A Liberal Religious Investigation of EVIL
A Course by Rev. Anya Sammler-Michael
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A Liberal Religious Investigation of Evil
CLASS READER
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CONTENTS
Section One
1. Geddes, Jennifer L. “Evil After Postmodernism.” Introduction. 2. Rosenbaum, Ron. “Rescuing Evil” First Things
Section Two
1. Shultz, William. “What Torture Has Taught Me” The UU World, Winter #II, I 2006 2. Augustine, Saint, of Hippo. “The Confessions of Saint Augustine” Book 2, Between CE 397 and CE 398 (selections).
Section Three
1. Peck, M. Scott. “The Case of Bobby and His Parents” People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil. New York: Touchstone: 47- 65 2. Cushman, Thomas “Evil after Postmodernism” Reflexivity of Evil— Modernity and Moral Transgression in the War in Bosnia. Ed. Jennifer Geddes: 79-100.
Section Four
1. Parker, Rebecca. “Not Somewhere Else, But Here” Soul Work: Anti-Racist Theologies Ed. Wheatley and Jones 171-185 2. Sachs, Rabbi Jonathan. “The Dignity of Difference.” Exorcizing Plato’s Ghost: 45-66
Section Five
1. Walker, Alice. “The Gospel According to Shug” The Color Purple
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READER A Liberal Religious Investigation of Evil
Class One homework, to be completed in preparation for Class Two:
Read the Introduction to Lance Morrow: Evil, an Investigation, p. 1-13
(Extra reading, for a deeper engagement) Read Section One of the Reader including: Introduction, Jennifer L. Geddes: Evil after Postmodernism, and Ron Rosenbaum “Rescuing Evil,” from First Things.
Class Two homework, to be completed in preparation for Class Three:
Read Chapter 4 of Lance Morrow, Evil, an Investigation, pg. 34-38.
Read the first piece in Section Two of the Reader: Shultz, William. “What Torture Has Taught Me” The UU World, Winter: 11,1, 2006.
(Extra reading, for a deeper engagement) Read the second piece in Section Two of the Reader: Augustine, Saint, of Hippo. The Confessions of Saint Augustine, Book 2, between CE 397 and CE 398 (selections).
(Extra listening, for a deeper engagement) Listen to NPR, “The Bad Show,” Radio Lab, season 10, episode 5, section on the Milligram experiment. http://www.radiolab.org/story/180092-the-bad-show/ (minutes 8:45 through to 25.00).
Class Three homework, to be completed in preparation for class four:
Watch one movie: “12 Years a Slave,” director Steve McQueen; “City of God,” directors Fernando Meirelles, Kátia Lund; “Fallen,” director Gregory Hoblit; “Seven,” director David Fincher; “The Ring,” director Gore Verbinski; “Dark Matter,” director Chen Shi-zheng; “Boys Don’t Cry,” director: Kimberly Pierce; “American History X,” director Tony Kaye; “Mississippi Burning,” director Alan Parker; or “The Ox-Bow Incident,” director William A. Wellman.
Prepare to report: Prepare to share a synopsis of the movie as well as your personal experience of the movie, especially your experience of the evil portrayed.
Read: Morrow, Lance: Evil, an Investigation, Chapter 7 “The Axis of Wrong,” pg. 49-56
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Class Four homework, to be completed in preparation for Class Five:
Read the first piece in Section 3 of the Reader: Peck, M. Scott. People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil, New York: Touchstone, p.47-65
Watch: Bloom, Paul. Just Babies - The Origin of Good and Evil http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLrzetNHAYo
(Extra Reading for a deeper engagement) Read the second piece in Section 3 of the Reader: Ed. Geddes, Jennifer. Evil After Postmodernism “Reflexivity of Evil - Modernity and Moral Transgression in the War in Bosnia” by Thomas Cushman. p. 79-100
Class Five homework, to be completed in preparation for Class Six:
Read: Morrow, Lance. Evil, an Investigation, “Us and Them,” p. 175-178
Watch Video: Anderson Cooper’s version of The Doll Test, 2010 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FSdKy2q6pEY)
(Extra Reading for deeper engagement) Read the first piece in Section 4 of the Reader: Wheatley and Jones ed. Soul Work: Anti Racist Theologies, p. 171-185 (“Not Somewhere Else, But Here” by Rebecca Parker.)
(Extra Reading for deeper engagement) Read the second piece in Section 4 of the Reader: Sachs, Rabbi Jonathan. The Dignity of Difference, p.45-66 (“Exorcizing Plato’s Ghost”)
(Extra Videos for a deeper engagement) Study finds "White kids are far more negative about racial interactions than Black kids are,” 2012 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TC1nRepRSxo) and “Kids Speak Their Minds on Race”, 2012 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TC1nRepRSxo)
Class Six homework, to be completed in preparation for Class Seven:
Read: Morrow, Lance. Evil, an Investigation, “Hope,” p. 259-266
Read Section 5 of the Reader: Walker, Alice. The Color Purple, “The Gospel According to Shug”
Prepare your Definition of Evil for presentation. You are welcome to present a prose piece, poetry, a drawing, a video, etc. Each participant will be given ten minutes total - five minutes to present and five minutes to engage questions.
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1
SECTION ONE
1. Geddes, Jennifer L. “Evil After Postmodernism.” Introduction.
2. Rosenbaum, Ron. “Rescuing Evil” First Things
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SECTION ONE, #1
Evil After Postmodernism
Introduction, Jennifer L. Geddes
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What is evil after postmodernism? Is there such a thing as evil after postmodernism? And if so, how has postmodernism changed our ways of thinking about and experiencing evil? Two extremes mark out opposite ends of the terrain within which the essays of this book navigate their explorations of these questions. On the one hand, there is a fundamentalism that does not shy away from labeling the other “evil,” and therefore deserving of any violence that might come his or her way; and, on the other hand, there is a relativism that refrains from making any moral judgements whatsoever, either out of fear of offending someone (or anyone) or out of apathy, a kind of bland tolerance towards everything. Both extremes avoid the difficulty of grappling with evil after postmodernism: fundamentalism by thoughtlessly applying the term “evil,” moral relativism by thoughtlessly discarding it. On the one hand, “evil” is a useful word for justifying violence, and, on the other hand, it is a useless or unwanted word. In both cases, a thoughtful consideration of what it might mean to call something or someone evil, what might be achieved and/or lost by such a categorization, remains unexplored. This book attempts to navigate between these two extremes without falling prey to either.
Related to these two extremes in the use of the word “evil” are two opposing views of the relationship between evil and postmodernism. According to one view, there has been so much violence associated with the word “evil,” particularly as it has been used by political and religious fundamentalists to justify their aggression against others, that we would do better to be rid of the term. According to this view, the word “evil” is seen as a holdover from metaphysical and religious vocabularies that have been revealed by postmodern thought to be oppressive, binary, totalizing, and exclusionary. The word “evil” should be discarded, it is argued, because it has been used so often in oppressive ways. The act of identifying something as evil, of naming it “evil,” actually promotes suffering, and in no small part by continuing ways of thinking that lead to violence and destruction. Many of the events of the twentieth century most often described as evil have been fueled by the indiscriminate (or perversely discriminating” application of the label “evil” to people unlike the perpetrators. The word has been used so often to justify cruelty and violence, is so laden with its historical abuses, so outdated, so metaphysically and theologically burdened, and inextricably linked with the very atrocities it describes, it is argued, that we would do well to jettison it from our vocabulary. If the book championed this view of the relationship between evil and postmodernism, it might well be titled Postmodernity and the Limitations of “Evil.”
According to the other view, articulated by those who focus on the moral relativism that is widespread in our postmodern world, it is not the case that postmodernism reveals the dangers and baggage associated with using the word “evil,” but rather the opposite: that the reality of evil reveals the shortcomings of postmodern thought. Postmodernism, it is argued, has few resources with which to respond to the occurrence of evil, few resources which might guide one in making moral judgements. Its focus on play, on dissolving grand narratives and foundations, on deconstructing binary oppositions, on transgression, leaves it more open to championing (or, at the least, allowing) evil than to preventing it. Evil after postmodernism, it is argued, becomes aestheticized as transgression, as excess, as sublime, and the real sufferings of the victims of evil A Liberal Religious Investigation of Evil A course by Rev. Anya Sammler-Michael 12 become eclipsed. Faced with the necessity of responding to the injustices and suffering caused by evil events and actions, we need to be able to identify evil and judge it, and postmodern thought is powerless to do so. Following this viewpoint, the book might become Evil and the Limitations of Postmodernism.
Does postmodernism show us that the word “evil” should be discarded from our vocabulary because it is too weighted with metaphysical baggage? Does the occurrence of evil present a stumbling block to postmodern thought, a reality that its theories cannot take into account? Can thinking about evil after postmodernism resist the extremes of fundamentalism and moral relativism?
This book wagers that it can. In between the extreme view that the word “evil” should be left behind and the opposite view that postmodern thought should be discarded, the essays in this book explore the possibilities for thinking about evil with all the complexities that the world after postmodernism presents. While we live in a postmodern world, the movement “postmodernism” has lost the place that it once held. We are now at a short distance from postmodernism and can begin to evaluate its resources and its limitations. None of the contributors to this volume is willing to dispose of the word “evil,” but each has something to say about the deficiencies of our current understandings and uses of it. They point out ways in which the word “evil” has been used to justify horrifying events and increase suffering and argue for a better articulation of what we mean by it. Likewise, none of the authors is quick to discard postmodernism: some aspects of it are criticized, while others are seen to be helpful in responding to the particular forms that evil takes in our postmodern world. The essays take upon themselves the more difficult task of seeking resources in postmodern thought for re-thinking and responding to evil and pointing out ways in which the experience of evil challenges postmodern thought.
The essays in this book explore the ways in which cultural, institutional, and technological changes have shaped our understanding of what evil is. Because we live in a time of rapid cultural transformation, the ways in which we think about moral questions are also undergoing rapid change. How with the waning social currency of traditional moral vocabularies, are we thinking about and responding to moral questions? Specifically, how are we thinking about events and situations that have traditionally been described as evil, and how are we thinking about the very concept of evil itself? What is evil after postmodernism?
Writings about evil generally fall into one of two categories: theoretical or empirical. That is, they usually seek either to explain how and why evil things happen in the world, thereby taking up the subject of evil at a conceptual and theoretical level; or they seek to describe and analyze particular events or situations deemed evil. This volume seeks to bridge the divide between these two approaches to evil, combining the strengths of both to overcome the limitations of each. While the theoretical approach explores important questions about the ways in which we think, judge, and understand the world around us, it is sometimes so abstract that the discussion seems to have very little to do with the real suffering of those who are the victims of evil. Evil becomes a problem for A Liberal Religious Investigation of Evil A course by Rev. Anya Sammler-Michael 13 thought rather than a problem of lived experience. This is often the case with philosophical and theological books on “the problem of evil” or theodicies, which attempt to explain or justify the occurrence of evil and to reconcile it with the existence of an all- good, all-powerful God. While these studies offer important clarifications of terms and concepts with which to work, they can be overly theoretical and divorced from the particularity of empirical events.
Conversely, while the empirical approach draws our attention to particular evils that occur in the world around us, it sometimes does so with an underdeveloped understanding of what it means to call something evil. It also easily overlooks the ways in which conceptual frameworks contribute to the perpetuation of evil. Books on evil can be so deeply involved in the description of a particular historical event that they do not move from its specifics to thinking about the larger questions about evil that it raises. This focus is often necessary for the purposes of a book, and historical accounts provide us with important details about atrocities that have been committed and keep discussions of evil grounded in the lived experience of evil. However, books on evil of this sort may not move beyond these details, and more is needed to confront the problems that evil raises.
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SECTION ONE, #2
Rescuing Evil
Pondering the Consciences of Hitler, Hamlet, and England’s Psycho-Cabbie Killer
by Ron Rosenbaum October 2010
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At the close of the final 2010 Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowship seminar series in Cambridge this June, after writer Rob Stein’s informative discussion of “Conscience,” as everyone began packing up, one of the moderators, Sir Brian Heap, turned to me and asked (presumably because I’d once written a book entitled “Explaining Hitler”), “Did Hitler have a conscience, Ron?” Having spent a decade examining that very issue, which was at the heart of my book, I was able to reply, crisply and cogently: “Um, well, I’m not sure . . . I mean, it all depends.” Yes, it all depends. It all depends on how you define conscience, and how you define conscience depends on how you define evil, the cancer for which conscience is the soul’s MRI.
Evil has gotten a bad name lately. It always was a name for some sort of badness, yes; but lately the word sounds antiquated, the product of a less-sophisticated age. Evil belongs to an old, superstitious world of black and white, and we all know now that everything is gray, right? It belongs to a world of blame in which the Enlightenment tells us that “to understand all is to forgive all.” No blame, just explanation. There are some who argue it’s an unnecessary word: Having no ontological reality, no necessary use, it’s merely a semantic trap, a dead end.
After a century that saw the slaughter of more than a hundred million souls, we seem to be insisting on one more casualty: the word evil. Perhaps because by eliminating its accusatory presence and substituting genetic, organic, or psychogenic determinism, we escape the accusatory finger it points at the nature of human nature. Things go wrong with our genes, or our amygdalas, or our parenting, but these are aberrations, glitches. The thing itself, the human soul, is basically good; the hundred million dead, the product of unfortunate but explicable defects, not the nature of the beast.
But there are losses to the glossing-over process that has made the concept of conscious evil so unfashionable. If we could rescue free-will evil from the various determinisms that have been substituted for it, we could also set free will--the freely made choice to do good or evil--free again. Doing so would reestablish the possibilities of freely chosen courage and nobility, of altruism and self-sacrifice, rather than reducing them to some evolutionary biology survival stratagem. We diminish and marginalize the idea of evil because we don’t want to face the accusatory consequences that the free choice of evil--a choice contrary to conscience--entails.
Serial killers and mass murderers are frequently spoken of, in the mumbo jumbo of popularizing science, as people “without conscience.” But if they lack conscience, they lack transgressiveness; they cannot consciously violate an entity they lack. Consider Derrick Bird, a cabdriver in England’s West Cumbria, who, on a June morning in 2010, with no evident warning signs, turned into a spree killer who murdered twelve people and then shot himself. The murders took place at a time when I was in Cambridge for the Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowship and so was able to observe the cultural schism over the notion of evil and free will as it played out in the intensive coverage (virtually absent in the United States) of the murders and their aftermath.
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Bird--or “psycho-cabbie” as the tabloid News of the World’s front-page headline dubbed him--became an emblematic case study of how science and religion have shaped the split in society and culture over the nature of evil. Just take that headline moniker, ‘psycho-cabbie’. On the one hand, it melodramatizes the killings. On the other hand, it serves to defuse their malevolence: The murders were performed by a “psycho”, not a “normal” person, and psychologists tell us that psychos suffer from a disease, not from evil. They have poor “impulse control,” and so it’s not something we have to fear from normal people like ourselves.
On yet another hand, on its inside pages, the News of the World featured an exclusive photo of psycho-cabbie’s dreary kitchen, a shot taken from outside his kitchen window that spotlighted a bottle of HP sauce on his sad, loner’s kitchen table. The headline on that read “the devil’s kitchen.”
Tabloids believe in evil. And yet, if someone is possessed by evil spirits, does that mean he’s a victim, too? Was the headline saying that the devil was cooking up evil in that kitchen, using his special brew of satanic HP sauce on the previously non-devilish psycho-cabbie?
It’s complicated. But at least evil is still a problem to the moralists of the tabloid press. To the bien-pensant columnists of the serious press, it’s virtually a vulgarism. On the day after the psycho-cabbie’s killing spree, The Independent ran a story on the killings by an “investigative psychologist” with the headline, “A simmering anger fueled by low self-esteem and paranoia.”
Ah, that old (and shopworn) villain, low self-esteem. The allegedly more sophisticated media, with their investigative psychologists of various stripes, think we’re on the way to giving evil a local habitation and a name in the brain. Neuroscience will clear up the problem of evil that has troubled philosophers and theologians since before St. Augustine: Pinpoint the site of evil on this or that temporal lobe or cortical matrix and predict and perhaps interdict evil behavior.
Geneticists have recently proclaimed, with all the confidence of Columbus discovering the Indies, that they have located evil in the “evil twin” copy of the “warrior gene.” Brain- scan analysts say it’s located in “an imbalance between the orbital cortex and the amygdala,” as neuroscientist James Fallon recently informed listeners to National Public Radio. The morning before psycho-cabbie started on his murderous rounds, the ever- dependable Independent credulously informed us, at breakfast, of a different finding, in a story headlined “How a deprived childhood leaves its mark on the brain.”
Written by ‘Social Affairs Correspondent’ Sarah Cassidy, the story promoted the brain scan-based theory being peddled by a charity called The Kids Company, which, we were told, spent £1.6 million on a study to establish that “over-exposure to fright hormones damages children’s brain development and leaves them prone to violent outbursts and unable to calm themselves” when they grow up and perform evil acts.
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The story was accompanied by two scary-looking brain-scan slices, in each of which a sinister-looking, crescent-shaped swath was helpfully highlighted by The Independent in blood red to demonstrate the effects of “cortical atrophy,” seen in the difference between a “healthy three-year-old” and one who “suffered severe sensory deprivation with minimal exposure to language, touch, and social interaction.” It turns out that Rousseau’s child of nature, the epitome of unsocialized innocence, untainted by “social interaction,” is likely to harbor evil--or “cortical shrinkage”--rather than natural nobility within.
The red areas bore an unmistakable, if perhaps inadvertent, resemblance to Satan’s horns, growing inside the brain, but the story was another instance of the organizing of evil, the implicit determinism: Anyone with cortical shrinkage showing up on the brain scan, like anyone with the wrong orbital-to-amygdala ratio, was destined to commit evil acts--and to be absolved of them by science because they were only the product of neuronal defects.
The Kids Company study also showed “enlarged ventricles in the center of the brain.” Now we’re talking. Hasn’t evil as an “absence of being” been a theme of post-Thomistic discussions of the subject? Hole in the brain = absence of being, no? Curiously, on the page opposite the damaged-brain scans was a story about human remains found in the River Aire in West Yorkshire that turned out not to belong to two murdered prostitutes; evidently there had been speculation that a serial killer--a cortical-atrophied, poorly- ratioed orbital / amygdala type--was at work emulating the famous “Yorkshire Ripper.” The juxtaposition of stories suggested an account of evil: Cerebral atrophy means murdered prostitutes. A description of evil that, in effect, exculpated the evildoer by blaming his crimes on a bad brain scan.
Indeed, brain scans are the new phrenology of forensics, with the key bumps actually inside the head, on the soft parts of the brain, rather than outside, on the knobby protrusions of the skull. To my great satisfaction, the story in The Independent ended by quoting one of my favorite skeptics of pseudoscience, Raymond Tallis, a doctor and philosopher more well known in the U.K. than here, who suggested we not get too excited: “I do not think brain scans will add anything to what we already know,” he said. “The trouble is that that leads to a general sort of claim that ‘My brain made me do it.’ This neuromitigation of blame has to be treated with suspicion.”
