The Heretical Reason Modernists Coddle Criminals

Welcome to the Council of Trent Podcast, a production of Catholic Answers.

Are we rational creatures who can be held accountable for our actions or are we the inevitable byproducts of social engineering that should be treated like a malfunctioning appliance when we do something wrong? That’s what I’m going to be talking about today here on the Council of Trent podcast, I’m your host Catholic Answers apologist, Trent Horn. I do want to let you know I’ll be holding each of you accountable if you’ve not subscribed to the channel. Honestly, though, I don’t have to do that because I know you genuinely want to help us reach more people and you don’t want to miss out on all this great content. So definitely please hit that subscribe button.

So today I want to talk about a disturbing trend among some on the Left when it comes to making excuses to justify acts of violence as long as the violence fits their particular narrative. We saw this most recently with student groups defending the atrocities being committed by Hamas against innocent civilians. Over 30 student groups at Harvard signed a letter saying of Israel that, “The apartheid regime is the only one to blame,” they said for things like rape and the killing of children and women during the October 7th attacks on Israel. We also saw this in the year 2020 when reporters justified riots that were taking place all over American cities after the killing of George Floyd. In some cases, they hilariously claimed that most of these riots were just peaceful protests.

It is worth pointing out that it has been entirely peaceful, sometimes angry, but entirely peaceful. Bottle thrown, which is not uncommon. So there is some of that, but for the most part they have been very, very peaceful.

But when the looting and destruction became too obvious to ignore, they said these actions were justified.

I don’t know that every single person is doing this born out of pain, but I can tell you many people are, we’ve seen it. They don’t know what to do with that emotion. So their response, especially young folks, is to lash out. So acting out gets attention and they know that because the other way hasn’t gotten them the attention. It hasn’t done anything. It hasn’t changed anything.

And in April of this year, a looting spree took place in Chicago where hundreds of young people vandalized, burglarized, and even physically attacked people. The mayor elect of the city said this was unacceptable, but that we should not demonize those who committed these crimes.

They’re young. Sometimes they make silly decisions. They do. And so we have to make sure that we are investing to make sure that young people know that they are supported.

Victims Violently assaulted by a mob of teenagers over the weekend. They are sharing their experience exclusively with Fox. The video of twenty-year-old Ashley and twenty-two-year-old DJ being attacked on the 100 block of North Wabash went viral. They say they had just come out of Nordstrom shortly after eight p.m Saturday when they were surrounded.

They’re young. Sometimes they make silly decisions.

So what explains these kinds of excuses for criminal behavior? Part of it’s rooted in racist Marxist theory. If a person belongs to the so-called oppressed class, if they do something wrong, it’s simply because they were pushed to the edge and they lashed out. They simply had no other options. But if a member of a so-called oppressor class does something deemed wrong, like when protesters peacefully marched against lockdowns in 2020, they are morally blamed for actions that could kill somebody’s grandma. Allegedly.

That’s part of it, but this idea is built on a deeper anti-christian attitude. That is one of the major obstacles facing evangelism today. Basically, it’s this. You can’t have the good news of the Gospel without the bad news of sin. And part of the bad news of sin is that all of us, not just the oppressor class, but every single one of us, is born with a disposition to sin. This is a consequence of original sin and it’s called concupiscence, which the catechism says, “Stems from the disobedience of the first sin. It unsettles man’s moral faculties. And without being in itself an offense inclines man to commit sin.” We’re born bad, not as bad as possible, but still bad. We’re born with a natural desire to sin. And so it’s the job of society to make us good.

Primarily this is the job of the family, which some have called The First Society. Scott Hahn actually has a great book on that subject called The First Society, the Sacrament of Matrimony and the Restoration of the Social Order. But families don’t function in isolation since they rely on a stable social order in order to instill virtue into their children. That’s why virtuous families strive to improve society, and society in turn protects families. In rare cases, society must intervene if individual families become destitute or they become destructive to themselves. Families create society and society protects families.

