August 18, 2008
Evil
Clinton Quin was bishop of Texas during the late 1920s to the mid 1950s. He would sometimes introduce himself, “I’m Mike Quin. I work to beat hell.”
It’s a noble vocation for us churchers.
Just the other evening on the telly a similar vocation came up in an interview with the current presidential wannabes. I don’t remember hell being mentioned, but evil got its usual press. Hell and evil may be presumed to have a lot in common, but evil seems to be the in term being used these days, sometimes with more or less reckless abandon, and most of the time, anyway, by people who, like most of us, seem to know more about what it does than what it is or who have an overly simplistic notion about it that denies how altogether complicated it is.
Separately, the candidates were asked the same questions. Does evil exist? Do we ignore it? Do we negotiate with it? Do we contain it? Do we defeat it? Both agreed that evil exists. Like so many of us, neither defined it, but mostly just talked about what it does, maybe how it’s recognized. Like a supreme court justice once said about obscenity that he couldn’t define it, but he sure knew it when he saw it.
So, as an opener, and so we can have a few notions we can disagree with, Scott Peck suggested some diagnostic characteristics of evil in his book, The People of the Lie — The Hope for Healing Human Evil. Here’s what he wrote on page 129.
“In addition to the abrogation of responsibility that characterizes all personality disorders, evil would specifically be distinguished by a) consistent destructive, scapegoating behavior, which may often be quite subtle, b) excessive, albeit usually covert, intolerance to criticism and other forms of narcissistic injury, c) pronounced concern with a public image and a self-image of respectability, contributing to a stability of life-style but also to pretentiousness and denial of hateful feelings or vengeful motives, and d) intellectual deviousness, with an increased likelihood of a mild schizophrenic-like disturbance of thinking at times of stress.”
More generally, he also wrote that evil is that force, residing either inside or outside human beings, that seeks to kill life or liveliness. Goodness is its opposite, goodness is that which promotes life and liveliness. And evil is the use of power to destroy the spiritual growth of others for the purpose of defending and preserving the integrity of our own sick selves (Ibid, pp 43 & 119). In short, it is not only scapegoating, but seems to have an altogether casual disregard for its accuser.
Frederick Buechner calls our attention to the cross and says that practically speaking there is no evil so dark and so obscene — not even this — but that God can turn it to good. No less, he adds, the problem of evil is perhaps the greatest single problem for religious faith. (Wishful Thinking, p 25) It seems obvious that evil, like good, pretty well requires us human beings for a carnation ever to make its case. Like the daemons Jesus cast out of the Gerasene that required somewhere to go only to get a herd of pigs for their efforts.
Can evil be defeated? The pigs drowned, but the daemons? Even our scapegoating seems not always that efficient. Like somebody said, When I point one finger at something or someone for whatever reason, there are usually three pointing back at me.
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