Neuromitigation! Exactly the word we need to describe this organizing of evil. But evil is a problem not just for science. To promoters of a new religiosity--such as Terry Eagleton, who writes so well for someone whose thinking is so muddled, strangled in his own sophistry like Laocoön by the snakes--evil really isn’t a problem, barely exists at all. Of course, Eagleton’s sophistic denial of evil’s relevance, in a book called Evil, demonstrates even more strongly what a problem it is. As Alan Wolfe noted in the New Republic, Eagleton thinks evil is “boring, supremely pointless, lifeless, philistine, kitsch- ridden, and superficial. Indeed, lacking any substance, it ‘is not something we should lose too much sleep over. People can be wicked, cruel, and indifferent. But the concept of evil, with which theologians and philosophers have wrestled for centuries, can be A Liberal Religious Investigation of Evil A course by Rev. Anya Sammler-Michael 18 safely tucked away. When it comes to evil, we must be social and economic realists. “Most violence and injustice are the result of material forces, not of the vicious dispositions of individuals.” The neo-Marxist Christian view of evil.
There have been few takers lately for Jung’s view that evil has an ontological reality-- that it has real being, something to watch out for. Although I have met two very different people whose sanity and stability I respect who have said they have encountered the presence of palpably ontological evil. One was a New York City cop, from the Dominican Republic originally, who, because of his background, was assigned to investigate allegations of Santeria killings and a subterranean ring of exorcists who were actually extortionists.
In effect, he was often called upon in his job to try to distinguish who was truly possessed by evil spirits and who was being conned into believing it or was suffering delusions of possession. I watched him perform an exorcism in his off-duty role as spiritual counselor in an old, candlelit Lower East Side church. It was chilling. And somehow convincing.
He told me something much like what I also heard from Fraser Watts, a thoughtful, mild- mannered Anglican priest in Cambridge, also a trained psychologist, who described his experience of “deliverances,” as the Anglicans call exorcisms of those possessed by evil spirits. He conceded that most of the cases he saw were likely psychogenic, but he believed that in a few instances he felt he had been in the presence of genuine evil spirits.
Of course, even evil spirits are a problem for evil, since belief in them displaces responsibility from the individual possessed to the possessor. Still, it’s more than intriguing that similar language would be used by a hard-bitten New York cop and a soft-spoken Anglican priest in Cambridge.
Evil remains a problem, not just for its victims, though they should not be forgotten in all this theorizing, but for those who try to conceptualize it. This first came to trouble me during an exchange with the late historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who has grown in estimation as one of the most scrupulous and discerning historians of his time.
At the end of the Second World War, as a member of MI-6, Britain’s secret intelligence service, he was tasked with going into Hitler’s bunker to reconstruct the details of Hitler’s death, in part to halt rumors of the Nazi leader’s escape and survival. In the process, Trevor-Roper learned an immense amount of previously unavailable information. This included the discovery of Hitler’s “final testament,” in which, shortly before he killed himself, he commanded the German people never to cease and desist from their war to exterminate the “eternal poisoners of humanity, the Jews”--a job he’d left unfinished.
From the evidence he gathered, Trevor-Roper produced perhaps the first, certainly one of the finest, early biographies of Hitler. He agreed to be interviewed by me in the A Liberal Religious Investigation of Evil A course by Rev. Anya Sammler-Michael 19
Oxford-Cambridge Club, to which I had brought a tape recorder, which I nested in the shelter of what looked like a five-century-old chess set and at which he looked disapprovingly.
“A solecism,” he said tartly, indicating the recorder. I decided to brazen it out, and I’m glad I did because I might not have retained the stark reply he gave to my question, “Did Hitler know he was doing wrong when he was committing his crimes?”
“Absolutely not,” he shot back without hesitation. “He was convinced of his own rectitude.” Yes, rectitude. All that Trevor-Roper discovered confirmed him in his belief that Hitler was a true believer--a man who did not consider himself evil but a heroic doctor, a veritable Pasteur, a great benefactor to humanity purifying the human race of infection.
This is an old--but still unresolved--philosophical question: Can someone be evil if he thinks he’s doing good, no matter how deranged his thought process? It has troubled everyone from Plato to Augustine and their heirs, but it remains a genuine problem because most people we think of as doing great evil think of themselves as doing the right thing. Indeed, who does evil while thinking he actually is doing evil? Only a few characters in literature--Shakespeare’s Richard III, notably--and those cartoon villains twirling mustaches.
This is a hard notion to assimilate. In fact, the following week at Oxford, I placed it before Alan Bullock, Trevor-Roper’s rival as an early historian of Hitler and the author of Hitler: A Study in Tyranny. He exclaimed, with North Country bluntness: “If we can’t call Hitler evil, then who can we?” One way to sort all this out is to note that it is possible for evil to inhere in ideas as well as in men. There are evil ideas that men can become true believers in--thinking they are doing good in carrying them out. It is the intellectual version of possession by evil spirits.
In any case, back to psycho-cabbie, who raises a whole host of new questions about evil and its depiction in our culture. Beginning at 5:30 on that morning in June, the man whose name was not psycho-cabbie but the oddly cheerful name of Derrick Bird, began a killing spree that racked up twelve murders, not including his own suicide, in what was almost invariably referred to as the “sleepy seaside town of Whitehaven.”
Was he feeling “simmering anger fueled by low self-esteem” that morning? Other psychiatrists and savants lined up to weigh in. In a full-page diagnosis in a later edition of The Independent entitled “There is no one either good or bad, but circumstances make them so,” Julian Baggiani junked “self-esteem,” “paranoia,” and other such old- fashioned jargon for “situationism,” which he announced was “the dominant school of thought in psychology and philosophy now.”
Ah, situationism, which, we were told, “claims that the best predictor of how people behave is the circumstances they find themselves in, not their predispositions.” In other words, “everyone was doing it, you can’t blame me.” As the leading theorist of situationism, Philip Zimbardo, has put it, “We have underestimated the power of social situations because we overestimate the power of individual dispositions.” A Liberal Religious Investigation of Evil A course by Rev. Anya Sammler-Michael 20
It’s sad that conventional wisdom has thrown in its lot with “situationism.” One dramatic refutation of it can be found in Christopher Browning’s study Ordinary Men, which examined the choices made by the members of one of Hitler’s killing squads in the period before mass murder had been industrialized in death camps such as Auschwitz.
Browning studied letters and diaries from members of a reserve police battalion which slaughtered whole towns full of Jews and buried them in mass graves.
Browning learned that participation in the slaughter was not mandatory; troops had the choice to opt out, and some did. Despite the fearfulness of making such a choice, they refused, of their own free will, to participate in the evil. Which removed the “situationist” exculpation from those who did.
But there’s no indication, contra Julian Baggiani, that situationism has the slightest relevance to psycho-cabbie’s choices. He made them himself. Derrick Bird left the Devil’s Kitchen at approximately 5:30 a.m. Shortly thereafter he arrived at the much larger, more luxe home of his twin brother David and shot-gunned him to death.
Here we enter into one perplexing question raised by psycho-cabbie’s spree--the degrees of evil. “The primal eldest curse” is on the murder of a brother, Hamlet tells us. And a twin? It more than recapitulates the First Murder. And indeed there were other Biblical elements to the psycho-cabbie’s first murder. There was a struggle over a birthright and who was favored by the father’s blessing. Apparently the younger, but better-off of the twins (David), had received a £25,000 chunk of the father’s estate and then, when the father died, he didn’t feed it back into the evidently depleted estate to be shared with his brother.
Psycho-cabbie seemed to be wrought up over this, and over the way his solicitor had been handling it, and over the concomitant problem of Derrick’s keeping £60,000 pounds of his cabbie earnings under the floorboards of the Devil’s Living Room. He believed his brother and solicitor were “stitching him up” for the Inland Revenue so the brother wouldn’t have to come up with the £25,000 pounds.
So one could see Derrick “simmering with rage and paranoia” and perhaps even the dread low self-esteem, too. But we are all simmering to some extent. And yet: Murdering his twin in cold blood and then driving over to his solicitor’s house and shotgunning him in bed, too? Are these bad choices psychogenically determined, organically inevitable? Crimes just waiting to happen if we’d had a proper brain scan to warn us? Or are they evil? Can we utterly eliminate the fact that he had a choice, that he made a choice, and that it was an evil choice? Or do we just look at his brain scan posthumously for the real trigger? And what do we make of the nine further killings that morning, and of the dozen or so attempts that left several critically wounded?
From the murdered solicitor’s office Derrick drove to his customary post in the cabbies’ rank in Whitehaven, where he shot to death one of his fellow cabbies. There was talk that he did it because of a rumor that this poor fellow had gone out with Derrick’s ex- wife. In each of those cases one could say there was a rationale, a reason--not a good one, not an excuse, not an exculpation, but a reason, however inadequate. Does the A Liberal Religious Investigation of Evil A course by Rev. Anya Sammler-Michael 21 existence of a reason, however selfish and prideful, make these killings less or more evil?
Less, one could say, because they weren’t killing for killing’s sake. They were killing for ancient human grudges against twins and lawyers, perhaps. More, one could also say, because they were killings for selfish, greedy, felonious reasons. Felonious in the sense that they were about money and rivalry and ego and emotional wounds of being second twin in a father’s love.
In capital-punishment law in most American states, premeditated murder in the first degree is not enough to put one in jeopardy of the death penalty. It must be murder in the service of, or accompanied by, another felony--kidnapping, robbing a liquor store, and or the like--to put it over the top, because the murder is then done for some kind of gain beyond mere murder.
I wonder if here the law has it backward, that killing for the sake of killing is worse than killing with some further motive. At this point, after murdering three he knew, psycho- cabbie started killing complete strangers, killing for the sake of killing. He set out in his cab and started shooting just about everyone who crossed his path, shot-gunning motorists, bicyclists, and pedestrians point-blank in the face and head.
In other words, virtually every time he saw anyone--a person with whom he did not have any kind of psychogenic, emotional, legal relationship--he chose evil, more and further evil, until he totaled a dozen dead victims and then shot himself. He was in a world of utter freedom offered by the fact that he could not become any more morally or legally culpable than he already was. He was free to be as evil as he wanted to be. He could have shot himself after the first three, but he chose to blast open the faces of a dozen or so more, nine of them fatally.
The reason I focus on the factor of choice in thinking about evil, rather than its ontological status, is that giving evil ontological status--positing that it is something external that may enter into or possess a previously non-evil being--makes that being less culpable.
Perhaps it could be argued that some people are culpable in “leaving the door open” for evil. Tempting evil. But what I want to emphasize is not that I know what evil is, but that abandoning the concept of evil, refusing even to see it as a problem that cannot be reduced to organic dysfunction, is to abandon free will. Because if we are not free to choose evil, we are not free to refuse it.
Ron Rosenbaum, the author of “Explaining Hitler” and “The Shakespeare Wars”, is a cultural columnist for “Slate.”
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2
SECTION TWO
1. Shultz, William, “What Torture Has Taught Me” The UU World, Winter #II, I 2006
2. Augustine, Saint, of Hippo. “The Confessions of Saint Augustine” Book 2, Between CE 397 and CE 398 (selections).
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SECTION TWO, #1 What Torture Has Taught Me
Twelve years at the helm of Amnesty International challenged and affirmed William F. Schulz’s Unitarian Universalism.
By William F. Schulz / Winter 2006 11.1.06
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What Torture Has Taught Me
There is a smell to refugee camps that, once you have inhaled it, you never forget: goat dung and human waste; sweat and tears and unstaunched menstrual blood; but also a smell of desperation that gives way to sagging shoulders and the decay of the human soul. For a body can be clothed in the raiment of fear or stalked daily by death for only so long before the soul—whatever makes the human animal “human”—begins to collapse on itself as surely as the shoulders do.
I traveled to the refugee camps inhabited by the terrorized exiles from Darfur, Sudan, as executive director of Amnesty International USA. My twelve years with Amnesty, concluded earlier this year, were often inspiring. Meeting modern heroes such as Wei Jingsheng, the father of Chinese democracy, after his seventeen years in prison, and working with several of the 123 Americans who had served years on death row and were subsequently exonerated, were both a privilege and an inspiration to me. Meeting the refugees from Darfur, though, and then confronting the government officials who had ordered the terror from their state offices in Khartoum, brought me deep sorrow and outrage.
But nothing has had a deeper impact on me during the past twelve years than my exposure to torture—meeting both victims and perpetrators of torture, and understanding the profound impact it has on all of us. Torture has influenced how I understand God, human beings, ministry, and the world.
About a week after I began working at Amnesty, I came across a report of how the Mujahideen in Afghanistan—the predecessors to the Taliban—got rid of their prisoners. They tied each live prisoner to a corpse and then left the pair out in the sun to rot. Simple, low tech, and utterly terrifying.
About 130 countries in the world, close to two-thirds, practice torture. An ancient Greek philosopher’s response to that statistic would have been utter astonishment. “Why only two-thirds?” he would have said. “Why not every one?” For the ancient Greeks, and for the Romans who came after them, torture was not only acceptable, it was standard practice. But the Greeks were discriminating about who could be tortured and why. Only slaves—not free citizens—could be subjected to the whip and the chain. The ancients believed slaves did not possess the faculty of reason and hence lacked the capacity to dissemble. If you wanted to know the truth about something, all you had to do was to torture a slave, who, unlike a free citizen, wouldn’t be smart enough to lie to you.
The “rational” use of torture extended into medieval times. In the Middle Ages both civil and religious courts believed it was unethical to convict someone of a crime based on somebody else’s word alone. The only valid evidence of thievery or heresy or murder was a confession, and what more effective way to elicit a confession than the rack and the screw?
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The first country to abolish torture was the Kingdom of Prussia, in 1754. For about 150 years torture went out of vogue as an official instrument of government policy. But in the twentieth century it raised its ugly head again, with an important difference: Torture became an instrument of pleasure, a means of intimidating political opponents, a way to inflict pain on another person for the sheer sadistic joy of it. Abu Ghraib struck Americans like a thunderbolt because even the staunchest defender of the use of torture could not pretend that forcing naked prisoners to form a pyramid or to masturbate for the cameras or to be tethered to a leash like a dog has any purpose other than humiliation.
Sixty-three percent of Americans say that torture is acceptable in some cases—for example, when information about the location of a ticking bomb in a high-density neighborhood must be procured quickly—according to a 2005 survey by the Pew Research Center of People and the Press. The perennial “ticking bomb” argument for torture, however, is itself a red herring. First, torture rarely leads to accurate information. Second, torture generates enormous resentment among victims and their communities—resentment that may prompt the planting of far more bombs and hence the killing of far more people than might be saved in the first place. And third, as we have seen at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo, once a government sanctions torture, the slope into what even the heartiest advocates of torture would find morally reprehensible is a fast and slippery one. Once torture is sanctioned, there are no clear limits to its application: Would those 63 percent surveyed justify torturing a roomful of innocent subjects on the chance one of them might have information? What if direct torture of a suspect fails to open his mouth—but the torture of his two-year-old daughter might? There is simply no way to argue confidently that the moral good will outweigh the damage torture does.
In my years at Amnesty I was perpetually dumbstruck by the creativity of modern torturers. Beatings are the most commonplace form of the art—on the back, the buttocks, most painfully on the feet. Electroshock—especially to the penis, the vagina, the eyelids, the earlobes—is quickly gaining popularity with ever more sophisticated equipment available now even to the general public. But these are for mere beginners. In Brazil, prisoners in the 1980s were stripped naked and locked in small, bare concrete cells with only one other occupant—a boa constrictor.
In Central America in the 1990s soldiers were notorious for ripping open the wombs of pregnant women, tossing the fetuses into the air and catching them on their bayonets. In Augusto Pinochet’s Chile in the 1970s and ’80s, women were raped by men with visible syphilitic sores, sexually abused by dogs trained in the practice, forced to watch their own children being sexually assaulted, and then fed the putrefied remains of their fellow captives.
In contrast, our American obsession with water torture—most recently in the form of waterboarding, in which a detainee is strapped down and held under water—sounds almost mild. During the U.S. occupation of the Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century, our soldiers inserted bamboo tubes into victims’ throats and poured in gallons A Liberal Religious Investigation of Evil A course by Rev. Anya Sammler-Michael 27 of water, the filthier the better. The Filipinos got their revenge, however. They buried captured American soldiers up to their heads in manure, poured molasses over their heads and dropped hundreds of fire ants into the molasses.
Practices such as these have no rational purpose at all. They are designed solely to strip another of his or her humanity. If anything deserves to be called unadulterated evil, this does.
For the past twelve years this question has haunted me: Is what I say from the pulpit about the world around us, about the nature of God and humanity, about the dynamics of human relationships—is what I preach to people sufficient to encompass a world in which such coarseness and brutality exists? For I have always regarded myself first and foremost as a Unitarian Universalist minister. This faith and community have always been the principal resources from which I draw my strength, though I have taken a long detour and seen things both horrific and awesome along the way.
Liberal Christian theologian Sallie McFague says,
“There is no place where God is not.” Process theologian Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki insists “[God is] pervasively present, like water, to every nook and cranny of the universe, continuously wooing the universe . . . toward its greater good.”
But I would submit that no God worthy of the name is present in a torture chamber. I have talked to dozens of survivors of torture, read hundreds of others’ accounts. I have rarely, with the exception of some Muslim prisoners in U.S. custody, come across testimony that it was faith in God that saw them through the night. This has surprised me because survivors of other tragedies often say later that their faith sustained them through their ordeal. The torture victims I’ve encountered often talk about how they survived—by focusing on loved ones, their political cause, their hatred for their torturer, or their comradeship with other prisoners—but they rarely mention God or faith. I suspect that is because when the needle slips under the fingernails and the pliers rip them off, that pain obliterates the very face of God.
I am not trying to score some cheap point against the notion of God. Over the years I have myself become increasingly comfortable using the word to describe that source of graciousness upon which we depend for our very lives. All I am saying is that, whatever our conception of God (should we have one), it needs to be both complex enough and circumscribed enough to account for the fact that God’s absence—true absence—is as real a phenomenon as God’s immanence.
Similarly, our doctrines about human nature, such as the Unitarian Universalist Association’s affirmation of “the inherent worth and dignity of every person,” rest uneasily in a world full of torturers. In what sense can we defend the notion that a torturer is a person of inherent worth and dignity?
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South African neuropsychologist Victor Nell has recently theorized that cruelty, especially in males, is grounded in an adaptive reaction from the Paleozoic era. When early humans had to hunt for their food, the appearance of pain and blood in the prey signaled the success of the hunt. Gradually the evocation of howls of pain and of blood in our fellow humans became associated with personal and social power. That theory strikes me as plausible, but it doesn’t lend much credence to the notion of inherent dignity.
Who are the torturers? Are they madmen? Deviants? Hardened criminals? Sexual predators? Almost never. In fact, most police and military units weed out the psychological misfits because they know such people have trouble taking orders. The horrible truth is that the vast majority of torturers are average Joes and, on rare occasions, Janes.
Turning Joe into what most of us would regard as a monster is remarkably easy. You put him in a restricted environment, such as a police or military training camp, under the command of a vaunted authority figure. You subject him to intense stress. (The Greek military police in antiquity, for example, were renowned for their brutality—each recruit was subjected during training to severe beatings, forced to go weeks without food, and not permitted to defecate for up to fifteen days at a time.) Then, having created an angry, bitter, but obedient servant, you provide the sanction, the means, the opportunity, and the rationale for that servant to take his outrage out on a vulnerable but despised population. You tell him: “These are the people who are threatening our country. These are the people who are killing your comrades.”
