Evil Thoughts in America Today

You may not know Susan Neiman. She is the author of Evil In Modern Thought, a book that explains how evil is regarded in modern philosophy.

Ms. Neiman describes the early philosophical thinking that all things came from God. Including Evil. And that Evil was interpreted as human suffering regardless of the origin of the suffering. However, after the earthquake in Lisbon,Portugal in 1755 , the European thinkers realized that the death of the ‘good’ and the sparing of the ‘bad’ was indiscriminate. Precisely because there was  no rhyme nor reason to the victims and the survivors, precisely because there was not a pattern, the early philosophers began to consider Evil in different ways. (Later, science would show that earthquakes were predictable and a natural source of human suffering. Much later, science would demonstrate that a number of ‘divine events’ were destined to happen by mathematical models and not by divine intervention.) 

All of this leads to current thoughts that there are three kinds of evil: natural evil, moral evil, and metaphysical evil. At least according to Leibniz.

Natural evil is the human suffering from natural events like floods, earthquakes, plagues, etc. Moral evil is the evil brought about by Man. And the metaphysical Evil is the evil associated with the degeneration of the substance of the world (whatever that means). Metaphysical Evil is alleged to be the source of all Evil ( natural and moral)  under this thinking.

I was thinking today that it is so natural and common to believe in tectonic plates and pressure gradients that cause earthquakes; it is easy to think about high pressure ridges and Alberta Clippers sweeping across the plains, and the effects of El Nino on weather patterns. Yet 200 years ago, these scientific explanations were completely unknown and all actions were attributed to God.

Evil in America, if defined as the suffering of Man like it once was, has three causalities: Nature (as observed by science),  Man’s physical ill-being (anatomical and physiogical problems) , and Man’s moral choices. I would argue that there are people that cannot distinguish between right and wrong and inflict evil upon others. And I consider that physical ill-being.

There are those people that choose to do evil for their own reasons, this is moral evil. Whether they pull the wings off of flies, or beat their wives because they are frustrated, these people choose to perform evil upon others.   

(As Ms Neiman points out: “The more responsibility for evil that accrues to the human, the less that accrues to the divine.” Today, our churches teach that God is Good, but it was not always that way. Even today though, our churches teach that more people will suffer in Hell than will be saved. And some churchgoers believe that other Christians will suffer in Hell more than pagans and atheists will. Just ask a fundamentalist what will happen to a Mormon or a Jew when they die. All believe in Christ and God but two aren’t Christian.)

If we look at moral evil, choosing to inflict suffering for your own rationalizations, it appears that this Evil is carried out at three levels: by the individual in a person-to-person evil, by the imposition of a societal rule, and then by the organized, systematic, mechanization of evil, perhaps, even,  the process automation of evil.

The person-to-person Evil are the ones we think of as crimes: murder and mayhem. The societal rule types of Evil are the ones that we would associate today with the culturally accepted beatings of spouses, the stoning of adulterers, and the killing of female babies in a society that values male children. While these may be abhorrent to Americans, they are acceptable in the societies of other cultures.

It is the third type of evil that many (and I hope all) Americans find repugnant: the systematizing of Evil, the establishment of a process to inflict suffering, the mechanization of Evil that sits outside the moral sphere that we live in. Auschwitz and the gas chambers are an example of this third type of moral evil in which the practice of evil is broken into small tasks and then carried out in such a manner that no one person sees themselves as ‘responsible’ for the Evil that was committed.

In Nazi Germany, the directors of companies that provided the gas pellets did not see themselves as responsible, the construction crew that built the chambers did not see themselves as Evil, and the railroad personnel that transported people to the death camps did not see themselves as Evil. And yet the very worst Evil of all time was committed against 6 million people.

In America today, our government has sought to systematize Evil, to mechanize it, to establish a process to carry out suffering, to torture our enemies. The idea is repugnant to any free-thinking American. This is what I, and others, object to in the torture process: the establishment of an Evil process.

Some Americans have reasons and rationales for systematically torturing others: to protect our loved ones, to provide justice for victims, to make the bad guys pay for their actions against us. Yet we should think of this beyond ourselves; above ourselves, if you will.

Does torture come from God?  Yes, if  you think as the early philosophers believed. But I believe that God weeps when we torture. I believe He weeps when we choose moral evils of any type.

Today our God continues to permit suffering in this world. Our God continues to permit Evil. Perhaps God is waiting for Man to realize that Man is the source of Evil and that there are only natural events and Man’s Evil. There is suffering that comes as a result of God’s natural laws and there is suffering that comes from Man.

What will Man do to curb his Evil and when will he do it?