MEETING THE LORD OF THE FLIES:

Bush's Armageddon Obsession (Michael Ortiz Hill, October 23, 2002, AlterNet)

I'd become accustomed to George W. Bush's use of the word "evil" until he told the nation this last spring, "The evil one is among us."

Anyone with a passing understanding of the evangelical world of Bush' faith knows he was referring to the Antichrist. The implications of this are grave beyond telling and yet scarcely ever noted in the public discourse. On the eve of a misguided war the Commander in Chief of the most powerful military force in human history has located American foreign policy within a Biblical narrative that leads inexorably towards the plains of Megiddo, roughly fifty five miles northwest of Jerusalem: the battle of Armageddon. Two essential questions, as impertinent as they are imperative, need to be asked: Mr. President, as a born-again Christian is it not true that you regard this as the end times prophesied in the Bible? In what way does your religious understanding of apocalypse inform American policy in the Mideast?

It's not all clear that Mr. Bush was referring to the Evil One; he may well have just been referring to Osama bin Laden as "the evil one". But even assuming that the President was referring to Satan, it would hardly be as apocalyptic a reference as M. Hill seems to think. Here's a pretty good discussion of Satan, evil, and 9-11 from two unlikely sources--Bill Moyers and Andrew Delbanco--speaking on September 12th, 2001:

BM: Do you believe in evil?

AD: I don't see how anyone can have experienced even indirectly as you and I sitting here have the events of the last day and not take seriously the existence of evil. One of the things that a number of writers have said about the devil--some people believe in him as a literal being, some people believe in him as a metaphor or an image or a representation of these dark, human capacities--one thing that a number of writers have said is that the cleverest trick of the devil is to convince people that he does not exist. We saw evil yesterday. We have to confront it. We have to face it.

BM: Evil is defined as?

AD: Well, for me I think the best I've been able to do with that question is to try to recognize and come to terms with the reality of the fact that there are human beings who are able, by convincing themselves that there's some higher good, some higher ideal to which their lives should be dedicated, that the pain and suffering of other individuals doesn't matter, it doesn't have to do with them or that it's... That they're expendable, that it's a cost that's worth making in the pursuit of these objectives. So evil for me is the absence of the imaginative sympathy for other human beings.

BM: The absence of a moral imagination, the ability to see what the consequences of your actions are to someone else?

AD: Yes, the inability to see your victims as human beings. To think of them as instruments or cogs or elements or statistics but not as human beings.

BM: You have written about your concern that Americans have lost the sense of evil. Is what happened in the last 36 hours going to bring us back or is it too deep for that, our absence, our loss of memory.

AD: I think it simmers. It's dormant in all of us. We don't want to acknowledge it. We want to explain it away. We want to find [an explanation] for it. In a modern world we mostly live in a place where the terrible suffering of the world seems far away-abstract and unreal and we can somehow imagine that it hasn't anything to do with us. It came home yesterday. I think a lot of people in this city and in this country are searching their souls.

What's interesting about this from our perspective today is how it ties in to the post below on equality. Part of the reason that modern liberalism has to deny the existence of evil--beyond just its hostility to Judeo-Christianity--is because if we recognize that evil exists and that people are evil to greater and lesser degrees (we all, of course, have evil within us) that strikes at the very heart of the egalitarian project. After all, how can one justify redistributing wealth to the evil as well as to the "good"? And if we are to have affirmative action programs to "level the playing field" for every classification of folks known to man, should the evil too have jobs and college admissions reserved for them? That seems like it would be a tough sell to the voters. Any such gradation of human beings, implying as it does that we can, and should, make judgments about people based on their character must be anathema to the Left. And so they are stuck denying evil. Instead, an Osama bin Laden has to have been created and motivated by our own actions, so that if only we tweak this knob or punch this button he can be brought back around to being a perfectly decent chap.
Posted by Orrin Judd at October 26, 2002 2:45 PM