No single teaching can be acceptable to everyone. Nevertheless, we expect those who embrace one teaching not to simultaneously embrace its opposite. For example, you can’t believe in both capitalism and communism, or atheism and God. And so one struggles to understand a worldview in progressive politics today: a reverence for nature, and, at the same time, a denial of nature when it comes to human beings.

In popular discourse, these two opposing beliefs often take the form of extreme environmentalism and extreme gender politics. Extreme environmentalism commands people to think of nature as a kind of great temple to be worshipped. Extreme gender politics, on the other hand, brushes nature aside. DNA means nothing; if a man says he’s a woman or a woman says she’s a man, that’s all that matters. The question is, how can people worship nature and want to get back to nature, but then say there is nothing natural in sexuality and that it is all a social construct?

Conservatives mock all of this, because they can see parts of the contradiction. But they can’t see into its depths, since they often have a worldview equally contradictory. In fact, much of humanity has believed in opposing ideas for centuries. This is because three different religions have tugged at people’s minds, pulling them this way and that. To understand the progressive contradiction, and the catastrophe toward which it is ushering us, we must first look at an earlier contradiction and the catastrophe that resulted from it.

Three Religions and a Catastrophe

Early on in my medical career, I took care of a religiously devout patient who was scheduled to donate a kidney to a stranger. When she spoke of her belief in God I listened with gravity and courtesy, although I myself was secular. At one point she asked me if I thought she was doing the right thing. I demurred, yet had I spoken truthfully, I would have told her that I would give a kidney to myself because I was most important, or to a family member, but only to certain ones because some I didn’t like, and then maybe to a friend, but beyond that I would not donate at all, and certainly not to a stranger. The last act seemed crazy to me, given the surgical risk.

My error in all this was to think of myself as the secular party. I was not. I was as religious as she was. Only mine was a different religion.

Religion has many definitions, but the simplest may be the best: Religion is how people define their relationship to the infinite world that surrounds them. For “conventional” religious people, such as religious Christians and Jews, their most important relationship is with God. For others, their most important relationship is with some group—for example, communists prioritize their relationship with their class, nationalists with their nation, racists with their ethnic group, and bourgeois parents with their families. Others put their relationship with themselves first; they prioritize their personal happiness. Plenty of Americans fit in this last category, ranging from libertarians to liberals.

These three fundamental relationships have defined religion in the West for more than two millennia. Most morality flows from these relationships, which leads to conflict, since different moralities arise as a result. For example, an avowed communist thinks it right to betray his nation to help his class, while a nationalist thinks it wrong. A woman thinks it right to marry someone of lower status, while a bourgeois father, worried about the family name, thinks it wrong. The conflict between the moralities never ends, as people cannot behave otherwise until they alter their relationship with the infinite world around them—and many of them never will.

Some people have tried to meld the different religions, resulting in their holding contradictory beliefs. For example, some Christians prize their personal happiness while still calling themselves Christians. Some Christians prize their class—they call themselves Christian socialists. Some Christians prize their nation or race—they call themselves Christian nationalists. None of this makes sense. Christianity (and Judaism for that matter) holds that one’s highest aim in life should be to carry out the will of God. It says nothing about loving oneself, one’s class, or one’s nation first. Indeed, what emerges from all this is not just contradiction but hypocrisy, as people skillfully pretend and deceive others. They officially embrace Christianity but their true motivation behind their behavior is, in fact, their love for their group or for themselves.

This was yesterday’s contradiction. But if people could just love everyone, reformers proclaimed, the contradiction would disappear. The effort to make this happen led to some of the 20^th century’s major political catastrophes.

Christianity preaches love, but until the late Middle Ages, most knowledgeable people distinguished religious love—whether one calls it “charity” or agape—from sensual love. In the centuries to follow, the distinction faded. In fact, many clergymen envisioned a new alliance between religious love and sensual love that would let people enjoy the happiness of a private passion while, at the same time, forever coaxing them to widen their circle of sensual love to include all mankind, thereby spreading sensual love ever wider and wider, thus moving them closer to God’s perfect love.