The anti-christian attitude I’m talking about is one that reverses This idea reverses the idea that we are born bad and society makes us good. It says we’re actually born good and it’s society that makes people bad. Borrowing from philosophers like Karl Marx, this view says society is just a system of oppressors and oppressed. According to revolutionaries, if we could just get rid of classes, just get rid of inequality in society, then we would have a truly just and peaceful world. So instead of fixing individuals in order to fix society, all you have to do is fix society in order to fix individuals.

Now, to be clear, some societies are truly unjust and they inhibit individual moral development as a result. True virtue can’t exist in society as long as evils like slavery or abortion are legal. But while true social justice is necessary for human flourishing, it’s not sufficient for that goal. Pope Benedict XVI said the following of Karl Marx in his encyclical Spe salvi, “Marx thought that once the economy had been put right, everything would automatically be put right. His real error is materialism. Man, in fact, is not merely the product of economic conditions and is not possible to redeem him purely from the outside by creating a favorable economic environment.”

You can see this error in those who still try to promote the insane idea of police abolition in spite of its obvious failures in the wake of cities that tried variants of this after the riots of 2020. Here’s Constantine Anthony, the mayor of Burbank, California, back in September of this year, talking about how we need a police-less society

Complete transformative change in our society to move to a police-less state, meaning the fundamental understanding of how we convict, catch, chase, crime and criminology and treat people in jails and prisons and all of that, is flawed. We are still living in sort of a quasi-20th century ideology of you do something bad, you got to get punished. That works when you’re five.

Notice once again, the disdain for the idea that we are moral agents who can be held accountable for our actions. When Anthony says, “You do something bad, so you have to be punished,” he’s criticizing the idea of retributive punishment. Only human beings are capable of choosing to do good or evil, so only human beings can be held responsible for their actions.

What’s underlying his and other people’s support for police abolition is the idea that crime, they usually, they don’t call it sin or evil, crime is a sign that a person’s needs were not met, and so if we had just met their needs, they wouldn’t commit crimes. This idea, like other dumb ideas, it starts as it often does in academia with articles like Barbara Fried’s 2013 piece, Beyond Blame. It’s summarized in this way in the article’s abstract, “The philosophy of personal responsibility has ruined criminal justice and economic policy. It’s time to move past blame.” Fried then writes, “The reality is that we are all at best compromised agents whether by biology, social circumstance, or brute luck. The differences among us are differences of degree that do not admit of categorical division into the normal and the abnormal.”

So under this view, we’re all victims and we are all criminals, so go easy on the criminals. On an interesting side note, Fried’s son Sam Bankman-Fried, was just found guilty on seven counts of fraud in relation to a cryptocurrency scandal that resulted in him stealing $8 billion from his customers. He could end up in jail for the rest of his life. This is his mother here in one of the courtroom sketches.

Make of this biographical detail what you will, but you also see this attitude in the 2022 article, The Role of the Victim in the Criminal Legal System published in the Brooklyn Law Review. And notice the scare quotes around the word victim. That’s intentional. She says that, “The failure to address the root causes and cyclical nature of violence perpetuates a racialized narrative of individual culpability and a stark moral binary between those who harm and those who are harmed.” Oh, heaven forbid we note that there are people who harm and people who are harmed, and we blame the former, not the latter. She even claims we must, Recognize the victimhood of those who harm and conversely, the harm committed by victims.” For more on this, I definitely recommend Christine Rosen’s article Criminals and Their Apologists. It’s a great resource on this issue.

Now this mindset then enters the popular imagination through the media’s sympathetic portrayal of so-called oppressed criminals, and far Left prosecutors who refuse to punish those who they say we cannot blame for their actions. Now, there are cases where an individual raised in a horrible environment is less culpable for his actions, but those exceptions do not absolve criminals at large of their moral accountability, especially since many people grow up in awful circumstances and do not become criminals, and some people grow up in very good circumstances and still choose to become criminals.

