Ugly feelings and shameful impulses reveal a war within. This war is a battle between right and wrong happening inside our own heads and hearts. We desperately try to deny the facts. We are pros at claiming either that the feelings came from somewhere else, or that the judgment about their ugliness did. But after all the mental gymnastics have been tried, we must admit that both the evil impulses and our condemnation of them are our own.
In the battlefield of the mind, we do not experience evil impulses as alien invaders but as creatures in their natural habitat. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn put it more elegantly in The Gulag Archipelago: “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts.”
The evil impulses and feelings that we are talking about are called covetousness. To covet is to desire wrongly. It happens before you act, or speak, or even think. It is an unbidden impulse or feeling that you did not consciously choose. And, as soon as you become aware of its presence, you simultaneously loathe it and are attracted to it. That’s the war within.
Over the past year, this column has explored the Natural Law in ten monthly installments. Today’s reflection completes that exercise by noticing that our natural disgust with our own impulses and desires anticipates God’s commandment, “Thou shalt not covet” (Exodus 20:17 KJV).
This final commandment—like those that we have explored in previous columns—is not the alien imposition of a tyrannical deity. It is imprinted on the human heart long before God descended on Mt. Sinai. The capacity to notice that some of our feelings are wrong and shameful is uniquely human. Moreover, this capacity challenges some of the most basic assumptions of our culture’s dominant philosophical worldview. And it challenges them at the very foundations of who we are.
Rene Descartes charted the course for modern philosophy with the assertion, “Cogito ergo sum, (I think, therefore I am).” Rational thought so defines our thinking that it crowds out anything that is beyond reason and will. But our internal compass, which condemns covetousness, is just such a thing. How can feelings be wrong if they are not subject to reason and will?
Modern psychology rationalized this problem away by treating the heart as a subconscious and subhuman “id.” It is some automatic animal instinct that is walled off from the rational will. Contrary to the testimony in our own hearts, modern psychology simply denies any moral responsibility for urges over which one has no conscious control. But this philosophical move has introduced some frightful consequences.
First, it enables modern man to dehumanize people whose conscious choices cannot be demonstrated. People are regularly judged to be non-persons who seem to lack sentience. This modern judgment has been devastating to the unborn and the mentally disabled.
Second, relegating covetousness to the nonhuman realm has not made people less judgmental. It has only shifted the basis of judgments from a person’s actions to the person himself. In a vain attempt to exempt some feelings from human judgment, modernists have excluded wrong-thinking humans from the realm of humanity. This is how identity politics has poisoned public discourse.
If you want to understand the nastiness of our present moment, stop blaming abstract bogeymen like terrorism, bullying, conservatism, or liberalism. It is much simpler and more concrete than these. It is open warfare against anyone and everyone with the temerity to say: We are morally responsible for fighting feelings that we did not consciously choose.
It would be far better to take seriously the witness of our own hearts. The war within is real and it’s worth fighting. It is a war not only against wrong actions, wrong words, and wrong thinking. It is also a war against our own wrong feelings and evil impulses. To declare a ceasefire within does not end the war. It only causes it to spill out into the public square.
Recognizing “covetousness” as real evil—even before it becomes a thought, word, or action—allows human beings to nip it in the bud. “Thou shalt not covet” is the capstone of the Ten Commandments and of the Natural Law because it deals with the fullness of our humanity.
As long as evil feelings and impulses are connected to a person’s unchangeable identity, there is no hope for repentance, reconciliation and renewal. But both Scripture and the Natural Law judge otherwise. And by that judgment they open the door to hope.