Evil Is What’s Left
So I must define evil and to do that I start by paring off the things we thoughtlessly call evil, but which are really not. First the random things: they feel bad, may actually have quite bad consequences, but are not evil in themselves, only random, natural, mostly unpredictable: earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, tornadoes, hurricanes, landslides, mudslides, floods, rock falls, droughts, blizzards, avalanches, diseases, mental illnesses, epidemics and such, the natural disasters caused by very real, physical, measurable, sometimes even predictable forces of nature, though sometimes unpredictable, unforeseeable. Yes, they are destructive and injurious and leave a path of pain and even death and other forms of human misery behind them. But I cannot call them evil; they are natural, unavoidable, unescapable. Certainly not willful; they just happen.
I find a subcategory here: the things caused mostly by forces of nature, only slightly avoidable and rather unpredictable. When my first wife was diagnosed with cancer, I could almost feel the evil that was her tumor, it felt palpable in the room with us, it had an odor and color and, in my mind’s eye, a form and shape, so that while it was hidden deep within her body, I could almost touch and grasp it; it had some presence in the room. Yet in my saner, more reasonable moments I knew it was not a demon, not a touch of satan, certainly not an act of God; a single cell had mutated out of control and reproduced endlessly until it consumed and killed her. These are the factors, events, elements of the natural world in which we live, of which we, at least our bodies, are actually a portion. Their results may feel evil to us, but themselves are natural.
And next I pare off the accidents, true accidents, randomly happening accidents, not of willful intent. Bad consequences, but again acts innocent in themselves. I cannot call these evil either. Newscasters agitatedly misname them tragedies, calamities, but they are not really evil; rather they are naturally occurring events, perhaps influenced by the randomness built into the universe.
Randomness
Several decades ago a friend handed me an issue of the magazine OMNI, and in it an article which continues to fascinate me entitled “Connoisseurs of Chaos.” It was about the discoveries of physicists who study chaos. They learn that chaos is not chaotic at all, but instead that all motion is organized around three forces: the fixed point attractor which defines homeostasis (a fixed or stable state), the limit cycle attractor which defines simple and complex harmonic motions (a rhythmic and recurring motion such as a swinging pendulum), and a random attractor which introduces an element of randomness into all things. I do not understand the complexities but this understanding suggests to me that randomness is built into the universe, into all things, and into all life. It is the driver of the genetic mutations fundamental to Darwin’s thesis of the natural selection of the species. And next, as a theological speculator, I interpolate that some of what we experience or call evil is simply randomness, an unpredictable, unforeseeable twist of events which usually has an undesirable result (when the result is favorable we call it good luck or God’s blessing, but I think it is still randomness). In his book When Bad Things Happen to Good People, Rabbi Harold Kushner theorized similarly that many bad things are not God’s will, but merely randomness.
Now I am Left with Two Categories of Things I Feel Justified to Call Evil
Jeffrey Dahmer, carefully selecting his victims, killing them with such thoughtfulness and planning that the murder goes undetected, and then eating the body parts of his victims. This is evil, tinged perhaps with an unimaginable psychological aberration, but quite unadulteratedly evil. The willful drunken driver who, having been tagged five times goes out once more to drink and then drunkenly drive, killing a young girl walking along the street. There is willfulness here, an unreasonableness, and, if not a deliberateness, then at least a knowingness and willingness: not as simple as negligence, but maybe deliberate negligence. There is evil here too. It does not smell as pungent as Jeffrey Dahmer’s evil, but still is well within the category. But bounds of this category are mushy, it has an unclear, ill-defined edge. While the Dahmer event was purely individualistic, there is a societal complicity with our drunken driver. These exemplify one category of evil, but there is another. There is the Hitler syndrome.
This second category is much more problematic, more greatly impactful, and leads to the heart of my problem with sin. The evil that remains in the basket is communal and cultural: poverty, oppression, racism, violence. I have lived through the war with Nazi Germany, the S.S. Troops, and Hitler’s effort to exterminate all Jews from the face of the earth, the Holocaust. And I saw the latter years of Stalin’s U.S.S.R., of his and his government’s efforts to dominate and to eliminate persons and populations that were in the way, his cruel oppression and murder of his own people. And I am living in the aftermath of George W’s preemptive war against Iraq, his eradication of Saddam Hussein and his government, and the resultant unleashing of the conflictful, bloodthirsty clans and tribes and sects within the culture which Hussein had understood how to keep in check through the use of cruel oppression. And I am watching the deliberate enrichment of the wealthy at the expense of the poor and middle class in this country, and in the mid-East the oppression of dispossessed Palestinians by the same Jewish people who had been so cruelly oppressed by the Nazis and others. The litany can go on; I am well aware of this evil in this world. I am a systems person, I believe in and understand social systems. And this evil is systemic, not individual. It is deliberate, social, even though perhaps unconscious (or pre-conscious or subconscious); and it is deeply embedded in the social system. We build together and then live within a social system which rewards and punishes for no obvious or reasonable cause, or for deeply hidden causes. And we do nothing about it. We allow that evil. We may even quietly, silently, unwittingly enable it. We are complicit, sometimes ignorantly, but always voluntarily. We cooperate with that social system. In our prayers we pray abstractly about poverty, but we do not pray in ways that actually change or alleviate that poverty; we pray and then let it be. Therefore many go hungry, or homeless. And we allow it. And we do not consider that a sin for which we are individually culpable, in need of God’s forgiveness. And that is the heart of the problem. Hitler may be the embodiment of evil, but the reality is that we vote for him, and cheer for him at rallies, and readily or reluctantly and unresistingly, do his will. Again, the boundaries of both these categories are only vaguely visible, and fade into invisibility.
When I study these two categories of evil, one word resounds within me, malevolence. There is a will to do harm, injury, oppression, neglect, however conscious and deliberate, or unconscious and complicitous that will might be. Malice.
The Trivialization of Sin
Into the world I’ve just sketched I invite you to talk with me about sin. This is the framework within which I am questioning, “What is sin?” Mine is a world in which there truly is evil, but in degrees and gradations and maybe even in layers. And where often things that appear evil, may not be; but are just bad, or destructive. Or simply random. Unpredictable. Unforseen and unforeseeable. Even though damaging and hurtful.
In this world the notion of sin has been trivialized beyond significance. The sin we talk about these days in church is individualized, putting the locus entirely within the individual. Since earliest Christianity we have focused on versions such as the seven deadly sins: wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy, and gluttony. I note that these sins all require me to look within myself, at my interior life. But in reflection I note that Jack Bowers’s sins are puny and nearly insignificant when I confess them alongside a Hitler, a Stalin, an Idi Amin, a 2014 Tea-Party-driven U.S. Congress. The Hebrew Scriptures had it right when they placed the locus of sins mainly (though not exclusively) at the national level, when they sent the scapegoat off into the Wilderness of Zsin bearing on its head the collective sin of the nation. Yes, we may be complicit as individuals in the evils of the national sin, but Jack Bowers is not the paramount sinner. It is true that we can smell the evil of some individuals e.g., a cannibalistic serial murderer, and that we, the society, need to be protected from that evil. But mostly we need to be rescued from the evil of national sin, for we are both victims and complicit collaborators in that: hunger, poverty, inequity, oppression, abuse, functional slavery, destructive and self-serving governance, greed. To encourage myself to be focused interiorly on my own petty sins as an individual is to be seduced away from any awareness