What Is, Ought Be

“Get away! Get away, Jew!”

A bruised and bloodied German officer shouts it at a boy of about ten. He has already torn the coat off the boy’s back. He shoves him away, hard, and spits on him. One of the Red Army captors turns and levels a submachine gun. The officer stands there in his red cape and epaulets, filthy now.

The soldiers let the boy go.

Captain Klenzendorf was dragged off with a serene smile, and shot against a wall.

Taika Waititi’s Jojo Rabbit is a 2019 satirical comedy about Nazism. The boy is Jojo, who failed out of a Hitler Youth camp after refusing to kill a rabbit and whose imaginary friend is Adolf Hitler. The officer ran the camp. The film is a comedy and mostly stays one; this scene is one of the gutpunches between the laughs.

A man in a Nazi uniform, waiting to be shot, cursed a child as a Jew and knocked him to the ground. That is what the Russians saw. It is also mostly what happened.

In the year 2178, Marilyn Lee Cross stows away on an Emergency Dispatch Ship bound for the planet Woden. She is eighteen years old and weighs a hundred and ten pounds.

On a cruiser or a passenger liner her weight would not matter. An EDS is built to put lifesaving cargo onto a frontier world as fast as physics allows, and it carries enough fuel for the trip it was sent to make and not an ounce more. Six men on Woden have kala fever, and a tornado destroyed the serum they had. With her aboard, the ship does not land, and the six men die. Barton, the pilot, runs the figures every way they can be run. There is nothing else aboard to throw away.

Her brother Gerry is on Woden. Seeing him is the whole reason she is aboard. What she gets instead is a few minutes on the radio, and she spends them saying goodbye:

“You’re fading out, Gerry,” she said. “You’re going out of range. I wanted to tell you—but I can’t now. We must say goodbye so soon—but maybe I’ll see you again. Maybe I’ll come to you in your dreams with my hair in braids and crying because the kitten in my arms is dead; maybe I’ll be the touch of a breeze that whispers to you as it goes by; maybe I’ll be one of those gold-winged larks you told me about, singing my silly head off to you; maybe, at times, I’ll be nothing you can see, but you will know I’m there beside you.

“Think of me like that, Gerry; always like that and not—the other way.”

Dimmed to a whisper by the turning of Woden, the answer came back: “Always like that, Marilyn—always like that and never any other way.”

“Our time is up, Gerry—I have to go now.”

She walks into the airlock and tells Barton: “I’m ready.”

“The Cold Equations” is a 1954 science fiction short story by Tom Godwin, written for a magazine called Astounding Science Fiction. Its editor, John W. Campbell, kept sending it back, because Godwin kept coming up with ingenious ways to save the girl. The version that ran is the one where nothing works. The fuel is the fuel. The mass is the mass. The story’s argument is that the universe keeps no account of how innocent she is, and that sentiment is a luxury it does not extend.

The air went out of the lock, the ship quivered, and then, in Godwin’s words, there was “a vibration to the wall as though something had bumped the outer door in passing.” Six men on Woden lived.

We might say that a girl who did no wrong ought not to die that way. We might say that a man who curses a child and spits on him ought to be despised.

What is, is.

Hume

The third volume of A Treatise of Human Nature went on sale in 1740. Its author was twenty-nine, and the book did not sell well.

David Hume was a Scot, and by the verdict of his century and his country he was an infidel. He never claimed the title of atheist, but he wrote against miracles and against the argument from design, and the reputation attached itself to him. It cost him two university chairs, ethics at Edinburgh and logic at Glasgow. He took work as a librarian instead, and made his name and his money later, writing history.

One thing he put into that third volume was not a theory but a complaint about other men’s books. A moral philosopher would proceed soberly for pages, reasoning about what is and what is not, establishing the existence of God, setting out observations about human affairs. Then the verbs changed. Hume would suddenly find himself reading about what ought and ought not to be, and nobody ever marked the place where the is became ought. He did not say that crossing was forbidden. He said it was imperceptible, that it mattered far more than it looked, and that somebody had better explain how it is made. In every system of morality he had read, nobody had. The names came later, and they are larger than the thing: Hume’s Law, Hume’s guillotine, the is-ought barrier.

There is an answer older than the question. It says the gap is not there to be crossed, because being and goodness are not two things but one thing named twice. Augustine held that evil has no substance of its own, that it is a privation, a hole where a good should have been. Aquinas gave the positive half of it a formula the schools repeated for centuries: ens et bonum convertuntur. Being and good convert into each other.

Put plainly, that is an enormous claim. Not that the world contains good things. That existence and goodness are the same fact, and whatever is, is good in the measure that it is.

It held for a very long time.

