Twenty years ago, I went around the United States giving speeches arguing that “The Concept of ‘Evil’” was important— important because such a “Force of ‘Evil’” had taken over the once-respectable Republican Party. And because defeating that Force required that it be understood — and fought— for what it was.
(With “Evil” defined as “a coherent force that consistently makes the human world more broken.” Which aligns quite well with how people in the religious traditions imagined “Evil” working. But this understanding of “Evil” does not involve at all the “supernatural,” being based rather on the inevitable systemic dynamics that arose with human civilization.)
All of that remains true and important — more so than ever, in this time when we see a Fascist Force working energetically to dismantle American Democracy.
Unfortunately, the secular worldview has lacked any way of seeing some “coherent force” like that, playing an important role in the human world. Couldn’t see it because it lacked any way of conceptualizing how such a Force could exist.
The following seeks to provide a purely secular and rational way of seeing the reality and importance of Evil, so defined.
The reality and importance of such a force are demonstrated below— first in an essay, and second in a video.
(Seeing What We Are Up Against here in America today as a Force of ‘Evil” is not a way of expressing our hostility toward a political force we don’t like, but rather is a way of capturing an important reality about how the human world works. For the lack of such understanding has been a major reason this destructive thing has been able to gain so much power in the once-proud United States of America.)
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The essay and the video show the reality in our world, as the civilization-creating species, of “a coherent force that consistently works to make the human world worse.” And they argue that such a force, if it could be shown to exist, would be reasonable to call “Evil,” because that’ pretty well corresponds with how the religious tradition depicted Evil as operating.
But, in my BETTER HUMAN STORY, in contrast with the religious tradition, that “coherent force” is not supernatural. Rather, it is an inevitable consequence of a systemic dynamic that arose with civilization.
(And an understanding of the systemic dynamics that give rise to this destructive force can illuminate something essential about the dangerous things that have been happening in the American power system over the past generation.)
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Evil: Lost and Found
Over the centuries, for people whose worldview was governed by the religions of Western civilization, it was reasonably straightforward to conceive of the existence of a “Force of Evil.” Judeo-Christian religion personified such a force in the figure of Satan, or the Devil.
Imagining this Supernatural Being enabled people to form some intuitive conception of a force that makes bad things happen: the Devil. with malevolent intent, was always working to get people to do what they shouldn’t do, and to degrade the human world.
The Devil could make the world uglier by wielding his power with diabolical cleverness. (Quoth Luther: "For still our ancient foe / Doth seek to work us woe;/ His craft and power are great/ And, armed with cruel hate./ On earth is not his equal.")
The more recent movement to a secular worldview has meant that this supernatural figure has disappeared from the picture of the human world held in the minds of a major component of the Western world. And this disappearance of Satan left most of those people with no way of conceiving of something that might reasonably be called a “Force of Evil.”
And with no way of conceiving of anything so coherent as “a Force of Evil” operating in the world, many of those with a secular worldview were left unequipped to perceive such a Force even if it turned out to be an important reality.
And it turns out that there is such a Force.
It turns out that one can see, operating in the human world, “a coherent force that consistently makes things worse” (Or, “consistently spreads a pattern of brokenness.”)
That is a reasonable definition of something reasonable to call “Evil.”
That is, we can see at work in our world something that aligns in so many ways with the ancient, freighted concept of “Evil,” that it makes sense to give it that name.
(For those who are repelled by that ancient word, “Evil” – and nearly two decades of experience have taught me that many liberals reject the word -- I suggest forgetting about the question of it’s name. (One could as well call it a “Force of Destruction,” or “Force of Brokenness,” both of which capture its essence.)
It does not much matter what we call it.
What does matter is that we recognize that there is an “It” to be called. (That “It” is a Force— meaning that it pushes the human world in a consistent direction.)
Indeed, it turns out to matter greatly, because it turns out that the inability to see that “It” – that Destructive Force, or Force of “Evil” – can be catastrophic.