This was the plan: Every man loves himself, which is natural and needs no incentive; then he loves his family, which brings him happiness; then his tribe, which supports and protects him; then his race, which may not be so instinctive, but is also common. From here, the love impulse faces a steeper climb. A man is encouraged to love his countrymen, who speak his language and share his traditions, yet love for one’s country is less real than love for oneself or one’s family, since loving a nation involves loving strangers. At this aggregate of humanity, the man’s power to love begins to wane. Yet, despite this weakness, the man is coaxed to take one final step and expand his love to include all humanity.

By the 18^th and 19^th centuries, humanitarians had adopted a secular version of the plan: Expand the kingdom of love to build a new global community of people who will live together in peace, although not in the name of God. Extend an individual’s love ever outward until it reaches all of humanity.

Yet so long as people fell short of loving all humanity, the intensification of all the parochial loves—each supposedly a necessary step along the way to loving all humanity—destabilized society. People who loved themselves or their families most were troubling, but far worse were the racists, the communists, the fascists, and the ultra-nationalists, who built new political ideologies based on their respective idealized communities, each of which envisioned total strangers coming together in a group and loving each other most.

This was the plan’s fatal flaw. People were encouraged to intensify their love for others, to join in consciousness with an ever-expanding number of individuals, with loving all humanity the final goal. But it is impossible to know “humanity” in the concrete. Humanity is a fiction; it cannot be loved. The love that people felt for others in their immediate life lost its efficacy as the objects of love grew more distant. The concept of humanity evoked no feeling in people.

Disaster loomed. With the threat of communism, fascism, racism, and ultra-nationalism rising at the turn of the 20^th century, it became all the more essential to widen the sphere of love to include all humanity, to keep the peace. Yet by doing so, by calling on people to look beyond their personal lives toward some ideal community, and to love strangers, the reformers only made things worse, as the goal of loving all humanity could not be reached. With their parochial loves stoked, people simply grew more racist, nationalist, classist, and tribalist.

The end result was catastrophe: the First World War (nationalism), the Second World War (fascism and racism), and the Russian Revolution (communism).

The Progressive “Contradiction”

Several years ago, I attended a humanities conference where the subject of California’s water restrictions came up. Most of the participants supported the restrictions to help vulnerable fish, although the restrictions also threatened the livelihoods of thousands of farmers. When I announced that I cared more about the farmers than the fish, one professor smirked, and replied in a condescending tone, “I care more about the fish than the farmers.”

The professor espoused other conventional progressive views. She revered nature and harbored a special hatred for developers. She subscribed to identity politics, and supported Black Lives Matter and undocumented Latino immigrants struggling against deportation. She voiced support for the poor and called for an expanded welfare state. She declared all gender to be a social construct and said people should be able to choose their gender. Her positions were closely reasoned and not simply delivered under the influence of a hypnotic spell. Yet the contradiction between her first and last points, revering nature on the one hand and ignoring it on the other, seemed lost on her.

My first instinct was to lump her in with the hypocrites of yesteryear, albeit with a small substitution. The professor saw life’s meaning in personal happiness; she believed every individual should be able to decide his or her gender. She also saw life’s meaning in the well-being of a particular group; she supported people of color and the poor. She also saw life’s meaning in service to the Will that created her, only in her case that Will was not God’s but nature’s, which she thought divine. Yet a person cannot profess three relationships with the infinite world. One must prevail.

To trap her in a contradiction, I asked her: Would you surrender your tenured position at the college to an immigrant or a person of color? Would you cancel your plane ticket to Europe to spare the atmosphere extra carbon dioxide? In other words, whom do you love most: yourself, some group, or nature?

When religious people feel themselves caught in a contradiction, usually a shocked hush arises. They look embarrassed and worried; their consciences are uneasy; their split personality has caught up with them. This sometimes happens when a presumably devout religious man is caught having passed on the collection plate at church, or when a presumably devout religious woman is exposed as a bigot. The compelling spell of religion’s message—love all humanity through love of God—is hard to resist, and while it cannot easily overcome people’s love for themselves or their group, it has the power to sap their will and produce strain beneath the surface whenever they stray from it. To force religious people to admit that their self-love or group love is greater than their love for God can be a humiliating experience.