Who is this creature of “inherent dignity” who is so easily led astray? Sixty-five years ago James Luther Adams, the most renowned Unitarian theologian and ethicist of the twentieth century, delivered a Berry Street Lecture that was a turning point in liberal religious understanding of human nature. While he rejected the doctrine of total depravity, he resurrected the notion of “sin”:
[W]hether the liberal uses the word “sin” or not, he cannot correct his “too jocund” [blithe] view of life until he recognizes that there is in human nature a deep-seated and universal tendency . . . to ignore the demands of mutuality and thus to waste freedom or abuse it by devotion to the idols of the tribe. . . .
It cannot be denied that religious liberalism has neglected these aspects of human nature in its zeal to proclaim the spark of divinity in man. We may call these tendencies by any name we wish but we do not escape their destructive influence by a conspiracy of silence concerning them.
Have we forgotten Adams’s exhortation? If we no longer think of human beings as made in the “likeness of God,” are we not still reticent to dwell on the features of the flesh that make us not just “slightly lower than the angels” but out of the angels’ league altogether? Do Unitarian Universalists even have a commonly shared doctrine of human A Liberal Religious Investigation of Evil A course by Rev. Anya Sammler-Michael 29 nature today, and if we do, is it sufficient to explain why even the most reputable souls may, under the right circumstances, be transformed into savages?
When I was seven or eight years old, I lived across the street from a little dog named Amy. Every afternoon after school let out, Amy and I would play together. One of Amy’s favorite games was a dancing game in which I held her two forepaws in my hands and we would dance around the yard. Sometimes Amy even put her paws in my lap to signal that she wanted to dance. But I noticed that after a few minutes Amy’s hind legs would get sore and she would pull her paws away. The first few times we played our dancing game, I dropped her paws the moment I sensed her discomfort. But one day I decided to hold on. The more Amy tugged, the tighter I held on until finally, when she yelped in agony, I let her go. But the next day I repeated my demonic game. It was fascinating to feel this little creature, so much less powerful than I, entirely at my mercy.
I was lucky that Amy was such a gentle dog for she had every right to have bitten me. After two or three days I saw that my friend, who had previously scrambled eagerly toward me, now cowered at my approach. I realized with a start what I had done, and I was deeply frightened of myself and much ashamed. Whatever had come over me that I would treat someone I had loved that way?
What had come over me, I now know, was the displacement of anger onto one who held no threat to me. Bullies at school might pick on me. My parents might tell their only child what he could and could not do. My piano teacher might try to slam the keyboard cover on my fingers when I played off key. But in that yard I ruled supreme. Not only did I hold the power, but the one who was powerless for a change was Not Me.
Adams, like nineteen centuries of theologians before him, would try to rescue humanity from its own degradation by asserting that freedom was what underpinned our inherent worth—the capacity I retained to stop tormenting Amy, the fact that not every student of torture chooses to finish the course.
But is freedom sufficient to overcome the basest of brutality? When we speak of the “inherent worth and dignity of every person,” are we really thinking of free agency anyway? I doubt it. I suspect that we base our belief in the inherent worth of human beings on some far vaguer notion that aliveness itself is good and that because human beings represent the pinnacle of aliveness, we inherently possess some kind of merit. I don’t buy that anymore. I have fought tirelessly against the death penalty in this country. I have visited death rows and spoken frequently with condemned prisoners. Some of them have acknowledged their crimes and altered their hearts. Others are truly innocent. Many are mentally ill. And some are vicious, dangerous killers who will kill again given the opportunity. I oppose the death penalty not because I believe that every one of those lives carries inherent worth. In some cases their deaths would be no loss at all to anyone. I oppose the death penalty because I can’t be sure which of them falls into which category and because the use of executions by the state diminishes my own dignity and that of every other citizen in whose name it is enforced. In other words, I need to assign the occupants of death row worth and dignity in order to preserve my own. But I find no such characteristics inherent in either them or me.
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If a loved one of mine were murdered, I would want her murderer to suffer the worst torments of hell I could imagine. No torture would be too great to satisfy my lust for revenge. But I do not want the state to indulge me in my worst impulses. Part of the role of government is to save us from our basest passions in order to extract some semblance of worth and dignity out of the muck and meanness that infect our hearts. Is the worth and dignity of every person inherent? No, inherency is a construct, a useful myth perhaps, but a myth nonetheless, designed to cover up the fact that we all are sinners and that we are not always certain which sins, and hence which sinners, are worse than others. Each of us has to be assigned worth—it does not come automatically—and taught to behave with dignity. As Jean-Paul Sartre once said, “If it were not for the petty rules of bourgeois society, we humans would destroy each other in an instant.”
So who does the assigning of worth? How do we decide that something is a sin? How do we know that torture is wrong? What is the basis for human rights?
There are only three options. Rights are established by divinity, by natural law, or by pragmatic consensus. I wish we could get everybody to agree on one of the first two. But the philosophical and religious clashes that have raged unceasingly and often violently since the birth of civilization prove that we cannot. So we are left with public opinion—global public opinion, to be sure, but public opinion.
This is a discomfiting notion. We Unitarian Universalists are champions of the individual as the source of authority for both truth and righteousness. We are aficionados of the lonely, courageous soul standing up for truth, justice, and Esperanto even in the face of the crowd’s disparagement. But you know something? Most of the time those lonely, courageous souls are sheer crackpots. Unless they can get a whole bunch of other people to agree with them—at least eventually—we would usually be wise to keep them at a safe distance.
Was torture wrong even before anyone in the world, including the slaves being tortured, thought it was wrong? The hard answer is no. Or if it was wrong in some parallel ethical universe, it was no violation of anybody’s rights until a significant number of people in this world began to say that it was. When South Carolina shut down its video poker parlors a few years ago, one stalwart gambler was quoted as saying, “This is like the state telling me I have no rights. It’s pretty close to being Communist.” I’m sorry, but there is as yet no international consensus that all human beings have a right to play video poker.
Human rights are whatever the international community—through its various declarations, covenants, treaties, and conventions—say that they are. This means that theoretically at least the world could regress and torture could once again be deemed acceptable. But since the birth of the modern human rights movement in 1948, with the adoption of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we have seen that the more people who are involved in decision making about rights, including the victims of their violation, the less likely the backsliding. If there is one arena in which Theodore Parker’s famous dictum that “the arc of the universe bends toward justice” seems to have been borne out, it is the evolution of human rights.
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When it comes to deciding right and wrong, when it comes to assigning worth and dignity, the individual is not the final source of authority. Without a reference to the values of the larger community—of the world community, not of any one nation alone— our individual judgments are fit only for a desert island on which we are the only occupant.
This means that our job as religious people, as builders of the blessed community, is tougher and more important than ever. For if we can’t rely on the inherency of human worth and dignity, if we have to assign worth and teach dignity, then we must confront those who would reserve worth to only a few and save dignity for their immediate neighbors—people like those children and grandchildren of immigrants, for example, who would not be where they are today if their forebears had been treated the way they propose to treat a new generation of Americans. If the individual is not the ultimate source of authority when it comes to some of the most important decisions on earth, like who lives and who doesn’t, then our own personal religious stories are inadequate—not deleterious or to be shunned, but insufficient for a faith that would not just engage the world but transform it. What torture has taught me is that, fascinating as I find my own life, it alone is a cloudy prism through which to view Creation absent reference to the experience of others, the wisdom of community, the demands of tradition, the judgment of history, and the invitation of the Holy.
At the same time that these past twelve years have caused me to rethink the nature of God, the inherency of human worth, and the credibility of individual authority, they have confirmed two other bedrock Unitarian Universalist principles—the indomitability of the spirit and the mysterious workings of an unfettered grace.
Consider these two short vignettes from among dozens of encounters in my time at Amnesty. Nick Yarris spent twenty-three years on death row in Pennsylvania for a murder he did not commit—a singular form of torture. Asked how he felt on his release, he replied, “What are my choices? I could be really devastated and angry and let them continue to own me, or I could have fun. [Having fun] sounds better. . . . The lowest insult would be if I came out destroyed, a broken man. . . . My survival technique was to become a good man.”
The Rev. Luis Pérez Aguirre, a Jesuit priest and human-rights leader in Uruguay, was repeatedly arrested and tortured in prison. Years later, walking along the street, he ran into the man who had tortured him, as Lawrence Weschler recounts in “A Miracle, A Universe: Settling Accounts with Torturers”. The torturer was now being prosecuted, and he tried to avoid Pérez Aguirre’s gaze. But Pérez Aguirre took the initiative. He called him over and asked how he was. The man said he was very depressed. He was being prosecuted for his crimes. After a moment’s pause, Pérez Aguirre responded, “If you need anything, come to me. I forgive you.”
What torture has taught me, what all those brave souls and even a few of their tormentors have taught me, is to never give up on the glimmers of grace. If even survivors of torture can reclaim a sense of life’s bounty, then surely you and I can, too. If the torturer cannot fully break the human spirit, nobody can.
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SECTION TWO, #2 St. Augustine Confessions Book II
From Wikipedia: Confessions (Latin: Confessiones) is the name of an autobiographical work, consisting of 13 books, by St. Augustine of Hippo, written between AD 397 and AD 398. Modern English translations of it are sometimes published under the title The Confessions of St. Augustine in order to distinguish the book from other books with similar titles.
The work outlines Augustine's sinful youth and his conversion to Christianity. It is widely seen as the first Western autobiography ever written, and was an influential model for Christian writers throughout the following 1000 years of the Middle Ages. It is not a complete autobiography, as it was written in his early 40s, and he lived long afterwards, producing another important work (City of God); it does, nonetheless, provide an unbroken record of his development of thought and is the most complete record of any single individual from the 4th and 5th centuries. It is a significant theological work. In the work St. Augustine writes about how much he regrets having led a sinful and immoral life. He discusses his regrets for following the Manichaean religion and believing in astrology. He writes about Nebridius's role in helping to persuade him that astrology was not only incorrect but evil, and St. Ambrose's role in his conversion to Christianity. He shows intense sorrow for his sexual sins, and writes on the importance of sexual morality. The book is thought to be divisible into chapters which symbolize various aspects of the Trinity and trinitarian belief.
In Book 2, sections of which are included here, he explores the question of why he and his friends stole pears when he had many better pears of his own. He explains the feelings he had as he ate the pears and threw the rest away to the pigs. Augustine argues that he most likely would not have stolen anything had he not been in the company of others who could share in his sin. Some insight into group mentality is given.
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CHAPTER IV
9. Theft is punished by thy law, O Lord, and by the law written in men's hearts, which not even ingrained wickedness can erase. For what thief will tolerate another thief stealing from him? Even a rich thief will not tolerate a poor thief who is driven to theft by want. Yet I had a desire to commit robbery, and did so, compelled to it by neither hunger nor poverty, but through a contempt for well-doing and a strong impulse to iniquity. For I pilfered something which I already had in sufficient measure, and of much better quality. I did not desire to enjoy what I stole, but only the theft and the sin itself.
There was a pear tree close to our own vineyard, heavily laden with fruit, which was not tempting either for its color or for its flavor. Late one night -- having prolonged our games in the streets until then, as our bad habit was -- a group of young scoundrels, and I among them, went to shake and rob this tree. We carried off a huge load of pears, not to eat ourselves, but to dump out to the hogs, after barely tasting some of them ourselves. Doing this pleased us all the more because it was forbidden. Such was my heart, O God, such was my heart -- which thou didst pity even in that bottomless pit. Behold, now let my heart confess to thee what it was seeking there, when I was being gratuitously wanton, having no inducement to evil but the evil itself. It was foul, and I loved it. I loved my own undoing. I loved my error -- not that for which I erred but the error itself. A depraved soul, falling away from security in thee to destruction in itself, seeking nothing from the shameful deed but shame itself.
CHAPTER V
10. Now there is a comeliness in all beautiful bodies, and in gold and silver and all things. The sense of touch has its own power to please and the other senses find their proper objects in physical sensation. Worldly honor also has its own glory, and so do the powers to command and to overcome: and from these there springs up the desire for revenge. Yet, in seeking these pleasures, we must not depart from thee, O Lord, nor deviate from thy law. The life which we live here has its own peculiar attractiveness because it has a certain measure of comeliness of its own and a harmony with all these inferior values. The bond of human friendship has a sweetness of its own, binding many souls together as one. Yet because of these values, sin is committed, because we have an inordinate preference for these goods of a lower order and neglect the better and the higher good -- neglecting thee, O our Lord God, and thy truth and thy law. For these inferior values have their delights, but not at all equal to my God, who hath made them all. For in him do the righteous delight and he is the sweetness of the upright in heart.
11. When, therefore, we inquire why a crime was committed, we do not accept the explanation unless it appears that there was the desire to obtain some of those values which we designate inferior, or else a fear of losing them. For truly they are beautiful and comely, though in comparison with the superior and celestial goods they are abject and contemptible. A man has murdered another man -- what was his motive? Either he
A Liberal Religious Investigation of Evil A course by Rev. Anya Sammler-Michael 34 desired his wife or his property or else he would steal to support himself; or else he was afraid of losing something to him; or else, having been injured, he was burning to be revenged. Would a man commit murder without a motive, taking delight simply in the act of murder? Who would believe such a thing? Even for that savage and brutal man [Catiline], of whom it was said that he was gratuitously wicked and cruel, there is still a motive assigned to his deeds. "Lest through idleness," he says, "hand or heart should grow inactive."[52] And to what purpose? Why, even this: that, having once got possession of the city through his practice of his wicked ways, he might gain honors, empire, and wealth, and thus be exempt from the fear of the laws and from financial difficulties in supplying the needs of his family -- and from the consciousness of his own wickedness. So it seems that even Catiline himself loved not his own villainies, but something else, and it was this that gave him the motive for his crimes.
CHAPTER VI
12. What was it in you, O theft of mine, that I, poor wretch, doted on -- you deed of darkness -- in that sixteenth year of my age? Beautiful you were not, for you were a theft. But are you anything at all, so that I could analyze the case with you? Those pears that we stole were fair to the sight because they were thy creation, O Beauty beyond compare, O Creator of all, O thou good God -- God the highest good and my true good.[53] Those pears were truly pleasant to the sight, but it was not for them that my miserable soul lusted, for I had an abundance of better pears. I stole those simply that I might steal, for, having stolen them, I threw them away. My sole gratification in them was my own sin, which I was pleased to enjoy; for, if any one of these pears entered my mouth, the only good flavor it had was my sin in eating it. And now, O Lord my God, I ask what it was in that theft of mine that caused me such delight; for behold it had no beauty of its own -- certainly not the sort of beauty that exists in justice and wisdom, nor such as is in the mind, memory senses, and the animal life of man; nor yet the kind that is the glory and beauty of the stars in their courses; nor the beauty of the earth, or the sea -- teeming with spawning life, replacing in birth that which dies and decays. Indeed, it did not have that false and shadowy beauty which attends the deceptions of vice.
13. For thus we see pride wearing the mask of high- spiritedness, although only thou, O God, art high above all. Ambition seeks honor and glory, whereas only thou shouldst be honored above all, and glorified forever. The powerful man seeks to be feared, because of his cruelty; but who ought really to be feared but God only? What can be forced away or withdrawn out of his power -- when or where or whither or by whom? The enticements of the wanton claim the name of love; and yet nothing is more enticing than thy love, nor is anything loved more healthfully than thy truth, bright and beautiful above all. Curiosity prompts a desire for knowledge, whereas it is only thou who knowest all things supremely. Indeed, ignorance and foolishness themselves go masked under the names of simplicity and innocence; yet there is no being that has true simplicity like thine, and none is innocent as thou art. Thus it is that by a sinner's own deeds he is himself harmed. Human sloth pretends to long for rest, but what sure rest is there save in the Lord? Luxury would fain be called plenty and abundance; but thou art the fullness A Liberal Religious Investigation of Evil A course by Rev. Anya Sammler-Michael 35 and unfailing abundance of unfading joy. Prodigality presents a show of liberality; but thou art the most lavish giver of all good things. Covetousness desires to possess much; but thou art already the possessor of all things. Envy contends that its aim is for excellence; but what is so excellent as thou? Anger seeks revenge; but who avenges more justly than thou? Fear recoils at the unfamiliar and the sudden changes which threaten things beloved, and is wary for its own security; but what can happen that is unfamiliar or sudden to thee? Or who can deprive thee of what thou lovest? Where, really, is there unshaken security save with thee? Grief languishes for things lost in which desire had taken delight, because it wills to have nothing taken from it, just as nothing can be taken from thee.
14. Thus the soul commits fornication when she is turned from thee,[54] and seeks apart from thee what she cannot find pure and untainted until she returns to thee. All things thus imitate thee -- but pervertedly -- when they separate themselves far from thee and raise themselves up against thee. But, even in this act of perverse imitation, they acknowledge thee to be the Creator of all nature, and recognize that there is no place whither they can altogether separate themselves from thee. What was it, then, that I loved in that theft? And wherein was I imitating my Lord, even in a corrupted and perverted way? Did I wish, if only by gesture, to rebel against thy law, even though I had no power to do so actually -- so that, even as a captive, I might produce a sort of counterfeit liberty, by doing with impunity deeds that were forbidden, in a deluded sense of omnipotence? Behold this servant of thine, fleeing from his Lord and following a shadow! O rottenness! O monstrousness of life and abyss of death! Could I find pleasure only in what was unlawful, and only because it was unlawful? ...
16. What profit did I, a wretched one, receive from those things which, when I remember them now, cause me shame -- above all, from that theft, which I loved only for the theft's sake? And, as the theft itself was nothing, I was all the more wretched in that I loved it so. Yet by myself alone I would not have done it -- I still recall how I felt about this then - - I could not have done it alone. I loved it then because of the companionship of my accomplices with whom I did it. I did not, therefore, love the theft alone -- yet, indeed, it was only the theft that I loved, for the companionship was nothing. What is this paradox? Who is it that can explain it to me but God, who illumines my heart and searches out the dark corners thereof? What is it that has prompted my mind to inquire about it, to discuss and to reflect upon all this? For had I at that time loved the pears that I stole and wished to enjoy them, I might have done so alone, if I could have been satisfied with the mere act of theft by which my pleasure was served. Nor did I need to have that itching of my own passions inflamed by the encouragement of my accomplices. But since the pleasure I got was not from the pears, it was in the crime itself, enhanced by the companionship of my fellow sinners.
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CHAPTER IX
17. By what passion, then, was I animated? It was undoubtedly depraved and a great misfortune for me to feel it. But still, what was it? "Who can understand his errors?"[56] We laughed because our hearts were tickled at the thought of deceiving the owners, who had no idea of what we were doing and would have strenuously objected. Yet, again, why did I find such delight in doing this which I would not have done alone? Is it that no one readily laughs alone? No one does so readily; but still sometimes, when men are by themselves and no one else is about, a fit of laughter will overcome them when something very droll presents itself to their sense or mind. Yet alone I would not have done it -- alone I could not have done it at all.
Behold, my God, the lively review of my soul's career is laid bare before thee. I would not have committed that theft alone. My pleasure in it was not what I stole but, rather, the act of stealing. Nor would I have enjoyed doing it alone -- indeed I would not have done it! O friendship all unfriendly! You strange seducer of the soul, who hungers for mischief from impulses of mirth and wantonness, who craves another's loss without any desire for one's own profit or revenge -- so that, when they say, "Let's go, let's do it," we are ashamed not to be shameless.
