Maleficent Obsession
The Long Dark Tunnel of Resentment
I have been reading Max Scheler's Ressentiment, an analysis of the inversion of moral values that occurs when someone who is in an inferior position, unable to strike out openly in vengeance and wrath, and unable to eliminate the condition that makes him feel inferior, turns the virtues of the superior into vices, and sees his own hatred, weakness, envy, and vindictiveness as virtues. Nietzsche said that Christianity was a religion of ressentiment, but Scheler corrects him on that crucial point, affirming the generous rejoicing in excellence that characterizes the saint. If saints strive with one another, it is in the happiness of giving. They are indifferent to that bourgeois competition, says Scheler, which takes the place of the saintly and the courtly, and which perceives inequality as at best a necessary evil, and at worst an evil to be obliterated, even at the cost of liberty or of many a masterwork that never will be wrought.
The premise of political ressentiment in our time is that if laws were just and if people were not racist or sexist or whatever else is considered opprobrious, equality would result. But what if the premise is not true? What if the condition that galls, the condition of inferiority in some respect that the man or woman of ressentiment cannot forget, is irremediable, because it is a fact of nature generally, or of the nature of the individual in question? What if it is remediable, but only by a cultural renewal that, with all the good will and determination in the world, must require two or three generations to accomplish?
What the Irish Did
When the poorest of the Irish emigrated from their English-dominated country to the United States, they met many a sign that read, "Irish Need Not Apply." Why the hostility? Part of it came from ignorance. Catholics and their "priestcraft" were suspect. Consider the outrageously popular Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk (1836), a slanderous and absurd tale of prostitution and infanticide in a convent in Montreal: the Catholic predecessor to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. We can dispense with that nasty foolishness. Part of it came from the notion that Irish men were drunken roughnecks. That was a prejudice properly speaking, a judgment before the fact or before a fair examination of the evidence. The stolid English and Dutch of the northeast expected no better from the Irish. "A moral bog-hoe" is what the broad-minded Thoreau called the Irishman.
Yet we must not beg the question. Believing that Irish men often got drunk and fought brawls was not like believing a phantasmagoria of evil in some cloister a thousand miles away. The latter strains credulity, and in any case can only be confirmed by special investigation; you must go to that cloister. The former does not strain credulity, and it can be confirmed by ordinary experience. Irish men did like their whisky and did swing their fists. I am sure that any given Irishman was more likely to see the inside of a jail than was any given Dutchman. Animus against the Irish, no doubt. But also a plain fact: Paddy was more likely to disturb the peace.
Irish Catholics had groaned under the British boot since the days of Queen Elizabeth I and her aggressive pacificator, Lord Grey de Wilton. When they came to America, though, they had healthy outlets for their anger and vengeance. "Dagger John" Hughes, archbishop of New York, told the mayor in 1844, after arsonists had burned two Catholic churches in Philadelphia, that if that should happen in New York, Protestant churches would burn likewise. It did not happen. Nor were the sons and daughters of the Mayflower the only citizens in the United States, which in any case was underpopulated, with vast expanses of land to develop. So the Irish had plenty of opportunities for alliances, for maneuvering against their enemies, and for building up their own towns, such as the coal-mining borough of Archbald, Pennsylvania, where I grew up.
All of that would have been in vain, though, if the Irish had lived down to the prejudices of the already-settled; if they had not put into action the virtues of civilization. Anger and frustration might drive the Irishman in County Donegal to drink, and we can understand the cause and judge him leniently. But unless he throws the whisky away, we can do nothing with him. His bucket is punched full of holes. Not all the good will and clean water in the world will help, until he gets rid of the old bucket and gets a new one, a bucket that will hold water.
That is what the American Irish did, by the millions. They showed themselves to be good American citizens, good enough to try to hold down the Italians when they came to America in turn. The Irish had some considerable advantages. They were willing to work very hard at filthy jobs. They had a Church as strong as steel to keep the men in line, and to raise the children well. They had the family. They proved themselves against the English by their deeds.
Ressentiment Among Women
But suppose it is not possible to do what the Irish did? If you do not expect equality, you are not prone to ressentiment. The medieval peasant working the turf on the lord's manor did not believe that there should be no lords, though he might have wanted his lord to be less grasping. He took his station in life as a matter of course. The women of Rome could gaze at the frescoes of Michelangelo and not consider that it was a man who had painted them. What else could you expect? But in our time, we demand equality. That breeds ressentiment.
Take the example of women in mathematics. I do not deny the existence of Sophie Germain and Emmy Noether. Of themselves, the outliers do not suffice. If I say, "Women are not in the highest ranks of mathematicians, because they choose other fields to study," I will be abominated. The imbalance must be due to sexism. If I say, "Men vary much more widely in intelligence than women do, so that men will be overrepresented at both the low and the high end, and from the very highest of the highly intelligent do we get men such as Euler and Gauss," I will again be abominated.
Eppure si muove, as the legend has Galileo saying.