Ivan

He is often remembered as an atheist. He is not one. Ivan Karamazov sits in a tavern with his younger brother Alyosha, a novice at the local monastery, and grants God without argument. He will grant the rest of it too: the moral order, and the harmony at the end of history when the mothers embrace the men who tore their children apart and everything is explained and forgiven. He grants all of it and says no anyway.

The Brothers Karamazov is Fyodor Dostoevsky’s last novel, serialized through 1879 and 1880 and finished a few months before he died. He was a Christian and an uneasy one. He wrote once that his hosanna had passed through a great furnace of doubt, and he had reason for the furnace. In 1849 he was arrested with the Petrashevsky circle, a group of young men who met to read banned books, and sentenced to death. On a December morning they were given white shirts to die in and marched into a square, where the first three were tied to posts and blindfolded, and the rifles came up. Dostoevsky was in the next three. The reprieve reached the square before the order to fire did, and he went to Siberia for four years of hard labor instead.

In May of 1878, while the novel was taking shape, his three-year-old son died of a seizure that lasted twelve hours. The child had been laughing that morning. Dostoevsky was epileptic, and his son had it from him, so he knew from the inside what he was watching. He went in June to the monastery at Optina Pustyn and sat with an elder there, who became the model for the holy monk in the book. The boy was called Alyosha. So is the brother in the tavern.

Ivan does not argue in the abstract. He has been collecting cases, and he sets them in front of his brother one at a time, and they are all about children.

A general in the days of serfdom keeps hounds. A boy of eight throws a stone and hurts the paw of the general’s favorite dog. The general has the child stripped naked, made to run, and torn to pieces by the pack in front of his mother.

A girl of five is beaten by her educated parents for wetting the bed. They smear her face with her own excrement and lock her all night in a freezing outhouse. Ivan asks his brother to account for her:

Can you understand why a little creature, who can’t even understand what’s done to her, should beat her little aching heart with her tiny fist in the dark and the cold, and weep her meek unresentful tears to dear, kind God to protect her?

Then he puts it directly. Suppose the whole happy future of the human race were yours to build, everything finally at peace, on one condition: that it required torturing a single child to death, and the entire structure had to rest on that child’s unavenged tears. Would you consent to be the architect on those conditions?

Alyosha, who is a novice, says no. He would not consent.

Ivan is not asking whether God exists. He believes God exists. He is declining the terms.

It’s not God that I don’t accept, Alyosha, only I most respectfully return Him the ticket.

Too high a price is asked for harmony, he says. It is beyond our means to pay so much to enter on it.

Job

A messenger comes to a man in the land of Uz and tells him the oxen and the donkeys are gone and the servants minding them are dead. While he is still speaking another arrives to say fire has fallen and burned up the sheep and the men with them. While that one is still speaking another arrives: the camels taken, those servants killed as well. And while he is still speaking, the last one comes in and says:

Thy sons and thy daughters were eating and drinking wine in their eldest brother’s house: And, behold, there came a great wind from the wilderness, and smote the four corners of the house, and it fell upon the young men, and they are dead.

Job 1:18–19

The man is Job. He is rich, and he is blameless, and the book says so before anything happens to him, because the case does not work unless he is. Then he loses his health too. Boils cover him from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head, and he sits in the ashes scraping himself with a piece of broken pottery.

He does not bear it quietly. He curses the day he was born. He accuses God of hunting him like a lion, and of watching him so closely that he is not left alone long enough to swallow his own spit. He wants a hearing. He wants the charges read out.

The book does something to its reader that it never does to Job. The prologue lets you watch the arrangement being made, between God and the figure the Hebrew calls the accuser. You are told why. Job is not, and when God finally speaks to him, he still is not.

Three friends come and sit with him. For seven days they say nothing, which is the best thing anyone does in the entire book. Then they begin to explain. Their case is a reasonable one: God is just, suffering is not arbitrary, and if Job is suffering then something must account for it. Since God cannot be at fault, Job must be. They press it gently at first and then not gently, because he will not take it. It runs for nearly thirty chapters, three friends in three rounds, and then a fourth man who has not been mentioned before arrives and adds six more.

When God finally answers, out of a whirlwind, he does not mention any of it.

He asks Job where he was when the foundations of the earth were laid. He asks whether he has entered the springs of the sea, or seen the gates of death, or entered the storehouses of the snow, whether he can bind the Pleiades or send out lightning with instructions. He describes the wild ass, who laughs at the city and will not hear the driver shouting. He describes the ostrich, who leaves her eggs in the dirt and is not troubled about them, because God withheld her share of wisdom. He describes the war horse, who smells the battle far off and cannot be made afraid. Then Behemoth, and then Leviathan for an entire chapter, in the tone of a man showing off an animal he is fond of.

There is no theodicy in it, no defense of God, no mention of Job’s children. No explanation, no accounting, and not one word about why any of it happened. It is a description of what exists.