None of this happened with the professor. She was not crushed when exposed. As for the poor farmers threatened by water restrictions, their demise she assumed to be a matter of course. She scoffed at the idea of giving up her job for someone else. She hadn’t cheated to get her professorship, she said; she hadn’t skipped to the front of the line or snuck in through a back door; the only problem was a job shortage that more government jobs, paid for with higher taxes, would fix, she declared. The carbon dioxide challenge left her incredulous, as if only a fool would skip a European vacation to save the planet. She enjoyed the luxurious life. Sure, she worried about climate change, but she also had other things on her mind.

The professor said all this without fear of contradiction, because there was no contradiction, I realized. She had only one religion—love of self—and that’s all she ever had. True, she cared for certain disadvantaged groups, but she never loved them; she was not even a member of one. She cared for nature, but she never loved nature. If caring for nature were inconvenient, she would simply stop caring. Nature existed for her pleasure—and pristine nature gave her pleasure, which is why she wanted it to remain pristine. Nevertheless, her caring for nature was merely an extension of her own self-love. She even expressed the urgency of climate change through her self-love. “Climate change is going to ruin my life and my future!” she insisted. Her mindset recalls that of the affluent white liberals in Nantucket who strongly supported wind energy, but then opposed building windmills in Nantucket Sound when it threatened to ruin their view.

Saint Augustine explained how a love for nature that bordered on the religious could, in fact, be a concealed form of self-love. In the fourth century, he fought against Manicheism, a religious system that rivaled Christianity. The Manicheans believed nature was divine, in the sense that bits of the divine (called Light) lived in every animal and plant. Manicheans were forbidden to eat meat because the divine part supposedly escaped when the animal died, leaving only filth (called Darkness), thereby defiling anyone who consumed it.

All this was vanity, Augustine declared. Such reverence for nature was, at bottom, self-love, a way for people to imagine themselves superior to others through diet. Yet who is nobler, Augustine asked: the man who eats small amounts of meat, politely and respectfully, or the man who lusts after heaps of fruits, vegetables, and bread, who sups all night on the pile, who stuffs his face grossly, who chews with his mouth open, and who passes gas in public both from above and below while doing so?¹ According to Manicheism, the latter is more moral, because the food is more moral, which is ridiculous, Augustine said; it is not what goes into a man’s mouth that defiles him but what comes out.

Augustine’s criticism of the Manicheans applies to today’s extreme nature lovers: The obsession with golden melons and shining berries; the way you pick through produce, fussing over whether vegetables are organically grown, as if looking for crumbs of Light amid a sea of factory-produced heathen Darkness, comes from a vain delusion that you can search for God with nose and palate.

Self-love rears its head again, Augustine declared, when the Manicheans searched for God with eyes and ears. The Manicheans were the extreme environmentalists of their age. They revered nature and saw the divine in nature; they dared not even pick a fig for fear that it might cry. They wanted nature left untouched; humans only brought contamination, they insisted.

We hear similar arguments among today’s extreme environmentalists. Augustine’s riposte is still relevant: Extreme environmentalists reject building an amusement park in the forest because it is too bright, too loud, too stinky, and too cramped, but, to paraphrase Augustine, are not the colors of flowers brighter and more varied; are not the sounds of rushing water louder; are not the smells of animal waste more putrid; is not the dense forest more cramped and claustrophobic?² Why does the whiteness of a flower speak to you but not the whiteness of painted metal? Why do you call the blue ocean one of God’s treasures while a sea of blue cars is despised? Like the Manicheans, today’s extreme environmentalists sniff contemptuously at human-made objects, yet, to paraphrase Augustine, do not the ingredients that go into metal and paint come from nature? And if so, why does the intervening hand of humanity defile those ingredients? And if humanity defiles them, then why do you grow angry when trees planted by human beings are cut down to make way for an amusement park also made by human beings?

Such reverence for nature, joined to a belief that one has the power to discriminate between good and evil matter, Augustine said, springs not from a love of nature but from a love of self, from a vain and false delusion that one can discern the presence of the divine in material things. It is a delusion that allows people to imagine that they are living on the highest plane of existence.

Such vanity has persisted through the centuries. Today’s progressives, for example, would find a kindred spirit in the 18^th-century philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau, who spoke of his reverence for nature, and how contact with nature gave him a mad rush. Walking along a river, smelling the flowers and trees, he imagined himself the humble exile, the thoughtful artist, the quiet hero, the conscience of society, obliged to return to the vile city and chase its contemptible dollars, yet, until then, cherishing a moment of divine beauty that put him on the same level as the distant snow-capped mountains. When Rousseau smelled nature, his nose was altogether in the air.

