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Home The Unexpected Snake

The Unexpected Snake

The Farmer and the Snake

A Farmer walked through his field one cold winter morning. On the ground lay a Snake, stiff and frozen with the cold. The Farmer knew how deadly the Snake could be, and yet he picked it up and put it in his bosom to warm it back to life.

The Snake soon revived, and when it had enough strength, bit the man who had been so kind to it. The bite was deadly and the Farmer felt that he must die. “Oh,” cried the Farmer with his last breath, “I am rightly served for pitying a scoundrel.”

The Greatest Kindness Will Not Bind the Ungrateful.

The moral of this commonsense fable of Aesop's from a mere 2500 years ago is that doing good to evil will only result in more evil. Aiding those who kill only brings more death, not life. It is human nature to think that people will return good for good and evil for evil. This kind of thinking perversely leads some to assume that if they are being treated evilly, then they must have done something evil to deserve it. This logic is routinely used by the left to argue that Islamic terrorists are simply paying us back in the same coin.

However the problem with assuming that good is repaid for good, and evil for evil, is that it presumes that all peoples, all cultures, all ideologies and religions are equivalent. That they all react in the same way and with the same motives, treating others as they are treated. It furthermore assumes that evil exists because evil has been done to someone else.

In September 1 1939, W.H Auden responded to Hitler's invasion of Poland by penning the lines;

Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return

Since then those same lines have been routinely taken up by liberals eager to pen their own apologetics for evil. In the wake of another early September, September 11th, Auden's poem was re-embraced once again by liberals penning essays explaining why we were the real terrorists.

But while it is easy enough to dismiss W.H. Auden as naive, snakes don't always look the way you expect them to. Particularly snakes who take refuge in the mind of man. Auden was more snake than farmer and his words were the snake-words of one scaly creature excusing the evil of another.

Auden you see was a Communist. And in September 1939, the USSR and Nazi Germany had an agreement. An agreement to carve up Poland. And W.H. Auden was no pacifist. The man who two years earlier had penned the line, "The consious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder" in his poem Spain, when referring to the Soviet atrocities in Spain, was not a pacifist. He was one of the snakes.

And those who today go on to quote "Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return", to excuse and justify terrorism are they the farmer or the snake? On the surface of it, there is no clearer or simpler justification of evil than these lines. After all they presume that anyone who does evil, has been first sinned against. And while that may not entirely render them guiltless, it clearly spreads the guilt around and adds a touch of white paint to the murderous figure in the center of the room.

The irony is that while Auden himself later in life repudiated the poem for its justification of evil, those who quote it and its sentiments refuse to do the same. Because the idea behind it is just too appealing. Too compelling to give up. And so we return to the farmer and the snake again. Why does the farmer pick up the snake? Is it naive pity, or is there something in the farmer that draws him to the snake? Is there something in those who feel so much pity for evil that draws them toward evil.

The dichotomy between the farmer and the snake may not be so simple after all. Because even an idiot knows better than to shelter a snake. Nor does a snake appeal to any normal person as a creature that needs sheltering. Is it only misguided pity that draws a man to shelter a snake, or something else entirely. Because the very idea that good will be repaid with good and evil with evil has something else lurking in it as we've already seen. The farmer's logic can be read both ways, the naive man who genuinely expects that only good can come of good until he dies of that sort of thinking, or the evil man who believes initially that he is safe from the snake because the snake's evil as his own, can only come as the result of some external force. For the farmer to act as he does, he must believe that the snake is not evil, and such a belief is the province of the very naive or the very evil.

And so we return to September 1, 1939 again. To Hitler's tanks riding into Poland. To the inability to describe evil as evil. And we return to September 11, 2001 as well. And to so many other days. To free countries beleaguered by an enemy within its own borders, by the snakes they have taken to them, kept warm and perish, poisoned by their bites. But the curious thing is the sight of all these farmers lovingly clutching handfuls of poisonous snakes to them, proclaiming how wonderful they are, and shouting down anyone who would warn them about the poison. That deadly poison.