The idea of blaming all crime on social inequality has even led some prosecutors to quit their jobs in protest. Chicago’s Jason Poje blasted the Cook County State Attorney’s office for failing to hold criminals accountable for their actions and then said in his exit email, “Once we decide that it’s worth risking citizens’ lives to have a little social experiment, the balance is lost. The unavoidable consequences are what we are witnessing in real time. An increase in crime of all kinds, businesses and families pulling up stakes and the bodies piling up.” The natural end result of these sociological excuses for criminal behavior, it ultimately ends up in positions like Anthony’s that says since we can’t blame people for their actions, well, we shouldn’t have police at all. A 2015 article in The Nation sums up this view. Well, it says, “Abolish the police. Instead, let’s have full social, economic and political equality.”

And that’s not just a quirk of the article’s headline, by the way. The author Mikkel Denzel Smith writes, “When I say abolish the police, I’m usually asked what I would have us replace them with. My answer is always the same. Full social, economic and political equality, but that’s not what’s actually being asked.” So once again, notice the error wrongdoing isn’t the result of a rational being choosing evil and thus being able to bear the consequences of his actions. Instead, wrongdoing is our fault because society failed to provide a passive lump of clay what he needed to be molded into an ideal citizen. This later showed up in media with pundits saying that when citizens use force to defend themselves from violent criminals and the criminal dies unintentionally, it is the person defending himself who should be primarily blamed. One of my favorite YouTube channels. Freedom Tunes, skewered this idea really well in a video published earlier this year.

No, how could this happen? Where did society go wrong? How could the system fail this poor man? If only he’d had a better stool. Do you want some hot cocoa? I bet no one ever gave him hot cocoa. If only he had hot cocoa growing up, there would be no crime.

After a U.S. Marine used a chokehold to stop a mentally disturbed man who was threatening other passengers on the New York City subway, some commenters said that expecting public transit to not have dangerous people on it was a form of discrimination called sanism. One academic said in response, “Mad people experience sanism just as disabled people experience ableism and inaccessibility. The thing is, I think there is a real divide that occurs between mad people and people who claim to be sane or claim to not have mental illnesses. We are all mad people.” Now, obviously we should have compassion for the mentally ill, but what is truly insane is saying the concern about public safety in these situations is discriminatory. Once again, Freedom Tunes has a good parody of this.

The New York City Transit Authority’s Mental Health on Wheels program celebrates its 70th year of operating their famous mobile homeless shelters for the mentally unwell.

The program has proven to be an unmitigated success with millions of brave volunteers choosing to participate every day, but it’s not without its naysayers.

That’s right. Critics are beginning to become concerned that allowing volunteers into these shelters creates an unsafe environment for the mentally unwell who might be attacked while screaming at a child or threatening an elderly woman.

Another reason this view on moral accountability is anti-christian is because it’s often bundled up with what has been called the myth of the noble savage. The idea behind this is that society, especially Christian society, makes people bad through its hierarchies and inequalities, and if we just lived like more ancient indigenous people, we wouldn’t be selfish. We’d live in harmony with each other and mother earth and things like capitalism or the police wouldn’t make us evil. For example, Aphra Behn in her 1688 novel Orinoco describes indigenous Africans this way. “These people represented to me an absolute idea of the first state of innocence before man knew how to sin. And ’tis most evident and plain that simple nature is the most harmless, inoffensive and virtuous mistress. ‘Tis she alone, if she were permitted, that better instructs the world than all the inventions of man religion would hear, but destroy that tranquility. They possessed by ignorance and laws would but teach them to no offense of which now they have no notion.”

The eighteenth-century explorer, James Cook, aka Captain Cook, said the following of Australian aborigines he met. “They live in a tranquility which is not disturbed by the inequality of condition. The earth and sea of their own accord furnishes them with all things necessary for life. They covet not magnificent houses, household stuff.” Under this view, Christianity and the salvation it gives from sin is not the solution, it’s actually the problem. It’s what makes people wrongly think that people are evil rather than evil societies. They say we need to instead tear down modern culture, tear down modern religion with its evils of inequality and hierarchy. We need to do a 180 and embrace the egalitarian ways of our ancestors instead.

