Holiness vs. Fanaticism

July 12, 2019

I posted this comment to David Brooks' opinion in The New York Times on July 5, "Will Gen-Z Save The World?"

Mr. Brooks, the notion of young people growing in holiness seems to have given you hope. I'm glad you got to meet them. My own experience with young people who are working on holiness is rather depressing. They are the people who criticize the mote in the immigrant's eye while ignoring the splinters of intolerance in their own. The young are easy to idealize and "believe on." They look so fresh and innocent. But the students who wanted to meet you are surely a tiny minority; nor is there anything to indicate they aren't just going through another adolescent psychosis. When the young zealots come to burn me out of my house for helping a child get an abortion, I'll think of you.

A kind reader responded to my post:

I feel like you may be confusing holiness with religious fanaticism. I think that spirituality or holiness is not the same as espousing a militant fundamentalism.

The short answer to this is: “Wait and see, wait and see.”

The long answer: Holiness and religious fanaticism share many characteristics, which creates confusion. One person’s holiness is another’s fanaticism. The Romans, for example, regarded Jesus’ followers as fanatics, and who’s to say the Romans were confused?

Even from an absolutist perspective, we see that a person with ten practices might be nine parts truth and one part error. Do the nine holy bits redeem the tenth bit that is unholy? Jesus advised against serving two masters, which I’m confident applies to this state of limited and qualified employment in fanaticism. If you need a concrete example, think of the family, generally holy in its practices, that has driven-out a child of their own over sexual preferences. They deem it holy to destroy their family and their child; who’s to say they are confused, when many advisors trusted in their church say, "Right on!"

There's no clear line between holiness and fanaticism; they are on a continuum, kept apart by a wide gray area. The young people on whom David Brooks bases his hope for saving the world do also exist and move, day to day, on this continuum, inching no doubt toward what they think is holiness.

I implied that these teenagers carry within them a potential for great evil. I confess that I was thinking of the Inquisition, but only because Brooks invokes it in his last line, “The young zealots may burn us all in the flames of their auto-da-fe, but it’s better than living in a society marked by loneliness and quiet despair.” I do agree with him; they may very well broil us on the spit. But I disagree that the Inquisition would be better than loneliness and quiet despair, which have been our inheritance, the human estate, for thirty-thousand years and more.

I can predict what the future will hold as well as Brooks. The worst among them will enter politics, where the uncompromising, rhetorical division of the world into good vs. evil will bring to her the benefits of monetization and approval, two mirrors in which she will regard herself. The best among them will settle for less, making small changes in her own narrow neck of the woods. Like Candide, she will accept human limitations, be resigned “to make our garden grow,” and find happiness building a warm nest in a small space. But most of them will remain in a murky gray area like the space they currently occupy, to their discomfort.

Brooks’ critique of the baby boom generation, which occupies most of his column, oversimplifies and deceives, as many of his respondents noted; he ignores the virtues of our brilliant, now defunct, adolescence. None of us boomers survived adolescence; the vast middle settled for adaptive lives that fall far short of perfection.

The truth is, nobody survives adolescence, but undergoes “a sea change, into something rich and strange.” Yes, growing up is a death, one of many. Shakespeare in "The Tempest" says that death is the mother of coral and pearls; Hart Crane, "At Melville's Tomb," thinks that “the dice of drowned men’s bones” yield silent answers concerning the Pequod, its obsessive captain and this world's crew. But adolescent eyes don’t become adult pearls, and adolescent bones don't augur the mind of God.