“Evil” can be usefully defined as “a coherent force that consistently works to make the human world worse.” (Or, “to make the human world more broken.”)
I hope you’ll agree that if such a “coherent force” could be identified as operating in the world, it would be reasonable to call it “Evil.” For that “consistently working to make the human world worse” captures pretty well how “Evil” was understood to operate in the traditional religious framework. But here, there’s nothing “supernatural” involved, but rather an observable systemic force.
One of the ways* such a force can be seen as real and important is when some particular “actor” in the world meets that criterion of consistency in the destructive impact its actions have on the world. Most “actors” are mixtures of the constructive and destructive, but on infrequent historical occasions a particular definable actor arises that demonstrates that consistency of having a destructive impact.
In the three cases discussed in this video,
- one of the “actors” is a region of the United States during the crucial period in the 19th century that brought this nation to a nightmarish Civil War;
- one is a nation in the heart of Europe that drove the whole world into a global conflict; and
- one is a political party that has done great damage to the United States over the past generation, and now threatens to inflict potentially catastrophic damage on the American nation, and indeed possibly the whole world.
(Each of these three instances had different ways in which the “Force of Brokenness” gained great power to wreak destruction on the world:
- in the case of the Slave Power, the vulnerability was created by a hugely important issue — slavery — that the nation struggled to deal with peacefully/politically, but ultimately without success.
- in the case of the Nazi regime, the German people were repeatedly traumatized over the almost 20 years leading to Hitler’s rise to power, with trauma generating brokenness in millions of the German people;
- in the case of the Republican Party of our time, neither huge issues nor major trauma was the wedge that broke things apart, but rather masterful propaganda (inadequately countered) was what created the popular support for the rising force of Fascism on the political right.)
The boundary of such an actor — whether region, or nation, or party, or — provides the coherence in that definition of “Evil” that that speaks of a “coherent force.” And when that actor acts at virtually every junction in a way that makes things worse, we must conclude that something is driving those choices to come down in such a non-random fashion. (The odds against an unbiased coin coming down “heads” every time in a dozen tosses are prohibitive.)
It is important to pay attention to that discernible reality that sometimes there arises in our world such a force — understood in purely secular terms -- that acts much as “Evil” has traditionally been understood to act. It is important to see such a force because such a force must be fought for what it is.
It could be called a “Force of Brokenness,” or a “Force of Destruction.” But calling it a “Force of Evil” seems preferable, for it is more likely to evoke those moral and spiritual passions that can empower the effort to defeat it and thereby to protect what’s of positive value in our world.
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* Another way of “seeing” this force is through tracing the connections in the dense web of causes and effects, where one can see that “Brokenness Begets Brokenness.” It is a complex way of demonstrating a kind of coherence, as a “pattern of brokenness” gets moved through the human world over time. Not so visible as these “Pure Case” single actors, but still discernible, if we ask of each “broken” phenomenon in our world, “What causes this brokenness to develop?” as it arises out of the past; and then also, “What are the consequences of this brokenness?” as it impacts the future.
See “The Discernible Reality of a ‘Force of Evil.’”
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Regarding the American South, see
“What Was the Confederacy About?”
and also: