https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=0O4vXsQaJN0
I’ve always been struck by one of Elie Wiesel’s works, it was of course in Auschwitz, I don’t even know, The Trial of God. Did you ever read that one? No. It’s worth reading and there’s a version of it he replays in another of his books, I think, The Gates to the Forest. Anyhow, it was something that I think Wiesel saw in Auschwitz, but there was a night where in the camp, some rabbis decide that they will put God on trial and Wiesel describes it in extraordinary detail and it’s riveting, the silence in the room and eventually the case for the prosecution, the case for the defence, given by very, very learned rabbis from Poland and nobody could know more than these men routinely knew, which is a reminder of what was lost, but in the end they find God guilty. See, the Jews never did that in the Old Testament. Well no, but then something very important happens, which is that they find God guilty and there’s a silence in the heart and they realise what they’ve done and then somebody one of the rabbis says, OK, it’s Friday night, we need to go and do our prayers and they do. That’s kind of reminiscent of what happens in the Grand Inquisitor. Yes, exactly. When the Inquisitor leaves the door open for Christ, right, even though he’s doomed him to hypothetically to death because he’s no longer necessary. Well, you know, in the story of Cain and Abel, Cain puts God on trial because Cain is making these sacrifices, which are second rate. Abel’s sacrifices are lauded in the stories, but Cain’s aren’t and there’s an intimation that they’re not of the highest quality. Now, Abel offers up animal material to God and Cain vegetative material and that plays into it as well, but Cain calls out God and says essentially something like, you know, I’m breaking myself in half here, working on my life and nothing’s going my way and your favoured son, Abel, for reasons that I can’t really understand is thriving on all fronts. What the hell is the problem with the cosmos you created? And God says, and I got this from reading multiple translations, God says, first of all, He says, if you do well, will you not be rewarded? That’s the first rejoinder. And the second rejoinder is something like sin crouches at your door like a sexually aroused predatory animal and you’ve invited it in to have its way with you. And so, and I’ve read a lot of the diary material of serial killers and sexual slayers and that sort of people, and you can be rest absolutely assured that they invited that spirit of resentment in and have been creatively interacting with it. So I was thinking too, you know, this issue of suffering and death, you know, imagine that you have a parent, let’s particularize it, because maybe the question isn’t what should the state do about exceptional suffering? Maybe that’s the wrong level of analysis. Maybe the right level of analysis is something like, what would you do if your father was dying a terrible death? And I would say, what you should have done was live the life that you should have lived so that at that point of unbelievable complexity, you’d be wise enough to make the appropriate decision and to see your way through, but that there would be no way that you could generalize that decision. It would only have to be made in a particularized manner. And you wouldn’t have the wisdom to make that decision properly if you hadn’t conducted your life with exceptional care. Nobody can make it for you. That’s for sure. No function. 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And if you’re fuzzy minded and demented enough because of your own lies that you’re incapable of such judgment, you’ll make the wrong decision and you’ll regret being alive as a consequence. Well, that’s one good reason not to do something that you’re going to regret. I mean, I’ve said for a long time that there should be a category, perhaps there is one, somebody watching can describe it to me, but I’ve thought for a long time there should be a category of argument which is recognized cannot be solved because somebody involved in the argument has done the thing and regrets it deeply, but at such a deep level that they could never face up to it. So the example I’ve always had in my mind is if you have an argument like the ethics of abortion, if there’s one person in the room who’s had an abortion, you’re very unlikely to get anywhere in the discussion because there is somebody who has everything on the line, everything at stake and either they regret it, in which case nothing, you can’t get anywhere in the discussion because you don’t want to open up that pit or they have to pretend not to care, in which case you have another glimpse into a pit. Now, actually, again, you and I talked about this last night, Helen Joyce made this brilliant observation about the trans issue recently, which was that we, for the rest of our lives, will all be facing a certain type of person who cares more about that issue than anyone else in the world because they’ve done the worst possible thing to their child and they will never concede it. Or to themselves. To themselves. They will never concede it. But moving away from that negative, if I may, you get back to this thing of people deceive themselves very often unless somebody comes along and says exactly that. That’s one of the things I’m fond of Nietzsche about, the person of resentment, is Nietzsche’s observation that the secular priest would be required to stand over the person’s life and say, you are right, there is somebody who has destroyed your life in this world, the person is you. Now, our mutual friend, Anthony Daniels, said that when he was a prison doctor, he was one of the few people who actually used to do this with his… He’s a remarkable person. He’s a wonderful man. And… That’s Theodore Dalrymple, for those of you watching, listening. He’s written great books. And he had the observation, he told me once that he quite often in prison would have people coming to him saying, oh, doctor, I think I need some pills of antidepressants. Why do you want antidepressants? I go, I think I’m depressed. Why do you think you’re depressed? I think I’m suffering from low self-esteem. He said he would reply, well, there’s one thing you’ve got right. Right. He said, almost without exception, whenever he did this, the patient laughed. Yeah. Because they’d been caught out. The point is, you’re in prison for doing a terrible crime. You ought to be depressed. That’s why it’s a penitentiary. It’s why it’s a penitentiary. You ought to be suffering. You ought to be questioning your self-esteem at this point. This is a very good time to do it. And you ought to… For like a decade. Yeah. And you ought to try to medicalize it away. And the state maybe shouldn’t help you too easily medicalize away whatever you’re feeling in that situation. But I was always struck by that story because I thought how few adults… I always say there are so few adults in the room these days, but there are so few adults who will stand over the life of anyone and say, I’m sorry, Barko, but it’s you.