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Reading:  

  from Evil: an Investigation, by Lance Morrow

 

Why do people do evil?

 

·      Because it gives them pleasure.

·      Because it gives them power.

·      Because they don’t know any better.

·      Because they are afraid of their victims.

·      Because they think that the evil they are doing is righteous, or good, or necessary.

·      Because they are indifferent to the suffering of others.

·      Because they are too morally stupid to recognize the evil they are doing.

·      Because they are forced to do it by people holding power over them.

·      Because they are caught in a mob’s frenzy.

·      Because they feel a perverse itch to do harm and it occurs to them that they may do so.

·      Because it is customary among their people, and not to do it would be a breach of community tradition or ceremony.

·      Because it is an accident.

·      Because they are habituated to it.

·      Because they suffer from a compulsion.

·      Because they themselves were treated evilly once.

·      Because Satan make them do it.

 

            What happens when each tribe—Serbs, Croatians, Muslims, Kosovars, and so on—lives by the principle of Never Forget? What if no one ever forgets? Then we all eventually live in the cemetery, and tell stories about what it was like in the days before our universes of incompatible memory collided and made such terrible fission. What life is that? The Serbs never forget the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, when the Ottoman Turks under Sultan Murad I defeated the Serbs under Prince Lazar in their advance toward Vienna and began the 500 years’ subjugation of Christian Serbia by the Muslim conquerors.

            Remembering is indispensable. Evils arise from not remembering (those who do not learn from the past are condemned to repeat it, etc., etc.). But evils, terrible evils, also arise from not forgetting. Obsessive memory mandates revenge. Ralph Waldo Emerson, the least Balkan of men, formulated the American secular theology of forward spin. He might have been addressing the Balkans when he asked, “Why drag about this monstrous corpse of your memory?

 

Sermon:

            It was a crystal clear morning, blue skies, a couple of clouds. I was up early, there was too much work to do, and so I sat at my table in the front room, looking out over our lake, watching the ducks float by. The TV was on behind me, as it was most mornings—multitasking is one of the things I do a lot. So I was doing email, when something in the voice of the announcer caught my attention, and I turned around. I saw the image on the TV—the New York City skyline, with smoke coming out of one of the Twin Towers. How strange, I thought. The announcer said that they thought a small plane flew into the Tower. What a horrible thing, I thought. And then, suddenly, there was a streak across the screen, then an instantaneous burst of fireball. How totally unreal. How could a second plane have also flown off course into the Towers? What the heck was going on?

            Well, we all know, now. Two planes, flown directly into the towers, killing thousands. Another into the Pentagon. Another still into the ground. Unimaginable, isn’t it, still after all these years. Then, the answer most often supplied was that not only was this terrorism, but also a particularly harsh form of evil. To fly planes of unsuspecting people into buildings with thousands more innocent people—this shocked, alarmed, angered, and outraged not only Americans, but others around the globe. Then to see on TV crowds in other nations dancing in the streets at the devastation, that added even more to the outrage, fear and upset of those of us who couldn’t quite comprehend. What does it mean that those buildings aren’t there any more, that those people disappeared, that the fires raged so hot and hard that there was nothing left of so many people? The previously infrequent word, evil, became a household one—both in the White House, and in other houses around our nation. Evil had been done. The terrorists were part of the axis of evil, it was in their nature, their will, and we, as a nation, must do something about it.

            Evil. What, exactly, is evil? It seems like a simple question, somewhat like “what is a dog?” But when you really try to define it, to peel back the layers and know what evil is, it’s not that easy after all. The attacks of September 11th—were those evil? Or just wrong? Or just sad? Evil is slippery, something that’s hard to define, that lives in the cracks between theology and philosophy, between ethics and morality, in a gray area where nothing is really clear. The sine qua non of evil is Hitler. But beyond that, we’re rarely unanimously certain.

            For years, Unitarianism and Universalism have virtually ignored evil. Ever since we threw out original sin in the early 19th century, we’ve tried to ignore evil. Instead, we’ve focused on the good things, on optimism, the love of god. The scientific discoveries of the 19th and 20th centuries, and the evidence of evolution, brought us the notion that there was, and would be, as steady progression of humanity toward perfection. Plus, if you argue God is all-loving as we did and do, then you have to throw out all powerful, since there is no way to reconcile all loving, all powerful and all good with the undisputed existence of evil. We struck with all loving, and relegated evil to the dustbin. “Onward and Upward” was our rallying cry—as we moved reason into the place where others placed scripture and god, kept that loving god and thought we no longer needed to wrestle with evil, to come to terms with the harsher side of life.

            Even now, we often try to avoid evil, couching it in dualistic terms. Colleague Davidson Loehr has said that “Of course there is evil, and it is in us.” While I agree with him, Davidson goes on to say that good has no meaning unless evil has meaning. For him, evil is constricting life into too small a vision, of treating people like things. Rev. Dr. Thandeka, another of our theologians, defines evil as “the failure to understand the inherent worth and dignity of every person as part of the interdependent web of all existence.” She continues, “When horrible things happen, human beings are responsible.”

