Ex Post Facto - After The Fact, The End Of Disillusionment, And A Welcome To God's Country

Braden Phelps believed in things - love, summer mornings, freshly baked bread, and Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses.  He was a romantic, an idealist, a believer that God had created a perfect world to which we could return if we did not stray from the path. 

As such Braden was the perfect political progressive - he not only had a firm historical grounding in the early labor heroes of the 20th century, Brandeis, LaFollette, and Gompers, lessons learned from the noble Russian experiment, and an almost spiritual belief in ultimate goodness. 

He had always been a good boy - respectful, hardworking, considerate, and affable.  Father Brophy thought he would be a good candidate for the seminary, and Fenton Abrams, his math professor, was certain he would make waves in quantum physics. 

Braden was sure of only one thing - doing good, making a difference, having an impact.  None of this was out of arrogance or presumptuous, but of good will.  It hurt him to see homeless men on the street, terminal cancer patients in the hospital wards, orphans, minorities, and desperate asylees.  He was seemingly born with 'a compassion gene', an oddity noted by Eugene L Franks of Bowdoin, geneticist and social philosopher. 

Individual strands of DNA cannot account for such behavior, nor even predict a soul given to kindness, charity, and compassion. These attributes are within the nurture side of the equation, at least for the time being. 

Yet such inspired outwardness often manifests itself in what would be considered the least compassionate and generous families.  What ever it is, whether Nature or Nurture, science is still perplexed by its occurrence. 

We are more perplexed by its current political expression.  Doing good, making a difference, setting the world on a utopian path has never before been witnessed.  Compassion has taken on defiance, and this is where psycho-pathology comes in. 

Dr. Franks could have been describing Braden Phelps, so accurate was his description of upbringing, psychological tendencies, and commitment to the larger community of progressive reformers. In later articles, most importantly in the journal Science, he expanded on the notion of 'collective goodness', 'this feverish, inchoate, inflexibility' - again describing Braden to a 'T'. 

Braden, because of his deep-seated, almost spiritual longing for a better world, his willful momentum towards an imagined utopia, and his growing defiance of all naysayers, indeed became 'feverish' in his assault on those who chose to disregard the truth.  Global warming, the continuing oppression of the black man, the federal SS troops deployed to round up and deport legitimate asylees, the brutal assault on gay men and lesbian women were undeniable truths, and those who were too ignorant to accept this reality no longer belonged within the body politic. 

Braden could be found on every front line against fascism.  He marched for sanctuary cities, protested for the adoption of the gender spectrum as canon and included in every school curriculum, cheered the street demonstrations of Black Lives Matter which recalled the black uprisings in Detroit, Newark, Watts, and Washington, DC decades earlier, and lived in a tent city outside the White House demanding an end to war. 

'The compassion gene' wrote Prof. Franks, 

is a very weak element in the psycho-pathology, too fragile to grow, easy to fracture, quick to dissolve in a solution of reality.  The true believer must come to grips with the inevitable rounds of perpetual war,  imbalanced social pyramids, the screeching and caterwauling for justice when none has ever prevailed on a universal scale

The coming of the end of Braden's 'febrile dreams' - another characterization of true belief coined by Dr. Franks - when his childhood Catholic education intruded on his most secular aspirations. Without thinking, he said a prayer, asking God for divine intervention.  Man's efforts alone would not be enough to stem the tide of ignorance and apostasy.  Again without thinking, he blessed himself, making sign of the cross as he had a thousand times as a boy. 

 

Now, the progressive movement had been most explicit in its condemnation of organized religion.  The Vatican was nothing but an instrument of doctrinaire authority, a bullying, intimidating, destructive force.  Protestant fundamentalism was ignorance at its very worst - a bathos of mindless charisma, and Judaism a prehistoric, bookish, academic world of mumbo-jumbo. 

So when Braden realized what he had done, he was chagrinned and embarrassed. He had broken the rules, ignored the canon, and dealt in self-serving fantasy. 

But how to account for The Flood, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the centuries of inhumanity to man after Christ's sacrifice for the forgiveness of ins and for universal redemption? God had made a mess of Creation, and not even his only begotten son could right the ship.  Wasn't the only purpose of prayer to accept the inevitable?

The lesbians in a basement on Thomas Circle smelled bad.  They had a thing about washing, a telltale sign of a recidivist bourgeois upbringing. Bodily odors were positive emanations, radical pheromones, the perfume to attract the faithful.  They were also ugly and misshapen again in the spirit of militancy.  Attention to personal appearance, like personal hygiene, was counter-revolutionary.  Ugliness was a trope, a meme, an ethos. 

Braden asked for forgiveness for such anti-canonical thoughts.  These women should not be judged by anything except their principles; and yet, leaving the meeting and existing into the clear December night, he took a deep, long breath of fresh, crisp, cold air. 

And why should compassion come in only one size?  Wasn't there something to the old Chinese saying about giving a poor man a rod to fish with and not the fish itself, the ultimate reward of self-sufficiency and personal responsibility? Wasn't charity nothing more than the chains that bind?  Wasn't unaccountable generosity tantamount to economic enslavement?

He was clearly in a muddle.  Had logic simply come too late - had he been guilty of arrested development, hanging his hat where it looked good not where it belonged?  Was he only an emotional cripple, hobbled by years of fealty to the wrong gods?

Changing horses in midstream has never been a good idea, but when the horse you're riding rears and bolts, leaving you in a cold water wash, and you have no choice but to change direction, who could object. 

His newfound conservatism was not an epiphany by any means.  When Braden looked back on the last few years, he should have recognized and admitted his growing disillusionment. 

Again Prof. Franks was right on the mark - the compassion gene is a very weak bit which does not hold up to pressure.  It gives in because it is an anomaly in what is the more firmly established human nature which is aggressive, self-interested, territorial, and amoral.  It may try to wiggle its way into a position of influence in the double helix, but even if it finds some traction, it is not long for this world. 

Braden did not go around the bend with his new perspective.  He wasn't on the opposing front lines, howling and shouting for a conservative view of justice.  He just knew he was right, and that was enough. 

As for his former colleagues?  None of them had any semblance of a compassion gene. They were too stupid for any reflection that considered God, history, and human nature.  To give them their due, it was that stupidity which fueled The Movement, and everything needs something in the tank to keep it running.