On Sympathy with the Devil

Milton, Blake told us, was of the Devil’s party without knowing it. Though Lucifer in the Paradise Lost turns out, ultimately, to be a populist demagogue, one never shakes the early impression of a tyrant-defying Hero. Milton surely poured out his own republican defiance of the Stuarts into that initial depiction:

All is not lost; the unconquerable Will,
And study of revenge, immortal hate,
And courage never to submit or yield
And what is else not to be overcome?
That glory never shall his wrath or might
Extort from me. To bow and sue for grace
With suppliant knee, and deify his power
Who from the terror of this Arm so late
Doubted his empire, that were low indeed,
That were an ignominy and shame beneath
This downfall...

Well, sometimes evil comes cloaked as an angel of light, and must be identified and combated. Yet there is a deeper truth here – that to understand and even sympathise with one’s enemies is both practically and morally necessary.

Practically necessary, certainly. Few would dispute this. “Know thine enemy”, Sun Tzu said. (Of course he added “know thyself”, too, like the Oracle at Delphi; but few of us have the rigorous honesty and courage for that.) If you do not know what your enemy believes, or is capable of accomplishing, you will quickly be defeated. If you believe that Panzers cannot cut south through the Ardennes, you will be conquered. Even on this point, however, I fear the point is widely misunderstood. The objective is taken to be a numerical assessment of strength and a hostile, critical evaluation of objectives. This is insufficient, even for practical purposes, for two reasons.

Firstly, this leads to a superficial understanding of a situation; by only knowing contingent facts and purposes of the enemy, we miss their deeper principle, and will be unable to adapt to changes in their posture inspired by that principle. It would be like knowing every chess opening by heart but failing to understand the deeper principles of chess that allow one to transmute such knowledge into a ruling methodology.

Secondly, by taking a hostile approach – one is understanding only so as to defeat – one runs the risk of never truly understanding the enemy, but only one’s projection onto them. Are we seeking to understand our enemy’s stated values and purposes, or merely seeking to interpret them in terms of our own? Psychoanalytic paranoia about the “real” reasons people say or do things leads to personality death. Ever seeking out the “true” motives of their action, we end up in a Freud-invented nightmarescape: a world of mirrors where every other person only ever reflects us to ourselves, til we get lost in the infinite recursion of our warped image.

Before any act of interpretation or translation, we have to “trust, but verify”. We have to listen to the account a person gives of themselves. Yes, they may well be deceiving you, or themselves – but a swiftness to parse their statements in terms of “trauma” or “sin” or “privilege” risks missing what they actually say. Albeit the will is often a divided, tortured thing, but precisely when a person is deluded in their beliefs, they can be said to be sincere in them. Imagine you really believed in the Christian God (notwithstanding the prospect of His nonexistence) – you would act in accordance with that belief, would you not? It would be a delusory motivation, but nonetheless a very real one. Dreams may have reality – as de Gaulle, riffing on Chateaubriand, spoke of achieving grandeur “by leading the French through dreams”. He achieved grandeur largely through the spinning of those dreams, and they were no less real for it.

So when we come to our opponent’s thought, we must read and understand it with a deeply sympathetic imagination. We must imagine what it must feel like to be such a man, dive deeply into the concerns and cares that energise their actions, discover the different and conflicting textures and components of their mind, and finally, in a sense, accept them as they are. We must almost be like the method actor, fully immersed – yes, even staring into the abyss – so that when they talk or write or act we are of one mind with them and know their direction of travel and true intention just as well as they do. Indeed, if we wish to convince them of an alternative view, we must be able to have understood why their account is convincing to them.  To defeat an enemy we must, in a word, love them.

But there is also a moral call to understand and love them “as they are”. I mean neither the noble dominical command to “love thy neighbour as thyself”; nor do I mean any soft-handed, lisping humanistic validation of human goodness (“you are perfect just as you are” – never such a grim lie told). I offer two reasons for this.

