Why is Kyle Rittenhouse considered a hero by many? Perhaps because his moral error pushed in the opposite direction of our culture’s moral sickness.
Rittenhouse wasn’t hunting down anyone, wasn’t a white supremacist, and wasn’t bloodthirsty. He was, I believe, foolhardy to show up amid riots despite being a 17-year-old boy and ended up in situations where he needed to shoot in order to defend himself.
But in an age of cowardice, foolhardiness can seem like a virtue. In a time of inaction, even rash action is refreshing. Rittenhouse, by risking his life to protect the property that the police would not protect, became in the eyes of his admirers an antidote to America’s disordered passivity.
“Disordered passivity” is the apt phrase from Yuval Levin in his incisive essay on our current state. In general, we lack positive virtue and fail to do good and difficult things more than we violate the “thou shalt nots.”
What passes for moral education among today’s elite is a string of taboos we must not break and missteps we must not make. In Alienated America, I called it an “infertile virtue” — at best a string of “best practices” that were mostly crafted to avoid falling into failure or shame.
This leaves young men and women without a positive path, goal, or purpose in life. Levin describes it this way: “The waning of the life scripts provided by family, religion, and widespread traditional social norms leaves younger Americans less sure of where to step and how to build their lives.”
This disordered passivity leads to less marriage, less risk, less family formation, less dating, less fun, less accomplishment, and so on.
It also causes an aimless and angry reaction among those who know, deep in their souls, that humans are meant for more than passively not messing up — but find no outlet presented by their culture.
The lack of a purpose in daily life, Levin writes, leads to a politics filled with overly “assertive and moralistic social agendas, whether of the Left or the Right. The case for such agendas easily becomes too strident and desperate, and it runs the risk of drawing some among the young into a depraved and vicious vitalism. But it is rooted in the valid perception of a moral void that is surely at the bottom of much of the pathological passivity we now encounter.”
Now, consider Rittenhouse or Anthony Huber or Gaige Grosskreutz (the second and third men Rittenhouse shot). All three men looked up from their passive world and saw a chance to do something. If anyone acted as a vigilante that night, it was Huber and Grosskreutz, both of whom apparently decided that Rittenhouse, after shooting Joseph Rosenbaum, couldn’t be allowed to retreat. Grosskreutz had shown up to document the evening, believing that more cameras on the street were necessary to justice.
All three saw a chance to become men of action. And all three acted rashly.
A good father, I believe, would have told his son not to go out that night. And here’s a telling detail: At least three of the four men at the center of that evening lacked a father who could have told them that. They all came to the streets of Kenosha, Wisconsin, from broken families and also came into adulthood or to its cusp feeling the need to write their own scripts.
Rosenbaum reportedly wasn’t raised by his father. He testified that his stepfather sexually abused him and his brother regularly as children. When his mother was sent to prison, Rosenbaum ended up in a group home, where he was accused of sexually abusing the boys he was temporarily living with.
Huber also came from what looks like a dysfunctional home. His mother was reportedly a hoarder, and “the layers of garbage and cat feces that accumulated in the house had been a source of constant stress for Huber,” the Washington Post reported. Most of his arrest record involves his assaults on family members, including his grandmother.
And Rittenhouse, of course, was coming of age without a father at home. His parents are divorced. Mike Rittenhouse lived in Kenosha, while Kyle, famously, lived across the border in Antioch, Illinois. Reportedly, Kyle’s father struggled with alcoholism, used drugs, and was charged with assaulting Kyle’s mother.
All three men, by all appearances, grew up without church and without fathers. This left them to write their own scripts. They all wanted a course in life that deviated from the empty passivity they were taught. Lacking positive stories and models of men of action, they pursued childish and foolhardy ones.
