On Solving the World's Problems

St. Michael the Archangel

Everyone ought to have a leftist friend—or, if you are yourself of the left, a rightist friend. Without one, how do you know what the other side really thinks? And, if you do not know what they think, how do you know whether you really disagree?

The trick is staying friendly. Sadly, most people these days don’t talk with those on the other side of the culture wars; that is what happens when it becomes a kind of war. I think abortion made it a war; it is now hard to be a leftist without being consciously immoral. And it is hard to be sanguine about the difference between right and wrong.

I am lucky enough, though, to have more than one friend who is on the left and who is still speaking to me. One of them recently presented me with what seems a, maybe the, fundamental argument for leftism generally.

Here it is, in point form:

1. We imagine heaven as a place without wars, without armies or weapons, of perfect equality, where nobody dominates anyone else.
2. If we can imagine this in heaven, we can imagine it on earth.
3. If it is imaginable, it is possible.
4. Therefore, we ought to work to make earth like this.

Sounds good, on the face of it. And this seems to me to raise some important and interesting points.

First, can we really imagine heaven as a place without wars?

St. James

I think not.

Those who have read the Bible will be aware that it indeed speaks of a “war in heaven.” St. Michael and all that. Revelation 12: 7-9, inter alia.

This is usually thought of as happening in the primordial past; but in fact, in Revelations, it is also reported as a future event, part of the end times. Jesus also speaks, cryptically, of “the violent taking heaven by storm” (Matthew 11:2) at the time of the New Testament.

And, at the end of the Book of Revelations, when the New Jerusalem, the ultimate image of the perfection of the created world, descends from the sky… it has walls. “It had a great, high wall with twelve gates” (Revelations 21:12). There is no point to a walled city if there is no threat of war.

St. John sees the New Jerusalem descend from heaven.

So the matter is clear. Not only has there been war in heaven, but war is an eternal feature of heaven. There was war in heaven before Adam and Eve, and there will be war in heaven at the end of time.

And there are armies in heaven. God is “Lord of Hosts,” “The Lord who commands armies” (Isaiah 6:5).

Is there free will in heaven? Of course; there has to be; it would not be heaven if we lost our free will in getting there. But so long as there is free will, there is the chance of choosing evil. Ask, not only Lucifer, but Adam and Eve, who chose evil in the very face of the beatific vision. Therefore, there can be and has been moral conflict in heaven. And, if there has ever been war in heaven, there is always war in heaven. That is the nature of things eternal.

Does the presence there of war make heaven less than heaven? No, just the reverse. Ask any decent storyteller. A story without conflict is dead. Would a heaven that is deadly boring be heaven? No.

Ergo, heaven without war is inconceivable. The difference with earth, I suspect, is that in heaven, as in a work of fiction, the participant, the reader or the fictional character, never really gets hurt.

Is war in itself evil? Certainly not, if it is a clear contest between good and evil. It is not evil to fight evil, for that would be a contradiction in terms. While we have a moral obligation to avoid unjust war, it is too often forgotten that we have, equally, a moral obligation to engage in just war. It is pacifism, not war, that is objectively immoral.

Consider this too: how could a truly moral person be content sitting in heaven strumming a harp with the awareness that evil and suffering persisted in the created world below? Therefore, so long as there is ill-being on earth, there must also be conflict in heaven. Happiness would require continuing to fight in that war. Hence, of course, the Catholic doctrine of saints. And at the end of time? That is eternity, and eternity is not an absence nor an infinite extension of time; it is a point from which all times are equidistant. The war is still present.

So premise 1 in my friend’s argument is false.

But let’s not pass on without dealing as well with equality, since that is yet closer to the modern left’s bosom.

Here too, it is quite clear from the Bible that there is no equality in heaven. There is an elaborate hierarchy. There are ranks of angels, and levels of saints, with thrones, principalities, powers, some elders seated closer to the throne of God than others (Revelations 4:4), and so forth. When James and John ask for seats at Jesus’s left and right, he does not demand equality; he says that it is not for him to choose.

Really, equality in heaven is a strange idea. There is no equality with God, of course. Moreover, why would someone who was “no better than he should be” be equal in heaven to a Mother Teresa, an Oskar Schindler, or a John the Baptist, who demonstrate “heroic virtue”?

This is objectively unjust.

The idea that there should be equality in heaven, I gather, comes from a misunderstanding on the left of what political equality on earth means or ought to mean--a concept that itself comes from Christianity. It means everyone should get the same chances; not that everyone should get the same results. We understand and accept that when we put murderers in prison. Meritocracy is not opposed to true equality, but is its result. The absence of meritocracy is automatically inequality.

If heaven, or indeed social justice, is our aim, then, the left has it wrong. We should not be seeking a situation in which everyone gets the same salary, for example, but one in which everyone is rewarded according to their efforts. Just as in heaven. The whole concept of heaven and hell is of ultimate just rewards, not everyone ending up with the same result.

On to point 2 and 3: that what we can imagine in heaven, we can imagine on earth; and what is imaginable is possible. This is true in a sense, but trivial. The limits of what we can imagine are the limits of what we can imagine. And we cannot imagine anything that is logically or mathematically impossible. But we can imagine things that are impossible in practical terms, like flying pigs or the moon being made from green cheese.

Just so, anything we can imagine happening in a dream, we necessarily can imagine happening in waking life. But if I dream that I can fly, it is not necessarily a good idea to jump off a tall building the next morning.

In fact, recognizing this distinction is more or less definitive of sanity.

Practical circumstances in heaven and on earth might be somewhat different.

But let’s even allow points 1, 2, and 3. I think there is still a problem with point 4: that we ought to work to make earth more like heaven.

Actually, why? Couldn’t God manage it on his own? Isn’t he omnipotent and all? So why isn’t it perfect already?

In other words, it follows from God’s omnipotence that the world is as it is largely because it ought to be or must be so.

So should we change it? Are we sure?

It takes long and sober thought to understand what our proper role and purpose is here. To seek to remold the world to fulfill our desires is not obviously it; it might instead be an act of disobedience, of arrogance, and of selfishness. One thinks, first off, of the Tower of Babel. The builders sought to make something “whose top may reach unto heaven.” Bad idea. As bad as Eve’s similar plan “to be as God.”

Why are we here, then? Genesis suggests an answer: Genesis 2: 15. We were created to tend a garden. It is not our garden; we are just the gardeners.

And, at least at the creation, there was no need to work the garden for material sustenance; that came after the fall (Genesis 3:17-18). Though we have to do that now as well, that was not the purpose. It is not that kind of garden.

Now, if a gardener is not gardening for food, what is his purpose? What other kind of garden is there?

He is gardening for beauty. That is our mission: to change and adapt the natural world as and when this produces greater beauty. Pruning here, weeding there.

But not just beauty in the strictest sense. It is important to add, with Keats, that truth and moral good are both forms of beauty—the selfless good deed, the mathematical equation that elegantly solves the problem.

This may, but does not obviously or automatically, involve political action.