Fighting Outrage: It's Very Difficult

In the early part of the 20th century, the pope of the time determined that modernism was destroying traditional institutions. He was not wrong. The Industrial Revolution brought with it huge changes that upended homogeneous and traditional structures forever: the town as agricultural center, the aristocracy, family units, religion, the arts.

He determined that priests needed to be separated from all this corruptive modernism. Theological academies for priests were established apart from regular universities. Priests in training were sequestered from their families, married people, women, women with babies, even the radio. Anything that smacked of risky or illicit behavior was problematic. The priests in training needed to be shielded.

As happens in prisons, these priests in training failed to mature. As they left the seminaries for posts in actual parishes, they were completely unequipped to deal with actual family matters, let alone people and life in general. They were emotionally and sexually stunted. Some of them became predators.

This is the argument of ex-seminarian John Cornwell in The Dark Box.

He has an axe to grind. He also has a point, which is that moral certainty rooted in fear is a powerful and potentially flattening force.

The pope of the time saw a threat, a threat that many Catholics (and for that matter, Protestants) agreed with. To push back, to say, But wait a minute. Isolating these young men from risk--risk of giving up the priesthood, risk of being tainted by modernism, risk of supposed moral taint by women--might possibly lead to more problems in the future . . . well, obviously if there were Cardinals who tried to make those arguments, they lost.

When people are faced with threats--and modernism honestly did some of the awful stuff people claimed it did; Marx wasn't writing in a vacuum--they over-react, they double-down, they decide on a narrative, and they refuse to question that narrative.

It is easy to be dismissive of “other” morality, to say, for instance, that that pope was reactionary and hide-bound and so on and so forth. But the truth is, the moral certainty of any movement or decision depends entirely on the moral certainty of its members, not the cause itself.

The reporters and prosecutors who promoted the 1980s daycare scandal narratives; the psychologists and therapists who backed “recovered memories” of abuse; the citizens and politicians who supported allegations by McCarthy that Communists had infiltrated the United States government: all these people felt entirely justified in their moral outrage.

It is tremendously difficult to argue with these narratives, precisely because they are based in moral outrage. McCarthy argued that more Communists existed in government than had been found. He was correct. However, he failed to recognize how his outrage alienated even his supporters.

History shows again and again that narrative-based outrage—the state of being appalled by the inherent wrongness of a group or situation or simply the unfairness of life—rarely ends well for anyone. It divides communities. It encourages paranoia. It leads to false accusations. It produces strained relationships and unhealthy focus on possible schisms. It overreaches, eventually stigmatizing any out-of-compliance behavior, no matter how benign. It fails to distinguish between cases and individuals. And ultimately it backfires when it attempts to over-ride due process.  

Unfortunately, history isn't always enough these days. Not when a narrative has already been determined.