Hell and the Credit-Card Lobby

I've mentioned before that I don't believe in the idea of "Hell" as a place of infinite, eternal torment for those beyond or outside of the grace of God.

And neither, apparently, does Edward L. Yingling.

Yingling is the head of the credit-card lobby. He's spent the past several months vigorously fighting against any limits on the predatory usury and capricious, fine-print larceny that his industry regularly employs to transfer billions of dollars — yes, billions — from the poor to the wealthy. This is an industry that routinely lends hundreds of dollars to the desperate or the unwise and then demands and collects thousands of dollars in repayment.

Edward L. Yingling is, in other words, a Very Bad Man. His actions produce actual, human victims — people with names who are suffering because of the professional work of Edward L. Yingling, people whose suffering has been very lucrative for Yingling and those he works for. The two-word biography of this man: Human fail.

In yesterday's New York Times, Yingling argued that if banks aren't allowed to continue their practices of arbitrary fees, undisclosed charges on those fees, and usurious interest rates invoked under the cover of the failure to promptly pay the undisclosed charges on the fees on the rate hikes — if any of that is to be subjected to regulation, then good, responsible, hard-working white people will suffer in order to subsidize lazy, irresponsible crack addicted welfare queens. As a professional apologist for unchecked corporate power, of course, Yingling know he can't state it quite that baldly, so he euphemizes. In the wake of regulation of the debt market, Yingling says:

That last sentence is a marvel. We could unpack that for weeks — the bald-faced threat, the dishonesty, the mythologies reasserted and reinforced. Divide and conquer? Check. Assertion that the poor are morally inferior and therefore deserving of their lower caste? Check. Warning that justice is a zero-sum game and that you will suffer if others are not preyed upon? Check. And let's not even bother lifting the rock of "those that have credit problems" to see what's wriggling and squirming under there.

So, again, Edward L. Yingling is not a good human being. He's not good at being human. It's clear from his behavior that he does not believe there is such a place as Hell because he must surely know that if there were such a place, there'd be a very special room in it reserved just for people like him.

Yingling is guilty, after all, of sodomy. "This was the sin of your sister Sodom," the prophet Ezekiel wrote, "She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and the needy." That's Edward L. Yingling and his employers in a nutshell. The credit-card magnates are arrogant, overfed and unconcerned. They sodomize the poor, every day, for money.

Perhaps, then, the world might be a better place if usurers and their lobbyists were convinced in the reality of an eternal, sulfurous torment awaiting the unjust. The idea of Hell might provide some value as a deterrent.

Something like this notion of the deterrent value of Hell is frequently suggested as an objection to my initial statement in this post, that I don't believe in Hell as a place of infinite and eternal torment. "But without Hell," this objection goes, "why should anyone be good?"

To their credit, almost none of the devout people raising this objection really means it. They are not, themselves, shaped and driven primarily by the fear of punishment. Such a fear is neither necessary nor sufficient to explain their own belief in the obligation to be and to do good, to love, to do justice or to correct injustice. The fear of Hell is, for them personally, scarcely a motivating factor at all. Their motivation is more like what 1 John says, "We love God because God first loved us," and not the terrorized and traumatized mutilation of that scripture, "We love God because God will burn us forever and ever if we don't."

So it's telling that the main advocates of the idea of Hell as a deterrent are not themselves influenced by that deterrent at all.

Nor, unfortunately, are those who really need to be — the usurers, the torturers, the tyrants, abusers, enslavers, despoilers or predators.

I don't know of any attempt to measure this precisely, but it is a measurable thing. We could look across or within societies to gauge the pervasiveness and intensity of a belief in Hell and then, in turn, we could measure the corresponding presence and frequency of behaviors that members of that society associate with those who are bound for Hell and …

You get the idea. It'd be soft science, but science nonetheless. It would also be an awful lot of work — particularly since what I strongly suspect it would uncover would be little or no evidence to support the idea that belief in Hell influences hellish behavior one way or another.

The example of Edward L. Yingling provides a good illustration for why that is — why the idea of Hell doesn't actually work very well as a deterrent. To be a usurer — or, in Yingling's case, a professional advocate for usurers — one must remain undeterred by dozens of things more tangible and certain than the abstract fear of a potential future torment. To do what he does, Yingling has to pretend that other people are unreal — that they do not matter. Compared to that, disregarding the fear of Hell is a piece of cake.