But what are we supposed to do until we achieve perfect equality? Which is never going to happen, by the way, because people are unequal in talent and ability. In fact, Pope Leo XIII said in Rerum Novarum, this kind of equality found in pleasant dreams would lead to the leveling down of all to a like condition of misery and degradation. So to reiterate, what do we do until we get to this critical point? Well, indigenous people, they didn’t have police. When people disagreed, they just sat in peace circles to discuss the infraction that happened. One article about police abolition endorses this approach as an alternative to the police. It says the following. “This is a peace circle, a style of community meeting practiced by indigenous peoples around the world, including some Native Americans for centuries. The practice draws on the abolitionist notion that pre-modern methods of conflict resolution provide valuable alternatives to today’s over-reliance on police and prisons. The organizers argue that plenty of cultures successfully addressed harm and practiced non-violent conflict resolution before the invention of policing in the 1800s.”

However, the myth of the noble savage becomes just that a myth when you actually study ancient history and cultures. For example, many of these indigenous tribes practice what we would now call “total war” in order to compete for resources. Historian Mark [inaudible 00:18:11] provides one vivid example. He writes, “Although military historians tend to reserve the concept of total war for conflicts between modern industrial nations, the term nevertheless most closely approaches the state of affairs between the Pawnees and the Sioux and Cheyennes. Both sides directed their actions not solely against warrior combatants, but against the people as a whole. Non-combatants were legitimate targets. Indeed, the taking of a scalp of a woman or child was considered honorable because they signified that the scalp taker had dared to enter the very heart of the enemy’s territory.”

William McLeod wrote an article back in 1937 about what he saw firsthand and how crime was prosecuted in Native American territories and it wasn’t with peace circles. He writes, “Severe flogging, even to the point of death and the destruction of the offender’s horses, dogs, tent, robes, and other property, even to the point where he has left destitute were the usual punishments. The small town of Alice Springs in Australia is the stabbing capital of the world because many of the aboriginals who live near the town still enforce their age-old practice of administering criminal justice through controlled stabbings. Dr. Abraham Jacobs studied the issue and published a 2007 paper on the subject which says the following. “Traditional punishment is still practiced in central Australia and thus explains the high number of thigh injuries. A particular pattern of traditional stab injuries was also noted. Medial thigh to kill, posterior thigh to permanently disable, and lateral thigh to punish.” To summarize, you can’t have a perfect society by trying to return to some mythical pre-modern state that never really existed.

You also can’t have a perfect society through the mythical Marxist revolution that’s never succeeded. You can never have a perfect society because society is made up of sinful people. What you can have is a society that soberly recognizes this fact, and so it helps people. It helps families instill virtue among individuals and then holds those individuals truly accountable for their actions. Ideally, society would order people towards their true temporal goods and true spiritual goods, but at the very least, even if a society is not religious, it can still order people towards natural goods. By having natural law enshrined into civil law. St. Paul eloquently describes how society fits into God’s plan for human beings.

In his letter to the Romans in Chapter 13, he writes the following. “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities for there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore, he who resists the authorities resists what God has appointed and those who resist will incur judgment. For rulers are not a terror to good contact, but to bad. Would you have no fear of him who is an authority? Then do what is good and you’ll receive his approval. For he is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid for he does not bear the sword in vain. He is the servant of God to execute his wrath on the wrongdoer.”

Now, in some cases, civil authorities become corrupt and perpetuate human rights abuses, and in those cases we have to obey the higher biblical principle found in Acts 5:29, where Peter tells the Sanhedrin, “We must obey God rather than man.” But when the state is justly enforcing the principles of natural law for the common good of society, then it is up to Christians to defend the system against an alternative rooted in magical thinking that denies original sin, denies free will, denies moral accountability, and in doing so, denies everyone else the ability to live in safety and order with one another and be able to truly promote human flourishing.

If we fail to do that, then we really will see the body counts start to rise. So thank you all so much for watching and I hope you have a very blessed day.

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