The Existence of Evil

I had a great conversation with my friend, Lee Smith last night. Lee's a writer and a great one. He's currently writing a book. I don't know what it's about but I'm guessing it has to do with the Middle East. He's spent a lot of time there, most recently living in Beirut during the unpleasantness a few years ago. Lee's not only a great writer but a serious thinker and I'm tremendously lucky to have him as a friend. To me, he is the best example of journalistic ethics. He seeks to understand, not just tell a story and I always have an interesting conversation when we get the chance to talk.

Last night, I was on Facebook. Lee is my only friend on Facebook. I only signed up so I could have a single source to read his material. Anyway, while I was logged on, I got a instant message from Lee. This caught me by surprise mostly because instant messaging isn't something that I normally. Plus, it was around 0500 where Lee lives in DC. Anyway, I gave him a call and we had an interesting chat at that late hour. We talked about a lot of things but the topic that really stuck in my mind was our conversation of Evil.

He asked me if I thought that a person could believe in the existence of Evil and be secular at the same time. What an interesting question. I never really looked at it that way. I guess I would consider myself secular but I don't deny the existence of God. My God is the Spinozan God who is relatively unconcerned with the day to day matters of my life. He has created this wonderful world and if I can't negotiate it, well, that's my problem, not His. (I like the Spinozan idea of loving God without ever expecting him to love you in return) This has never really collided with my secular beliefs, though there are times that it does. I'm again referring the Straussian notion that our internal conflict (in the West) is a struggle to reconcile out Hellenic cognition with our Hebraic morality. I used to wrestle with this idea mightily. Finally, I was beaten by this Angel and I found (through Spinoza) a way I could honestly believe in both without sacrificing my sense of wonder and gratefulness and my good sense and rationality.

So my answer to Lee would be quite simple. Believing in the existence of the "DEVIL" doesn't mean that I don't believe in science. Like someone once of said of Mussolini or Hitler (I'm not sure which), the regimes of those men made evil banal. When we use our secularism to tamp down our repulsion of evil, we discard the God-given gift of higher reason and deny the best of our humanity. In the movie, The Usual Suspects, Kevin Spacey's character said that the greatest trick the Devil ever played was to convince the world he didn't exist.

The thing is this. I can't prove to you through logical theorems that the Evil exists. If you haven't experienced it, there is simply no way for me to convince you that it does. It's like trying to explain "sweet" to someone who has never tasted anything "sweet." You can't do it. It's a matter of first principles. Now, not every anti-social act is evil. Evil isn't the absence of good or the absence of virtue. Evil is the presence of Evil. Is is positive (not in the moral sense but in the existential sense). It is not the lack of something but the presence of something more. You know it when you see it and it is undeniable.

It is like the notion of "swing" in jazz. You can't define it verbally but you know when something "swings" and when it doesn't.

Americans have a really poor understanding of this-- especially our academics. I think that is the residue of Marxism that makes us believe that everything boils down to materialism. That's simply not true. I think this is because America is a safe society in ways that we cannot measure. Our youth take risks that youths in other countries would never dream of because we have network that will care for them in ways that they take for granted. Conservatism is not a longing for the old ways. It is a philosophy based on the hard-won experience that being wrong is very costly. The levers that academics and social scientists are so eager to pull are attached to human lives. A cogent and cohesive system of beliefs is nothing if it ends in human misery.

We take virtue for granted because we take safety for granted. The basic lawfulness of your average American is the end result of man's combined learning in ruling since the beginning of civilization. Your average American obeys the law not because he is scared of punishment but because he believes it's the right thing to do while at the same time forgetting that this belief is the true benefit of being an American. We have some basic notion that being good works out in the end. But what about all those countries where people do not feel that way? Take practically any city in Asia and you will find people unconcerned for the body politic. I wonder if we could act so virtuously if our safety nets were not in place?

Our "virtue" as a people, such as it is, is a convenient one, based on the conditions of safety provided to us by better men. Yet even in a society such as ours, Evil does exist. Secularists want to write it off as mental defect or psychological abnormality because doing so, gives us the idea that we can eventually defeat such behavior at its roots-- that we can event a pill that gets rid of Evil. That will never happen and I'll tell you why. God's big joke is the the very thing that makes up our human dignity is what debases us as well. Our ability to take a stand a say "No! I will die before I allow this!" is the same impulse that would rather fight than give up it's old ways. Remove this instinct and you have sheep, not men.

Good and Evil are this impulse in action in two diametrically opposing viewpoints. The very same thing that makes a hero makes a villain. At the same time, i don't believe that it is relativist which is which. Some systems are simply different while some systems are in reality better than others. You cannot tell me a system of beliefs that condones the stoning of women for the crime of being raped is on the same moral level as ours. Principles apply to everybody or they mean nothing. If we are to believe that everything falls victim to relativism, then nothing has meaning at all. That may be true but my experience of the world would seem to counter that argument.

So I have attempted to give you reasons for an understanding that I originally stated cannot be achieved through language. You simply have to see it and in American society, you are unlikely ever to so the vast majority of our citizens have no rational idea of how to combat it while our intelligentsia refuses to believe it exists. That we haven't already lost the battle is a testament to the enduring power of virtue. I'm torn with hoping that everybody gets to experience Evil so they would value what we have as a people and the protective instinct to shield people from it's existence.

Lastly, I want to say something about the language of virtue. I'm a victim of the East Coast Intelligentsia (which provided the bulk of my higher education) and because of that, I am uncomfortable using words that evoke morality or virtue. But I am more and more convinced that we have to use those words because what they represent matters and if we fail to talk about them, we will lose them and in doing so, lose our chance for real human dignity.