Firstly: As Weil put it, true beauty and true ideas are in three dimensions, viewable from different angles by different persons. This is not the Parable of the Elephant, where no-one really knows what is going on, but rather an appreciation that every mighty conception of the world is a grappling with truths, even if in the final event the conception fails. I am a Christian, and a devout one, and yet one of the most moving and stirring books I have ever read is Nietzsche’s Anti-Christ. There, without any canting or hypocrisy, the mad German excoriates the emptiness of a rationalist Christianity, and offers his own heroic conception of the soul – ever striving, ever courageous, never bowing, like Lucifer quoted above. Of course I finally conclude there to be a pleonexia, an overreaching in all this, but the Marlovian overreacher is a stock hero now. Why? Because we recognize in that self-driven seizing for Heaven a profound truth about the human condition in this era after God. I would miss all that if I came to Nietzsche aiming to moralise at first glance, and I would miss the delicately moving nature of his portrait of the Christ Himself, Nietzsche seemingly contemptuous but deeply enthralled: “The only true Christian died on the Cross.” Never a truer word said!

A moralising approach, no matter how right, would deprive my soul of moral pleasures. To put it in a different way, without reading my enemies with a sympathetic ear, I could never be stirred by that greatest declamation of that demented Jacobin Paine:

THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.

A monster may have said it, and it may seem misapplied in part to its situation, but it is nonetheless a true and noble sentiment. Monsters are often the vessels of nobility: “Blow, wind! Come, wrack! // At least we’ll die with harness on our back”. It is a small man who cannot admire his worst enemy when he utters a high and real sentiment.

Secondly: A Christian song lyric goes: “When I look into the face of my enemy, I see my brother”. There is an issue of virtue as well as of aesthetics at stake when it comes to understanding your enemy. To degrade them, degrades you; to mar human dignity, to make uglier the world, all in pursuit of their destruction, has greater consequences than you can imagine. You efface the whole race when you animalise an enemy. If nowhere else, you will find the grub marks on your soul. Rather, where you see that a man is wicked, say and mean “There but for the grace of God go I” – is your heart so pure as to stand in condemnation? The truly pure in heart are always the most pitying, knowing the tragedy that is sin.

This is the continuation of my previous remarks about knowing your enemy by entering into their experience, by “method acting” their role. By widening your understanding of the human experience – not through participating in immorality, but by developing a pitying understanding for it – you gentle your heart. This is no excuse for weak humanitarianism, but the opposite. More surely than ever you will understand that punitive justice is a means of restoring the wicked to the bounds of ordinary society (the gallows as means of reconciliation), and that for some it is kinder by far to force them to face eternity honestly, without the Purgatorio of imprisonment or the earthly Inferno of an unfree life of heinous crime. But you will come closer to the divine quality of love by understanding every lineament of the enemy.

You will see the fugitive glimpses of beauty amidst the ruins of the wicked soul, and learn to identify even the smallest quantities of worth. You will be able to intellectually separate the wrong ends of your political enemy, and appreciate the nobility of their character; or, conversely, you will be patient with their brutality and sympathise with the noble hopes they have. Being capable of these will enable you to forget the childish tribal dichotomies of Good and Evil, just as you have forgotten the trivial quarrels of your youth. You will never abandon the pursuit of real Good, but an admiration of your foe will enable you to root out the little Evils that bedevil every Idealist, hidden like nimble rats beneath the skirts of their ermine robes: pride, a critical heart, ambition, and the incipient violence of the tribal heart. Understanding your enemy on their own terms may not change them, but it will, ultimately, change you, and for the better.

And who knows? With a heart so changed, what else might you accomplish? Remember that no real hero is remembered for hatred, no sainthood is bought with accomplished political rhetoric. There is no risk for the wise man when he looks into the Abyss; the real risk is looking away from it, and letting its Shadows grow behind and around him, as all the while he shouts “I am Wise and Good! I am Wise and Good!” Perhaps that was Lucifer’s downfall, too.