The Relinquishing of Moral Agency
Evil hides behind the relinquishing of moral responsibility. We need to bring it back.
The recent unveiling of high-visibility sexual predators has brought the subject of moral agency into the spotlight. The guilty parties and their defenders — caught red-handed and practically bare-bottomed — have tended to shift the blame to some other person or force, perhaps because the crushing weight of condemnation would otherwise be just too damned difficult to bear.
So, they say: These supposed victims are lying. My political enemies are out to get me. I suffer from a disease. I suffer from an addiction that of course makes me a victim, too, and only now after decades of indulging myself, destroying lives and using all the power in my hands to cover it up am I seeking help and forgiveness. You see, I was helpless before. I am just as powerless as you. You and I are on the same side against this strange, manipulative foreign agent.
Damn it, I did nothing wrong!
Moral Agency Raises Humanity Above the Animals
I marvel that somehow this is the same species that left Earth’s orbit and walked on the moon’s face. The same that builds skyscrapers, composes soul-inspiring music, writes towering tomes of literature and, yes, produces films of devastating dramatic power. Human beings are unique among God’s creatures in their dual capabilities for achievement and disgrace.
The reader may or may not believe the Book of Genesis to be a true account, but it nonetheless supplies a fascinating perspective on this uniqueness. First, man is made in the image of God. Adam, the first man, is asked to name and hold righteous dominion over the beasts of the field and the fowls of the air, placing humans above the animals but still below God Himself.
Together, Adam and Eve gain “knowledge” by the partaking of the forbidden fruit, allowing them to “be as the gods, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5, KJV). We can define this “knowing good and evil” as moral agency: the capacity to choose between right and wrong. This is a power not granted to animals or the rest of creation, and which makes humanity essentially half-god and half-beast, forever teetering between the two. Animals cannot be evil even when committing great violence because they never had a choice; it is pure instinct. Only humans are accountable for their actions because they have the ability to choose against their impulses.
To sacrifice one’s power to choose, then — with whatever excuse we like — is to relinquish what makes us fundamentally and uniquely human: our moral agency. If we are no longer agents to freely act, we become objects that are acted upon, like a cue ball in a game of pool. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks recently said, “If you define yourself as a victim, you can never be free.”
A Race for Victimhood Instead of Virtue
Sadly, we see this eagerness to be victims everywhere today, in culture and in politics, and on both sides of the political aisle. There’s immense power to be gained by telling people their problems are not their fault, are actually the result of somebody else’s evil and that only a consecrated politician can fix those problems by wreaking vengeance on the true evil-doers.
You see this in every wing of identity politics: your misfortune is the result of some other demographic! And it inflames the sense of tribalism while throwing up ever higher walls between us. It is these very flames of division and anger that Donald Trump fanned in his campaign and swept him into office, where he now acts as our Whiner-in-Chief, always complaining of the unfair witch hunt trying to hold him accountable.
Now we have Roy Moore crying about the “forces of evil” out to get him and stop his righteous works from taking place in the Senate. He is simply the latest to seek escape from the consequences of his many horrible choices over the course of his life.
Between Chinatown and Hollywood
Given that Harvey Weinstein was the first domino to fall, let’s talk about him for a moment. From the Daily Beast, a conversation between Weinstein and his adviser Lisa Bloom (who went on to be an infamous enabler of Weinstein’s corruption):
“Look I’m a famous movie producer, everyone wants an Academy Award, I can really help their careers,” Weinstein reportedly told Bloom and Ajamie.
Bloom said to Weinstein, “Wait, wait, wait, Harvey, you’re married. Are you saying you had sex with these women while you were married?”
Weinstein responded, “Yes, Lisa, that’s exactly what I’m saying.”
To which Bloom responded, “But your wife [Georgina Chapman] doesn’t know?”
Weinstein replied, “No, I don’t tell her.” Bloom said, “You’re cheating on your wife, right?”
Weinstein said, “Well, yeah, Lisa, this is Hollywood and this is what happens.”
Bloom replied, “OK, I’m just a little taken aback by this. But I’m not judging you or anything. I’m not judging.”
What a wonderful way to excuse decades of decadent behavior! Even without resorting to the in-vogue terminology of “disease” or “addiction,” Harvey Weinstein has proven just how little he valued his own moral agency. Before he’s even asked to pay consequences, he is already putting the blame elsewhere. One gets the sense that this is exactly what he’s been telling himself all these years in his fight against his own conscience: “This is Hollywood, Harvey. You’ve done nothing wrong. Everyone does this. It’s Hollywood! Damn it, conscience, stop pestering me!”
However — in a way, he’s absolutely right. This conversation exemplifies the modern Hollywood mentality. “I’m not judging!” Lisa Bloom protests, presumably in effort to avoid ridicule and condemnation reserved for even the slightest hint of backwards conservative sensibilities.