CHAPTER X
18. Who can unravel such a twisted and tangled knottiness? It is unclean. I hate to reflect upon it. I hate to look on it. But I do long for thee, O Righteousness and Innocence, so beautiful and comely to all virtuous eyes -- I long for thee with an insatiable satiety. With thee is perfect rest, and life unchanging. He who enters into thee enters into the joy of his Lord,[57] and shall have no fear and shall achieve excellence in the Excellent. I fell away from thee, O my God, and in my youth I wandered too far from thee, my true support. And I became to myself a wasteland.
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A Liberal Religious Investigation of Evil A course by Rev. Anya Sammler-Michael 38
3
SECTION THREE
1. Peck, M. Scott. People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil. New York: Touchstone: 47-65
2. Cushman, Thomas. Evil after Postmodernism “Reflexivity of Evil—Modernity and Moral Transgression in the War in Bosnia”. Ed. Jennifer Geddes: 79-100.
A Liberal Religious Investigation of Evil A course by Rev. Anya Sammler-Michael 39
A Liberal Religious Investigation of Evil A course by Rev. Anya Sammler-Michael 40
SECTION THREE, #1
People of the Lie The Hope for Healing Human Evil
M. Scott Peck
The Case of Bobby and His Parents
It was February in the middle of my first year of psychiatric training. I was working on the inpatient service. Bobby, a fifteen-year-old boy, had been admitted the night before from the emergency room with a diagnosis of depression. Before seeing Bobby for the first time I read the note written in his chart by the admitting psychiatrist:
Bobby’s older brother, Stuart, 16, committed suicide this past June, shooting himself in the head with his .22 caliber rifle. Bobby initially seemed to handle his only sibling’s death rather well. But from the beginning of school in September, his academic performance has been poor. Once a B student, he is now failing all his courses. By Thanksgiving he had become obviously depressed. His parents, who seem very concerned, tried to talk to him, but he has become more and more uncommunicative, particularly since Christmas. Although there is no previous history of antisocial behavior, yesterday Bobby stole a car by himself, crashed it (he had never driven before), and was apprehended by the police. His court date is set for March 24th. Because of his age he was released into his parents’ custody, and they were advised to seek immediate psychiatric evaluation for him.
The aide brought Bobby into my office. He had that typical body type of fifteen-year-old boys who have just undergone their early adolescent growth spurt: long, spindly arms and legs, like sticks, and a skinny torso that had not yet begun to fill out. His badly fitting clothes were nondescript. His slightly long, unwashed hair fell forward over his eyes so that it was difficult to see his face, particularly as he kept his gaze riveted on the floor. I shook his limp hand and motioned him to sit down. “I’m Dr. Peck, Bobby,” I said. “I’m going to be your doctor. How are you feeling?”
A Liberal Religious Investigation of Evil A course by Rev. Anya Sammler-Michael 41
Bobby did not answer. He simply sat staring at the floor.
“Did you have a good night’s sleep?” I asked.
“Okay, I guess,” Bobby mumbled. He started picking at a small sore on the back of his hand. I noticed that there were a number of such sores on both his forearms and hands.
“Are you nervous being here in the hospital?”
No answer. Bobby was really digging into that sore. Inwardly I winced at the damage he was doing to his flesh. “Pretty much everyone’s nervous when they first come to the hospital,” I commented, “but you’ll find that it’s a safe place. Can you tell me how you happened to come here?”
“My parents brought me.”
“Why did they do that?”
“Because I stole a car and the police said I had to come here.”
“I don’t think the police said you had to come to the hospital,” I explained. “They just wanted you to see a doctor. Then the doctor who saw you last night thought you were so depressed, it would be better for you to be in the hospital. How did you happen to steal the car?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s a pretty scary thing to steal a car, especially when you’re alone and when you’re not used to driving and don’t even have a driver’s license. Something very strong had to be pushing you to do it. Do you know what that something was?”
No answer. I didn’t really expect one. Fifteen-year-old boys who are in trouble and seeing a psychiatrist for the first time aren’t likely to very verbal—particularly when they’re depressed, and Bobby was clearly very depressed. By this time I had had a chance to catch several quick glimpses of his face when he inadvertently raised his gaze from the floor. It was dull, expressionless. There was no life in his eyes or mouth. It was the kind of face I had seen in the movies of concentration camp survivors or victims of natural disasters who had seen their homes destroyed and their families wiped out: dazed, apathetic, hopeless.
“Do you feel sad?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
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Probably he didn’t, I thought. Young adolescents are just beginning to learn how to identify their feelings. The stronger the feelings, the more overwhelmed they will be by them and the less able to name them. “I suspect you have some very good reasons to feel sad,” I told him. “I know that your brother, Stuart committed suicide last summer. Were you close to him?”
“Yes.”
“Tell me about the two of you.”
“There’s nothing to tell.”
“His death must have made you hurt and confused,” I said.
No reaction. Except that maybe he dug a little deeper into one of the sores on his forearm. He was clearly not able to talk yet in this first session about his brother’s suicide. I decided to drop the issue for the present. “How about your parents?” I asked. “What can you tell me about them?”
“They’re good to me.
“That’s nice. How are they good to you?”
“They drive me to scout meetings.”
“Yes that’s good,” I commented. “Of course that’s the kind of thing parents are supposed to do when they can. How do you get along with them?”
“Okay.”
“No problems?”
“Sometimes I’m mean to them.”
“Oh, like how?”
“I hurt them.”
“How do you hurt them, Bobby?” I asked.
“Like when I stole the car, that hurt them,” Bobby said, not with triumph but with a dreary, hopeless heaviness.
“Do you think maybe that’s why you stole the car—to hurt them?”
“No.” A Liberal Religious Investigation of Evil A course by Rev. Anya Sammler-Michael 43
“I guess you didn’t want to hurt them. Can you think of any other ways you’ve hurt your parents?”
Bobby didn’t answer. After a long pause I said, “Well?”
“I just know I hurt them.”
“But how do you know?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Do they punish you?”
“No, they’re good to me.”
“Then how do you know you hurt them”
“They yell at me.”
“Oh? What are some of the things they yell at you for?”
“I don’t know.”
Bobby was feverishly picking at his sores now and his head had drooped as far as it would go. I felt it would be best if steered my questions to more neutral subjects. Perhaps then he would open up a bit more and we could begin developing a relationship. “Do you have any pets at home?” I asked.
“A dog.”
“What kind of dog?”
“A German shepherd.”
“What’s his name?”
“Her name,” Bobby corrected me. “Inge.”
“That sounds like a German name.”
“Yes.”
“A German name for a German shepherd,” I commented, hoping somehow to get out of my interrogational role. “Do you and Inge do a lot together?”
“No.” A Liberal Religious Investigation of Evil A course by Rev. Anya Sammler-Michael 44
“Do you take care of her?”
“Yes.”
“But you don’t seem very enthusiastic about her.”
“She’s my father’s dog.”
“Oh—but you still have to take care of her?”
“Yes.”
“That doesn’t seem quite fair. Does it make you angry?”
“No.”
“Do you have a pet of your own?”
“No.”
We clearly weren’t getting very far on the topic of pets, so I decided to switch to another topic, which often elicits some enthusiasm from young people. “It’s not long since Christmas,” I said. “What did you get for Christmas?”
“Nothing much.”
“Your parents must have given you something. What did they give you?”
“A gun.”
“A gun?” I repeated stupidly.
“Yes.”
“What kind of gun?” I asked slowly.
“A twenty-two.”
”A twenty-two pistol?”
“No, a twenty-two rifle.”
There was a long moment of silence. I felt as if I had lost my bearings. I wanted to stop the interview. I wanted to go home. Finally I pushed myself to say what had to be said. “I understand that it was with a twenty-two rifle that your brother killed himself.”
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“Yes.”
“Was that what you asked for Christmas?”
“No.”
“What did you ask for?”
“A tennis racket.”
“But you got the gun instead?”
“Yes.”
“How did you feel, getting the same kind of gun that your brother had?”
“It wasn’t the same kind of gun.”
I began to feel better. Maybe I was just confused. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I thought they were the same kind of gun.”
“It wasn’t the same kind of gun,” Bobby replied. “It was the gun.”
“The gun?”
“Yes.”
“You mean your parents gave you your brother’s gun for Christmas, the one he shot himself with?”
“Yes.”
“How did it make you feel getting your brother’s gun for Christmas?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
I almost regretted the question. How could he know? How could he answer such a thing? I looked at him. There had been no change in his appearance as we had talked about the gun. He had continued to pick away at his sores. Otherwise it was as if he were already dead—dull-eyed, listless, apathetic to the point of lifelessness, beyond terror. “No, I don’t expect you could know,” I said. “Tell me, do you ever see your grandparents?”
“No, they live in South Dakota.”
“Do you have any relatives that you see?” A Liberal Religious Investigation of Evil A course by Rev. Anya Sammler-Michael 46
“Some.”
“Any that you like?”
“I like my aunt Helen.”
I thought perhaps I detected a faint sign of enthusiasm in his reply. “Would you like it if your aunt Helen came to visit you here while you’re in the hospital?” I asked.
“She lives quite far away.”
But if she came anyway?”
“If she wanted to.”
Again I felt in him the faintest glimmer of hope—and in myself. I would be getting in touch with Aunt Helen. Now I had to end the interview. I couldn’t tolerate any more. I told Bobby about the hospital routines and explained that I would see him the next day, that the nurses would be watching him quite closely and that they’d give him a sleeping pill at bedtime. Then I took him back to the nurses’ station. After writing his orders I walked out of the building into the courtyard. It was snowing. I was glad of that. I just let it snow on me for a few minutes. Then I went back to my office and became very busy with dull, routine paperwork. I was glad of that also.
The next day I saw Bobby’s parents. They were, they told me, hard-working people. He was a tool-and-diemaker, an expert machinist who took pride in the great precision of his craft. She had a job as a secretary in an insurance company, and took pride in the neatness of their home. They went to the Lutheran church every Sunday. He drank beer in moderation on the weekends. She belonged to a Thursday night women’s bowling league. Of average stature, neither handsome nor ugly, they were the upper crust of the blue-collar class—quiet, orderly, solid. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the tragedy that had befallen them. First Stuart and now Bobby.
“I’ve cried myself out, Doctor,” the mother said.
“Stuart’s suicide was a surprise to you?” I asked
“Totally. A complete shock,” the father answered. “He was such a well-adjusted boy. He did well in school. He was into scouting. He liked to hunt woodchucks in the fields behind the house. He was a quiet boy, but everyone liked him.”
“Had he seemed depressed before he killed himself?”
“No, not at all. He seemed just like his old self. Of course, he was quiet and didn’t tell us much of what was on his mind.”
A Liberal Religious Investigation of Evil A course by Rev. Anya Sammler-Michael 47
“Did he leave a note?”
“No.”
“Have any of your relatives on either side had a mental illness or serious depression or killed themselves?”
“Nobody in my family,” the father responded. “My parents emigrated from Germany, so I have quite a few relatives over there I don’t know much about, and I can’t tell you about them.”
“My grandmother became senile and had to be put in a hospital, but no one else had any mental difficulty,” the mother added. “Certainly no one committed suicide. Oh, Doctor, you don’t think that there’s any chance that Bobby might…might also do something to himself, do you?”
“Yes,” I replied. “I think there’s a very significant chance.”
“O God, I don’t think I could bear it,” the mother wailed softly. “Does this sort of thing—I mean hurting yourself—does it run in families?”
“Definitely. Statistically, the highest risk of suicide exists in people who have a brother or sister who’s committed suicide.”
“O God,” the mother wailed again. “You mean Bobby might really do it too?”
“You hadn’t thought of Bobby being in danger?” I asked.
“No, not until now,” the father replied.
“But I understand that Bobby’s been depressed for some time,” I remarked. “Didn’t that worry you?”
“Well, it worried us, of course,” the father responded. “But we thought it was natural, what with his brother’s death and all. We thought he’d get over it in time.”
“You didn’t think of taking him to see someone like a psychiatrist?” I continued.
“No, of course not,” the father replied again, this time with an edge of annoyance. “We told you we thought he would get over it. We had no idea that it might be this serious.”
“I understand that Bobby’s grades have gone way down in school,” I remarked.
A Liberal Religious Investigation of Evil A course by Rev. Anya Sammler-Michael 48
“Yes. It’s a shame,” the mother responded. “He used to be such a good student.”
“The school must have been a bit concerned about him,” I commented. “Did they get in touch with you about the problem?”
The mother looked slightly uncomfortable. “Yes, they did. And of course I was concerned too. I even took time off from my job to go in for a conference.”
“I’d like to have your permission for me to communicate with the school about Bobby if it seems necessary. It might be quite helpful.”
“Of course.”
“In that conference you had,” I asked, “did anyone from the school suggest that Bobby see a psychiatrist?”
“No,” the mother answered. She seemed to have so rapidly regained her composure, I wasn’t sure she’d ever lost it. “They did suggest he might get some counseling. But not a psychiatrist. Of course if they had suggested a psychiatrist, we would have done something about it.”
“Yes. Then we would have known it was something serious,” the father added. “But because they said counseling, we thought they were just concerned about his grades. Not that we weren’t concerned about his grades too. But we’ve never been ones to push the children unless we had to. It’s not good to push children too hard, is it, Doctor?”
“I’m not sure that taking Bobby to a counselor would have been the same as pushing him,” I commented.
“Well, that’s another thing, Doctor,” the mother continued, more on the offensive than the defensive. “It’s not that easy for us to take Bobby here or there during weekdays. We’re both working people, you know. And these counseling people, they don’t work on weekends. We can’t be just taking off from our jobs every day. We’ve got a living to make, you know.”
It didn’t seem as if it would be fruitful for me to engage Bobby’s parents in an argument over whether they could or could not have discovered available counseling services in the evenings or on weekends. I decided to raise the issue of Aunt Helen. “You know, “I said, “it’s possible that my supervisors and I may decide that Bobby will need more than a brief hospitalization—that he may need a complete change of scene for a good while. Do you have any relatives with whom he might stay?”
A Liberal Religious Investigation of Evil A course by Rev. Anya Sammler-Michael 49
“I’m afraid not,” the father responded immediately. “I don’t think any of them would be interested in having an adolescent boy on their hands. They’ve all got their lives to live.”
“Bobby mentioned to me his aunt Helen,” I suggested. “Perhaps she might be willing to take him.”
The mother jumped in. “Did Bobby tell you he doesn’t want to live with us?” she demanded.
“No, we haven’t even talked about the subject yet,” I replied. “I’m only seeing what all the options are. Who is Aunt Helen?”
“She’s my sister,” the mother answered. “But she’d be out of the question. She lives at least several hundred miles away.”
“That’s not far,” I responded. “And I’m thinking in terms of a change of scene for Bobby. That distance might be just right. It’s close enough so that he could visit you but far enough so that he’d be away from where his brother committed suicide and perhaps away from some of the other pressures that he’s experiencing.”
“I just don’t think it would work out,” the mother said.
“Oh?”
“Well, Helen and I aren’t close. No, not close at all.”
“Why is that?”
“We’ve just never gotten along well together. She’s stuck up, that’s what she is. Although what she’s got to be so stuck up about, I don’t know. All she is is a cleaning lady. She and her husband—he’s not very bright, you know—all they have is a little house-cleaning service. I don’t know what makes them think they can go around acting superior all the time.”
“I can understand that you and she don’t get on too well together,” I acknowledged. “Are there any other relatives with whom it would be better for Bobby to live?”
“No.”
“Even though you don’t like your sister, Bobby seems to have some positive feeling for her, and that’s important.”
A Liberal Religious Investigation of Evil A course by Rev. Anya Sammler-Michael 50
“Look, Doctor,” the father interjected, “I don’t know what you’re insinuating. You’re asking all these questions like you were a policeman or something. We haven’t done anything wrong. You don’t have any right to take a boy from his parents, if that’s what you’re thinking of. We’ve worked hard for that boy. We’ve been good parents.”
My stomach was feeling queasier moment by moment. “I’m concerned about the Christmas present you gave Bobby,” I said.
“Christmas present?” The parents seemed confused.
“Yes. I understand you gave him a gun.”
“That’s right.”
“Was that what he asked for?””
“How should I know what he asked for?” the father demanded belligerently. Then immediately his manner turned plaintive. “I can’t remember what he asked for. A lot’s happened to us, you know. This has been a difficult year for us.”
“I can believe it has been,” I said, “but why did you give him a gun?”
“Why? Why not? It’s a good present for a boy his age. Most boys his age would give their eyeteeth for a gun.
“I should think,” I said slowly, “that since your only other child has killed himself with a gun that you wouldn’t feel so kindly toward guns.”
“You’re one of these antigun people, are you?” the father asked me, faintly belligerent again. “Well, that’s all right. You can be that way. I’m no gun nut myself, but it does seem to me that guns aren’t the problem; it’s the people who use them.”
“To an extent, I agree with you,” I said. “Stuart didn’t kill himself simply because he had a gun. There must have been some other reason more important. Do you know what that reason might have been?”
“No. We’ve already told you we didn’t even know that Stuart was depressed.”
“That’s right. Stuart was depressed. People don’t commit suicide unless they’re depressed. Since you didn’t know Stuart was depressed, there was perhaps no reason for you to worry about him having a gun. But you did know Bobby was depressed. You knew he was depressed well before Christmas, well before you gave him the gun.”
A Liberal Religious Investigation of Evil A course by Rev. Anya Sammler-Michael 51
“Please, Doctor, you don’t seem to understand,” the mother said ingratiatingly, taking over from her husband. “We really didn’t know it was this serious. We just thought he was upset over his brother.”
“So you gave him his brother’s suicide weapon. Not any gun. That particular gun.”
The father took the lead again. “We couldn’t afford to get him a new gun. I don’t know why you’re picking on us. We gave him the best present we could. Money doesn’t grow on trees, you know. We’re just ordinary working people. We could have sold the gun and made money. But we didn’t. We kept it so we could give Bobby a good present.”
“Did you think how that present might seem to Bobby?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that giving him his brother’s suicide weapon was like telling him to walk in his brother’s shoes, like telling him to go out and kill himself too.”
“We didn’t tell him anything of the sort.”
“Of course not. But did you thank that it might possibly seem that way to Bobby?”
“No, we didn’t think about that. We’re not educated people like you. We haven’t been to college and learned all kinds of fancy ways of thinking. We’re just simple working people. We can’t be expected to think of all these things.”
“Perhaps not,” I said. “But that’s what worries me. Because these things need to be thought of.”
We stared at each other for a long moment. How did they feel, I wondered. Certainly they didn’t seem to feel guilty.
Angry? Frightened? Victimized? I didn’t know. I didn’t feel any empathy for them. I only knew how I felt. I felt repelled by them. And I felt very tired.
“I would like you to sign permission for me to communicate with your sister Helen about Bobby and his situation,” I said, turning to the mother. “And yours also,” turning back to the father.
“Well, you’ll not have mine,” he said. “I’ll not have you taking this out of the family, you acting so superior, like you’re some kind of judge or something.”
