the Democratic Party have bought into Ivan’s wager. The 70% are the tortured child that has been sacrificed for the greater good. But not all tortured children die. Some grow up filled with a lust for revenge and a rage to destroy. We have especially not given men a future, and so they grow up bitter misogynists. The reaction of some women is to internalize this hatred: the mother who directed the torture of Sylvia Likens is said to have told her that she was teaching her what her lot was as a woman.

In situations of crisis, the role of the imagination becomes prophetic. The prophets came out of the desert to the people of Israel to tell them, “If this goes on…” But the negative, admonitory role of the prophet goes into reverse after it all hits the fan. When people are staring into the abyss of despair, prophets such as Isaiah assumed the burden of hope. We said that the unconscious has become so split off that it has rebelled as a demonic Other that is sucking masses of people into it like a black hole. The primary myth of modern times is a descent into the darkness to attempt to communicate with that Other. This may take many forms, not all of them in the arts, though the arts are, always, models of social recreation, new ways of seeing, of feeling. Communication may ideally, if we are lucky, lead to union, with a marriage of heaven and hell, a bond with the lost powers below.

Out of that marriage something might be born, and the symbol of the birth of new possibilities has always been the child, the Puer. Christianity believes that salvation came into the world as a helpless, threatened child, born in a foreign place to poor parents, barely surviving a Slaughter of the Innocents ordered by a psychotic authoritarian ruler who felt threatened. But hope has always arrived as a mysterious child. Moses was a baby found in the bullrushes. Luke Skywalker, Harry Potter. Dickens’ stories of suffering children influenced Dostoyevsky profoundly, and his David Copperfield is Dickens’ alter ego, signified by the fact that the initials of his name reverse those of Dickens. David’s experiences in the blacking factory were Dickens’ own, and his persecution by the sadistic Murdstone makes him of a type with all the suffering children of Dickens’ stories: Tiny Tim, Little Nell, Oliver Twist, who timorously asks for more gruel. In the first line of the novel, David wonders whether he shall turn out to be the hero of his own life. It is a question for all of us. The mysterious child may appear, not just projected in stories, but born in us, born as us.

What is that child’s secret power, the one who shall overthrow princes? Maybe the Grand Inquisitor had it wrong. It is the Inquisitor, after all, who gives the traditional theological rationale for suffering, all that stuff about how we’re all miserable because of some abstract ideology of freedom of the will. Christ does not say a word to that, as if he were again resisting temptation, as he did once in the desert. What is his only answer to the Inquisitor? A kiss. Love. The Inquisitor will never get it. In O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” the Misfit complains that Jesus “threw everything off.” He means by this that he can no longer fit his punishment to his crime. In fact, weirdly, he claims that he cannot remember what his crime was, and perhaps he is being truthful—another victim of possession. But maybe Jesus didn’t come to play the game of punishment and justification. What he offered is what the Grandmother offers, love. And the Misfits of the world find that terrifying.

References

Campbell, Joseph. The Masks of God, volume 4: Creative Mythology. Penguin, 1968. The discussion of Mann and Nietzsche is on pages 644-45.

Dostoyevsky, Fyodor. The Brothers Karamazov. Translated by David McDuff.

Penguin, 1993, 2003.

Mann, Thomas. The Magic Mountain. Translated by John E. Woods. Vintage, 1996.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. Vintage, 1967.