Caught by Contagion

"Evil is caught by contagion. We are mimetic creatures. What we see, we tend to imitate, even if our imitation involves opposing what we see."

From Crisis

By Anthony Esolen, PhD

You are the company you keep. And here, the more agreeable you are, the more susceptible you are to the infection.

The seraph Abdiel has stood up against Satan’s lies to his subordinate angels and warned him to seek pardon from the Father and the Son while there is yet time. But Satan replies with haughtiness and contempt, telling Abdiel he had better get lost: “Fly, ere evil intercept thy flight.” Abdiel must bear up alone because none of all the hosts under Satan’s authority will listen to reason. He leaves, but not before he addresses Satan and his hosts one last time:

O alienate from Heaven, O Spirit accursed,
Forsaken of all good! I see thy fall
Determined, and this hapless crew involved
In thy perfidious fraud, contagion spread
Both of thy crime and punishment.

It is not the only time the poet Milton employs the image of contagion to describe the spread of evil or its punishment. No one then knew of germs, but they did know about contagion, literally what you catch by touch, even if the contact is through the air. They knew that the clothes of someone who had died of the plague should be burned—and Milton is certainly thinking here of the plague. Evil is caught by contagion. We are mimetic creatures. What we see, we tend to imitate, even if our imitation involves opposing what we see.

If you go to the less humane of social media websites, you will see such contagion in full rage, as if all mankind had not only caught the plague but was eager to spread it too. All is rancor, accusation, contempt, hatred, political scorekeeping, flippancy, self-congratulation, and hardness of heart. Imagine two people on separate dung heaps, festering with open sores, each accusing the other of stinking the worse. Nor can you keep yourself free of it. You go down into that valley of the plague-ridden and you find yourself behaving likewise. You become like the company you keep, even if you hate the company. 

I am reminded of the avaricious and the prodigal in Dante’s Inferno, who spend eternity in their separate teams, rolling boulders against each other and shouting out condemnations of the other team’s fault. When Dante suggests to his guide, Virgil, that he probably knows the names of some of these sinners, Virgil says there’s no point to it, as their “nothing-knowing life / Sinks them beneath all recognition now.” And Virgil had never seen the internet, with people boasting names that are not names.

Political hatred, of course, is not new in the world. Witness the last hundred years of the Roman republic. They began with the assassination of the Gracchi brothers, several years apart, in the late second century B.C., after the Roman state had crushed Carthage and sowed her fields with salt. “Carthago delenda est,” said the stern Cato the Elder, as the last words to every speech he made before the Senate.  

Carthage was indeed destroyed, deleted, we may say, though the Romans built it up again nearby. But once assassination became a politically acceptable way of getting rid of your enemies, and now that Rome was the most powerful player in the Mediterranean, the stage was set for Marius and Sulla and their armies, loyal not to Rome but to their paymaster and chief; the treacherous rebellion of Catiline; Caesar crossing the Rubicon with his armies to march on an ungrateful and fearful Rome that wanted him dead; his own assassination at the hands of the envious and vindictive and those who dreamed that there was a republic still to save; the proscriptions of Octavian, Marc Antony, and Lepidus, gangsters dickering and trading associates and kin to be assassinated.

You are the company you keep. And here, the more agreeable you are, the more susceptible you are to the infection. Think of a group of women at lunch, chatting about how stupid or frustrating their husbands are—or how stupid or frustrating they were, if a couple of them are divorced. The problem afflicts men in a different way. The more closely you identify yourself with the male platoon or crew or team, the more easily will you be led by an evil custom the group has adopted. Think of the locker room of a football team, with boys boasting of their conquests.

Can we not imitate the good as well as the bad? We can; but virtue by its nature is difficult. Nor is there anything in what is called (without any sense of irony) social media that encourages such imitation. Flippancy and scorn are easy. Insults and outrage are ready at your fingertips. But it is not easy to examine any human issue with due consideration to all its features, and to the variety of consequences if you get it wrong, and even sometimes the unwanted consequences if you get it right. It is not easy, so nobody does it. 

If you read political analyses from before 1900, as I often do from the old popular magazines I collect, you will see that even the most partisan writers will attempt to appear reasonable to all people of good will, and they cannot make that appearance unless there is some reality behind it. I think of Jacob Riis’ reportage on life among the poor in the slums of New York. Were it all noise and fulmination, no one would have listened to him; but he was not that way, and he understood very well that poverty and moral failures are mutually reinforcing and that the contagions caught among the poor are not only such things as influenza and cholera.

The best way to keep free of the contagion is to flee the bad company. But here we face two problems. First, it is getting more difficult to flee it. Every feature of what used to be an ordinary human life has been politicized. By that, I do not mean that it is a part of a healthy polis, a community of people who live together and work sometimes for the common good. I mean that it has become the object of politicians and their programs, and political passions and hatreds, and ambition and strife. 

Common people used to care for each other’s children; that was political in a healthy sense. Now we have calls for nationally-funded day care; that is political in a monstrous and unhealthy sense, making the former less likely, less imaginable. But the calls come with anger and demands.

My mother did not bang on the door of Mrs. Giovannini across the street, demanding that the old lady look after me for an hour while she went to the grocery store. There was no need. Mrs. Giovannini was glad to do it, and I was glad to go there. But now, all you hear are bangs on the door and shouts: “Let me in!” “Get lost!” “You owe me!” “Get your hand out of my pocket!” “You hate us!” “You deserve to be hated!” and so on. As in a mob, the loudest and most irrational voices prevail; which is why mobs are evil, no matter what has brought them together.

The second problem is that, unless we are in immediate moral danger, we should not wash our hands of the world and let it go to Hell. Those are our brothers and sisters marching lockstep into the infernal pit. Somehow, we must be like Jesus, who did not embroil Himself in the controversies between Pharisees and Sadducees, though both groups hated Him; who neither pandered to the Romans nor set Himself in useless opposition to their government; who was neither a Zealot nor a retreating Essene; who led a vigorous public life but also went to the mountains to pray; who had in mind the last days to come but never forgot about this day, now; who said, “Suffer the little children to come unto me.”

I cannot say I know how to do this. The temptation is always to fall back on what everyone else is doing—and thus to become infected. Perhaps it cannot be done alone. Perhaps we must ultimately fight the false “society” with a real one. After all, that is what Abdiel the faithful seraph did. He turned his back on “those proud towers to swift destruction doomed” and returned to the hosts of the faithful, who greeted him with “joy and acclamations loud, that one, / That of those many myriads fallen yet one / Returned not lost.”  

We need places to return to. It would be nice if they were neighborhoods, but those have been evacuated during most of people’s waking hours. It would be nice if they were schools, but schools have also been invaded by the noise and the mire of political passion. Can the Church provide them? I hope so. I don’t see anyone else who can.