Cover image: “Good Samaritan” by V. Van Gogh (1890)
“Frank reads Notes from Underground as satire, and he contends that the Underground Man is caught in an agonizing self-contradiction: intellectually, he accepts the basic premises of the Rational Egoists’ outlook, such as the denial of free will; but he finds that, ‘despite the convictions of his reason,’ he cannot live with the amoral and dehumanizing implications of those premises, which strip human beings of moral responsibility.”
— James Scanlan Scanlan, Journal of the History of Ideas.
I.
I am a sick woman…. I am a spiteful woman. I am a woman of probably average attractiveness. Sometimes my heart feels diseased, but I know too many things plague it so, sometimes, it feels like nothing’s wrong because I also know that I am one among millions. One of the millions who refuses to make amends from spite. That’s something that even you must certainly understand. Even though we can’t explain who precisely we’re mortifying in the cases of our spite. We know better than anyone that by all this, we’re only injuring ourselves and no one else. But that doesn’t stop us.
Asserting logical authority has done us precious little. Irony thrives, alive and vicious, as facts get muddled with fiction. We get eye strain from trying to see clearly and our voices grow hoarse from shouting into the smoke as we try to open the eyes of Diggles trapped in dark stables. We remain baffled as to why no amount of rational bludgeoning appears to be bending others to our will. Too many people shouting all at once—and we’re one of them. Intellectual spite is easy; well-reasoned for-fuck’s-saking is easy.
II.
It is clear to me now that, as I am only twenty-six, that I often look at myself with furious discontent, only occasionally verging on loathing, and so I try to attribute the same feeling to everyone. Too often, I find mediocrity disgusting, even as I live in constant fear of its benign presence, and so every day I’m filled with the urge to try to behave as independently as possible, and to assume a lofty expression, so that I might not be suspected of being as abject as any other angst-ridden Gen-Z adult. “My life may seem mediocre,” I think, “but let it be lofty and expressive.” But I am positively and painfully certain that it is impossible for my countenance ever to express those qualities.
Asserting the parable of the Good Samaritan has done us precious little. Christianity tells us to love our enemies, but it also tells us to love our neighbours. While enemies are meant to be a logical subset of neighbours, they tend not to overlap in our mental Venn diagram. People can preach with ease about embracing the poor—“love thy neighbour as thyself” and “whatever you do to the least of these you do to me”—but pointedly bypass “turn the other cheek” and “pray for those who persecute you.” And understandably so; we focus on the Samaritan’s actions, not who they are. Only unity with the people we want to unify with, right?
III.
Ministering to the poor and sick is easy. (Well, not actually easy, but it has a simple direction of movement.) Stressing the importance of God’s image in transgender people and the right to a fair trial for immigrants is easy: it is something lofty from which we may look down. A romantic war of moral good and evil without really wanting to realise that we’ve all fallen into the same trap of dugouts and trenches trying to subjugate each other. We don’t seem to be doing much stopping to ask, “But what comes after? What’s this all for?”
A minister recently told her congregation to relearn the parable of the Good Samaritan as not an indictment for just romantic magnanimous charity, but as a lesson to draw close to those we’d rather not. To associate with the foul stinking dwarves in small dark stables. I think everyone who sat there that Sunday morning shuddered a bit. Surely not! Not the people who happily snapped selfies at “Alligator Alcatraz.” Not the people who attended a Charlie Kirk vigil. Not the people who feel nothing when they see a starving Palestinian baby. How could such a thing be asked of us?
