Good and Evil: Simpler Than We Pretend

More than 1500 years ago, St. Augustine of Hippo told us that evil was not a positive force but rather a privation in being. He reasoned that all being comes from God and has to be good. He had, so to speak, a devil of a time justifying the existence of Satan, a being who was totally evil because Satan’s substantial being couldn’t be evil because it comes from God but Satan could will to be evil because his will comes from…Never mind.

It’s quite true that being comes from God and has to be good. What we Christians haven’t yet learned from St. Thomas Aquinas and from the subsequent explosion in empirical knowledge is:

Substantial being in this universe is not immutable. At any given time, it exists in a specific state but that state evolves through time — to better or worse states. And most complex things or living creatures are born in rather vague states where they are bundles of potential more than particular entities.

A human being isn’t born with a sturdy moral backbone. He develops one through proper exercise just as he strengthens the bones of his legs by stressful exercise such as running or playing tennis. I wish I had a much stronger moral backbone and I fear that I’m nearly an invertebrate in some ways. I was raised in the United States, the great Melting Pot — where boys are melted down so they can flow into the mainstream so good a target of profiteers, political and commercial alike. You shouldn’t expect those boys emerge from that pot as men with sturdy spines. What you get are the sorts of creatures which Adam Smith feared might emerge in a prosperous society centered on commercial activities — genial and having little moral integrity.

Is it so bad to be living in a society of genial men and women? Ask the Jews who survived the Holocaust. In a series of frightening books, Hannah Arendt, the Jewish philosopher and historian, was forced to the conclusion that most of the evil of the modern world was carried out by nice, middle-class men. The dedicated Nazis were too stupid to carry out such a complex operation as the Final Solution.

Heinrich Himmler quietly disobeyed Hitler’s orders to fill the good jobs with true Nazis and instead provided good careers and benefits packages for the likes of Adolf Eichmann, a man that Professor Arendt labeled as one of the nicest men she’d ever met. It was his misfortune to be in a job where he had to round up Jews and transport them east. He felt sorry for them and, when it had been possible, did his best to allow them to escape the roundups. Eichmann truly couldn’t understand why so many Jews, and others, hated him so much that they hunted him down in South America, kidnapped him, and transported him to Israel for trial. By the time, he was hung, those prosecuters and interrogators who had worked on his case, as well as those few like Hannah Arendt who’d been allowed to talk for him, had to face some difficult questions. How could such a nice man have done so much evil? How could he have so efficiently and so energetically applied his logistical and bureaucratic genius to an evil cause which had actually disgusted him?

Perhaps being nice and genial isn’t enough? Perhaps it takes a bit of backbone, some guts, and a bit of stuffing in the chest to do what’s right when a price is to be paid? Perhaps we should be raising boys to have the courage appropriate to men and girls to have the maternally directed courage appropriate to women? Females are probably in better shape, all else being equal, because experiments have shown that the hormonal flows after giving birth will reshape the brains of females of other species of mammals and there is general evidence that human mothers also go through drastic changes of this sort. A modern mother might well go against her upbringing and defend her children to the death long after the modern father has cut and run, perhaps to go overseas in uniform to defend the interests of his masters.

We aren’t born saints and we aren’t born with moral integrity. The virtuous pagans of the Roman Republic worked hard to toughen up their sons as did other pagans such as the Apaches. I could imagine Geronimo converting and becoming a martyr for Christ while I have trouble thinking of the typical Christian priest or minister accepting the sufferings inflicted on the early martyrs. I can imagine Geronimo telling Hitler to go to hell while so many clergymen and other baptized Christians collaborated with the Nazis to keep alive their careers, to be able to pay their bills and take care of their children, to retain their social standing. Are children better off receiving toys and nice clothes through the paychecks of a Daddy who’s a cowardly collaborator with evil?

Robert MacNamara spoke in similar ways of genial men without moral integrity in his book about the war of the American government against the Vietnamese: In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam. He was allowed access to the Johnson and Kennedy libraries and found facts that confirmed his worst fears: he and the other top American officials had been conducting that war as if a business venture, worrying about todo lists and career prospects, while forcing American soldiers to systematically wage a brutal and criminal war against the civilians of South Vietnam, the supposed beneficiaries of our fighting. The evidence that the war was being conducted in a criminal manner, whether justified initially or not, was in reports and memos sitting on the desks and conference-room tables of those nice men in Washington. I think we should worry a lot about the image of nice men conducting a criminal war from comfortable offices in the United States and then driving home in their nice cars to their nice houses in nice neighborhoods. And what nice meals they’d eat that evening as they gathered with their nice wives and nice children. Enough said.

And yet we follow that most modern of all theologians, Flip Wilson, in his pontifications upon the cause of the evil we do: “The Devil made me do it.” Many modern men, including our political leaders, have gone one step further in conjuring away objective evil; evil is manifested in he who stands in the way of the satisfaction of our desires or the completion of our schemes.

Modern man is a traitor to his own children whose brains and souls are twisted and deformed by the entertainment industry and other exploiters while he’s so willing to take rifle in hand and go kill strangers on the other side of the globe in the interests of his owners. A traitor to God, he serves the gods of the marketplace so enthusiastically in his work and his consumption while begrudging a little time and effort to his Creator. Still more a traitor to his children, he raises his sons to be as spineless and as prone to violent desires as he is as he sits enjoying the sight of men brutalizing each other on the football field or in Rambo movies.

We’re born as bundles of possibilities, and each of us is shaped into a particular form by our environments and, most of all, by our responses to those environments. We’re born as battlegrounds of order vs. disorder in a world which is a larger scale battleground of the same sort. It’s our job, as pagan honoring Nature or — far better — Christian honoring Christ, to choose order, to order our internal being and, consequently, our future actions even when we are surrounded by disorder, even when that disordered environment extracts a great price from us for choosing to be morally good.

The world of God is naturally good in its substance but moral goodness has to be developed. We have to work to develop our moral integrity, our moral spine, the stuff in our chests as C.S. Lewis might have said. A morally evil human being is the result of a failure to pay the price to develop moral integrity, a failure to choose the Good, ultimately a failure to center one’s being on God. That evil human being, nice as he might be, is impoverished in his moral character.

Moral goodness is not something we simply fall into so long as we don’t murder or rape on a regular basis. Moral goodness has to be chosen and nurtured with the realization that we might have to pay a big price to do what is right.

It’s been said that all that’s necessary for evil to conquer is for good men to do nothing. It would be far more accurate to say that all that’s necessary for evil to conquer is for men to fail to pay the price to become good men, for them to also fail to raise their sons to be good men. Goodness is a much deeper matter than the superficial signs of niceness and decency. It’s not something we fall into but rather something we have to choose.