But as Aesop already knew some 2500 years ago; The greatest kindness will not bind the ungrateful. Virtually every civilized country affected by Muslim terror, has responded by trying to make life better for Muslims. But no matter how much they warm the snake, it still bites. The snake will always bite.

Only the fool or the sociopath genuinely believes that evil is returned only for evil. That snakes will only bite you, if you bite them first. That if you warm them and cuddle them, they will warm and cuddle you in turn. Things that are poisonous bite. And Islam has been carrying around poison in its fangs for far too long to expect events to go otherwise.

Was the farmer's crime, pity or identification with the snake? Just as Auden to some degree identified with Hitler's stormtroopers. As Israel's Labor Prime Minister Barak said that if he had been born a Palestinian Arab, he would have become a terrorist as well. That of course is the snake speaking from inside the farmer. The voice of the snake that says the only difference between us and evil men, is that they have suffered and we have not. That sees not a moral continuum, but one in which deprivation releases and justifies our worst impulses. Legitimizes the poison.

That is the problem of the farmer who believes that inside he is really a snake, and the snake who believes he is really a farmer. For if there is no difference between good and evil, but that those who do good have had good done to them, and those who do evil, have had evil done to them-- then we can welcome in the snakes and it will be alright. Because we are all snakes inside. And it is only by warming snakes, that we change that. This in essence is the worldview of liberalism. This is the key to much of its madness. And so they pick up the snake, and are bitten and die, wondering why their worldview which seemed so right, proved to be so wrong. And we die with them. For the farmer has carried the snake home, made a nest for it, and filled his home and the homes of his neighbors with snakes. And as a post-mortem it may be hard to know where the farmer began and where the snake ended.

Comments

  1. Mikec14/4/10

    It was a snake in Eden that caused Adam and Chavah to disobey G-d.

    Adam and Chavah became gods by having their own knowledge of good and evil

    G-d gave us Torah which mitigates mans knowledge of good and evil by allowing us access to G-d's Knowledge of Good and Evil.

    The farmer does not keep Torah....

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous14/4/10

    DG wrote: For the farmer has carried the snake home, made a nest for it, and filled his home and the homes of his neighbors with snakes.

    Its not just a snake. Our political elite idiots, without once asking us if we wanted snakes, have allowed nests of snakes to take hold in the West.

    Now these snake farmers are going to retire on stare funded pensions, leaving us the joys of having to tackle this nest of vipers.

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  3. But until we clean out the nests of vipers, the farmers are going to have to endure a lot of bites (strikes) from those vipers, which is going to cost them a lot of pain.

    ReplyDelete
  4. I love how you so wonderfully combine your knowledge of history, literature and current events in your articles:)


    "Why does the farmer pick up the snake? Is it naive pity, or is there something in the farmer that draws him to the snake? Is there something in those who feel so much pity for evil that draws them toward evil."

    Why does the farmer pick up the cold and frozen snake? It's a flaw in our understanding of evil--real or perceived vulnerability. I have no doubt that had a priest been near Hitler to give him last rites he would have.

    This perceived vulnerability causes people to cheer for the underdog (Palestinians living in poverty, the elderly S. Hussein on the gallows, the reporter who wept over the elderly, frail, and dying Arafat) and myriad other situations in the world). We are too empathetic and cannot discern genuine evil from genuine good, or are oblivious to true evil.

    Evil people will always exploit empathy. ALWAYS. Poor Gilad Shalit who at 10 thought fish and sharks could swim together; and dear Anne Frank who believed all people are basically good at heart.

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  5. Anonymous16/4/10

    So is the meaning of

    "Those to whom evil is done / Do evil in return"

    J beats her child P, who in turn beats her child L?

    or

    J does evil to P, and P, in seeking justice oversteps the mark and does evil to J (who deserves some of it)?

    ReplyDelete

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