Much of my conversion has rested on the foundation of a cultural, intellectual and emotional history that has been more felt than read or studied. I have an idea of what it means to be a Christian, both in a way that is good, as, say, my grandfather was Christian, or the desert fathers were Christian, or GK Chesterton was Christian, or C.S. Lewis was Christian, and in a way that is bad, as, say crusaders were “Christian”, or Kenneth Copeland is “Christian.” I think the goods and the bags of these people and their professed world views are quite easily understood, and readily, by anyone who simply lives in our society, and has for a few years.

As I’ve been reading and attending my Catechumen class a more sophisticated, but also simpler, and clearer (these things not being mutually exclusive, of course) understanding of what it means to be Christian has emerged. There are the simple, clear, and largely culturally understood feelings of being Christian: Love as much as you can, always be kind, then there are the more specific ritualistic things such as taking Communion, confession, and the heuristics of study as guided by a priest and chosen Spiritual Father. I am gaining clarity on each.

To me what undergirds the best of these things and my understanding of them is a near total rejection of utilitarianism. If you must do some sort of mental math or justification or reasoning to justify making the “right” choice, you are making the wrong one. C.S. Lewis spoke well of it when he described the self evident nature of virtue and correct decision making. We know in our guts, and right away.

Most examples of anti-utilitarian thinking are born of pretty extreme situations, like most examples of thinking, they must be boiled down to a very pure distillation to be fully understood. And it was a very extreme example indeed that may have been the crack in the dam of my secular thinking. It was in Quebec City, December 2018, when I finished A Canticle For Leibowitz.

SPOILERS

In this book, and I may have written about it before, the world has been obliterated by nuclear holocaust. An order of Catholic monks toil in anonymous desert obscurity to preserve engineering documents they do not understand in hopes of resurrecting society. Ultimately they do, after millennia of hard work, and ultimately society consumes itself again in atomic fire. At the dawn of that second apocalypse, as the world is ending and society collapsing, a monk travels to a government-managed euthanasia camp set up to ease the suffering of those certain to die of radiation poisoning.

Suicide, being a sin, is not something the monk can cotton to, so, he convinces a mother and child, nearly and certainly soon to be dead by radiation, to not take the pill and to come with him. He will nurse their suffering with water and milk and help to ease their suffering until the end, but he will not choose their end, that is not their choice to make.

This is, on the face of it, an unimaginable cruelty. To essentially coerce the kidnapping of a woman and child so they must endure agony I cannot even imagine? Ghoulish. But when you understand that, from the perspective of the monk, and now from the perspective of me, the purpose of life is not the maximization of pleasure and the minimization of suffering, even suffering as horrible as death by radiation poisoning. If that is the truth of the purpose of life, then it makes perfect sense. It is Right.

SPOILERS DONE

This is an astonishing example no doubt. I was kept up, rapt in my reading because it cut so straight and so deeply against the grain of my cultural and ethical understanding. It was so obviously an insanely cruel thing to do, but equally obviously the right thing to do. It was viscerally the right thing to do.

This monk, and the woman and child, by going along with them, were making a decision entirely divorced from utilitarianism. A hard choice born of a totally different set of standards than I had ever really been exposed to. And it was exciting.

As I’ve read more and learned more about Christian thought, which is, do not doubt for a second, the bedrock of our western morality, the more I abhor the long-think of utilitarianism, and attempt to kill it within myself.  If you must justify the virtue of your actions or think through them for even a second, you’re almost certainly working only to ease yourself into the wrong choice.

Now, that isn’t always true, there are situations that are truly prickly, but they tend to be pretty inconsequential.

How should I navigate this friendship?

How should I deal with this person at work I don’t much like?

How can I handle this mistake I’ve made?

These can be difficult and fraught situations with no clear answer, but the bigger the issue, the clearer it is, at least when being navigated from a non-utilitarian perspective.

In my Catechumen class a classmate seemed genuinely anguished by the question of wether or not the creation and use of the atomic bomb on Japan was the right thing. If it prevented countless deaths resulting from a land invasion of Japan, and if some person other than Oppenheimer would have invented it anyways regardless of how many people chose not to dirty their hands.

We cannot prevent others from making evil choices, but we can prevent ourselves. Using others as the excuse to do bad things because they would happen anyways or be worse is a bad thing. Two wrongs, et cetera.

We have no idea what a land invasion of Japan would have been like because someone who thought they knew better didn’t allow it to happen. We do not know what an atomic weapons program would have looked like under someone other than Oppenheimer because he did not allow it to happen.

That isn’t to say that those alternate realities would have been better, I have no idea how they would have been. But all we can do is choose virtue for ourselves and pray that the Holy Spirit doesn’t allow the world to devolve into a blasted hellscape of nuclear glass.