I might say more. The peculiar quality of intelligence involved in higher mathematics is the ability to imagine many abstract items in motion, as it were, simultaneously. That same quality is evident in math-like activities that do not have anything like the social or economic power of mathematics. It is evident in chess. Women and girls must have their own tournaments, excluding males. Judit Polgár was by far the greatest female chess player ever, rising to the rank of eighth in the world in 2005. Fifteen years later, there is only one woman ranked in the top 100, Hou Yifan (86); the second-ranked woman is very far behind and would not make the top 200. Two girls would make the top 100 among the boys (77, 100-tie). The best boy chess player in the world, Alireza Firouzja, is only 17 years old, and ranks a stunning 91 points higher than Yifan, who is ten years his senior.
"But boys are encouraged to play chess," someone objects, seeking to deny the obvious. Encouragement cannot explain the enormous gap, and besides, as I have said, women and girls have their own protected tournaments. But the reasoning puts the cart before the horse. Why chess? I have heard one feminist complain that American boys have an advantage in math because they play baseball. But why—why should boys invent a game like baseball in the first place? Having invented it, why should they encrust it with numbers?
Go to the on-line clearinghouse for baseball statistics, and you will see, for the general record of someone who has played five or six years, well over a thousand numbers. These numbers do not merely tally events. They are measures of comparison with hundreds of thousands of other numbers from contemporary players. They interpret and weigh things: for win probability added and defensive runs saved and park factor customized for parks the pitcher threw in and many another factor that no one but a quasi-autistic boy or man would think of. Wherever you find a lot of numbers, you will find boys, and wherever you find boys, you will find a lot of numbers or number-like things.
Women have been playing musical instruments for a long time, but there has never been a female Mozart, with his preternatural capacity to see many strains of music in motion alongside and against one another. It is the same capacity that produces the epic poet, the comprehensive summa of Thomas Aquinas, and the self-similar structures within structures of Chartres Cathedral. Women have been energetic authors of poetry in English for two hundred years, and still they have written not one great poem of any length: their genius is to the short lyric, as in the work of Emily Dickinson and Elizabeth Bishop.
Suppose that what we perceive here is nature, and not the result of sexism. What to do?
But what is the problem? Someone with a healthy sense of values is not affronted by the genius of Michelangelo. He receives the man's genius as a gift. I do not want a world in which no one is better than I am at chess or at musical composition.
But to the modern feminist, the problem is acute. She cannot read Milton without chafing. First she says that there have been mute inglorious Miltons among the women, but they were not granted his education, or they were discouraged from writing poetry, or, like the Judith Shakespeare that Virginia Woolf imagined, they did not have a room of their own to work quietly in. These objections are based upon sheer supposal. We have not a shred of evidence for a female Milton thwarted. In any case, the objections no longer apply, and still we do not have Judith Shakespeare, nor are there any prospects for one.
At this point, rather than be glad that there is a William Shakespeare, the woman of ressentiment inverts the system of values. It is not a good thing to be Shakespeare. It is horrid to be Milton. When you cannot make the rank, you traduce the excellence.
But that requires intense psychological pressure. Truth threatens to break loose. The problem would vanish if ambitious women, like the Irish emigres, could obliterate the difference between them and their brothers. Yet that is not going to happen, not at the level of Milton, Galileo, Newton, Bernini, Brahms, Leonardo da Vinci, Capablanca, Edison, Riemann, and Einstein.
What galls, endures. A sane woman is not troubled by the fact that her brother is stronger than she is. That is to be expected. But in these matters of the highest genius, and of the quality of mind I have tried to describe, the woman has been encouraged to be suspicious and envious, to think of herself as inferior, simply because no one of her sex has been Einstein. That way lies madness, the spiritual poison of ressentiment.
There is no solution except a return to nature, to the realities that the Christian faith purifies and raises up. For men and women were never meant to compete against one another. The man is for the woman, and the woman is for the man, and both together for Christ.
Ressentiment Among Blacks
We come to another breeding ground of the illness: the historical fact of slavery in the United States, and the shabby indignities that followed in its wake for a hundred years. Here is a permanent condition. It cannot be undone. If a man steals your farm, you can make him give it back to you. That is restitution. If a man burns down your house, you can have him put behind bars. That is retribution. But the slave holders are long dead. Most of the people who upheld the ways of racial segregation are dead. The great majority of people in the United States now have had little or nothing to do with any of them.
Calls for "reparation" are fantasies, because no one can specify what is to be repaired, who is to repair it, and for whose sake; nor can anyone explain why others, such as Jews against the Germans, or Irish against the English, or southern Italians against northern Italians, or Berbers against Arabs, or any losers in a war or a mass migration against their victors, should not also convulse the world in an attempt to reverse the innumerable chances and changes of human history. It would be an open wound, festering. It would be enmity, world without end.