A Liberal Religious Investigation of Evil A course by Rev. Anya Sammler-Michael 52
“To the contrary,” I explained with cold rationality. “What I am trying to do is my best to keep it in the family as far as possible. Right now you and Bobby and I are the only people involved. I feel it is necessary to involve Bobby’s aunt, at least to the extent necessary to find out if she can be of help. If you tie my hands in doing so, then I will have to discuss the issues thoroughly with my supervisors. I suspect we would conclude we have an obligation to refer Bobby’s case to the State Children’s Protective Agency. If we do that, then you’ll have a real judge on your hands. We may have to do it anyway. It seems to me, however, if she is able to help, that approaching Helen is a way that we can avoid notifying the state. But it’s up to you. It’s completely your choice whether you want to give me permission to communicate with Helen.”
“Oh, my husband’s just being silly doctor,” Bobby’s mother exclaimed with a gay, charming smile. “It’s just been very upsetting to him to have to see our son in a mental hospital, and we’re not used to talking to highly educated people like yourself. Of course we’ll sign permission. I have no objection whatsoever to my sister being involved. We want to do whatever we can to help. All we care about is what’s best for Bobby.”
They signed permission and left. That night my wife and I went to a staff party. I drank a bit more than I ordinarily do.
The next day I got in touch with Aunt Helen. She and her husband came to see me right away. They understood the situation quickly and seemed quite caring. They too were working people but were willing to have Bobby live with them as long as his psychiatric care could be paid for. Fortunately, through their employment Bobby’s parents had insurance coverage with unusually good psychiatric benefits. I contacted a most competent psychiatrist in Helen’s town, who agreed to take on Bobby’s case for long-term outpatient psychotherapy. Bobby himself had no understanding of why it was necessary for him to live with his aunt and uncle, and I didn’t feel he was ready to deal with any real explanation. I simply told him it would be better for him that way.
Within a couple of days Bobby was quite amenable to the change. Indeed, he improved rapidly with several visits from Helen, the prospect of a new living situation, and the care he received from the aides and nurses. By the time he was discharged to Helen’s care, three weeks after his admission to the hospital, the sores on his arms and hands were only scars, and he was able to joke with the staff. Six months later I heard from Helen that he seemed to be doing well and that his grades had come up again. From his psychiatrist I heard that he had developed a trusting therapeutic relationship but was only barely beginning to approach facing the psychological reality of his parents and their treatment of him. After that I had no more follow-up. As to bobby’s parents, I saw them only twice more after that initial meeting, and then only for a couple of minutes each time, while Bobby was still in the hospital. That was all that seemed necessary.
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Whenever a child is brought for psychiatric treatment, it is customary to refer to her or him as the “identified patient.” By this term we psychotherapists mean that the parents—or other identifiers—have labeled the child as a patient—namely, someone who has something wrong and is in need of treatment. The reason we use the term is that we have learned to become skeptical of the validity of this identification process. More often than not, as we proceed with the evaluation of the problem, we discover that the source of the problem lies not in the child but rather in his or her parents, family, school, or society. Put most simply, we usually find that the child is not as sick as its parents. Although the parents have identified the child as the one requiring correction, it is usually they, the identifiers, who are themselves most in need of correction. They are the ones who should be the patients.
This was exemplified in the case of Bobby. Although he was seriously depressed and desperately in need of help, the source, the cause of his depression, lay not in him but in his parents’ behavior toward him. Although depressed, there was nothing sick about his depression. Any fifteen-year-old boy would have been depressed in his circumstances. The essential sickness of the situation lay not in his depression but in the family environment to which his depression was a natural enough response.
To children—even adolescents—their parents are like gods. The way their parents do things seems the way they should be done. Children are seldom able to objectively compare their parents to other parents’ behavior. Treated badly by its parents, a child will usually assume that it is bad. If treated as an ugly, stupid second-class citizen, it will grow up with an image of itself as ugly, stupid, and second-class. Raised without love, children come to believe themselves unlovable. We may express this as a general law of child development:
Whenever there is a major deficit in parental love, the child will, in all likelihood, respond to that deficit by assuming itself to be the cause of the deficit, thereby developing an unrealistically negative self-image.
Bobby, when he first came to the hospital, was literally gouging holes in himself, destroying the surface of himself piece by piece. It was as if he felt there was something bad, something evil, inside him underneath the surface of his skin, and he was digging at himself in order to get it out. Why?
If it happens that someone close to us commits suicide, our first response after the initial shock—if we are normally human with a normal human conscience— will be to wonder what we did wrong. So it must have been for Bobby. In the days immediately following Stuart’s death he would have remembered all manner of little incidents: that only a week before he had called his brother a stupid slob; that a month before he had kicked him in the midst of a fight; that when Stuart picked on him, he often wished that his brother would somehow be removed from
A Liberal Religious Investigation of Evil A course by Rev. Anya Sammler-Michael 54 the face of the earth. Bobby felt responsible, at least to some degree, for Stuart’s death.
What should have happened at this point—and what would have happened in a healthy home—would have been for his parents to begin reassuring him. They should have talked with him about Stuart’s suicide. They should have explained that even though they themselves did not realize it, Stuart must have been mentally ill. They should have told him that people don’t commit suicide because of everyday squabbles or sibling rivalry. They ought to have said that if anyone was responsible, it was they, the parents, the ones who had had the biggest influence on Stuart’s life. But as far as I could ascertain, Bobby had been given none of this reassurance.
When the reassurance he needed was not forthcoming, Bobby became visibly depressed. His grades fell. At this point his parents should have rectified the situation or, lacking the insight to do so themselves, should have sought professional help. But they failed to do so, despite its actually having been suggested to them by the school. It was likely that Bobby even interpreted the lack of attention his depression was receiving as a confirmation of his guilt. Of course no one was concerned about his depression, he felt; he deserved it. He deserved to feel miserable. It was appropriate that he should feel guilty.
Consequently by Christmas Bobby was already judging himself to be an evil criminal. Then, unsolicited, he was given his brother’s “murder” weapon. How was he to understand the meaning of this “gift”? Was he to think: My parents are evil people, and out of their evil, desire my destruction, just as they probably destroyed my brother? Hardly. Nor could he, even with his fifteen-year-old mind, think to himself: My parents gave me the gun out of a mixture of laziness, thoughtlessness, and cheapness. So they don’t love me very well—so what? Since he already believed himself to be evil and lacked the maturity to see his parents with any clarity, there was but one interpretation open to him: to believe the gun an appropriate message telling him: “Take your brother’s suicide weapon and do likewise. You deserve to die.”
Fortunately Bobby did not immediately do likewise. He chose what was probably his only other psychological option: to publicly label himself a criminal so that he might be punished for his evil and society might be protected from him by means of his imprisonment. He stole a car. In a very real sense he stole it that he might live.
All this has been supposition. I had no way of knowing precisely what had occurred in Bobby’s mind. First of all, adolescents are the most private people. They are not apt to confide the inner workings of their minds to anyone, much less a strange, frightening white-coated adult. But even if he had been willing and able to confide in me, Bobby still would not have been able to tell me such things, for his own awareness of them would have been dim indeed. When we A Liberal Religious Investigation of Evil A course by Rev. Anya Sammler-Michael 55 are adults, the greater part of our “thought life” proceeds on an unconscious level. For children and young adolescents, almost all mental activity is unconscious. They feel, they conclude, and they act with precious little awareness of what they are about. So we must deduce from their behavior what is going on. Yet we have learned enough to know that such deductions can be remarkably accurate.
From such deductions we can arrive at another law of child development, this one specific to the problem of evil: When a child is grossly confronted by significant evil in its parents, it will most likely misinterpret the situation and believe that the evil resides in itself.
When confronted by evil, the wisest and most secure adult will usually experience confusion. Imagine, then, what it must be like for a naïve child who encounters evil in the ones it most loves and upon whom it depends. Add to this the fact that evil people, refusing to acknowledge their own failures, actually desire to project their evil onto others, and it is no wonder that children will misinterpret the process by hating themselves. And no wonder that Bobby was gouging holes in himself.
We can see, then, that Bobby, the identified patient, was not himself so much sick as he was responding, in the way that most children would, in a predictable fashion, to the peculiar, evil “sickness” of his parents. Although identified as the one who had something wrong with him, the locus of evil in the total situation lay not in him but elsewhere. This is why his most immediate need was not so much for treatment as for protection. Real treatment would come later, and would be long and difficult, as it always is for the reversal of a self-image that does not correspond to reality.
Let us turn now from the identified patient to the parents, the true source of the problem. Appropriately, they should have been formally identified as the sick ones. They should have been the ones to receive treatment. Yet they did not. Why not? There are three reasons.
The first, and perhaps most compelling, is that they did not want it. To receive treatment one must want it, at least on some level. And to want it one must consider oneself to be in need of it. One must, at least on some level, acknowledge his or her imperfection. There are an enormous number of people in this world with serious and identifiable psychiatric problems who, in a psychiatrist’s eyes, are quite desperately in need of treatment but who fail to recognize this need. So they don’t get treatment, even when it is offered on a silver platter. Not all such people are evil. In fact, the vast majority are not. But it is into this category of persons most intensely resistant to psychiatric treatment that the thoroughly evil fall.
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Bobby’s parents gave many indications that they would have rejected any type of therapy I might have offered them. They did not even pretend to demonstrate any guilt over Stuart’s suicide. They reacted only with rationalization and belligerence to my intimations that they had been remiss in not earlier seeking professional help for Bobby and that their judgment had been poor, at best, in their choice of his Christmas present. Although I sensed in them no genuine desire to care for Bobby, the idea that it would be better for him to live elsewhere was anathema to them because of its implied criticism of their ability as parents. Rather than acknowledging any deficit, they refused to assume any blame on the grounds that they were “working people.”
Still, I might at least have offered them therapy. Just because in all probability they would have rejected the offer, this was to help them grow toward understanding and compassion. But I sensed that even if by some miracle they had been willing to undergo psychotherapy, in their case it would have failed.
It is a sad state of affairs, but the fact of the matter is that the healthiest people— the most honest, whose patterns of thinking are least distorted are the very ones easiest to treat with psychotherapy and most likely to benefit from it. Conversely, the sicker the patients—the more dishonest in their behavior and distorted in their thinking—the less able we are to help them with any degree of success. When they are very distorted and dishonest, it seems impossible. Among themselves, therapists will not infrequently refer to a patient’s psychopathology as being “overwhelming.” We mean this literally. We literally feel overwhelmed by the labyrinthine mass of lies and twisted motives and distorted communication into which we will be drawn if we attempt to work with such people in the intimate relationship of psychotherapy. We feel, usually quite accurately, that not only will we fail in our attempts to pull them out of the morass of their sickness but that we may also be pulled down into it ourselves. We are too weak to help such patients—to blind to see an end to the twisted corridors into which we will be led, too small to maintain our love in the face of their hatred. This was the case in dealing with Bobby’s parents. I felt overwhelmed by the sickness I sensed in them. Not only would they likely reject any offer I made to help them but I also knew I lacked the power to succeed in any attempt at healing.
There is one other reason I didn’t try to work with Bobby’s parents. I simply didn’t like them. It was even more that that; they revolted me. To help people in psychotherapy it is necessary to have at least a germ of positive feeling for them, a touch of sympathy for their predicaments, a smidgen of empathy for their sufferings, a certain regard for their personhood and hope for their potentials as human beings. I didn’t feel these things. I could not envision sitting with Bobby’s parents hour after hour, week after week, month after month, dedicating myself to their care. To the contrary, I could hardly stand being in the same room with them. I felt unclean in their presence. I couldn’t get them out of my office fast enough. From time to time I will attempt to work with someone whose case I suspect to be hopeless on the off chance that my judgment is wrong, and for the A Liberal Religious Investigation of Evil A course by Rev. Anya Sammler-Michael 57 learning value to me, if nothing else. But not Bobby’s parents. Not only would they have rejected my therapy; I rejected them.
People have feelings about each other. When psychotherapists have feelings about their patients, they label those feelings “countertransference.” Countertransference can run the whole gamut of human emotions from the most intense love to the most intense hatred. Volumes have been written on the subject of countertransference; it can be either extremely helpful or extremely hurtful to therapeutic relationships. If therapists’ feelings are inappropriate, the countertransference will distort, confuse, and sidetrack the healing process. Should the countertransference be an appropriate one, however, it can be the most useful tool there is to understand a patient’s problem.
A crucial task of any psychotherapist is to recognize whether the countertransference is or is not appropriate. To fulfill this task therapists must continually analyze themselves as well as their patients. If the countertransference is inappropriate, it is the therapist’s responsibility to either heal himself/herself or refer the patient to another therapist, one capable of being more objective in that particular case.
The feeling that a healthy person often experiences in a relationship with an evil one is revulsion. The feeling of revulsion may be almost instant if the evil encountered is blatant. If the evil is more subtle, the revulsion may develop only gradually as the relationship with the evil one slowly deepens.
The feeling of revulsion can be extremely useful to a therapist. It can be a diagnostic tool par excellence. It can signify more truly and rapidly than anything else that the therapist is in the presence of an evil human being. Yet, like a sharp scalpel, it is a tool that must be used with the greatest care. Should the revulsion result not from something in the patient but from some sickness in the therapist, all manner of harm will likely be done unless the therapist is humble enough to recognize it as his or her own problem.
But what would make revulsion a healthy response? Why might it be an appropriate countertransference for an emotionally healthy therapist? Revulsion is a powerful emotion that causes us to immediately want to avoid, to escape, the revolting presence. And that is exactly the most appropriate thing for a healthy person to do under ordinary circumstances when confronted with an evil presence: to get away from it. Evil is revolting because it is dangerous. It will contaminate or otherwise destroy a person who remains too long in its presence. Unless you know very well what you are doing, the best thing you can do when faced with evil is to run the other way. The revulsion countertransference is an instinctive or, if you will, God-given and saving early-warning radar system.
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SECTION THREE, #2
The Reflexivity of Evil1 Modernity and Moral Transgression in the War in Bosnia
By Thomas Cushman From Evil After Postmodernism, Ed. Jennifer L. Geddes
I It is common practice in studies of evil to begin with an anecdote or story which tries to capture the essence of the evil under study. It is not easy to do this, in part because one runs the risk of reducing the immensity and complexity of evil to one image, and no one image can stand in for such immensity and complexity. But there are events which in their singularity capture the essence of a particular evil, which, in this essay, is the evil that occurred in Bosnia. Zlatko Dizdarević, a prominent Sarajevo writer whose articles about the siege of Sarajevo and the destruction of Bosnia are notable for the way they capture the grievousness and the absurdity of the destruction of Bosnia, writes:
In Sarajevo a three-year-old girl playing outside her home is hit by a sniper’s bullet. Her horrified father carries her to the hospital. Bleeding, she hovers between life and death. Only after her father, a big hulk of a man, has found a doctor to care for her does he allow himself to burst into tears. The television camera records his words. These words, every one of them, belong in an
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anthology of humanism, helplessness and forgiveness at its most extreme—not so much forgiving the criminal who shot a three-year-old child, as forgiving the wild beasts for being wild beasts, for being debased by an evil that destroys every human impulse. Two of his sentences accompany thoughts that will linger long past today or tomorrow. The first comes when the stricken father invites the unknown assassin to have a cup of coffee with him so that he can tell him, like a human being, what has brought him to do such a thing. Then he says, aware that this question might not elicit any human response: “One day, her tears will catch up with him…”2
What is significant about this story? One is tempted to begin with the analysis of the culture that could produce a man who could be so conciliatory and forgiving in the face of such wanton and intentional cruelty against his child. Yet it is the wanton cruelty of the act itself—the very evil of the assassination of a small, defenseless child—that most captures our attention. We, like the father, find the act incomprehensible and are left aghast by it. The father’s question is a desperate and plaintive one, asked without expectation of an answer to the voyeuristic journalists who were an omnipresent part of the mise-en-scène of Bosnian misery. He, like we, realize that the answer to his question lies somewhere beyond the realm of rational explanation, in the realm of the irrational, unpredictable world of evil.
Or does it? There is an apocalyptic quality to much writing on Bosnia, a certain awestruck “homage to the extreme” as Michael Bernstein calls it, which presumes that the answers to the question “Why did it happen?” lie outside the ken of normal human knowledge.3 Rather than assume that events in Bosnia reveal some greater metaphysical truth about evil or about some presumed stage of regression or apocalypse in Western culture, I suggest that there might be a way to offer at least some answer to the question of why those events occurred and that such an answer lies in the analysis of the discrete actions and interactions of specific agents within the contours of the social time and space in which such agents exist. In this essay, I would like to render the rhetorical question “Why did it happen?” into a sociological one: “What brought individual agents to do such things and how were their acts facilitated by their social and cultural environments?” The answer to this question requires a sociology of evil that does not really exist, or if it does, only exists inchoately in a few explicitly sociological works that attempt to present the logic of evil and cruelty. My central purpose here is to work toward the provision of such a theory. There are, to be sure, problems that immediately arise in such a task.
As a moral concept, evil is an “ancient, and heavily freighted term.”4 The freight, in this case, is the baggage of morality, metaphysics, emotions, essentialism, psychology—in short, all of the things that sociology has defined itself against in the course of its development as an autonomous discipline. Sociology is grounded in philosophy. But if
2 3 4 A Liberal Religious Investigation of Evil A course by Rev. Anya Sammler-Michael 60 philosophy prior to the twentieth century seemed inordinately concerned with the question of evil (as can be seen in the works of Hegel, Kant, Hume, and Schopenhauer, to name some of the most prominent), sociology is characterized by a conscious distancing of itself from the term and a selective appropriation of ideas that fit the nascent discipline’s idea of human nature and the positive telos of human evolution. Indeed, evil is sociology’s Doppelgänger, always present, but unwelcome, haunting the discipline and its quest for enlightenment by calling to mind questions of metaphysics, agency, and the “dark side” of human progress.
If evil appears at all in mainstream sociological theory, it does so as a “falling away” from the good. As Jeffrey Alexander notes: “In social scientific formulations of culture, a society’s ‘values’ are studied primarily as orientations to the good, as efforts to embody ideals. Social notions of evil, badness, negativity are explored only as patterned departures from normatively regulated conduct.”5 And, as Niklas Luhmann tells us, it is Durkheim’s own sense of evil in his sociology that sets the pace for the career of the concept of evil in the development of sociology: evil, for Durkheim, is basically seen as the absence of the good instead of the presence of something unto itself.6 Evil is always “not-A” rather than “A.” This moral stance—the idea that immorality, deviance, and evil are “fallings away” from the good—is deeply embedded in the history of sociological thought and has worked to disestablish the ontological reality of evil in social theory and, by way of that, to elide the presence of evil in social life. If evil does appear as autonomous and independent reality, it does so as a sense of something negative about this or that social force rather than as an explicit quality of social forces. While purporting to be scientific and purely rational, such concepts as “Gesellschaft,” “Entzauberung,” “anomie,” or “Kapital” are axiological, conveying a negative sense of the world. While sociology aimed to set itself apart from the question of evil (a question that was central to philosophy), its concepts often convey a sense that, even if evil is not specifically addressed, it is still present in the world.
The first step in a sociology of evil, then, is to establish the ontological status of evil. Without such a status, there is only an emergent sociological evil or a purely relativistic conception, which makes it impossible to make any statements about the actual existence of something that we call evil.7 Pragmatic philosophy and “social theory in the pragmatic mode” decry the effort to fix an idea of evil over and above the language which is used by human beings to describe the sensations they have of extreme phenomena. Yet after all that such philosophies and theories have said and done to distance themselves from the reality of evil, we are left—especially in consideration of the brutal facts of the twentieth century—with a sense that there are still things on earth that are not dreamt of in the philosophies of those whose business it is to know the world.