I don’t use that word, “catastrophic,” lightly: I would be glad to argue that if the “secular” part of America had been capable of seeing that “It” better and sooner, the catastrophe of Trump winning again the powers of the Presidency would never have occurred.
Liberal America — with its predominantly (?) secular worldview — and its political arm, the Democratic Party have done a (disastrously) poor job of protecting the nation against the force that has been taking over the Republican Party.
And a compelling case can be made that a major contributor to that failure has been the inability of Liberal America to perceive what it was up against, and thus to fight it appropriately; and that inability was largely due to the secular culture, that predominates in the world of the Democratic Party, to recognize the reality of such a thing as “a Force of Evil.”
A piece of wisdom in the baseball world says that you can’t hit what you can’t see.” But also ““You can’t see what you have no conceptual way of including in picture of reality.” Which the failure of the Democrats to defeat this rising Destructive Force — as it was rising -- shows.
This tragic piece of American history demonstrates that the ability of people to protect the Good can depend on their ability to perceive the reality of a “Force of Evil.”
The Secular Worldview as a Work in Progress:
This appears to be a major cost of the current under-development of our still relatively new “secular worldview.” Which is a worldview that has let go of the doctrinal answers of the religious understanding (like on matters of Good vs. Evil) while having no way of replacing the religious view (with Satan, etc.) with a “Force of Evil” that is demonstrated to be real in accordance with the rules of evidence and logic that play a central role in how many in the secular world come to their beliefs.
But, as I will attempt now to show, it is possible to perceive and understand “the reality of a ‘Force of Evil’” in a purely secular framework.
(That understanding takes a bit of work, but that work is worth it, because the more people who can see WHAT WE’RE UP AGAINST, the stronger will be the forces of Democracy that now are embattled against the forces of Fascism. (And the stronger will be the forces that might help human civilization to survive for the long haul against those forces that would drive us to self-destruction.)
Understanding sometimes really does matter. It reveals a systemic problem of brokenness in America— the path that led to the catastrophic 2024 Election was one where one side of the system went over to Brokenness, while the other side, failed to perceive or properly combat the Force in the Republican Party that was changing the nature of the battle from the level of issues to a deeper battle between coherent forces pushing in opposite directions.
- With the Republican Party coming to show itself governed by “a coherent force that consistently works to make the human world more broken.”
- And the Democratic Party unable to perceive what the secular worldview gave them no way to conceptualize as a major reality in the human world.
I will turn now to the task of showing that reality.
Connections in the Dense Web of Cause and Effect
The good news is that the reality of this force can be shown.
The bad news is that seeing this “Force of Evil” doesn’t come as naturally to us humans as seeing that “It” personified in the figure of “the Devil.”
We are equipped, by our nature, to imagine something like “our ancient foe.” That’s the advantage of representing “Evil” in terms of malevolent supernatural forces.
But the challenge is different when we operate within a secular worldview, from which supernatural beings and forces are excluded. The reality of this force, as I will show, becomes visible as a natural dynamic through observation of the evidence presented in the dense network of cause and effect, from which logical inferences can be drawn.
Takes some work. But, as the American crisis demonstrates, among the strengths required of us to protect the Good against evil, some of them require that we undertake the intellectual work required to see it.
So here’s one way that this Force – this “coherent force” that acts like “Evil” -- can be shown. (In the next entry in this series, I’ll present another.)
Consider the dichotomous pairs of war/peace, justice/injustice, love/hatred, cruelty/kindness, greed/generosity, integrity/hypocrisy, honesty/deception, life-serving/death-dealing, etc.
For any particular instance of any of those on the “broken” side of such dichotomies, we can ask two kinds of questions regarding their place in the dense web of causes and effects:
• Peering backward, we can inquire about its causes. What is it in the world that produces this brokenness? E.g. What are the factors that led to this war? What were the factors that led to this exploitative social arrangement? Or, what is it that resulted in this person being cruel, or greedy, or insistent on domination? (Many see “evil” just in terms of “evil people,” but people are shaped by their world.) • Looking forward, we can examine the effects of that war, of that exploitation, or of this instance of human cruelty or greed or lust for power. What impact does this or that broken thing in our world have on how the human world develops from there?