            On the surface, I agree with both Davidson and Thandeka—yes, evil does exist, and it involves us human. But I find myself bothered by what seems to be their prevarication, or what feels like too easy an out for us—that evil must be there for good to have meaning, and that it’s about not understanding the inherent worth and dignity of every person. Even the Rev. Dr. Rebecca Parker, president of Starr King School for the Ministry, even Rebecca’s words fall a bit short for me. She says that “evil has to qualify acts, not human beings. We are all capable of doing either good or evil and everything in between, but our being itself is good, is worthy, is of value.”

            Somehow, it’s not enough. It’s simply not enough. Yes, evil is a human thing. And yes, we people—all of us people—are capable of doing evil. And yet there are times that I wonder whether all beings are good and worthy and of value. And I know that this thought, saying this out loud, also seems to fly in the face of our Unitarian Universalist first principle—that we covenant to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person.

            Where is the inherent worth and dignity inside someone who creates and carries out great atrocities? Those who fly into buildings, or divert badly needed food aid, or who rape and murder children? Too often we seem to let people off the hook by remembering their good side. It’s often said that Hitler loved dogs, and while I believe that to be true, what does that matter? The crimes that he orchestrated, the devastation and destruction that he perpetrated on people he defined as “other”—those who were disabled, gay, lesbian, Jewish, Roma, “degenerates” all—the devastation and destruction cannot be made any less by knowing that he loved dogs. And what about others? Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge and the killing fields? The incessant fighting and genocidal activities in the Balkans, by Ceausescu in Romania, Idi Amin, Stalin, Genghis Khan, in Rwanda, and in Darfur—is all of this evil? Or merely bad? What about their inherent worth—both perpetrators and victims?

            The answer, it seems, depends on whom you ask. As you heard in the reading this morning, the Serbs justify their actions by the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, and the fighting forces in the Middle East all claim the “right” to do what they do based on millennia of wrongs by the other side. As Morrow said in that reading, “evils arise from not remembering . . . but evils, terrible evils also arise from not forgetting.” For every massacre and genocide, you’ll find someone who has a reason why what they are doing is not wrong, for it was done to their ancestors by those they now oppress.

            So when does being a victim allow you to do something to others? Is there ever a time? And what does it take for governments outside of those countries to step in to stop the horrific, if not quite evil, actions of those perpetrating unspeakable crimes? Our military ends up in the Balkans, but we’re not in Darfur. Hitler was our enemy, but Stalin, who killed more people during his tenure in the Soviet Union than Hitler ever did, was rarely, if ever, condemned by our government for that—the “enemy of our enemy” theory made him our friend and ally, even as people were dying horrible deaths.

            I feel like I’ve strayed a bit from evil, but not really. For there are all sorts of things that people say to justify their actions, to try to get them seen as only really bad, not evil. Justification is a big one—they did it to me first. The whole theory of proportional response to injury is something that always has me shaking my head—what makes something proportional? The number of people killed? The proportion of the population killed? Does the firebombing of London during the Second World War justify the firebombing of Dresden and other European cities? Does the possibility that 700,000 American troops and millions of Japanese could quite possibly have died in an all out battle in the Pacific justify the loss of the 150,000 civilians immediately and 300,000 to 400,000 after in Hiroshima and Nagasaki? These are questions that cannot be answered, and even to entertain them sometimes feels as if it is colluding in excusing evil.

            That’s one other aspect of evil that is rarely mentioned: the complicity in evil by silence. For years, it’s been asked what the Germans knew about the Holocaust when it was happening, and then the good questions of what could they have done if they knew. There are no known answers to these questions. Is it evil to watch genocide and do nothing? Is it evil to watch the destruction of civilizations and fighting and creation of refugees in nations around the world, and do nothing?

            Or is it evil to watch the destruction in our American inner cities, and to see the havoc and loss of lives and possibilities that systemic problems such has poverty, apathy and racism cause in this nation? What should be our response as we notice, if we dare, the still ravaged New Orleans, or the thousands and thousands of people without access to health care? Or the young black men dying in gun violence? Is that evil? If not evil, then what is it more properly called?

            Again, perhaps a bit off track. But that’s the problem with evil: without the ability to clearly define it, to say without a doubt that X is evil and Y is not, we will always be on that slippery slope, that land of subjective definition, and with that, the land of either denying or diluting evil into something more palatable.

            Another story, this one from closer to my home. I remember, long before that clear blue skied day, another day. It was a dingy, overcast, and cold February afternoon. Again, I was working while the TV was on—you know, that multitasking phenomenon. Again, the news, and once again, the announcer’s voice caught my attention. There had been a murder—a twelve year old girl was dead, presumably at the hands of her fifteen year old brother. Tragic, I thought. Is it evil, I wondered? Murder of anyone comes close, and the murder of a child—that has to be closer still, and maybe even crossing the line. And then the name, and connection. The daughter and son were the children of one of my police lieutenant’s. I was, at that time, a volunteer police chaplain in my local community. I tried calling the department to get information, but the thin blue wall was closed tight, even to chaplains. Protection was the name of the game. I couldn’t get details, and I wondered what the heck was going on?

