This piece is appearing as a newspaper op/ed in my very red congressional district (VA-06).
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Evil: A coherent force that spreads a pattern of brokenness.
Liberal America (generally) hasn’t believed that anything operates in our world that might reasonably be called “a force of Evil.” And so when, over the past generation, that kind of consistently destructive force took over the Republican Party, Liberal America – and its political arm, the Democratic Party -- failed to beat it back.
As is said in baseball, “You can’t hit what you can’t see.” And you aren’t likely to “see” what you don’t think exists.
But, in our times, events have worked to make steadily more visible the reality of such a thing: i.e. a coherent force that consistently works to destroy what’s good.
Think of the “good” as that which fosters human flourishing.
Virtually all of us would ideally wish to live – would flourish most -- in a world ruled by love, justice, kindness, truthfulness, beauty, etc. We regard those as good, because we recognize them as conducive to our greatest fulfillment.
If those are our Good, any force that works consistently to achieve their opposites is the opposite of Good.
Usually, the good and the evil are well mixed in complex human organizations. But occasionally a “pure case” arises. Occasionally, when one actor consistently makes things more broken, that consistency shows the unity and coherence of the force that’s animating it.
We can see that, for example, in the Republican Party of our times, as it:
Transfers national wealth to the very richest, widening the already injurious inequality gap; Fans the flames of hatred and conflict between racial, ethnic, and religious groups; Continuously speaks falsely, trying to deceive on virtually every subject; Implements ecologically disruptive policies, even to the point of endangering the human future; Creates unnecessary international crises and discord (rising tensions with Iran, and with our friends over the Iran issue; a thoughtlessly and illegally waged “trade war” of choice with the second largest economy of the world); Offers no vision whatever of a better America, and shows indifference about using its power to move the nation forward; Attacks the rule of law, the constitutional order, and the other foundations of our democracy; Rips children away from their parents; Encourages dictators around the world while alienating our friends among the world’s most decent and democratic nations.Although this “brokenness” takes many different forms, common to all these forms is a “pattern of brokenness” – hate not love, strife not peace, lies not honesty, injustice not justice, cruelty not kindness etc. That consistency shows the coherent spirit of brokenness behind it.
The existence of such coherent force of brokenness in the world can also be shown by connecting the lines of cause and effect involved in moving brokenness through the human world. For each form of brokenness we see in the world, we can ask two questions:
One question peers backward in time: What caused this brokenness? E.g. What factors led to this war? What caused this person to become greedy, or cruel, or insistent on domination? The other question looks forward in time: What are the effects of this brokenness? (What impact does this or that -- injustice or cruelty or strife -- have on how the human world develops from there?)What we find is that the different forms of brokenness -- conflict, injustice, cruelty, greed, trauma, hate, exploitation, fear, the lust for power, deceit, etc. -- feed into each other. The form of brokenness is shape-shifting while the persistent “pattern of brokenness” is moved through the culture.
Sketching this coherent network of cause and effect reveals an “It” -- something working destructively upon the human world over time. We can see that “It” – that “coherent force” —just as we can “see” the wind by the way it makes the branches bend and sway and the clothes on the line slap in the breeze.
And we can see that this “It” acts just like what has long been called “Evil.”
America has paid a high price for the failure of Liberal America to see what it was up against. That failure to understand the nature of the destructive force that has hijacked the Republican Party over the course of a generation -- along with the resultant failure to respond with the appropriate moral passion – has enabled that force to gain in power and do more and more damage to all the structures that have protected America’s goodness.
Now that the Trump Presidency – and the Trump Party that supports him – have made so blatant this unvaryingly destructive impetus of the force that’s arisen on the right, the task for Liberals/Democrats is
to see the coherent force, and to see how profoundly it acts in the world like what our religious traditions have said about “evil”; to fight against it with the passion appropriate to the sacred importance of protecting the human Good; And to fight that battle with an understanding of the terrain (of fundamental moral values) on which the battle should be fought.