Job answers:

I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee. Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes.

Job 42:5–6

Then God turns to the friends.

My wrath is kindled against thee, and against thy two friends: for ye have not spoken of me the thing that is right, as my servant Job hath.

Job 42:7

The men who defended God are told they did not speak of him rightly. The man who said God hunted him like a lion, and would not curse him for it, did. God calls him his servant.

Eliphaz

The friends were not stupid and they were not cruel. They were looking for the reason. God is just. Job is in the ashes. Therefore there is an account that makes it right, and if we sit here long enough we will find it.

That is a crossing from is to ought, performed in the dark, at exactly the place Hume said it happens. Job’s ruin is a fact. That it was deserved, or corrective, or necessary to some larger good, is a verdict, and no quantity of the first has ever produced the second. The friends never noticed making the move. Nobody does.

Eliphaz inferred Job’s guilt from Job’s ruin, and put the inference in God’s mouth. That is what God tells him he got wrong.

Ivan gets the same treatment, and he has to. Every reply that comes with an explanation is a version of what the friends said. Suffering builds souls. Suffering is the cost of a freedom worth having. Evil is a privation and not a positive thing, so God did not make it. The harmony at the end will be worth the price of the ticket.

A better theodicy is still a theodicy. It can be subtler than anything Eliphaz managed, and it is still an inference handed to a man in the ashes.

Back at the table, Alyosha has been listening to all of it, and he breaks. He tells his brother he cannot admit it. Then he plays the only card he has: there is a Being who can forgive everything, all and for all, because he gave his innocent blood for all and everything.

Ivan has been waiting all night for him to say it. He answers:

Ah! the One without sin and His blood! No, I have not forgotten Him; on the contrary I’ve been wondering all the time how it was you did not bring Him in before, for usually all arguments on your side put Him in the foreground.

Then he tells his brother he wrote a poem about a year ago, and never wrote it down, and remembers it, and would Alyosha like to hear it.

The poem is called “The Grand Inquisitor,” and it has had a life of its own outside the novel ever since. Christ comes back to earth in sixteenth-century Seville, the day after almost a hundred heretics have been burned in the square. The people know him instantly. The old Cardinal watches them know him, has him arrested, and comes down to the cell alone at night to explain where he went wrong. He thought too well of people. He gave them a freedom they were never strong enough to carry: freedom of will. He says it to his face:

Nothing is more seductive for man than his freedom of conscience, but nothing is a greater cause of suffering.

It takes the old man a very long time, and Ivan has built it with everything he has.

Christ does not answer a word of it. Ivan tells it this way:

But He suddenly approached the old man in silence and softly kissed him on his bloodless aged lips. That was all His answer. The old man shuddered. His lips moved. He went to the door, opened it, and said to Him: “Go, and come no more … come not at all, never, never!”

Ivan stops. And Alyosha, who has sat through the hounds and the outhouse and the returned ticket and the whole of the poem, leans over and kisses his brother on the lips.

“That’s plagiarism,” cried Ivan, highly delighted. “You stole that from my poem. Thank you though.”

Alyosha has no counter-argument and he does not attempt one. Dostoevsky, who had built Ivan’s case himself and knew exactly how strong it was, wrote in his last notebook that the reply to the Grand Inquisitor is the whole book. Not an argument. Not a refutation. A novel: a monk’s life, a brother’s conduct, and a great deal of ordinary behavior.

You cannot reason your way from what is to what ought to be. Hume asked for the reasoning and never got it. The answers since have had to bring the ought with them. But nothing in that forbids the traffic running the other way. An ought that cannot be concluded can still be performed, and the moment it is performed it has joined the facts. It is there, and it does not show.

The kiss is an is. So is God answering out of a whirlwind and explaining nothing. So is a man who cannot change the fuel figures walking a girl to the airlock instead of dragging her.

Godwin

“The Cold Equations” has no God in it.

The pilot Barton is not a cruel man. He finds her, and instead of putting her out he tells her what the fuel means. He gets her the call to Gerry. He waits while she says her final words. He does not drag her. She walks in and tells him she is ready, and then he does what the arithmetic requires.

Not one of those decisions makes her an ounce lighter. The ship still has to lose her mass. The six men on Woden still have kala fever, the tornado still took their serum, and Marilyn Lee Cross is still dead at the end of the story. In the terms the story sets, everything Barton does is worth nothing at all.

And the story sets those terms on purpose. It was built to prove that the universe does not bend, and that the ought is worth nothing against it. The arithmetic held. The argument did not. The story measured the ought by whether it moved the fuel, and nothing about the fuel says that is the measure. That is the barrier, and the story crossed it.

