Omnipotent moral busybodies

Two quotations from dramatically different contexts that make the same broader point:

First—Orestes Brownson, in his essay “Liberalism and Progress,” October 1864. Brownson was a pro-Union, anti-slavery New Englander but was nevertheless impatient with the radical Puritan-descended ideologues surrounding him, radicals like the author of the unpublished manuscript to which he’s responding here, in which its author advocates “exterminating the southern leaders, and new-englandizing the South”—what in any other context would now be called cultural genocide. In this passage he critiques the culture that produces such men:

The New Englander has excellent points, but is restless in body and mind, always in motion, never satisfied with what he has, and always seeking to make all the world like himself, or as uneasy as himself. He is smart, seldom great; educated, but seldom learned; active in mind, but rarely a profound thinker; religious, but thoroughly materialistic: his worship is rendered in a temple founded in Mammon, and he expects to be carried to heaven in a softly-cushioned railway car, with his sins safely checked and deposited in the baggage crate with his other luggage, to be duly delivered when he has reached his destination. He is philanthropic, but makes his philanthropy his excuse for meddling with everybody's business as if it were his own, and under pretence of promoting religion and morality, he wars against every generous and natural instinct, and aggravates the very evils he seeks to cure.

Second—CS Lewis in “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment,” originally published in the Australian journal Twentieth Century in 1949 and collected in God in the Dock. Here Lewis argues forcefully that modern concepts of judicial rehabilitation are actually crueler than traditional imprisonment or corporal punishment:

It is, indeed, important to notice that my argument so far supposes no evil intentions on the part of the Humanitarian and considers only what is involved in the logic of his position. My contention is that good men (not bad men) consistently acting upon that position would act as cruelly and unjustly as the greatest tyrants. They might in some respects act even worse. Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. Their very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level with those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.

To return to Brownson’s picture of the New England radical reformer:

He has his use in the community; but a whole nation composed of such as he would be short-lived, and resemble the community of the lost rather than that of the blest.

The thing which I greatly feared is come upon us. Food for thought.

Compare Brownson’s portrait of the 19th-century activist above with Ernst Jünger’s description in The Forest Passage of the modern mass-man—“he will gush humanitarian theory, yet be equally inclined to awful violence . . . whenever a neighbor or fellow human being does not fit into his system”—which I blogged about here. And for a paradigmatic modern busybody, see here.