The Progressive Gaze, The Humanitarian Theory, and the Murder in Charlotte
With the release of the full footage of the murder of Iryna Zarutska, many Americans are shocked at the brutality and are asking hard questions about how we got here. The racial dimension of the conversation is unavoidable, given the audio of the murderer saying, “I got that white girl.” The media, helpful as always, thinks that the story is the “far right” reaction to the murder, rather than the racially-motivated murder itself (and the progressive soft-on-crime policies that enabled it).
So how did we get here? There are many reasonable answers, depending on how far back you want to go, from the restructuring of American society via the Civil Rights regime to the rejection of God through widespread secularism. But here, I want to highlight two particular influences—one sociological and one ideological.
The Progressive Gaze
The sociological dimension is what I have elsewhere described as living under the progressive gaze. As I’ve written before in American Reformer, this is how conservative institutions are steered and manipulated by Victims, Activists, and Respectables.
Victims are the designated objects of empathy. Activists are the arbiters of “justice,” who speak and agitate on behalf of Victims in order to redirect institutions in the progressive direction. Respectables are the peace-mongering nice guys who go along with all of it while kneecapping any resistance that might arise.
David French is as good a representative of the progressive gaze as any. In response to the recent murder and outrage, French posted on X about two powerful images: Derek Chauvin kneeling on George Floyd, and Decarlos Brown standing over a terrified and bleeding Iryna Zarutska after fatally stabbing her.
Because he lives beneath the progressive gaze, David French wants us to see these events in parallel. Two images of death with the races reversed. To make the comparison work, French has to equate a man dying of a drug overdose while being arrested equivalent to a young woman brutally stabbed by a barbaric thug. This is what the Progressive Gaze does to Christians—you can’t just condemn the murder of Zarutska (and you certainly can’t draw attention to the racial motivation); instead, you must artificially balance the scales and make false equivalencies in order to maintain a winsome “third way” posture.
But give French his due; the two situations are related, just not in the way he wants to see. In reality, one flowed from the other. The death of George Floyd, and the riots, mobs, and activism that resulted from it, created a social context in which Decarlos Brown would be on the street and able to kill Iryna Zarustka.
The dynamics are obvious. In the aftermath of Floyd’s death, progressive politicians adopted policies to “reimagine policing,” “prioritize restorative justice,” and “address racial disparities in arrest.” As a result, criminals become the object of misplaced and untethered empathy, as captured in the old joke circulating on X the other day: Two social workers walking down the road come across a man who has clearly been viciously assaulted: he is bruised, bleeding, and lying unconscious in a ditch. One of the social workers looks at the other and says, “We have to find whoever did this. He needs help!”.
But toxic empathy for criminals isn’t enough. Desire for the approval of one’s (progressive and respectable) peers, as well as fear of progressive activists if you step out of line, is essential in reinforcing the progressive gaze. From law enforcement to social workers, from judges and lawyers to journalists and the press, untethered empathy, desire for approval, and fear of the wrath of activists work together to keep everyone in line.
These dynamics were present in the infamous Rotherham rape scandal in England a decade ago. Despite ample evidence that Pakistani men were grooming, raping, and violently abusing young girls, the police and local officials did nothing for fear of being called racist, as documented in the Jay Report from 2014. Ten years later, the Casey Report found the same thing in relation to grooming gangs throughout England and Wales. Such longstanding and tolerated evil, coupled with continuing mass immigration year after year, has finally bubbled over into riots and protests by native British people in 2024 and 2025.
The same is true in the United States. In a press release highlighting the Charlotte murder, the White House pointed to specific progressive policies and practices in North Carolina that contributed to Decarlos Brown being on the street despite a long history of crime, from pretrial release and no cash bail to decriminalizing homelessness and public nuisance behavior.
In sum, we don’t get here without the progressive gaze.
The Inhumanity of Humanitarianism
The ideological dimension is what C.S. Lewis referred to as the Humanitarian Theory of Punishment. In his famous essay on the subject, he argued that the humanitarian theory does away with traditional notions of “desert” and “retributive justice” in favor of punishment as deterrent and cure. Crime is viewed in pathological terms, as a disease in need of mending, rather than as an evil act demanding retribution (which is regarded as a savage holdover from barbaric times). Punishment, therefore, must aim to cure the criminal of his disease, as well as deter others from following in the criminal’s steps. Lewis minces no words.
