THE STUBBLING OF THE WEST:

'Know Ye Not Me?': America sees and defeats the face of evil. (DANIEL HENNINGER, April 18, 2003, Wall Street Journal)

John Milton, in the 1600s, lived in a place and time when everyone was a practicing Christian, no matter what they believed in private. Milton for 14 years labored on poetry that struggled with the most fundamental issues of good and evil; he gave all the best lines to the "Fiend," "Satan," for Milton never doubted the power, the appeal and the reality of evil's presence in the souls of some men. "Know ye not mee? . . . Not to know mee argues yourselves unknown."

Some 350 years later, no matter how much this particular weekend burns with ritual, it is evident that secular society, however real its benefits, doesn't dwell much on Satan or evil. It's not a subject. Even organized religion, both Catholicism and Protestantism here and in Europe, has recently dedicated its energies to more secular goals such as material justice rather than to purely spiritual goals, such as salvation or damnation, which once defined our common understanding of good and evil. Inside or outside the churches, it's not clear who believes what anymore, which wasn't true in Milton's time. What is now clear is that they don't believe in evil as John Milton believed in it, and as does, evidently, George Bush.

If this is true--that years of declining belief have diluted evil to an abstraction--it isn't surprising that for a great many people in the Iraq debate the idea that Saddam Hussein and his Iraqi regime were evil enough to require elimination from the civilized world simply did not compute; that's been deleted from their software. Despite the beheadings of women and the severing of dissenting tongues (Amnesty International report, 2000), the now-revealed prisons for children, the torture chambers with meat hooks, nine years of meticulous U.N. archiving of programs to produce weapons of mass destruction, the homicidal gassing of Shiites and Kurds, and a son, Uday, whose life reveals the Husseins to be, more than anything, Neronic voluptuaries, despite what this so obviously adds up to, it could never be "sufficient cause."

Milton thought that should evil win, then earth's base was "built on stubble." Not yet.

One of the most remarkable moments in the immediate aftermath of 9-11 came in the most unlikely of settings, a PBS show with Bill Moyers and Andrew Delbanco discussing evil:

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.

Here were two archetypal liberals, on the East Coast Establishment's network, forced to resort, however inadequately, to the only language and concepts available to us to sensibly describe what we'd just seen. What made this particularly ironic was that Mr. Delbanco was presumably on the show because of his book, The Death of Satan : How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil, which he describes as follows:

[T]he story I have tried to tell is the story of the advance of secular rationality in the United States, which has been relentless in the face of all resistance. It is the story of a culture that has gradually withdrawn its support from the old conception of a universe seething with divine intelligence and has left its members with only one recourse: to acknowledge that no story about the intrinsic meaning of the world has universal validity.

But once you surrender the ideas of the soul, transcendence, and intrinsic meaning you are left with a world that is wholly material and have nothing on which to ground the concepts of good and evil. For if you and I are merely temporary agglomerations of atoms, it can hardly matter what we do to one another, any more than it matters that lightning strikes a tree or a meteor smashes into the moon. If there are no universals, if everything really is relative, then what basis is there for judging what Mohammad Atta did on 9-11 to be evil and what Mark Bingham did to be heroic?
Posted by Orrin Judd at April 20, 2003 8:14 AM