Job is the easy case, which is not how that book is usually described. It is a book that wants its own answer to work, and even there the answer is not an argument: the whirlwind alters nothing about Job’s children and offers him no reason for any of them. Dostoevsky built the strongest case against his own faith that anybody has built, handed it to his cleverest character, and answered it with a kiss that alters nothing about the case, as Ivan points out while thanking him for it. Godwin was describing the universe he thought we live in, one that runs on arithmetic and makes the wanting worthless, and Barton alters nothing about the fuel and waits with her anyway.

There is also a kiss in the other direction.

Judas Iscariot chose it as the signal. A kiss alarms nobody, and it identifies a man without pointing at him. The arrangement is in the gospels: whomsoever I shall kiss, that same is he; hold him fast. He comes up in a garden at night, ahead of a crowd carrying swords and staves, and greets his teacher, and kisses him.

But Jesus said unto him, Judas, betrayest thou the Son of man with a kiss?

Luke 22:48

Alyosha kissed his brother and meant it. Judas kissed his teacher and meant to give him up.

Klenzendorf

He is in the line of prisoners when the boy sees him. Jojo comes over. They know each other: this is the man who ran the camp the boy failed out of, and who has been the nearest thing to a friend he has. Jojo is ten, and he is shaking, and his mother was executed in the town square not long before.

So Klenzendorf makes small talk with him. The boy stops shaking. He tells him his mother was a good woman and did not deserve what happened to her, which is true, and which is the thing the boy needs most and will keep.

He is also looking at the coat. The Russians are sorting the yard by uniform, and everyone still standing in one is going to be executed in the next few minutes. There is no time, and nobody to appeal to, and no version of this that can be explained to anybody, least of all to the child in front of him.

He stands Jojo up and tears the coat off his back, shouting that the boy is a Jew. The Russians come over to see what the noise is. One of them puts a gun on Klenzendorf and asks the boy whether he knows this man.

And Jojo, who has just been told that his mother was good, opens his mouth to speak for his friend.

Klenzendorf does not let him finish. He says he does not know this Jew. He shoves him away, hard, and spits on him. “Get away! Get away, Jew!” They carry the boy away to safety.

Captain Klenzendorf was dragged off with a serene smile, and shot against a wall.

Spitting on a frightened child is cruel, and lying is wrong, and both of those stay true afterward. He ought to have done it anyway. You can have every fact of that yard, his intentions included, and that it was love is not one of them.

There is a verse for this. Christ says it in an upper room, a few hours before any of the rest of it happens:

Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.

John 15:13

That is usually read as the ceiling, and the death it describes is legible. A man dies in another man’s place and the people watching understand what they have seen, and so does the man who was saved.

Klenzendorf does that, and then does something the verse does not cover. He lays down his life, and he lays down the credit for it, and the one witness who would have spoken for him is the witness he silenced.

Before that night is out, one of the men who heard Jesus say it is denying he ever knew him. The Apostle Peter had sworn he would die first. He has already been asked twice. Matthew records the third time:

Then began he to curse and to swear, saying, I know not the man.

Matthew 26:74

Peter says it in a courtyard, to save himself, and goes out and weeps bitterly. Klenzendorf says it in a yard, to save the boy, and goes to the wall smiling.

Later the same night, at the trial, they spat in Christ’s face. Matthew records it, and records it again the next morning, when the soldiers took it up as sport.

Then did they spit in his face, and buffeted him; and others smote him with the palms of their hands.

Matthew 26:67

And they spit upon him, and took the reed, and smote him on the head.

Matthew 27:30

Isaiah had put it in the servant’s mouth centuries earlier, and the servant does not say it was done to him.

I gave my back to the smiters, and my cheeks to them that plucked off the hair: I hid not my face from shame and spitting.

Isaiah 50:6

And the people at the foot of it were not looking at love either. They were looking at a condemned man on a Roman gibbet, which their own law called a cursed thing, and they said so. Nobody in that crowd was mistaken about what was in front of them.

What they saw was mostly what happened.

Hume asked how anyone gets from what is to what ought to be, and reported that nobody had shown him. Nobody has. No argument crosses it.

The crossing was made from the other side.

Ivan’s ledger is still accurate. The child is still in the freezing outhouse, praying to dear, kind God; the whirlwind still explains nothing, the fuel still does not bend. Nothing was corrected.

Being and goodness may well convert into one another. Whether they do is not what is wrong with it. Offered to Ivan, or to Job, it is a theodicy, and the Christ in Ivan’s own poem refused to give one. He kissed the old man instead. Alyosha kissed his brother.

Once, and only once, something came in from outside: a fact that is also a verdict, which was not inferred from anything, and was not concluded, and was not derived. It was born under Caesar Augustus. He was spat on. He was killed under Pontius Pilate, as a cursed thing, in front of witnesses who described him accurately.

What is, ought be.

And He is.