The dangers of this theory are manifold. It removes considerations of punishment and sentencing from ordinary juries and society as a whole and places them in the hands of technical experts and doctors, “penologists” (“let barbarous things have barbarous names”) who are qualified to determine how to “heal” the “disease” of crime. By removing justice from the equation, it creates the possibility (and indeed likelihood) that innocent people will be falsely “convicted” for exemplary purposes, so that others may be deterred by their punishment. It deprives the criminal of the rights of a human being, since he can now be “treated” for his neurosis for as long as it takes to cure him.
Lewis argues that the tyranny of the Humanitarian theory does not depend on the evil intentions of its practitioners. Indeed, the Humanitarian theory is what enables otherwise good men to do unspeakably evil things.
My contention is that good men (not bad men) consistently acting upon that position would act as cruelly and unjustly as the greatest tyrants. They might in some respects act even worse. Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may some- times sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. (C. S. Lewis, God in the Dock (ed. Walter Hooper; HarperOne, 1994), 324)
And, if wicked men should rise to power in a so-called Humanitarian society, Lewis feared the totalitarian hellholes that this theory would create: re-education camps for the crime of Wrongthink, as well as sham trials to send a message to the populace (regardless of the guilt or innocence of the one punished).
Lewis’s essay highlighted the cruelty of the Humanitarian Theory on criminals (and potential criminals). By removing justice from consideration, anyone who breaks the law is no longer a human being in the true sense of the word. “Instead of a person, a subject of rights, we now have a mere object, a patient, a ‘case’ (320). This is because “to be punished, however severely, because we have deserved it, because we ‘ought to have known better’, is to be treated as a human person made in God’s image.” Ironically, then, the Humanitarian theory is inhuman, one more step in the Abolition of Man.
First Things First
But I want to highlight a different consequence of the theory. The Humanitarian wants to substitute cure and prevention for desert and retribution. The problem is that in practice, it neither deters nor cures, with disastrous effects on society as a whole. This is one more instance of the “first things first” principle that Lewis commends elsewhere. “Put first things first and we get second things thrown in: put second things first & we lose both first and second things” (Letter to Dom Bede Griffiths, 1951)
In this case, put retributive justice first—treat the criminal like a human being with moral agency and responsibility, punishing him because he deserves it. When you do, you get second things thrown in—deterrence and, if God is gracious, repentance and reformation on the part of the criminal.
But if you put deterrence and reformation first, dispensing with basic justice, you don’t just lose justice; you lose deterrence and reformation as well, as the murder of Iryna Zarutska demonstrates.
Delinquents and the Limits of Patience
Lewis actually treated this problem directly in another related essay entitled “Delinquents in the Snow” (God in the Dock, 341-345). In it, he recounted his experience of being robbed by a local group of hooligans, who broke into his shed and stole several objects and sold them for money. They were caught, and as repeat offenders, Lewis hoped that “an adequately deterrent sentence would be given.” But, Lewis was warned, “It’ll all be no good if the old woman’s on the bench.” Apparently, the Longhouse existed in Britain in the 1950’s as well.
Sure enough, the “Elderly Lady” (as Lewis calls her) presided and let the culprits off with a small fine and a concluding exhortation to give up “these stupid pranks.” Lewis comments:
If they listened to her (we may hope they did not) what they carried away was the conviction that planned robbery for gain would be classified as a ‘prank’—a childishness which they might be expected to grow out of. A better way of leading them on, without any sense of frontiers crossed, from mere inconsiderate romping and plundering orchards to burglary, arson, rape and murder, would seem hard to imagine.” (342–343)
In other words, judicial actions have consequences. We will reap what we sow.
Lewis proceeds to describe her mindset as “characteristic of our age.” “Criminal law increasingly protects the criminal and ceases to protect his victim.” More than that, by failing in its basic duties, the State is undermining the very social trust that makes society possible. The State demands more and more from its citizens—fewer rights and liberties, as well as more burdens, but with less security and justice in return.