Christianity is a religion of love that competes with other loves. It sets half-hearted believers up for the charge of hypocrisy when they claim to love God but really love their group or themselves. No such tension exists in progressive politics when people revere nature on the one hand and view all sexuality as a social construct on the other. There is no competition between different loves and therefore no contradiction. Both points of view flow out of a love of self. Even nature is appreciated with an aristocratic nose, one with an upward tilt.

It is easy for someone who strives for personal happiness to identify with other individuals striving for the same thing. In this spirit, the professor mentioned above supported transgender rights. Yet supporting transgender rights demanded of her no real sacrifice, as nothing about the demand inconvenienced her. Lucky for the transgendered that the price of the professor’s caring for their personal happiness came cheap; otherwise she might not have paid it. After all, she refused to take a small pay cut to help adjunct professors at her college get health insurance.

A Caring Catastrophe

During a radio interview several months ago, Virginia Governor Ralph Northam appeared to defend infanticide. Commenting on pending abortion legislation, he said a deformed baby would be delivered, the infant would be resuscitated if the parents desired it, and then “a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother,” ominously suggesting that the discussants might take away the life they had just returned. Progressives pushed back and said Governor Northam had meant something altogether different. Nevertheless the sense that society’s moral foundations had shifted was inescapable. Governor Northam’s error was simply to have introduced the new approach unwittingly, clumsily, and halfheartedly.

As a physician, I was not surprised by what Governor Northam, also a physician, had said, for there is a natural, unthinking tendency among doctors to treat other people like animals (who are commonly euthanized). Doctors’ minds are so focused on anatomy and physiology, which humans share with animals, that sometimes they confuse the two groups. At the very least, doctors do not love their patients; they only care for their patients, and caring is how a human being feels toward an animal. Animals are handled with care; they are handled with love only if the handler pretends they are substitute children, best friends, or blood brothers—that is, if the handler pretends they are human. Love is a feeling reserved for a relationship between one human being and another. Caring, on the other hand, has within it a high degree of indifference. This is why religion (especially Christianity) embraces love as the one attribute that has the potential to lift humanity out of the rough, brutal ways of the animal kingdom.

When Christianity was the West’s pole star and love was the message, catastrophe ensued when reformers imagined joining humanity together through love and stoking people’s parochial loves to get there. Today, nature is the West’s pole star (or at least for the “progressive” West). As a vehicle to express self-love, nature is far more amenable than Christianity and God were. No more contradiction. The problem is that in nature, animals care for one another rather than love one another. The result for humanity is a dynamic as frightful as the earlier one.

The law of nature, which doctors and scientists know well, is the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest. It declares that each person, in order to attain his or her well-being or that of his or her group, must be the fittest, so that it is some other person or group that perishes. Many people fear this law and its application to life, which is why progressives believe in “caring” to ameliorate its consequences. Even then, the law of nature peeps through. A deformed baby will not survive in nature; Governor Northam simply proposed moving that inevitable process along, albeit in typical caring fashion, by making the baby “comfortable” before killing it.

Because the law of nature is contrary to any known morality, progressives substitute another idea from nature as a restraining force. This is the plan: People are no different from animals, and just as animals live in herds, so do people. Their desire for company will help to suppress their anti-social tendencies. In addition, just as animals use force to suppress behavior harmful to the group, so will people. In sum, people will care for each other the way animals care for each other, and this will help preserve some semblance of morality.

The Christian dream of getting everyone to love humanity is replaced with the progressive dream of herding people together to restrain their natural urge to compete against one another and slaughter one another to survive. People are herded first into families; then into gender groups, sexual orientation groups, ethnic groups, tribal groups, disability groups, age groups, groups of poor, and so on, with each member sacrificing his or her individual self-interest for group self-interest. These groups are then expanded to include more people around the globe. Once humanity is united in the form of a single state, with a single government, the law of struggle will cease, argue progressives.

It is in this spirit that progressives push identity politics. The more that individuals are pushed into groups, the safer society will be, progressives think, while the more nations are pushed toward a single world state, the safer the world will be.