It would also fail even at the purpose for which it is proposed. Here the shameful history of racism in the United States earns a punishment that no one could have foreseen. When blacks emigrated from the rural South to the urban and industrial North, they did not find the grandchildren of abolitionists waiting to welcome them. They found ice. They had arrived at a modus vivendi with whites in the south, especially among the poorer farmers. They had a place, a home. There was no such in enlightened Boston or in the City of Brotherly Love. The small local black church, that institution of social order, was too far away.
The black family began to fray as it never had in the South. Fewer than ten percent of black children in 1900 were born out of wedlock. By 1965, that ratio had tripled. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a liberal sociologist working for the Johnson administration, sounded the alarm in a report on the Negro family. Johnson delivered what he considered his most important civil rights speech on just that subject of concern.
It could not have come at a worse time.
There was the Vietnam War, of course, and the erosion of Johnson's popularity. But America was suffering a tectonic shift in moral values, moved by mass entertainment, relative wealth, and the Pill. It is easy to see why blacks might have said to themselves, "We have tried the Christian ethos, and see what it has gotten us." Already in A Raisin in the Sun (1959), we find a semi-comic but foreboding character, Joseph Asagai, who seems to have rejected America for Africa, and whose attentions to the teenage daughter are not welcome.
As the decade went on, many blacks set themselves against the habits and values of their oppressors, and those included, unfortunately, the expectation that people should get married before they have children, and that they should stay married. Toni Morrison was on the verge of her career as a black feminist, promoting in her novels a moral code that was "black" rather than "white," particularly as regards sex and the family. It was what led her to say, in 1998, that Bill Clinton, coming from a dysfunctional step-family, was the nation's first black president.
Whatever were the causes—the perverse incentives of the welfare state, the moral apostasy of many black leaders, the stubbornness and hardheartedness of whites (most destructive when it was found in the churches), the feminist hatred of the father-headed family, and the sexual vices promoted left and right, doing more harm to the poor than to the rich for the simple reason that moral and familial capital are all that the poor have to rely upon—whether any or all of these bled the black family, perhaps in concert with causes I have not considered, the fact remains: it happened. The black family was eviscerated. More than 70 percent of black children are born out of wedlock. If I may judge the syndrome by working-class white families I have witnessed in the same state, the damage is dreadful.
What Is Needed
What to do with the drunken Irishman? Drink is his way of dealing with the British insult to his faith, his homeland, his language, his folkways, and his very being. But so long as he remains a drunk, there is no hope. The black family has been shot full of holes. What is to be done?
Good will is not enough. What would help an ordinary person in an ordinary state of poverty will not suffice. The ordinary man needs a job. The drunk needs a moral revival. Blacks who have grown up in America—notably not those who have recently come from Nigeria, who do not have that galling awareness of indignities and injustice, and who have not rejected the family-building virtues of sexual continence, self-denial, masculine headship, and fidelity—need it, too. They need to be more continent than the moral slackers all around us. They need more order in the home, more training for their boys, and more patriarchy, not less; they need what gave other despised groups before them, Jews, Koreans, Japanese, the strength to keep their families and their small businesses intact against social and moral dilapidation.
They will not get these things. The sexual revolution is a juggernaut. Liberal churches will host ten gay choirs before they will help to build up one natural father-headed family. Conservative churches shore up the ethos with sandbags as the river rises, but they can hardly explain why; and their children, whose imaginations are formed by mass entertainment, pride themselves on their tolerance as they strip. Nobody knows what to do with boys and nobody cares to know. They die a little inside every day they go to school, or they turn their dynamism toward the destructive.
The inequalities will persist. Blacks will continue to be overrepresented in prison, along with men of other races who grew up without married fathers. Meanwhile, people from many parts of the world will come to the United States with families intact, ready to pass the native blacks by.
What Matters Now
I will be accused of "blaming the victim." I am not, but the objection misses the point. It does not matter how Paddy became a drunk. What matters is that he is a drunk now. We must deal with what he is and not what we wish he might have been. I am, of course, speaking of the general case, individual surprises notwithstanding.
I will be accused of lacking "empathy." I do not. I have tried hard to understand how it might chafe a black man to hear that he must reject all racialist fantasies, whether benign or malign, and return to the Christian and natural virtues of his ancestors. Chafing or not, it must be done. The return does not guarantee success. Nothing in life does. But staying put guarantees failure. Paddy who buries the bottle may still not succeed. Paddy who tips the bottle as before will continue to fail.
Will it be done? All the signs say no. Ressentiment is the national pastime. It is the motive and the aim of our schools and our politics. Hedonism comes a close second. There is no cause for optimism, just as there was none on a Friday in Jerusalem, long ago.
Anthony Esolen is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Thales College and the author of over 30 books, including Real Music: A Guide to the Timeless Hymns of the Church (Tan, with a CD), Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture (Regnery), and The Hundredfold: Songs for the Lord (Ignatius). He has also translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House) and, with his wife Debra, publishes the web magazine Word and Song (anthonyesolen.substack.com). He is a senior editor of Touchstone.
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