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To do evil is to intentionally inflict excessive pain and suffering on someone else. What is evil about human actions is, in Abigail Rosenthal’s words, “that aspect of them that intentionally obscures, disrupts, or deflects the ideal thread of plot in human lives” and which does so in a way that is from a normative standpoint, excessive, cruel, or aberrant.8 Neil Smelser notes that evil is “most appropriately applied to situations when force, violence, and other forms of coercion exceed institutional or moral limits.”9 John Kekes sees evil actions as those which “cause serious and morally unjustified harm to other human beings. [The] harm is serious if it interferes with the functioning of a person as a full-fledged agent.”10
The second step in the sociology of evil is to raise the study of evil to a level on par with those of other phenomena usually studied by social scientists. Given the definition of evil offered above, it is easy to see why it is important to establish an operational idea of evil into the vocabulary of analysis of the destruction of Bosnia. It was a particularly cruel and ferocious event, one that was unimaginable in the context of late twentieth- century Europe. Yet, in the dominant discourse on the war, economic disparities, nationalism, historical precedent, and other background factors are usually offered as the explanatory variables that caused the war. These factors in and of themselves, though, cannot explain some of the most salient aspects of the war: the specific acts of barbarism and cruelty that characterize evil. Why did soldiers rape and kill wives and children in front of husbands and fathers and then leave the latter to live with the memory? Why did soldiers destroy beautiful and ancient architectural monuments which had no strategic value? Why were 8000 in Srebrenica told that they were to be evacuated and exchanged for prisoners of war and then machine-gunned and thrown in mass graves? Why were 12,000 people—1800 of whom were children—intentionally murdered in Sarajevo? The answers to these questions can never be found purely in the analysis of political, economic, or even cultural factors because, in the first instance, politics, economics, and culture never do anything by themselves. It is individuals who are enmeshed in politics, economics, and culture who do things through or in relation to politics, economics, and culture. That is to say, the true character of cruelty in Bosnia and Herzegovina (and I think of cruelty in general) is to be found in the acts of agents in relation to the structures that enable and constrain them.
At base, evil is action and, as such the theory of evil that I present here is a theory of action. It presents a view that contrasts with those accounts that rely on some kind of historical or cultural determinism to explain social outcomes in the Balkans: “The war was caused by age-old hatreds.” “The Serbs are products of a cruel culture.” “The Croats have a natural affinity for Nazism and genocide.” These views constitute the main parameters of both popular and social science discourse on the war. They not only rely on crude stereotypes and errors of fact, but also fail to capture the sense of agency that is necessary in order to understand the specific qualities of evil and cruelty. One of the most important developments in contemporary social theory—especially
8 9 10 A Liberal Religious Investigation of Evil A course by Rev. Anya Sammler-Michael 62 theory that deals seriously with the issue of agency—is the idea that history and culture do not do anything by themselves. Rather, it is individuals who do things with the culture and history that surround them: “Men make history, but not in circumstances of their own choosing.” It was individuals who destroyed Bosnia and they did so not as automatons or dupes of historical or cultural forces, but as willful agents who reflexively responded to the contours of both local and global history, who reflexively adapted themselves to the exigencies and contingencies of the unfolding present, and who reflexively presented an ideal vision of the future that their actions would, ideally, bring about.
II
While I want to develop a sociology of evil by way of reclaiming what is important from the philosophy of evil, I do want to distance myself from the idea of essential evil. The basis for a sociology of evil is not metaphysics, but theories of social action. Evil is not an essential quality of human beings, but is intentional action, the result of the conscious reflection of actors and the willful decision to do something severe to someone else. There is nothing terribly new about this idea. Most major theologians and philosophers who have dealt with the problem of evil have tied the latter directly and unconditionally to the idea of free will. Augustine, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer, despite their many differences shared this view, and I think that anyone would be hard-pressed to find such a strong point of agreement on any other substantive issue among these disparate thinkers.
If evil is agentic and intentional action that is reflexively chosen, it should be fairly easy to account for it from the standpoint of existing sociological theories of action and agency. We could just adapt the latter to interpret actions that we consider evil. Yet, sociological theorists of agency have, like sociological theorists in general, displaced evil. This displacement has much to do with the unbridled political optimism of the progenitors of the pragmatic theories of social action. William James made some space for the idea of evil, noting in The Varieties of Religious Experience that: “The normal process of life contains moments as bad as any of those which insane melancholy is filled with, moments in which radical evil gets its innings and takes its solid turns.”11 Yet James’s sociological interpreters such as Mead and Cooley simply ignored the idea that the pragmatic, reflexive self could engage in action that was ferocious, malicious, and cruel in its ends, genesis, or outcomes. Action and reflexivity was, for these thinkers and their later followers, always considered as progressive. This development was ironic since such theories developed in a world historical context in which it was rather evident that agents used the infrastructure of modernity for nefarious rather than progressive ends.
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This belief in the optimistic and moral ends of agency is very clear in the work of Anthony Giddens, perhaps the most prominent contemporary theorist of agency. For Giddens, agency is what drives the “life politics” that aim to reenchant a world disenchanted by modernity. If there is any evil embedded in Giddens’ theory, it lies in his conception of modernity as a “juggernaut.”12 Agency, in contrast, expresses itself in the life projects of countermodernity. In Giddens’ actor it is much more possible to see a saint than a sinner. As with Durkheim and Parsons, Giddens simply cannot imagine that, as Jeffrey Alexander notes, “evil might be valued as energetically as the good.”13 This line of thought is carried forth in most sociological work that stresses agency and seems to be an essential political precondition for such theories.14
There is no logical or empirical reason to assume that reflexivity is fundamentally oriented to optimistic, progressive, Enlightenment ends. Indeed, if we are interested in looking at the ways in which agency is enabled by the infrastructures of modernity, we are likely to find our best examples in those whose acts would be classified as “transgressive.” The archetypal, ideal-type model of the evil agent is to be found in the fictional characters of James Bond stories: brilliant geniuses who have mastered modern technologies in the service of grand anti-Enlightenment schemes. Such characters are highly reflexive agents, perhaps even hyper-reflexive. But the ends of their agency and reflection are to maximize the pain and suffering of others, to deliberately obscure the plot lines of others’ lives through creative intervention. This conception, of course, involves a break with the view that reflexivity and moral progress go hand in hand: reflexivity, in my view, is neither moral nor immoral, progressive nor regressive, modern nor barbaric by nature. Rather, evil is reflexive, creative, imaginative, adaptive, and cunning, whatever its axiological ends, and especially so in relation to the more technologically complex condition of modernity.15 To miss or underestimate the reflexivity of evil is, I think, to fail to capture the most essential quality of evil.
So what we need is a conception of agency that allows us to examine evil as a form of social action. Such a conception can be found in an imaginative article on the nature of agency by Mustafa Emirbayer and Ann Mirsch, in which they note that agency always proceeds in relation to past, present, and future:
Actors are always living simultaneously in the past, the future, and present, and adjusting to the various temporalities of their empirical existence to one another (and to their empirical circumstances) in more or less imaginative or reflective ways. They continuously engage in patterns and repertoires from the past, project hypothetical pathways forward in time, and adjust their actions to the exigencies of emerging.16
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This “relational pragmatics”, as the authors refer to it, allows us to conceive of agency as a function of a reflexive consciousness that is oriented toward three temporal planes: past, present, and future. The latter constitute a kind of “chordal triangle” which actors “play” as they engage in reflexive social action.
In stressing the temporal bases of action, Emirbayer and Mirsch’s approach is much more sophisticated than that found in most theories of agency and offers an imaginative basis for examining the specific actions of agents under specific conditions of social time and space. Their view is also especially useful for understanding agency in the postmodern world in which past, future, and present are made manifest to actors in many more ways, through many different media. Curiously, though, the authors note that their analysis only delineates the “analytical space within which reflective and morally responsible action might be said to unfold.”17 There is no inherent reason why “relational pragmatics” should be considered inherently positive and morally responsible. Indeed, it is the central point of the present analysis that pragmatics are oriented in what might be called, to invert Emirbayer and Mirsch’s terminology, “morally irresponsible ways.” The connection between agency and moral responsibility is not grounded in an empirical assessment of the range of human activities, but rather is a product of the homage to the idealism of pragmatic social theory. It is, in fact, deceiving to restrict the analysis of action to those projects that are thought to be morally constructive and progressive. The destruction of Bosnia is only one recent case that illustrates that the forging of un-democratic politics, the perpetration of cruel and ferocious acts, and the masking of all the latter by the perpetrators and social science interpreters is the product of highly reflexive agents who insert themselves into the past, adapt to the present, and imagine a future. Such cruelty does not just happen; it is made.
III
The foregoing theoretical prolegomenon is meant to offer a basis for the analysis of key agents who set the stage for and committed acts of intentional cruelty in Bosnia. It is these acts which, taken cumulatively and collectively, constitute the destruction of Bosnia. Atrocities and cruelties were perpetrated by all sides, but the vast majority of atrocities and war crimes were committed by those on the Serbian side. Thus, I wish to focus principally on the Serbian elites who, as agents, set the historical process of the destruction of Bosnia into motion.18
There is a saying in the Serbo-Croation language: “riba se truje od glave nadolje,” which means that “fish rots from the head down.” The principle architects of the destruction of Bosnia—Slobodan Milošević, Radovan Karadžić, Ratko Mladić, and Željko Ražnatović —set into motion a whole process, a whole machinery of agents who,
17 18 A Liberal Religious Investigation of Evil A course by Rev. Anya Sammler-Michael 65 in toto, effected the destruction of Bosnia. The Bosnian war was perhaps the most widely covered war in history; phalanxes of journalists were constantly on the scene to capture events as they unfolded. The presence of these journalists was a major factor in the reflexive considerations of the perpetrators of violence, and it is through these media that we can witness the destruction of Bosnia and the reflexive accounts of the agents who effected that destruction and provided a rationale for them. My data is the actual footage of these figures by Western journalists and the {presentations of self” that these elites put forth through local and global media. The words of these agents provide indications of the ways in which they consciously and reflexively played the past present, and future as the basis for their ongoing social actions. I turn first to the principal agent in the dissolution of Bosnia, Slobodan Milošević.
Slobodan Milošević did not create himself as a nationalist, but actually inserted himself into an existing historical current of Serbian concern about the encroachment of national minorities on Serbs, particularly in the autonomous region of Kosovo. The special importance of Kosovo as the place where the Serbs suffered defeat at the hands of the “Turks” in 1389 is quite well known. But all through Serbian history, Kosovo has been a special site of tension between Albanians and Serbs: this tension had been exacerbated in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by patterns of out-migration of Serbs and in-migration of Albanians. Obsessive concern with this process was a hallmark of Serbian nationalist programs. In 1937, in an address to the Serbian Culture Club in Belgrade (and later deposited in an archive of the Yugoslav National Army), Vasa Čubrilović a professor at the University of Belgrade, provided a stark plan for the forced deportation, terrorization, and recolonization of the southern lands of Serbia, which included Kosovo.19
In his address, Čubrilović outlines the history of Albanian “penetration” into the lands of southern Serbia. He notes that this “Albanian bloc” cuts off the northern parts of Serbia from strategically important access to southern rivers and seas. The simple solution is the removal of the Albanian population by the use of force. He writes:
Our first task is not to leave a land of such strategic importance in the hands of an alien and hostile nation… We cannot succeed in suppressing Albanians only by gradual colonization because they are the only nation that has managed to survive within the nucleus of our state… but also to push our ethnic borders back towards the north and east in the last millennium… The only solution is to use brute force. We have always been superior to them in its use.20
After noting that the trend of Albanian encroachment into Serbia can only get worse due to the exceptional fertility of Albanian women relative to Serbian women, Čubrilović provides a detailed plan for the forcible eviction “en masse” of the Albanian population to lands in Albania and Turkey and the repopulation of the ethnically cleansed areas with Serbs. His plan has many of the trimmings of other blueprints for ethnic cleansing
19 20 A Liberal Religious Investigation of Evil A course by Rev. Anya Sammler-Michael 66 in the twentieth century—an organized program of terror, the use of brute strength to force emigration, and the willful destruction of the “foreign” culture. Čubrilović minces no words: “To cause the massive emigration, the first prerequisite is to generate fear” and to use the “pressure of the state apparatus” which
should make the Albanian existence here as bitter as possible: fines, arrests, ruthless application of all the police sanctions, punishments for smuggling, hewing down, and letting dogs loose, enforcing statute labor and all the other methods at the disposal of the police.21
This plan of terror and force is all to be followed by a repopulation of southern lands under the direction of the Serbian Royal Academy of Science in Belgrade and Čubrilović’s colleagues at the University of Belgrade whose scientific and objective studies of the problem would be the basis for the formation of a “Colonization Institute,” whose task it would be to develop and implement techniques for eviction and resettlement.
This motif ran through twentieth-century Serbian history and found expression and intensification in later pronouncements of Serbian intellectuals. In January 1986, two hundred prominent Belgrade intellectuals signed a petition to the Yugoslav and Serbian national assemblies.22 This petition laments the “genocide” of the Serbian people and demands the
right to spiritual identity, to defense of the foundations of Serb national culture and to the physical survival of our nation on its land. We demand decisive measures, and that the concern and will of all Yugoslavia be mobilized in order to stop the Albanian aggression in Kosovo and Metohija.23
The petition was signed by notable intellectuals, including former “Marxist humanist” editors of the prominent Yugoslav Marxist journal Praxis: Zaga Golubović, Mihailo Marković, and Ljubomir Tadić. The alignment of these prominent intellectuals with aggressive nationalism not only puzzled left acolytes of Yugoslav Marxism, but also pointed to a close connection between the latter and nationalism that has often been elided in contemporary accounts. In a later pronouncement on February 26, 1987, the three editors published a rejoinder to a criticism by Michele Lee of their support of nationalism.24 While claiming to continue to uphold the principles of democratic socialism in the journal and the general rights of all minorities, the three editors stress that, as Serbs, they are also defending the “Serbian victims of oppression.”25 They refer to the Albanian people as the “little David” which
21 22 23 24 25 A Liberal Religious Investigation of Evil A course by Rev. Anya Sammler-Michael 67
always had the upper hand most of the time because it was amply supported by overwhelming allies: the Islamic Ottoman Empire during five centuries until 1912; Austria Hungary which occupied the entire territory during World War I; fascist Italy and Germany which did the same during World War II; the Soviet Union and China after 1948; eventually a dominating anti-Serbian coalition itself over the last twenty years.26
Notice in this description the highly relational articulation of Serbian victimization: it emerges through the long durée of the history of domination of foreign peoples by enemies of all ideological stripes and continues to this day, ostensibly embodied in the nascent movements for autonomy taking place in other parts of Yugoslavia. The past is always present and all the more so in the most reflexive elements of the population, namely, the intellectuals.
These contours of Serbian history formed the central aspect of the more general cultural milieu in which political leaders in the disintegrating Yugoslavia existed. Serbian history formed the central aspect of the more general cultural milieu in which political leaders in the disintegrating Yugoslavia existed. Serbian history really was characterized by the series of oppressions named. What was decisive for the fate of Bosnia was the ways in which this history was “played” by politicians in the present. No one was a more skillful player than Milošević; his very power depended fundamentally on his exploitation and intensification of these anti-Albanian sentiments and the perception of the danger posed by Albanians to the Serbs. Indeed, what is remarkable about the tense situation in Kosovo, both in the late 1980s and now, is the way in which the present-day Albanians are seen as “Turk-surrogates,” symbolic stand-ins for the real Turks who defeated Prince Lazar 600 years before in 1389 at the Battle of Kosovo. In terms of the temporal plane of history, what distinguishes so much of the social action in the Balkans is the way in which history resides so close to the surface, always ready to be taken into consideration as the justification for this or that act in the present. Milošević set the stage for this contemporaneization of history in a famous speech to Kosovo Polje on April 24, 1987. Milošević used the tensions in Kosovo to effect a transformation of his own political identity from a communist apparatchik to nationalist savior of the Serbian people.” This was a highly intentional act, and while it no doubt “brewed” for some time, we have actual footage that shows the exact moment when Milošević recreated his identity. The Kosovo gathering shows the volatile mix of crowd dynamics, political calculations, the construction of charisma, and conscious insertion of the self into history that comprise acts of agency in the Balkans. While it is clear that Milošević emerged victorious at this time, what is not often commented on is the high degree of contingency and unpredictability of this event. Like other reflexive interactions in situations of co-presence, the interactions of a political leader with the masses is a precarious endeavor, even more so perhaps since the reflexivity of the “mob “ is not highly developed and, thus, the leader is forced to play to the mob rather than the other way around. Milošević might well have emerged a villain rather than a hero, and the contingency of the event is evident in the way the situation played itself out. While the
26 A Liberal Religious Investigation of Evil A course by Rev. Anya Sammler-Michael 68 event was highly orchestrated, the leader seemed ever conscious of the precariousness of the situation and only “struck when he was sure that the identity he had chosen would resonate with the crowd. It might just as well have gone the other way.
Milošević’s declaration, “You will not be beaten again,” is an utterance which places him, at once, in the past, present, and future: the reference to “again” does not refer to the immediate past of the staged and contrived attack on Serbs outside the lecture hall just a few moments ago, but to the long-standing beating of the Serbs by Albanians which has, presumably occurred since 1389. The utterance itself is a reflexive orientation to the mob which, in the present, demands something immediate of Milošević, and the use of the future tense means that Milošević has defined a vision of the future in which the Serbs will be safe from other threats. While I would not like to make too much out of one utterance, I would say that the pattern of “playing” the chordal triangle of past, present, and future which is so evident in this utterance was to establish itself as the principle grounding for destructive acts in Bosnia.
Milošević continued this playing of past, present, and future as he assumed more power. On May 8, 1989, Milošević assumed the presidency of Yugoslavia. The next month, on June 28, again at the very battlefield where the “Turks” had defeated the Serbs, a mass rally of over one million people was staged. Milošević as the transformed Serbian nationalist leader played the key role in the spectacle, which took place at Gazimestan, at the actual site of the battle of Kosovo. Mass audiences were convened to greet Milošević who, just as Hitler had descended to Nuremberg sixty years before in an airplane, descended to the field in a helicopter to greet the people. This spectacle continued Milošević’s reflexive transformation of his own identity. I want to stress this because, for the purpose of my general argument here, history is not simply a background force that caused the dissolution of Yugoslavia and the attendant destruction of Bosnia: it was a force that was activated by agents to refashion their identities and, by way of that, to alter the specific contours of the present and future. His speech elaborated the major motifs of Serbian propaganda that legitimated the war that was to follow: the Serbs are never aggressors; they are “liberators” who try to help others and who are thwarted in this by the aggressive and thankless hostility of those others:
Serbs in their history have never conquered or exploited others. Through two world wars, they have liberated themselves and, when they could, they also helped others to liberate themselves… The Kosovo heroism does not allow us to forget that one time we were brave and dignified and one of the few who went into battle undefeated… Six centuries later, again we are in battles and quarrels. They are not armed battles, though such things should not be excluded yet. 27
The consideration of Milošević as a reflexive agent is not meant to decide the question about whether or not Milošević is actually “evil” in some essential sense, although the case could be made philosophically that he is wicked, that is, he is an individual who is
27 A Liberal Religious Investigation of Evil A course by Rev. Anya Sammler-Michael 69 an habitual evildoer.”28 The point is that in his actions we see a strong intersection between the reflexive remaking of Milošević’s self and the investing of that self into a series of social actions that had a specific effect on the present and Serbian future. If it is the case that Milošević’s actions in the beginning of the war were the pretext for the destruction of Bosnia, it is also the case that his own actions enabled others who were the executors of his plans for the forcible repression of newly independent states of the former Yugoslavia. While Milošević’s transformation set the ball in motion, there is a seeming inconsistency between Milošević’s rather dispassionate and bureaucratic demeanor and the events that have come to characterize the war in ex-Yugoslavia: the brutal rapes, the acts of torture and mutilations, the killing of civilians and non- combatants. It is very easy to see Machiavelli rather than Rousseau in him.