And then Lewis describes two things that ought to sound familiar to us. First is the two-tiered justice system that inevitably results from coddling the criminal. “When the State ceases to protect me from hooligans I might reasonably, if I could, catch and trash them myself. When the State cannot or will not protect, ‘nature’ is come again and the right of self-protection reverts to the individual. But of course if I could and did I should be prosecuted. The Elderly Lady and her kind who are so merciful to theft would have no mercy on me; and I should be pilloried in the gutter Press as a ‘sadist’ by journalists who neither know nor care what that word, or any word, means.” We now call it “anarcho-tyranny,” but Lewis put his finger on it long ago.
The second is the possibility of a revolution from the Center or the Right.
“For those who suffer are chiefly the provident, the resolute, the men who want to work, who have built up, in the face of implacable discouragement, some sort of life worth preserving and wish to preserve it. That most (by no means all) of them are ‘middle class’ is not very relevant. They do not get their qualities from a class: they belong to that class because they have those qualities. For in a society like ours no stock which has diligence, forethought or talent, and is prepared to practice self-denial, is likely to remain proletarian for more than a generation. They are, in fact, the bearers of what little moral, intellectual, or economic vitality remains. They are not nonentities. There is a point at which their patience will snap.”
Lewis knew that this paragraph would sound to the Elderly Lady like a threat (Is C.S. Lewis “woke right?” Is the Elderly Lady named James Lindsay?). But conjectural predictions of undesirable events are not threats. That was true in Lewis’s day, and it’s true in ours, whether we’re talking about possible ethnic violence in the UK because Britain’s ruling class decided to let in massive numbers of Muslim immigrants who have proceeded to groom and rape British girls, or increased racial tensions in the United States because our governing authorities have been stoking racial resentment for decades while discriminating against white people (as detailed in Jeremy Carl’s book The Unprotected Class). We don’t want racial and ethnic conflict; therefore, for God’s sake, punish the criminals.
Conclusion
Lewis concluded his essay on the Humanitarian Theory by arguing that we should oppose it “root and branch, wherever we encounter it.” It displays a semblance of mercy that is wholly false. In fact, “the Humanitarian theory wants simply to abolish Justice and substitute Mercy for it” (326).
Mercy, detached from Justice, grows unmerciful. That is the important paradox. As there are plants which will flourish only in mountain soil, so it appears that Mercy will flower only when it grows in the crannies of the rock of Justice: transplanted to the marshlands of mere Humanitarianism, it becomes a man-eating weed, all the more dangerous because it is still called by the same name as the mountain variety. (326–327)
Mercy, planted in the marshlands of D.E.I. and Social Justice, has become a woman-stabbing weed, and it is long past time for it to be uprooted and planted back in the high mountains of divine Justice. The State must again recover its divine calling as a “terror to evildoers” (Romans 13:3), not a terror to comedians who mock transgenderism or women who object to their country being overrun by violent Muslims. The way back is a recovery of the Divine Gaze, a deep consciousness that God’s justice does not sleep and that his eyes are on us.
Lord, have mercy.
Postscript:
This essay was finished about a half hour before Charlie Kirk was assassinated in Utah. In light of that evil, I simply want to underscore something from Lewis’s essay that I didn’t emphasize enough. The failure of the State to execute justice against criminals while burdening and harassing the law-abiding unsettled Lewis because it would lead to a total breakdown of society, either through vigilante justice or the Center-Right revolution.
He refers to Samuel Johnson, who once speculated that, “if, under a peculiarity of Scottish law, the murderer of a man’s father escapes, the man might reasonably say, ‘I am amongst barbarians, who … refuse to do justice … I am therefore in a state of nature … I will stab the murderer of my father.’” In light of left-wing violence perpetrated over the last 5 years–from the George Floyd riots to the attempted assassinations of Donald Trump, to the proliferation of trans-shooters targeting Christian schools, to now the assassination of one of the youngest and most compelling spokesman for conservatism and Christianity in the country–it is not unreasonable to think that patience will run thin, and the violence will escalate, either through vigilanteism, or in more organized forms. Again, I don’t wish for such escalation, any more than Lewis did. But the sons of Issachar were commended because they understood the times and what Israel should do. Wisdom and action, two things that Charlie Kirk had in spades.
As William Wolfe pointed out on X, “Charlie Kirk—more than anyone else in America on the right or the left—built his platform making a good faith effort to model civil political discourse and debate in the public square. His entire project was built on reaching across the divide and using speech, not violence, to address and resolve the issues!” And because he was so effective at persuasion, he was martyred.
Again, Lord, have mercy.
