We were born to work together like feet, hands and eyes, like the two rows of teeth, upper and lower. To obstruct each other is unnatural. Marcus Aurelius
Let faith be the bridge you build to overcome evil and welcome good. Maya Angelou
If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
We are all mistaken sometimes; sometimes we do wrong things, things that have bad consequences. But it does not mean we are evil, or that we cannot be trusted ever afterward. Alison Croggon
The evils against which we contend are the fruits of illusions similar to our own. Reinhold Niebuhr
Do not accept an evil you can change. E. Lockhart
Sometimes, the wicked will tell us things just to confuse us–to haunt our thoughts long after we’ve faced them. Sarah J. Maas
Evil begins when you begin to treat people as things. Terry Pratchett
And your defect is a propensity to hate everybody. And yours, he replied with a smile, is willfully to misunderstand them. Jane Austen
I hope that real love and truth are stronger in the end than any evil or misfortune in the world. Charles Dickens
Judging others makes us blind, whereas love is illuminating. Dietrich Bonhoeffer
May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house. George Carlin
I’ve been getting a number of messages from various parts of the globe inquiring about how I was reacting to the recent US election results. I’m sure many of you have similar stories to tell and I’m also sure that your reactions to the messages have been similarly diverse – bewilderment, outrage, fatigue, perhaps even a measure of relief in some instances.
I won’t dwell on this too much now because, for me at least, such reactions at this early stage would largely lack perspective. The election is over. Unless somehow the House of Representatives flips, and perhaps even if does, we are two months from the likely start of mass deportations, a reoriented economy in the form of tariffs and fresh tax breaks for the already wealthy, new challenges to women’s rights and a federal bureaucracy where the litmus test for all applicants is loyalty to a president not a founding document.
The Democrats were anything but perfect in this election cycle, are anything but perfect in any and all aspects of governance. But it is interesting nevertheless that so many voters– including droves of Hispanic men and white women – chose to support a candidate so manifestly opposed to what might otherwise appear to be their interests. Or perhaps people in my orbit have merely failed to grasp what those interests are, how they might have been balanced for others in ways similar to how we seek to balance our own.
How to explain all of what is happening now in our world? The short answer is, I cannot. Many have honed in on anger around commodity prices and immigration in whatever form those are understood and, in the case of prices at least, are probably pointing fingers in the wrong directions. But point they have – we pretty much all did – and with an outsized consciousness of the “obvious” flaws of our adversaries with little sense of how the “garbage” some of us ascribed to others might motivate hatred in return with a fervor that at least some folks have managed to sustain.
Whatever else one could say about this election season there was certainly no shortage of hateful rhetoric, no end to the recriminations leveled by many people — including in my own orbit –against folks we know only by the conspiracies and dubious theology they espouse or perhaps by their fervent rejection of the “expertise” we in our policy bubbles inflict on people we don’t know, don’t want to know, don’t care about, and don’t pay attention to.
This has been a condition of our society for some time, the singular dismissal of the other, our growing comfort level with stereotyping devoid of real evidence, giving in to the arrogance of defining our ingroups by the best of them and our outgroups by the worst. We increasingly live in bubbles of our own choosing, at times even our own creation, but we forget that the reality as seen from a bubble is only a caricature of reality, only a small and insular piece of a broader truth which literally defies any and all facile understandings.
Whether we are able to sit with this or not, ours is an age of growing economic disparities, of manifestations of faiths which have little or nothing to do with their founders, of privilege magically transformed into merit, of rights in urgent retreat, of threats ignored or addressed in a manner guaranteed to magnify misery beyond what could ever be rationalized. There is much beauty still in the world and in ourselves but we’ve concealed so much of that behind curtains we’ve forgotten we’ve woven and hung.
None of this is news, of course, we flawed humans giving in to impulses incompletely understood, we who deign to make decisions for others whose realities are willfully sealed off from our own, we who parrot and even impose values that we fail to live by ourselves. This in itself is not newsworthy. The wrinkle for me in this last political cycle was the persistent and generally uncritical recourse to “evil” in describing political and religious “others” and their intent.
Evil, needless to say, is a loaded word, loaded with perverse meaning, with hostile intent, with self-righteous venom. And this is true whether we are describing evil actions or indulging in more essentialist determinations of evil as “of the devil,” the evil that cannot be healed, cannot be redeemed, cannot be transformed into something more closely approximating “civilized” let alone Godly behavior. This is the “evil” that ostensibly transcends individual acts towards an ontology which designates some as redeemed and others beyond redemption, the erstwhile “children of light” casting the “children of darkness” as destined for places beyond grace, beyond options, beyond reconciliation, beyond compassion.
I don’t entirely know what is gained from such designations, that “evil” which transcends the specific violations which we who hurl invectives have largely not done enough to prevent or transform. Moreover, such designations fail to honor the testimony of philosophers, literary authors, sages, psychologists and others, testimony which makes clear that the lines which separate good and evil in we humans are often thin, indeed. We forget that we must within our religious traditions constantly elevate the status of forgiveness not out of piety but out of necessity. For if it is not available to others neither will it likely be available to ourselves. And needless to say, given the metaphorical wolves we all struggle to keep at bay, forgiveness is needed at some point by each and every one of us..
And let’s be honest. To move as we now do in my country, as we did so often during the political campaign just past, move towards the positing of those we oppose as devils incarnate is to set in motion something we remain unlikely to control. We need to remind ourselves and be reminded by others that the essentialist “evil” we are too quick to ascribe is evil allegedly baked into the genetic makeup of our adversaries which cannot be negotiated so much as exterminated. We have seen this ugly (and in my view unjustified) conclusion incarnate at times in our own political and religious history – “God” or circumstance justifying mass carnage against others treated more as “things” than as humans deserving of dignity (as is now happening in Gaza and other zones of global aggression).
We are no stranger to this ugliness but the stakes are surely higher now, stakes which our current dispositions might well predict our collective ruin just as surely as climate change or nuclear weapons.
One of the things that we have repeatedly warned diplomats about over many years is their readiness to embrace “condemnation” as a response to the evils against which they ostensibly contend. In psychological terms, the more an individual or government is “condemned” the less impact condemnation actually has. To oppose is noteworthy, even heroic, when circumstances call for it. To condemn is largely an indulgence, an act which creates artificial distance and shortcuts the courage and mindfulness necessary to call out policy and practice which diminishes all of our better selves. It is simply too easy for we humans to transition from abusive acts which we believe warrant robust rejection to broader ascriptions of evil which deny all of the relevant connections between what we condemn in others and what needs fixing in our more immediate contexts.
Long ago, Socrates proclaimed the relative equivalence between evil and ignorance. We have, in this political season, demonstrated willful ignorance of our political adversaries. Sadly enough we have also demonstrated willful ignorance of ourselves, specifically the ties that continue to bind us, like it or not, to even the most vocal of those adversaries. These next years will likely be much as the prior years have been, a test of our basic humanity, of our willingness to confront and transition away from our own illusions with the same fervor that we attack or otherwise seek to diminish the illusions of others.
I think we can manage to do this, albeit with fingers and toes crossed and, for me at least, eyes scanning the heavens for guidance.
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