Yet a dangerous dynamic arises. No single state can arise, since progressives herd people in a way that permanently pits one group against another, even on a global scale—for example, women against men, blacks against whites, gays against straights, disabled against abled, Muslims against Christians, and so on. The struggle will always remain the struggle. It is the same struggle for existence as before, only it has been extended from the individual to the group. Even if a single state ever did come into being, which it cannot, the struggle would continue—for example, between human beings and the animal kingdom. Human beings prejudiced against animals have already been accused of “speciesism”—that is, of thinking themselves superior to animals. With the establishment of the single state, the law of struggle would continue. But the single state will never come into being. If the law of struggle is nature’s eternal law, then it cannot be conveniently cast aside by arguments about social progress, or diminished from within by some ethical code that springs out of nowhere. The various groups will fight each other, although more viciously than individuals do, since groups can arm themselves more heavily.

Not only will groups fight other groups, they will also break apart into smaller groups. Progressives encourage people to care for each other in their group, and the groups, in fact, demand this. But caring conceals a deeper self-interest; unlike love, it is not a strong bond of affection, and the law of struggle persists within it in a discrete, latent form. Inevitably, people within a group will refuse to sacrifice their own advantages in order to preserve the group, and the group will break apart because of competitive interests arising from within.

For example, the concept of intersectionality is supposed to unify different sub-groups under an all-encompassing framework, as overlapping systems of oppression bring them together. But fights are already occurring between the subgroups. For example, at women’s conferences, poor black feminists have criticized wealthy white feminists for being part of the corporate system of oppression. Transgendered people have criticized gay people, including tennis player Martina Navratilova, writer Andrew Sullivan, and activist Julia Beck, for pushing the agenda of gays over that of the transgendered, or, in the case of Navratilova and Beck, pushing the agenda of feminists over that of the transgendered. These people were once all united, but to escape domination, they must break with others in their group and concentrate their hatred and fear of the rest of the world in a new and smaller group. The group may break up altogether into lone individuals who know only self-love and the law of the struggle—the very danger that progressives tried to ameliorate in the first place.

The life of the man who knows only self-love and the law of the struggle has already set the tone of life in the progressive West. That man fights on his own, like a lone wolf, and like a wolf he is full of hate, and thinks it right to hate, and that all his angry feelings must be given free rein. He wanders about, his spirit tossed; he gets into fights; he pushes people aside or gets pushed aside in turn; he goes through life afraid and full of hatred for the world.

Hatred is a feeling very difficult to guard against. In the Christian era, so much emphasis was put on love, yet the end result was hatred that brought wars and revolutions that killed millions. This was not Christianity’s fault, but it testifies to the fact that even love can serve as a springboard for hate. The danger then was group hate on a mass scale. Today, the danger is the lone man who hates on a mass scale.

Identity politics struggles against hate, but it also preaches hate; indeed, hatred becomes a kind of “sacred” feeling in identity politics, a way to signal virtue among its practitioners. In this respect it is the opposite of Christianity. Science, in turn, tells people that they are nothing more than animals, and that the proper attitude toward people is to care for them. Nothing good can come from this combustible mix.

Take our lone wolf. The world for him becomes a steady parade of media impressions floating mistily in his head—of people to envy, to resent, to blame, and to hate. He is alone with his thoughts in a vast alien world in which everything moves slowly and stealthily, and everyone lives a strange, watchful, and rapacious life.

What does such a man think? If he is an animal who wants to retain his dignity, he takes his hatred into his lonely life, and thinks, “To see everything as it is, in order to change everything that is.” He becomes occupied with one thought—one hate—to which he returns unceasingly, no matter what other thoughts fill his mind. He never parts with it; it is the last and only thing that remains to him. If he creates a murderous plan, he will do everything in his power to fulfill it.

Should it surprise that two-thirds of the worst mass shootings in American history have come in the last 20 years—with most of these crimes committed by lonely, half-crazed men? We know more mass shootings will follow. It has nothing to do with the gun laws. If guns were unavailable other weapons would be found. It has to do with the fact that there is very little these days in progressive culture to restrain and condemn the animal side of people’s lives; at the same time, it stokes their hate. This is the catastrophe that arises when nature becomes humanity’s pole star, a human being becomes nothing more than an animal, and caring replaces love: a world of struggle and violence, at every level and at every turn.