EVIL. . .

Today, I found this long passage in one of my journals.

It appears as if the subject of evil frightens us; it is a dangerous subject in many ways and on many levels.  The first danger is that we see only the darkness cast by other people – individuals, communities, and nations.  Engaging the topic requires courage.  For Aristotle, courage was the most important virtue for without it he believed that we cannot practice any other virtue.  The second danger is that I/we fail to think about the evils that I/we are engaged in.  One effect of ignoring evils all around and in us is a way of being engaged in them.  It is not enough for us to look at the evil within.  At times we must take up arms against external evils.  Philip Hallie who fought in the French resistance against the Germans in WWII admired the pacifist people of a French village that defied Hitler to save Jews during the war; he resented them as well:  They didn’t stop Hitler.  They did nothing to stop Hitler.  A thousand villages would not have stopped Hitler.  It took decent murders like me to do it.  Murderers who had compunctions, but murderers nonetheless.  The cruelty that I perpetrated willingly was the only way to stop the cruel march that I and others like me were facing.  

 Sir Laurens van der Post noted that: Today what life demands of us most urgently is to find a means of overcoming evil without becoming another form of evil in its place. . .one culture after another is still running amok and men are still murdering one another in the belief that it is not they but their neighbors who are evil.

 A third danger is overlooking the price of repaying evil with evil.  Philip Hallie writes of his guilt over the killing of young German soldiers; he does not want to forget: If I did not keep aware of the conflict in my mind about being a decent killer, then I would be more immoral than I am . . . Because I deserve that agony; I want to believe in the preciousness of life and be a killer too.  And because I feel this way, I have to pay a price morally. 

 Not forgetting what others have done carries its own danger as well.  An evil you cannot forget or forgive lives on in your heart, and continues to affect you and those around you in countless ways.  The more one thinks about particular evils done to one, the greater the risk that one will do evil and the less able it will be to see that this is itself evil.

A fourth danger is that we come to imitate it.  Paradoxically, we find evil to be attractive, if not seductive.  Gregory Curtis captured this when he wrote: We must search for the good, while evil finds us out.  In Eden, Eve did not go looking for the serpent; rather, it came to her.  Evil accepts us.  It does not require us to improve.  No matter how great our faults, evil will embrace us.  Evil validates our weaknesses and our secret appetites.  It tells us we’re all right.  Evil does not ask us to feel guilty.  You are what you are, evil says.  In fact, if you want to, you can get worse. 

 You and I cannot escape the battle between good and evil; we will always be part of it.