On Evil: The Inescapable Fact

ON EVIL THE INESCAPABLE FACT

THE banality of evil. Hannah Arendt's trenchant comment on Jerusalem's Man in the Glass Booth springs easily to mind in contemplating the appalling horror of Pinkville.

The massacre of March 16, 1968, can be explained away as further proof, if any were needed, that war is indeed hell. Especially the Viet Nam war, with its peculiar frustrations, its bloody agonies, its nervous uncertainties about who and where the enemy really is. But to excuse My Lai on these grounds, or to argue that the enemy has done worse (as he has), is to beg a graver issue. The fact remains that this particular atrocity--a clear violation of the civilized values America claims to up hold--was apparently ordered by officers of the U.S. military and carried out by sons of honorable, God-fearing people. Inevitably, My Lai will be taken by some as a measure of American society

To certain critics of America, the masacre will be added evidence that th U.S. is an immoral, unprincipled and racist power; others will insist, with a shade more justice, that the action mocks the pious official rhetoric about saving Asia from Communist aggression in th name of humanity. The most pertinent truth, however, is less accusatory and more difficult for the U.S. to accept: is that Americans as a people have too readily ignored and too little understood the presence of evil in the world.

Challenge to Credibility

The phenomenon is almost too basic to be faced; responses to it have ranged from Rousseau'sinsistence that evil is illusory to Jean Genet's perverse, delighted acceptance of it as life's only real value. For the atheist, evil is the ultimate testimony to the meaningless absurdity of life. If God's will implies th torture of an innocent child, insists Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov, "I most respectfully return him the ticket."

For one who has faith in a loving Creator, it is the fundamental challenge to divine credibility: centuries of Christian theological cerebration have led to no more satisfying conclusion than that evil truly exists and that in some unknown way it will be conquered and made to serve the hidden purposes of God. For believer and unbeliever alike, Dostoevsky's riddle--"What am I doing on this earth where sorrow reigns?"--can only be solved provisionally or not at all. The collective historical experience of America is such that it has not really contemplated the question, much less tried to answer it; since De Tocqueville a succession of travelers from older and supposedly wiser civilizations have concluded that the U.S. lacks a tragic sense of life. The observation is largely true; the explanation is the varied strands of thought that, welded together, constitute the conventional wisdom of the American ethos.

America's Puritan sense tends to regard evil in stark terms of black and white. It has been pointed out endlessly, and correctly, that the western, with its crude division of good guys and bad guys, is the nation's archetypal art form. Evil has thus been transmogrified, whenever possible, into the definable, detestable enemy--like Hitler, say--who could always be defeated by the forces of justice. The national instinct to juxtapose good and evil is summed up with only a touch of irony by W. H. Auden's nostalgic reference to simpler times in his Epistle to a Godson:

Then sheep and goats were easy to recognize, local fauna; good meant Giles the shoemaker taking care of the village ninny, evil Count ffoulkes who in his tall donjon Indulged in sinister eccentricities.

It has always seemed puzzling how the essentially pessimistic theology of Puritanism could become the underpinning of a buoyant, almost recklessly optimistic civilization. Part of the answer lies in the fact that the Puritan ethos not only posits the fall of man, it also implies the existence of an Elect of God. America has presumed itself to be God's chosen remnant, to the point where it very nearly subscribes to the anthropocentric heresy of Pelagius, the 5th century Christian ascetic who argued that man could gain salvation without divine grace by his efforts alone. Put in secular terms, the Pelagianism of America means an unshakable faith in the righteousness of the U.S. "We tend to think," argues Roman Catholic Philosopher Michael Novak, "that it is not and cannot be evil at the center. We habitually believe that American intentions are good ones, that America has never started a war, that America is always on the side of democracy and justice and liberty, that Americans are unusually innocent, generous and good in their relationships with other people."

It is the particular heresy of Americans that they see themselves as potential saints more than as real-life sinners. Seen in the transfiguring mirror of patriotism, the history of America is a record of triumph over adversity, moral earnestness and accomplishment. America's libertarian achievements and idealism certainly justify great pride; and the nation's technological record in taming nature is one of the world's wonders. But Americans have insufficiently considered the possibility that this record is also tarred with betrayals of the nation's democratic ideals, and that no nation has a solitary, superior claim to virtue.

The Puritan ethos was a stimulus to striving and hard work; no wonder that it gave way to its secular descendant, pragmatism--the uniquely American philosophy articulated by C. S. Peirce, Dewey and William James. Americans are the exemplars of pragmatism, of rational humanism. The pragmatist, of course, does not deny the existence of evil--although he likes to call it something else. But he optimistically assumes that it exists in institutions rather than men, and can therefore be legislated away. Thus evils, in the American experience, have always been seen as concrete problems that could be dissected and analyzed--like poverty or hunger--and then dealt with, if the will was there to do so. Above all, in this view, evil could be exorcised through education.

A Dark Underside

Thus the American ethos--part pragmatic, part Puritan, part Pelagian--has had the synergistic effect of masking the popular consciousness of evil. Traditionally, evil has been something distant, Wholly Other, rather than an enemy within. When Rap Brown complained that "violence is as American as cherry pie," most Americans dismissed the charge as the aberrant nastiness of a Black Power fanatic. When the Kerner Commission proposed that America was a racist nation, the U.S. public reacted with "Who, me?" protests of innocence. But there is a dark underside to American history: the despoliation of the Indian, the subjection of the black, the unwise and probably unmoral insistence on the enemy's unconditional surrender that led to Hiroshima.

Today's young radicals, in particular, are almost painfully sensitive to these and other wrongs of their society, and denounce them violently. But at the same time they are typically American in that they fail to place evil in its historic and human perspective. To them, evil is not an irreducible component of man, an inescapable fact of life but something committed by the older generation, attributable to a particular class or the "Establishment," and eradicable through love and revolution. In fact, the fight against evil is more complex. "Good and evil, we know, in the field of this world grow up together almost inseparably," said Milton. The West's philosophic heritage shows that both are components of human existence, intertwined and inseparable. As Luther suggested, man is simul justus ac peccator--saint and sinner at once. To say that evil is part of man is not to condone evil deeds in men. Wrongdoing is not to be shrugged off with easy references to human nature. Yet to ignore the persistent dark element in man can be as misleading, and intolerant, as to see only the dark.

Reason for Affection

Searching other times and places, Americans can cite greater or more frequent crimes than Pinkville. But one massacre is more than enough. My Lai is a warning to America that it, like other nations, is capable of evil acts and that its idealistic goals do not always correspond to its deeds. "Those whom the gods would destroy," wrote the late Thomas Merton, poet and monk, "they first make mad--with self-righteous confidence and unquestioning self-esteem." In the light of My Lai, Americans have little cause for feeling self-righteous, and much reason for self-reflection. The massacre may be only one betrayal of American ideals; but is it possible that there have been other betrayals? My Lai is a token of the violence that trembles beneath the surface of American life; where else, and in what ways will it explode? How much injustice and corruption distort the reality of democracy that the U.S. offers to the world? The answers are debatable; the questions are not.

According to Christian moral theology, the self-awareness of sin and guilt is a necessary prologue to sanctity; in the prism of psychoanalysis, self-discovery is seen as the first step toward sanity. Individuals are not identical with nations, but sometimes they are analogous. And thus it can be argued that only the nation that has faced up to its own failings and acknowledged its capacities for evil and ill-doing has any real claim to greatness.

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