I suspect that when people raise the objection that Hell is necessary for people to be good what they're really getting at is something deeper — something that indicates their moral development actually has progressed a bit since they went through the terrible twos. What they're saying, really, echoes the cry of the Psalmist: "Why do the wicked prosper?"

Belief that life is meaningful, they are saying, seems to require a belief in something like justice. But, well, look around. For this idea of justice to matter in any meaningful sense then there must be more to it than what we see here in this world — there must be some kind of transcendent justice in the long run, some kind of ultimate balancing of the scales for those wretched who suffered more than they deserved as well as for those wicked who may have inflicted or ignored that suffering.

They're not suggesting that the threat of Hell is necessary to frighten people into virtue, but rather that some kind of ultimate justice is necessary to make sense of this life in this world. I'm quite sympathetic to this idea, but I don't think Hell is what it requires.

This is where I came in, actually. I read that NYT article yesterday and hit that quote from Mr. Yingling and said, out loud, "Go to Hell, Edward L. Yingling." But that's just a saying, of course. It's not really something I would want or wish for. I do want to see Yingling and people like him get their comeuppance, their just deserts, but that wouldn't require infinite suffering for eternity.

What I'd like to see — by which I mean what it seems to me ought to happen, the thing that would s

eem just –
– would be for Yingling to experience a bit of instant karma. I want him to get a bill in the mail that, unexpectedly, requires a payment 50 percent higher than it reasonably should be, and 30 percent higher than he can manage to pay without defaulting on something else. Then I want to see him hit with penalties for missing this payment, and penalty rates on top of that and fees and charges on those in turn. And as he protests that this isn't fair, that they're changing the rules, I want his protests to be met with disdainful disapproval of his reckless irresponsibility and with the bland, bureaucratic reassurance that everything that is happening to him — as he loses his home, his car, his job, his ability to sleep — is perfectly legal and appropriate. I want him to experience and to absorb the powerlessness of that situation, his utter impotence to escape the vortex of rapidly and massively compounding interest and ever shifting rules and penalties. And then, at his lowest point in all of this, I want him to experience the full weight of society's condemnation — the full force of the idea that his sudden, relentless and inescapable poverty can only mean he deserves it.

"The punishment should fit the crime," we say, expressing another aspect of that seemingly innate human longing and need for a just universe. "Fit" there entails both proportionality and apt-ness.

We discussed proportionality a few months ago the last time we were raising the subject of Hell. Disproportionate punishment doesn't serve up a double-dose of justice, but rather it answers one injustice with another. Hell is, by definition, disproportionate — meting out infinite punishments for finite evils and eternal punishments for temporal wrongs.

But when we say "the punishment should fit the crime" we don't only mean in degree, but also in kind. This isn't due to a longing for retribution or retaliation. It's pedagogical. This is also clear from the language we use when we talk about justice and injustice: "See how you like it …" We want the perpetrator of injustice to experience, to feel, what his victims felt, and thereby to understand the wrong that was done and why it was wrong. In other words, we want the punishment to teach so that the wrongdoer can learn.

What we have in mind there is just as corny and as glorious as Scrooge on Christmas morning or Zaccheus scampering home on his wee little legs to give everything away before dinner. What we have in mind is repentance and restoration. That is the purpose of punishment. That is ultimately what justice requires — what justice means.

Here in this fallen, broken world, such ultimate justice is elusive and rare. The wicked often prosper, and repentance and restoration are exceptional.

But if we're reaching for some notion of transcendent, eschatological justice that can give meaning to the injustice of our lives in this vale of tears, then that idea or ideal of justice can't be one that settles for cheap counterfeits like mere retaliation or retribution. It must teach and restore and make whole.

Hell cannot teach. It cannot restore. In fact, it makes restoration impossible. Hell would therefore seem to be a transcendent injustice — an idea that makes our lives here in this world less meaningful.

So, in summary, since I cannot tell Mr. Yingling to go to Hell, which is all I really set out to do here, let me conclude, instead, by saying this:

Screw you, Edward L. Yingling. And the horse you rode in on.