            It took a while, but I finally found an officer willing, wanting, to tell me what had gone on. It appeared that Michael had taken one of the shotguns out of the locked gun vault, tried to make a silencer out of a two-liter pop bottle, and shot his sister Laura. A horrible story that devastated our community. Days later, I ended up at the visitation for Laura. There was a long line to greet dad Gary and mom Linda. I hugged Gary hard, felt his tears fall on my shoulder, and then I turned to Linda. She and I had never met before, and I saw in her the distracted look of a grief stricken woman who didn’t know how many more people she didn’t know she could greet. I introduced myself, and said I was one of the police chaplains.

            As long as I live, I will never forget the laser-focused eyes that pierced me in that next instant. She turned, in that one instant, and said words I never expected to hear: will you visit my son? I said the only thing humanly possible to that crying woman: yes, I will.

            And I did. After going through the proper procedures I met Michael the next day, right after Laura’s funeral. Thus began one of the most significant relationships I’ve ever had. Over the next three and a half years, while he awaited trial, I visited Michael almost weekly. Over one hundred and thirty visits.

            When I first went there, I wanted Michael to be evil. He murdered his sister. I wanted him to be a monster—how else could I explain away the murder? How else could I explain the hell that he put Laura and Gary through? I wanted this young man to be wicked, evil, someone horrible.

            And instead, I fell in love with him. He was not evil; he may have been ill, had a psychotic break, we still don’t really know to this day. But he was not evil. He was, simply, a boy. A frightened, scared boy who is now growing up into a man. In the ten years since Laura’s death, this boy-child, now man-child, has never received a reprimand of any sort during his incarceration. His behavior has been exemplary. He’s completed high school, getting great grades. He’s completed a cooking trade course. He’s helped other inmates learn how to read. This person I wanted to be evil is not. But is what he did evil, or only tragic?

            Yet despite my experience with Michael, and despite his killing of his sister, I am still convinced that evil does exist in the hearts of us all. It is not something “out there” that we can catch, but rather it is something whose possibilities lurk inside every human. Evil, to me, is only human created. It needs intent. Needs to have a conscious dimension of knowing that what you’re doing is not right, and then doing it anyway. Or that you should have known it was not right, and you did it anyway. Does lack of understanding, stupidity or incapacity change it from evil to bad? Evil is also a turning away from the humanity of others, it is forgetting that there is just one human race, our human race, it is putting the self above others. It’s all those reasons that Jim read from Morrow’s book to us: the pleasure, power, stupidity, fear, and all of those other things. But none of those things forgives it. Excuses it. Makes it okay. Even as I cannot define it precisely, I know that evil is human borne.

            I also know that evil is real, and that it exists. Yet too often, we try to deny its existence and possibility. As Morrow puts it, “It begins to seem that not to see evil, not to ‘believe in’ evil, is the primitive view.” It is so easy, for those of us living privileged lives, to simply deny it exists, to simply deny that evil is real, much the way that our religious ancestors did by proclaiming the goodness of human kind. Yes, we are good, but we also do hold this possibility for ill, and for evil, inside. To believe otherwise is to be primitive in Morrow’s words, or naïve in mine. To believe otherwise is to be complicit in our silence, in our willful blindness to its possibility.

            And that we must not do. Because as long as we deny evil’s existence, and as long as we deny the possibility that we, too, could commit evil, then evil wins the day. It hides in plain sight, knowing that our optimistic naiveté does not allow us to see it. But see it we must, or in the not remembering, we will give ample room for it to arise again and again and again.

            So what’s the antidote to evil? Certainly it is the remembering, it is the necessity at times also to forget—to forget being a victim as sometimes when that’s all we remember we perpetuate the cycle of evil. To speak out when we see it, to work for justice for all. To do good is certainly part of the mix—if we could fill up the world with good, there would be no room for evil. All of these are necessary, and one more. Morrow, in the end of his book, says that it is hope, and hope alone, that is the antidote. I’m not sure if I agree with him fully—that hope is the only thing—but I do know that hope is a crucial ingredient. And maybe even the crucial ingredient. But it cannot be a blind hope, it cannot be a hope tainted with silence, it cannot be a hope that turns its eyes away and that doesn’t see the world as it really is. Rather, it needs to be a hope alive in the midst of knowing the horror of the world; a hope that doesn’t turn its back on despair, but a hope with its eyes as wide open as its heart and mind. A hope full of action, full of commitment to change the world. Hope is that thing with feathers, and it is up to us to keep in safe in the storm, and to help it fly out into the world. For evil there is, and evil there may always be. But people who love, who give forth hope, who see reality but live for a different day, for people who carry that hope forth, they—you, us—are the only hope there is.