In an unsystematic way, I’ve been asking those kinds of questions for more than a half century, investigating questions like what led to the American Civil War over the issue of slavery? And what led to the rise of the Nazi regime? And what experiences and cultural influences molded the human monsters who have played a disproportionate role in our history (like Hitler, and Stalin). What are the factors that differentiate those people inclined to hate out-groups from those without such hostilities? (On the side of “wholeness,” what cultural currents made possible the emergence of Democracy on the North American continent?) Etc.
What stands out from tracing the various connections of cause and effect is a pretty straight-forward pattern:
Brokenness Begets Brokenness
With “brokenness” understood as whatever is the opposite of life-serving – i.e. as leading toward the opposite of the well-being and fulfillment of sentient creatures (defined as creatures to whom things matter) -- what we see when we make all those connections is a pretty straightforward pattern:
Brokenness begets brokenness. (And conversely, wholeness begets wholeness.)
For the most part. (Sometimes, “good intentions” can lead to hellish results, and an “ill wind” can blow someone “good.” But overwhelmingly, the causes and the consequences of the broken things in the human world are other forms of brokenness.)
In that dense network of cause and effect, one can trace how wars and injustices and hatreds and trauma all feed into each other over time. Each form of brokenness tends to generate other forms of brokenness, and be generated by them.
Tracing the way each thing that makes the world worse is the fruit of other things that make the world worse reveals “a pattern of brokenness” traveling through the cultural system. We can see brokenness getting transmitted – over time -- from level to level (global to societal to individual and back the other way). And transmitted from form to form.
- We can see how the brokenness of hatred makes the world worse, generating for example the brokenness of conflict.
- We can see how the brokenness of war produces the brokenness of trauma.
- How the lust to dominate creates the brokenness of injustice.
- How unbridled selfishness generates the brokenness of human misery.
- How the brokenness of childhood trauma and historical trauma feed upon each other to achieve greater brokenness through having a Hitler in power, and or a Trump in power.
Something worth calling “brokenness” is moving through the human world in shape-shifting ways.
And something worth calling a “Force” cam be inferred to be pushing brokenness through the system over time.
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A “Force” is something that moves things—like the elementary physics formula, F = ma. And so it is with this Force that imparts brokenness to the human world, as the generations and centuries go by.
This Force is a natural dynamic. (Nothing Supernatural.) It’s just how the world works, a world in which causes produce effects. Utilizing the dynamic of “brokenness begets brokenness,” this Force transmits a “pattern of brokenness” through cultural systems over time. And the reality of that Force can be inferred from that movement.
We can “see” that Force the way we can “see” the wind in the swaying of the trees and the flapping of the clothes on the line.
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Now, looking toward the next installment of this “War College” series:
The Origins of Evil (Or, The Prime Mover Problem)
The idea that “Brokenness begets Brokenness” presents a “Prime Mover” problem: how does the whole thing get started?
If each broken thing in the world is the product of prior embodiments of “the pattern of brokenness,” how did Brokenness get into the system in the first place?
Just to give a bit of a preview of the answer to be presented in the next “War College” installment:
The answer does not require the attribution of inherent evil to human nature. It lies in a systemic dynamic that inevitably arises as a result of the breakthrough to civilization, defined as “those societies generated by a species that breaks out of the niche in which it evolved biologically by inventing its own way of life.”
Because of that inevitable systemic dynamic, and the social evolutionary process it inevitably generates,
Any creature on any planet, anywhere in the cosmos, that steps onto the path of civilization — regardless of its inherent nature -- will be condemned to a social-evolutionary process (and to a history) as tormented and destructive as that which has characterized the history of human civilization these past millennia.
(That systemic dynamic was described in the previous entry of this series: “A Big Picture View for Those Who Want to Keep on Fighting Without Focusing on the Current Ugliness).”
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Now, the video presentation of the “The Discernible Reality of a ‘Force of Evil.’”