After all, if we judge somebody, that means somebody might judge us. And because we’re powerful, and because we have so many desires, and because we want to express ourselves any way we like, we do not want to be judged. So everyone, give in to your weakness, do what you want to do, and anything goes — and while we’re at it, same for me. Any unwanted consequences can be taken care of with ease at our local Planned Parenthood, or suppressed by an army of lawyers, private investigators, and ex-Mossad agents.
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The irony is that it is precisely because of this lack of social consequence — e.g. Bloom’s failure to judge Weinstein for cheating on his wife and Weinstein’s refusal to judge himself all these years — that evil continued and amplified. All the while Weinstein’s own soul continued to atrophy as he not only broke his marriage vows, but infringed on the freedom of vulnerable women, like a lion preying on a lame-legged gazelle.
For decades, his wealth and status allowed him to prey on whoever he damn well wanted and to do whatever he damn well wanted, but that kind of existence is not true freedom. The philosopher Harry Frankfurt wrote that real freedom, the moral agency unique to humans, is not simply being able to do whatever we want. After all, an animal may do whatever it wants; lions are free to hunt whatever suits their fancy from moment to moment. But there’s the rub: eons of evolution have dictated that they only like freshly hunted meat.
True freedom, Frankfurt points out, is the ability to choose what you want. As human beings, we have the power to change a great deal of our inner natures, to reject instinct and live our own higher law. That is our moral agency. To decide what we want before actually wanting it.
Weinstein, as high-minded as he was when it came to film and art, did nothing to choose his own nature. He embraced what nature gave him and lived life as a beast, doing what a beast is programmed to do. He failed to choose his desires, and so his desires chose his fate for him, much like the helplessness of Jack Nicholson’s J.J. Gittes in the face of seemingly inevitable tragedy: “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”
As the years passed, he increased in power and wealth and influence, but failed to find power over his sexual impulses. And so instead of reining in his own sins, Weinstein used that increased power to ensure his freedom from consequence. All his many resources, talents and abilities were funneled into that project of baiting and suppressing women. The same goes for so many predatory men, who are brilliant but use that brilliance to serve selfish and evil ends. In a 1995 Vanity Fair profile of the recently accused public intellectual Leon Wieseltier, the late critic Diana Trilling foreshadowed his future fall.
“The way our world is designed, it’s a great temptation to use what God gave you, all that seductive power, in the expensive waste of the consequentiality of words and in worthlessness,” she said. “I worry that this all may be leading him somewhere where he doesn’t need to go.”
Indeed, Wieseltier is now being publicly disgraced for tendencies eerily similar to those of Weinstein. Today, we are (hopefully) seeing the fall of the former judge Moore, who, too, will be undone and disgraced by his own evil choices. The world needs men and women to use their godly minds to do good, not to find ever-cleverer ways to indulge in and excuse their own moral frailties.
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It is telling that Weinstein tried his damnedest to get out of the tidal wave of consequences with a post-reveal letter to his old friends and allies asking for their support. Kevin Spacey did the same thing when he came out of the closet as a way to deflect condemnation. And of course “the Judge” is summoning his brand of zealots to his side in a supposed fight against the forces of evil, and in so doing muddying their souls with his refusal to judge himself.
These people are not recognizing their evil and repenting, but the opposite. They are trying to escape accountability, and in so doing remain slaves to their behavior.
Standing back, what is the greatest offense of these people? It is crossing the boundaries of a fellow human being’s agency. It is using one’s considerable power to compel their victims to comply with their desires. It is taking over their bodies, plundering them of their own freedom and robbing them of their own agency.
What a tragedy it all is — these mighty souls with unending personal potential instead relinquish their own free will, the great privilege of all humanity, to the reins of their natural desires, and in doing so let the beast inside them deprive their victims of their agency. For with each new incident there are at least two new victims, spiritually speaking, two souls who are forever wounded. Think about it: what is Weinstein now but a shell of a human being? He is his own victim! He has destroyed himself! And Moore is doing the same, not realizing that his quest for political salvation is destroying his chances for the spiritual kind.
Losing captaincy of your destiny, ceding control of your own path and giving yourself over to another’s hands, is, in effect, how you lose your soul. That is what the stakes are in the cultural and political battlefield of our day: not mere policy, which comes and goes, but human souls.
Weinstein, Moore, what possesses you is not a disease. It may feel like one now — an addiction that is ever unsatisfied no matter how many vulnerable young women you lord over. But it is your fault for letting it come to that. It is your fault for refusing to rebuke yourself. It is your fault for destroying your own conscience, for glorying in your own power. You traded in the likeness of God for the likeness of a beast in the field. You sought this life, and so you own it. It is you: you are this disease.
“Control myself?” I can hear Harvey say with a disdainful laugh. “Forget it, Lisa. It’s Hollywood.”