Yet Milošević’s own transformation set in motion a general movement away from pure Machiavellianism to a more “fragrant,” contractual, and aestheticized version of transgression—transgression that manifested itself almost as a kind of Durkheimian ritual of negative solidarity. We can move from the analysis of the true believers who precipitated acts of cruelty in the name of the nation, the self-defense of the victimized Serbian people. In such a movement, we see manifestations of an autonomous evil, in which agents such as Milošević are well aware of what they are doing, and what John Kekes calls non-autonomous evil, in which actors perpetrate evil acts, but are convinced that what they are doing is good, righteous, or just.29 Whether autonomous or non- autonomous, like Milošević, these same actors played the chordal triangle of past, present, and future as they committed their acts of transgression.
Nowhere was this enthusiastic transgression more clear than in the case of General Ratko Mladić. In January 1991, Mladić was the deputy commander of the army corps in the province of Kosovo and later, in 1992, became the military commander of the Bosnian Serb forces. Mladić, who had close ties with Milošević, is one of the agents who bears primary responsibility for the destruction of Bosnia; indeed, he has been indicted by the International War Crimes Tribunal for the crime of genocide and crimes against humanity. The list of crimes in the indictment include setting up detention facilities; targeting political leaders, intellectuals, and professionals; deporting Bosnian Muslims and Bosnian Croats; shelling civilian gatherings; appropriating and plundering property; destroying property; and destroying sacred sites.30 According to one journalist:
By his own account, Ratko Mladić is a student of Hannibal, Alexander the Great, and Carl von Clausewitz. But over the last three years, in battle after battle, he has shown his belief in the doctrine of concentrated force espoused by Heinz Guderian, the German panzer general: Klotazen, nicht Kleckern!—“Smash!
28 29 30 A Liberal Religious Investigation of Evil A course by Rev. Anya Sammler-Michael 70
Don’t sprinkle!” Mladić’s commands to his artillery units around Sarajevo included: “Roast!” “Pound them senseless!”31
Like Milošević, Mladić grounded his acts of destruction in the chordal triad of past, present, and future. Such acts were immediately grounded in a sense of Serbian history, a history that was always flush with the present. Consider the destruction of Srebrenica, the supposed UN safe area— Mladić is known for his central role in this event which is now considered to be the worst atrocity of the entire war and, indeed, the worst atrocity to occur in Europe since the end of the Second World War.32 Mladić, the commander and chief of the Bosnian Serb forces, led the assault on Srebrenica. The assault was a highly reflexive act; indeed, it played itself out precisely in relation to the responses of the West, which were carefully monitored by Mladić’s forces. Jan Honig and Norbert Booth describe the way in which practically every Serbian military action played itself out with specific, calculated references to global actors. Such actors were seldom physically present, but they were omnipresent in the minds of the perpetrators as they reflexively considered the possibilities for social action:
After gaining new ground the Serbs would invariably pause. With so many UN Troops and observers present, they had to be wary of a possible international armed response. A pause enabled them to gauge the world’s reaction. Also, it tended to make the attack appear like a limited or isolated incident—a moment of pique that would not continue. They usually succeeded in taking the sting out of any intended tough response.33
This ongoing articulation of action with the ongoing present involved an almost constant interaction of Mladić and others with the agents who possessed the means to “make or break” the Serbs. Thus it was that Mladić was able to present himself to people such as General Michael Rose, the commander of UN forces in Bosnia, even as he was planning the liquidation of Muslims from the safe area of Srebrenica. In such interactions, if visual images are any evidence, Mladić was able to convince Rose that he was not so after all and had legitimate military objectives and the means to achieve them.
In addition to this reflexive consideration of the present, what was also important was the way in which the past lurked near the surface of the present. The case of Milošević’s rise to power seems relatively benign when considered against the actions of Mladić in his concrete military campaigns of ethnic cleaning. According to Mark Danner, upon conquering Srebrenica, Mladić spoke to the television camera:
Here we are in Srebrenica on July 11, 1995. On the eve of yet another great Serbian holiday, we present this city to the Serbian people as a gift. Finally,
31 32 33 A Liberal Religious Investigation of Evil A course by Rev. Anya Sammler-Michael 71
after the rebellion of the Dahijas, the time has come to take revenge on the Turks of this region.34
Again, the Muslim residents of Srebrenica are linked unproblematically to a distant “Turkish” past, an event at Dahijas almost three hundred years before in which Turks ruthlessly suppressed a rebellion by Serbs in the region. This linkage grounded Mladić’s perpetration of his own atrocity in the present. The atrocity itself is fundamentally tied to a vision of the future that is “Turk-less.” Unlike Milošević’s acts in Kosovo, which merely ignited the war, Mladić’s acts constituted the war itself and they were a product of his reflexive consideration of past, present, and future.
Another key agent of destruction who gained a notable reputation for cruelty in the war was Željko Ražnatović. Ražnatović, who went by the nickname of “Arkan” and who was recently assassinated in Belgrade, emerged as a leader of the paramilitary organization Serbian Volunteer guard, also known as the Tigers. Arkan emerged on the scene in the destruction and looting of the Croatian city of Vukovar in the fall of 1991. The destruction of Vukovar was what might be called, in modern capitalist parlance, a “Market-testing exercise” in which the pattern of bouncing images out on the world and escalating violence in relation to the reception was established. Arkan later applied that same strategy in the destruction of towns and cities in Bosnia. There, his troops were photographed committing vicious atrocities against Muslim populations. Serbs from the very beginning recognized that their actions had to be reflexively tailored to the response of the Wester “other,” which was the primary recipient of the images of mass destruction. What is remarkable is that the images, sometimes consciously crafted to be transgressive, evoked very little response in the West, except for non-response and indifference, which themselves are a type of response. When such indifference was conveyed back to Serbian elites, this indifference itself was a significant gesture that enabled further acts of destruction. This “conversation of gestures,” to use George Herbert Mead’s terminology, was not simply the innocent basis of social life, but an active process that led to acts of extreme cruelty.
Western passivity in the face of the media images of the war was actually an active force because it clued in Serbian forces to the fact that they could engage in future destructive action with impunity. As the war progressed, these interaction rituals between agents of destruction and media became a permanent part of the landscape and a major means which allowed suspected war criminals not only to engage with Western audiences, but to provide a discursive ground for their actions. In these regularized media events, figures such as Arkan could articulate their own rationale and programs.
This interaction with the media allowed for the overt denial of actions or reconstructions of the identity of the perpetrators even in the face of the evidence for atrocity, which might occur even in the same clip. Arkan appears as a boyish, suave, sophisticated man who presents himself as “gentlemanly defender of Serbian victims” even as he is
34 A Liberal Religious Investigation of Evil A course by Rev. Anya Sammler-Michael 72 surrounded by the evidence of mass destruction for which he and his soldiers appear to be responsible. Acts of intentional cruelty in the present are justified as acts of self- defense against an omnipotent historical other, and the discourse serves to deny and suppress the actual evidence of the evil of the event. While I have not focused on the mind of the Western audience, it is worthwhile to point out that the presentation of such contradictory images did not lead to action on the part of Western observers to stop aggression. Rather, it is more likely that it led to doubt and confusion as to what was actually going on. The “positive” messages which Arkan intentionally crafted in these little media spectacles—the façade of boyish charm, his facility with English, his association with the Serbian Orthodox Church, the reasonable-sounding story of the victimization of the Serbian people—contradict the historical reality and truth of the banal reality of evil. As the war progressed, it became progressively more difficult to link the perpetrators of violence to the actual acts they had perpetrated because the reflexive and creative messages of the perpetrators did not resonate with the banality of the events that they were meant to mask.
Arkan’s reflexive playing of the media was a pattern followed by all of the principal agents in the war. The latter were offered unprecedented opportunities to air their views in the major media venues of the West. At one point in the war, this mediated interaction between Western audiences and the perpetrators of the destruction of Bosnia reached a crescendo when Radovan Karadžić, the leader of the Bosnian Serbs, appeared on the CBS television news program “Sixty Minutes.”35 Karadžić, a former psychiatrist and poet, was the principal architect of the war and the principal ideologist of the Bosnian Serb position. He was offered a platform for his views on one of the most watched television shows in the United States. From a formal standpoint, this event was a case in which the leader most responsible for the war and the atrocities that occurred there could engage with Western audiences and present an account and rationale for his actions. This account served to deny his role in the atrocities in Bosnia by redefining and redescribing those events in terms of history, the present, and the future.
One of the major lines of thought in Karadžić’s interview is the idea of the duplicity and untrustworthiness of Muslims. Karadžić puts forth the idea that the Muslims were so duplicitous that they actually shelled themselves in order to gain Western sympathy. And he notes that Muslims are characterized by “intolerance, torture, anxiety, and deception” and therefore, “I can’t trust the Muslims because I have seen what they do to my people.” One can imagine that this would play particularly well in a Western public infused with orientalist images of fundamentalist Muslims who commit acts of treachery. Indeed, Karadžić notes that “for some nations we are heroes, Russians, Rumanians, Bulgarians, Greeks”—all nations, incidentally, which have long histories of tensions with Turkish and Muslim peoples. In noting that Serbs are doing “the same thing they did to us during Second World War,” Karadžića actually admits to atrocity, but conveys the idea that it is justified on the grounds of collective, historical guilt. Karadžić also notes that the Western media pays no attention to atrocities against Serbs, thus inferring that
35 A Liberal Religious Investigation of Evil A course by Rev. Anya Sammler-Michael 73 there is some kind of a conspiracy against Serbs. Finally, in the interview, Karadžić simply denies that there were any atrocities or crimes against humanity committed by his forces: “there were no killings except during fighting”; “my army and police have never committed any rape or atrocities.” He even defends Ratko Mladić as a hero and denies the facts of Srebrenica. Toward the end of the interview, Mike Wallace notes: “I don’t sense that there are any heroes in the Balkans.” To which Karadžić replies: “You are right because what we are going to be can’t be defined right now. Time has to decide whether we are going to be heroes or criminals.” Karadžić ends his interview sounding the note of future orientation—the actions that occurred in Bosnia were not only reflexively oriented toward the past, played out, but guided by a vision of the European future in which the Bosnian Serbs would be redefined as the protectors of the cultural purity of Europe. For Karadžić, what “we Serbs” are now is what others will think about us in the future. He actually imagines himself a European hero and such an imagining is not necessarily out of keeping within the long durée of European treatment of Muslims.36
I would argue that this interview is itself a model case which shows how evil plays itself out in the postmodern world. It is far more than a thrust and parry on television seen by millions of people: it is what might be called the postmodern presentation of self, the reflexive playing of past, present, and future through an omnipresent media that provides the raw material for a vast audience of observers. Cruelty, torture, and heinous acts are not new in the twentieth century; what is new is the way in which these things come to be grounded in a new, mediated, dialectical relationship between the perpetrators of evil and observers. In this dialectic, the point of view of the perpetrator has the possibility of appearing reasonable and understandable and can then be inserted into any number of other discourses and presented as a plausible and valid account. There is no idea in any of the accounts presented above whether those of Milošević, Mladić, Arkan, or Karadžić.
IV I have made mention of the fact that the destruction of Bosnia was closely watched by those in the West who also attempted to make meaning of the events that happened there. In the last section of this essay, I want to raise the issue of the Western response to the war in Bosnia in terms of the relevance of that response for masking and eliding evil. The central contours of the phenomenology of Western perception of the war were forged by the constant presence of Western observers on the scene in Bosnia and the constant interaction of the Western observers with the major and minor players in that scene. But contrary to the idea that knowledge of an event produces action in relation to it, the destruction of Bosnia was characterized by a high degree of indifference on the part of the West toward events there. The destruction of Bosnia was perhaps the most observed, covered, and written about event in the history of the twentieth century, but this coverage did not lead in any direct way to intervention to stop the events that were occurring. In fact, as I have argued in the previous section, the vast media coverage
36 A Liberal Religious Investigation of Evil A course by Rev. Anya Sammler-Michael 74 actually was the necessary condition which allowed agents to play the chordal triangle of past, present, and future as they committed their acts of destruction. Thus it was, to extend Marx’s famous insight, that men made history in circumstances that enabled them to reflect on it and present it to others in ways hitherto unimaginable until the advent of late modernity (or postmodernity, depending on one’s preference for defining the epoch).
Many separate issues arise in considering this relationship: the extent to which the indifference was functional for Western observers, the extent to which such indifference was actually complicitous in the destruction of Bosnia, and the extent to which Western accounts of the war masked or elided the specific qualities of the war. That the West was complicitous in the very beginning of the war, the agents who committed the destruction of Bosnia took their cues from Western leaders: the information “given off,” in Erving Goffman’s sense, served as a reference point for reflection and for the commission of acts of ferocious cruelty.37
This is where we come to what is “postmodern” about the practice of evil as I have described it in this essay. My argument here is provocative: the amount of information and its mode of presentation meant that competing narratives of the war, narratives which defined the truth of the war in radically different ways, came to delineate the space of analysis. This is certainly natural given that an expanded public sphere is one of the defining characteristics of a pluralistic society. Yet, in this case, the media was actually central to the purpose of the actors justifying and masking their accounts of mass atrocity. The media maintained a certain “discursive solidarity” with the perpetrators of evil whom I discussed previously. It provided a space in which Radovan Karadžić, Slobodan Milošević, Ratko Mladić, and Arkan could, in an ongoing way, reflect on and construct a rationale for their actions, in the terms of my analysis here, to play the chordal triangle of past, present, and future to a vast audience of observers. The sounds of this concert were, in a sense, “products” for consumption by Western audiences.
It is so often said that “there is no real truth about the Balkan war,” and it might be that, ironically, the truth of the event receded in proportion to the increase in the media coverage of the war. The media served to create a situation in which a set of competing vocabularies of motive could be presented. None of these vocabularies had any ontological or axiological primacy over the others. Indeed, since the presentation of accounts was not simply the presentation of truth-claims, but the persuasive rhetorics, gestures, and other symbolic tactics, the perpetrators had the constant opportunity to present their rationale for the torture. In the mind of the viewer—especially those for whom the apprehension of Bosnia was a completely mediated event—the reasonableness and seeming civility presented in a tactical mix of persuasive gestures could easily relegate the pain and torture for which the perpetrator was responsible to the margins of consciousness.
37 A Liberal Religious Investigation of Evil A course by Rev. Anya Sammler-Michael 75
Thus, what one remembers about Ratko Mladić is not his ferocity or his commands to “roast” Muslim civilians, but his own pain as a victim of the Ustasha fascists in the Second World War. What one remembers about Radovan Karadžić is not that he gave the orders to murder children in Sarajevo, but his compelling, emotional, and vitally powerful historical story about the historical ill-treatment of the Serbs at the hands of people of Muslim and Croatian background. What one remembers about Slobodan Milošević is his facility with English, his seeming charm and reasonableness, and not the conscious inciting of hatred at Kosovo or the fact that he gave specific orders for the destruction of Vukovar. The events that defined the cruel character of the war receded the more the presentation of self of the agents who committed the acts was effected through the forms of mass media. The media offered the means for local actors to insert their vocabularies of motive into the global scene, to compete for the attention of the audience, and at least to create an idea of doubt about the truth of the war.
Elaine Scarry, in her seminal work on torture, notes that the structure of torture consists of three elements: the infliction of pain, the objectification of the subjective attribution of pain, and the translation of the objectified attributes of pain into the insignia of power.38 This latter step, the denial of pain, is a consequence of the mass mediation of the Bosnian war, its transformation into a spectacle of competing accounts. In the acts of reflection and explanation that comprised the media spectacle, those who perpetrated the torture of Bosnia were able to deny the pain of that torture. There is, in Scarry’s conception, a kind of cruelty to the very process of describing cruelty itself: the torturer first “inflicts pain, then objectifies pain, then denies pain—and only this final act of self- blinding permits the shift back to the first step, the inflicting of still more pain.”39 What is most important in the process of injury is the way in which injury achieves invisibility; this is done by a willful act of “omission” and “redescription”:
Redescription may…be understood as only a more active form of omission; rather than leaving out the fact of bodily damage, that fact is itself included and actively cancelled out as it is introduced into the spoken sentence or begins to be recorded on a written page. Alternatively, omission may be understood as only the most successful or extreme form of redescription where the fact of injury is now so successfully enfolded within the language that we cannot even sense its presence beneath the surface of that language.40
Scarry’s observations about the discursive “disappearing” of pain describe well the actions of the agents involved in the destruction of Bosnia. It was through the postmodern plethora of media channels that the perpetrators of mass atrocities were able to commit acts of secondary symbolic violence: the disappearing, masking, and redescription of the pain and suffering of their victims through the propagation and dissemination of a welter of myths about the Serbian past, present, and future.
38 39 40 A Liberal Religious Investigation of Evil A course by Rev. Anya Sammler-Michael 76
V
In his work Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, Hegel noted, quite rightly, that “it is in world history that we encounter the sum total of concrete evil.” He was wrong, however, to surmise that the ultimate design of the world has been realized and that “evil has not been able to maintain a position of equality beside it.” Nowhere is the fact that we have not approached the “end of history” more evident than in Bosnia: the postmodern world, with its swirl of accounts, each circulating through the plethora of media outlets and each sounding as plausible and true as the other, has actually set the stage for the enabling of extreme behavior. The late twentieth century has become, in David Rieff’s terms, the age of genocide, a period in which we have witnessed a particularly volatile reemergence of evil that is troubling precisely because we have perhaps lost not only the moral ability, but the cognitive ability to recognize it or even name it.
Social theorists such as Zygmunt Bauman and Norbert Elias have noted, each in their different ways, that modern civilization is a condition in which good and evil present themselves together. To the Enlightenment minds, there was a troubling aspect to the pairing of good and evil, for part of the “grand design” of the Enlightenment project was that, through the march of time, the former was supposed to displace the latter. Yet it is the very technologies that are supposed to eradicate evil—the media, the rise of systems of mass education, more refined and differentiated political systems—that have also contributed to the emergence of new forms of cruelty and, ironically, to the maskings of their painful truths. Hegel is wrong to assume a telos of good and evil in world history; modernity is an engine that drives good and evil and if, indeed, we live in a postmodern era, it is an era in which new engines drive the history of good and evil in different directions.
