In Charles Dickens’ “Bleak House,” we encounter Mrs. Jellyby, a fanatical, crusading philanthropist who by correspondence and personal contacts hopes to bring education and trade to a remote part of Africa. Mrs. Jellyby spends much of her time dictating letters and memorandum to a “jaded and unhealthy-looking” girl who “seemed to have no article of dress upon her, from a pin upwards, that was in its proper condition, or its right place.”

We quickly learn that this disheveled scrivener is Mrs. Jellyby’s daughter Caddy, the oldest in a clan of dirty, wild children. The house they inhabit is filthy, littered, and cold, the meals are almost unfit for human consumption, and hot water is in short supply. “The African project at present employs my whole time,” Mrs. Jellyby offers by way of excuse for this chaos and mess.

Spring forward a hundred years or so to the 1960s rock-musical “Hair,” which features the song “Easy to Be Hard.” Here are the main lyrics:

How can people be so heartless?
How can people be so cruel?
Easy to be hard
Easy to be cold
Oh, how can people have no feelings?
How can they ignore their friends?
Easy to be proud
Easy to say no

Oh, especially people who care about strangers
Who care about evil and social injustice
Do you only care about the bleeding crowd?
How about a needing friend? I need a friend

In these few words, we find an apt description not only of Mrs. Jellyby, but of countless other Jellybys living today. They are the ones whose hearts bleed for the misfortunate living halfway around the world, but who rarely visit their memory-impaired father in the nursing home 20 miles away. They are the ones who shed tears over a YouTube video of a three-year-old afflicted with leukemia on the other side of the country, but who are blind and deaf to the suffering of a friend seated across the table.

In a recent Fox News interview, Vice President JD Vance raised the idea of ordo amoris, a medieval term meaning the proper order of love.

Your compassion belongs first to your fellow citizens. It doesn’t mean you hate people from outside your own borders, but there’s this old-school [concept]—and I think it’s a very Christian concept, by the way—that you love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then, after that, you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.

Vance’s remarks created a brief firestorm in the news, with criticism coming from here at home and from as far away as the Vatican. Victoria Moorwood of the Cincinnati Enquirer described one particular exchange in this controversy:

Rory Stewart, a former member of British Parliament, criticized the vice president’s ‘bizarre take’ as ‘less Christian and more pagan tribal’ on X.

‘Just google “ordo amoris,”’ Vance responded. ‘Aside from that, the idea that there isn’t a hierarchy of obligations violates basic common sense. Does Rory really think his moral duties to his own children are the same as his duties to a stranger who lives thousands of miles away? Does anyone?’

Leaving aside the religious and political arguments roused by Vance, let’s look instead, as he suggests, at ordo amoris and the moral obligations it imposes in the light of common sense.

Here’s an example from my own life that illustrates Vance’s point. In the last six months, the news has reported on the horrendous destruction delivered by Hurricane Helene to Western North Carolina and on the awful damage inflicted on parts of Los Angeles by wind-driven wildfires.

While I sympathized with the victims of the California wildfires, my heart was wrenched for a month or more by the stories pouring out from Asheville, N.C. Those mountains were my home for more than 30 years, and the friends and family members I’d left behind suffered extensive damage to their property and vehicles. One barely escaped alive from the floodwaters and was left completely homeless and without possessions. To her I sent a check, I donated money to a temporary charitable organization set up and operated by my oldest son, and I wrote stories calling attention to the area’s devastation and needs.

To most outsiders, the enormous difference of degree in my reactions to the wildfires versus the hurricane and the flooding just makes sense, a case of instinct driven by familiarity and affection.

The answer to the question Vance raises in his response to Stewart is clearly an unequivocal “no.” When we confuse or ignore the “hierarchy of obligations,” which is a hierarchy of love, we wind up like Mrs. Jellyby, a hypocritical do-gooder gone bad.

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The republication of this article is made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal. 

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