Barbarism lurks beneath the veneer of civility and not so much as a foreign body, but as an integral part of the very constitution of modernity. Its existence itself is troubling to the modern consciousness, but even more troubling is its unpredictability: we simply do not know when or where it will emerge. This unpredictability, as much as the existence of evil itself, is a constant source of consternation for the liberal mind. No one predicted that Sarajevo would be transformed from a metaphor of human cooperation into an abject symbol of hell on earth. Bosnia itself became a metaphor of how far we could fall so fast, of the existence of evil, geographically only hours away and in the media only nanoseconds away from the comforting “good” of capitalist, liberal democracy. The evil that supplanted the good in Bosnia was, however, near the “surface”” of present time, inchoate and unseen, waiting to be put into play by specific agents in particular times and places who, through their actions, make history.
Perhaps there is a new logic of evil in postmodernity. Agency exists in a cultural context of swirling simulacra in which claims for some kind of truth about the world seem absurd or simply naïve. Agency exists in relation to new forms of global media and information flows that allow agents to more easily excavate history, manipulate the present, and
A Liberal Religious Investigation of Evil A course by Rev. Anya Sammler-Michael 77 construct futures in new and even more creative—but not necessarily progressive— ways. This dialectic is likely to yield new expressions of evil that, at present, we can only imagine the fact that we have not approached the “end of history” more evident than in Bosnia: the postmodern world, with its swirl of accounts, each circulating through the plethora of media outlets and each sounding as plausible and true as the other, has actually set the stage for the enabling of extreme behavior. The late twentieth century has become, in David Rieff’s terms, the age of genocide, a period in which we have witnessed a particularly volatile reemergence of evil that is troubling precisely because we have perhaps lost not only the moral ability, but the cognitive ability to recognize it or even name it.
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4
SECTION FOUR
1. Parker, Rebecca. “Not Somewhere Else, But Here” Soul Work: Anti-Racist Theologies Ed. Wheatley and Jones 171-185
2. Sachs, Rabbi Jonathan. “The Dignity of Difference: Exorcizing Plato’s Ghost”: 45-66
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SECTION FOUR, #1
Not Somewhere Else, but Here The Struggle for Racial Justice as a Struggle to Inhabit My Country
By Rebecca Parker From Soul Work: Anti-Racist Theologies Ed. Wheatley and Jones
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A good deal of time and intelligence has been invested in the exposure of racism and the horrific results on its objects. . . . It seems both poignant and striking how avoided and unanalyzed is the effect of racist inflection on the subject. The scholarship that looks into the mind, imagination, and behavior of slaves is valuable. But equally valuable is a serious intellectual effort to see what racial ideology does to the mind, imagination, and behavior of masters.
— Toni Morrison
In 1976 I began a cross-country road trip, on my way to seminary. I traveled with a friend. We had time, so we decided to take back roads. One afternoon the road passed through rural western Pennsylvania. Late in the day, we came down through hill country into a valley. It had been raining hard, and as we neared a small town, we noticed blinking yellow lights warning of danger. We saw fields covered in standing water and passed several side roads blocked off with signs saying: Road Closed.
"Looks like they've had a flood here," we said.
Coming into town, we crossed a bridge over a wide river. The water was high, muddy, flowing fast. Sandbags lined the roadway.
"Gosh," we said, "They must have had quite a bit of high water to contend with here. Looks like it was a major flood!"
We headed out of town, following a winding country road, captivated by the evidence all around us that there had been a dramatic flood. Then we rounded a bend, and in front of us, a sheet of water covered the roadway. The water was rising fast, like a huge silver balloon being inflated before our eyes.
We stopped and started to turn the car around. The water was rising behind us as well. Suddenly we realized the flood hadn't happened yesterday or last week. It was happening here and now. Dry ground was disappearing fast. We hurriedly clambered out of the car and scrambled to higher ground. Soaked to the bone, we huddled under a fir tree. No longer were we lodged in our familiar vehicle; the cold water of the storm poured down on us, baptizing us into the present—a present from which we had been insulated by both our car and our misjudgments about the country we were traveling through.
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This is what it is like to be white in America. It is to travel well ensconced in a secure vehicle; to see signs of what is happening in the world outside the compartment one is traveling in and not realize that these signs have any contemporary meaning. It is to be dislocated—to misjudge your location and to believe you are uninvolved and unaffected by what is happening in the world.
James Baldwin wrote, "This is the crime of which I accuse my countrymen, and for which I and history will never forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds and thousands of lives, and do not know it, and do not want to know it." Reading Baldwin's The Fire Next Time has helped me recognize my experience. Born white in this country, I was gradually but decisively educated into an alienated state of mind. With this narrowing, my capacity for creative participation in my society was stunted, and I became compliant with social forms and patterns that failed to support the fullness of life for others or myself.
To come of age in America as a white person is to be educated into ignorance. It is to be culturally shaped to not know and not want to know the actual context in which you live.
I was born into the real world, in a small town at the edge of the rain forest, on the coast of Washington State. The world was a mixture of violence and beauty, human goodness and human greed, tender relationships and exploitation. But I learned to not see life whole. Our town was the white settlement. Upriver was the Quinault Indian reservation. The two communities were separated by a stretch of forest, whose towering trees and thick undergrowth cloaked us from each other. Elton Bennet, an artist who lived in our town and went to our church, was one of a handful from our community who moved in both worlds. His silk screens depicted the land and its diverse people. "They Speak by Silence," he titled one of his silk screens, in which a small band of Quinault moved along the shore between the forest and the ocean. As a small child, I watched Bennet pull the stiff paper from the inked cloth that created the image. It took the alchemy of art for me to know that I had neighbors I did not know.
But in fact, the real world I was born into included richly diverse cultures and communities. In addition to the community I knew—the white settlement of people who logged the forests, fished the waters, and built wood frame houses warmed with steaming coffee—there were other communities. The Quinault, Makah, and Puyallup Indians lived throughout Southwest Washington, preserving tribal ways against all odds. Chinese American cultural organizations in Seattle nurtured Chinese traditions and institutions at the heart of the city. Japanese Americans established temples and churches, landscaped gardens, shaped architectural styles, farmed the land. Farm workers from Mexico harvested the apples in Yakima and Wenatchee and stayed to found Spanish-speaking towns. African Americans established churches, neighborhoods, clubs, and civic organizations.
By the time I came of age, neighborhood and church, economic patterns, cultural symbolism, theological doctrines, and public education had narrowed my awareness of A Liberal Religious Investigation of Evil A course by Rev. Anya Sammler-Michael 87 the country I lived in to the point of ignorance. The Chinese, African, Latino/Latina, Japanese, and First Nations peoples had largely disappeared from my consciousness. Nor did I know the history of violence and exploitation that had occurred in my community. Two generations before I was born, Chinese workers on the Seattle waterfront went on strike for fairer wages; the white majority beat back the strikers with sticks and guns. Just before I was born, the strawberry farms of Japanese Americans living on the Puget Sound islands were seized on orders from General DeWitt. Their land confiscated by the U.S. government, the Japanese Americans were taken away to live in concentration camps, uprooted from their homesteads and communities. In our town, the Ku Klux Klan and the John Birch Society supported overt white supremacist agendas. The Birch Society's bright and large billboard on the highway into my childhood town broadcasted hate. And the First Nations people went to court over and over again, seeking to secure the fishing rights and land sovereignty that were theirs.
I inhabited a white enclave that did not know and did not want to know the complex, multicultural history of the land in which I lived. The white-washed world ignored the violence and exploitation in my country's history, as well as the resistance, creativity, and multiform beauty of my country's peoples. I was cut off from the reality of where I lived, whom I lived with, and what our history entailed of violence and of beauty.
There were moments of exception. During the Civil Rights struggle, our United Methodist congregation got involved. From the pulpit, my preacher father exposed the redlining practices that took place in our town. As a twelve-year-old, I went door to door, along with other members of our congregation, campaigning for open housing. Political involvement was exciting. I felt the importance of civic action.
But that same year, walking down the street holding hands with my best friend, Mary, we were passed by a car of hecklers who yelled profanities at us, words we didn't really know or understand. They turned the car around and drove by us again, calling us names, nearly hitting us as they sped by. Were they offended that we appeared as a black girl and a white girl together? Were they enraged that we were holding hands, laughing and embracing one another, as we walked along the road? I defended my friendship with Mary and stood by my love for her when other students and teachers communicated that there was something wrong with us. But I learned that such love was dangerous. Love became intertwined with fear.
Lillian Smith, probing the experience of being "cultured" into whiteness, describes growing up white in the South as an education into fragmentation and denial:
They who so gravely taught me to split my body from my mind and both from my "soul" taught me also to split my conscience from my acts and Christianity from southern tradition. I learned [white racism] the way all of my southern people learn it: by closing door after door until one's mind and heart and conscience are blocked off from each other and from reality. Some learned to screen out all except the soft and the soothing; others denied even as they saw plainly, and heard. A Liberal Religious Investigation of Evil A course by Rev. Anya Sammler-Michael 88
The result of this closing-down process for whites, Smith says, is that "we are blocked from sensible contact with the world we live in."
Smith describes racism as a fragmentation of knowledge—a splitting of mind, body, and soul; neighbor from neighbor; disciplines of knowledge from disciplines of knowledge; and religion from politics. This fragmentation results in apathy, passivity, and compliance.
When I speak of the ignorance created by my education into whiteness, I am speaking of a loss of wholeness within myself and a concomitant segregation and fragmentation of culture that debilitates life for all of us. Who benefits from this fragmentation and alienation? Does anyone? What I know is that I do not benefit from this loss of my senses, this denial of what I have seen and felt, this cultural erasure of my actual neighbors, this loss of my country. I become, thus educated, less present to life, more cut-off, and less creative and loving. Once I recognize it, this loss disturbs me deeply. It is precisely this loss that makes me a suitable, passive participant in social structures that I abhor.
Smith writes,
Our big problem is not civil rights nor even a free Africa—urgent as these are— but how to make into a related whole the split pieces of the human experience, how to bridge mythic and rational mind, how to connect our childhood with the present and the past with the future, how to relate the differing realities of science and religion and politics and art to each other and to ourselves. Man is a broken creature, yes; it is his nature as a human being to be so; but it is also his nature to create relationships that can span the brokenness. This is his first responsibility; when he fails, he is inevitably destroyed.
I want to inhabit my country, not live as if we did not belong to one another as surely as we belong to the land.
"Not somewhere else, but here" is a phrase from a love poem by Adrienne Rich that invokes love's imperative. The lover is drawn to what is present, to what is real, what is here, what is now, what is flesh. In its beauty and its tragedy, its burden of grief, and its full measure of joy, life is loved through presence, not absence; through connection, not alienation.
The moment my friend in Pennsylvania and I left our car and felt the rain falling on our bodies, soaking our skin, and had to exert ourselves to scramble to safety was a blessed moment—not because there is any virtue in danger, but because it was a moment when disoriented, alienated consciousness was interrupted. We became present to our environment. We ceased being passive observers or commentators. Our whole beings, bodies, minds, and senses became involved with the requirements of the situation. We arrived. We entered in. We left our compartment and inhabited the world.
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No longer tourists passing through the country, we became part of the place along with everyone else that day, in that corner of western Pennsylvania, in that storm.
I speak of this experience as a baptism because it was a conversion from distance to presence, from misconception to realization. It was an awakening to life, an advance into participation, and a birth into the world.
This is the conversion that is needed for those of us who are white Americans. We need to move from a place of passive, misconstrued observation about our country to a place of active, alert participation in our country. We need to recover our habitation and reconstruct our citizenship as surely, for example, as those of us who are women have had to learn to inhabit our own bodies and recover our agency when sexism has alienated us from ourselves.
How do those of us who are white come to inhabit our own country? Here are some of the steps in the conversion:
Theological reflection: To become an inhabitant of America, whites need to deconstruct the effect on our self-understanding of theological imagery that sanctions innocence and ignorance as holy states. This theological imagery is strong. For centuries, Christian theologians have told the story this way: Adam and Eve in the Garden were innocent of themselves and of the knowledge of good and evil. Within the safe confines of the Garden, all was provided for them. They were to ask no questions and be obedient to the rules outlined by God. In this state of primordial bliss, Adam and Eve were compliant and dependent. They cooperated with the divine ruler and rules. This state was holy. The two were without sin, living in harmony with God.
This interpretation of the Garden of Eden story sanctions innocence, ignorance, and lack of self-consciousness. It teaches that a carefully contained life, walled in by a providential God whom one is never to question, is a good life. In the insular Garden, human beings are in right relationship to God.
This primordial state of innocence was disrupted by the serpent's temptation to Eve. The serpent enticed her with the desire to taste the forbidden fruit and gain knowledge of good and evil. To gain knowledge, however, was to defy God—to go against the will of the divine provisioner. The consequence was a punishing exile. Adam and Eve were sent away from the Garden, cast out from God's presence.
In this interpretation, to know the world, in its goodness and its evil, and to know ourselves capable of both is to lose God. To taste reality is to follow the devil. Such a theology is admirably suited to the preservation of compartmentalized, alienated states of mind. It teaches those who have absorbed its message that goodness is aligned with innocence and ignorance. To not know the world is to know God. To know the world is to lose God. Furthermore, it teaches that a social structure in which one is abundantly provided for is not to be questioned. Abundant provision is a gift of God. This image
A Liberal Religious Investigation of Evil A course by Rev. Anya Sammler-Michael 90 comforts whites who benefit from economic structures that assure their thriving. One is to accept privilege and never ask at what cost the walled-in garden is maintained.
When religion sanctions ignorance, it cultivates alienation from life. It blesses segregation and encourages people who are comfortably provided for to remain compliant with the created order.
As a white person, I have allowed this theological imagery to shape my self- understanding, even when I have consciously rejected this theology. In practice, I discover myself to be deeply attached to being "innocent," guilt-free, good. If I glimpse any blood on my hands, I will react defensively to preserve my identity and fend off the painful experience of shame that I associate with being exiled from the community that I depend on for my survival and affirmation. Or I may attack myself, viciously trying to deny or destroy that in myself that does not conform to an image of innocent goodness.
This piety of innocence preoccupies me and other whites. I strive to assure my goodness by assuring myself that I am all good, "all-white," and blameless. Conversely, it makes me highly reactionary if I am blamed or confronted with complicity in violence— for my sense of goodness has been constructed on the suppression and exile of my capacity to do harm, as well as on the suppression of offending feelings of love and connection that, I learned early on, didn't belong in the garden.
One becomes "white," and this "whiteness" is a split in the psyche, a loss of consciousness, a numbing to the reality of what one has seen and felt and knows. This alienated state of mind is reinforced by religious imagery that sanctions "not knowing" and curses "knowing."
At the same time, part of us never forgets that we have achieved our goodness at a violent price. We have a guilty conscience. At some level, we know that our pristine garden has been created by what has been exiled and exploited. This primordial violence lies beneath our sense of privilege and security. We are fearful of this deeper violence being exposed. We feel helpless in the presence of our own violence. But theology assists us, even here. The doctrine of the atonement valorizes violence as life- giving and redemptive. The interpretations of Jesus's death on the cross as a saving event speak of the violation that happened to Jesus as the will of God and the source of salvation. When this theological perspective prevails, either explicitly or buried within cultural patterns and norms, the violence and abuse that human beings experience or perpetuate becomes valorized as necessary and good for the salvation of the world. Victims of racial injustice, identifying with Jesus, may interpret their suffering as necessary, holy, and redemptive. Perpetrators of racial injustice, identifying with God, may interpret their violence as necessary, holy, and redemptive.
Most particularly, violating experiences that occur early in life in parent-child relationships can be misnamed as good. In Learning to Be White, Thandeka analyzes the violent shaming experiences that create white identity. Such shaming is theologically sanctioned as God's will. The suffering child is like the suffering Jesus, A Liberal Religious Investigation of Evil A course by Rev. Anya Sammler-Michael 91 whose divinity is celebrated as his willingness to endure violation. The violating parent is doing what must be done as the divine enforcer of the "orders of creation."
Thus, the doctrine of the atonement reinforces violating and shaming experiences. Through these experiences, the shamed child preserves his or her relationship to God and to goodness. I learn to interpret the violence that has formed my narrow, "white" identity as holy. If I begin to approach the underlying violence that creates white enclaves and white identity, theology will tell me that violence is holy. Instead of facing my participation in violence, I can feel the pathos of violence with pious gratitude. Thus anesthetized, I will not seek to end violence.
The sanctioning of violence as redemptive is at the center of William R. Jones's theological inquiry, Is God a White Racist? He shows definitively that no formulation of redemptive suffering can succeed at ending violence. Such a theology will serve again and again, in its diverse forms, to sustain structures rooted in violence.
To recover and become an inhabitant of one's own life and one's own society, a different theology is needed. A new theology must begin here, a theology that assists in an internal healing of the fragmented self, that supports a new engagement with the realities of one's society, and that sanctions a remedial education into the actual history and present realities of one's country. Theology must direct us, like Eve, to taste the fruit of knowledge and gladly bear the cost of moving beyond the confines of the garden.
A different theology begins with the sanctification of knowledge and wisdom rather than the blessing of innocence and ignorance. The serpent can be re-imagined as a representation of a god who calls one beyond the circumscribed comforts of the garden. To long to know, to reach for wisdom, to taste and see the bitterness as well as the sweetness, to come to know good and evil—these movements can be embraced as movements of God's leading. Leaving the garden, one leaves the God who rules by rewards and punishments, and who offers security and comfort at the price of compliance to divine orders. Leaving the garden, one becomes a sojourner in the world, accompanied by the divine serpent who moves in the earth, sheds old skins and grows new ones as needed, slumbers long, and wakes to strike quickly.
Remedial education: The journey to the realm beyond the garden begins with claiming forbidden knowledge. Because my education cultivated in me and many others an ignorance rather than a knowledge of my country's history and its peoples, I can begin to change things when I accept my power and responsibility to reeducate myself. Resources for such restored knowledge abound. Reading Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States and Ronald Takaki's A Different Mirror, I become acquainted with my actual country. Immersing myself in the primary texts of First Nation's writers, Asian American writers, African American writers, Latino and Latina writers, and more, I begin to be aware of the world beyond my isolated enclave. Multiple voices surround me. I enter a miraculous Pentecost that has been sounding from before I was born. Takaki writes,
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Throughout our past of oppressions and struggles for equality, Americans of different races and ethnicities have been "singing with open mouths their strong melodious songs" in the textile mills of Lowell, the cotton fields of Mississippi, on the Indian reservations of South Dakota, the railroad tracks high in the Sierras of California, in the garment factories on the Lower East Side, the cane fields of Hawaii, and a thousand other places across the country. Our denied history "bursts with telling." As we hear America singing, we find ourselves invited to bring our rich cultural diversity on deck, to accept ourselves. "Of every hue and cast am I," sang Whitman. "I resist any thing better than my own diversity."
Knowledge is never an individual achievement alone. It is constructed by communities of people, and its construction transforms communities. "Knowledge claims are secured by the social practices of a community of inquirers, rather than the purely mental activities of an individual subject."
Ignorance is a precondition of violence. Once I as a "white" have been cultivated into ignorance of my society, its multiple cultures, their diverse gifts, and the history of cultural conflict and exploitation based on racial categorizations, then I am easily passive in the face of racism's re-creation. But my ignorance is not mine alone. It is the ignorance of my cultural enclave. Most of us do not know more than our community knows. Thus my search for remedial education, to come to know the larger reality of my country, is necessarily a struggle to transform my community's knowledge—not mine alone. As I gain more knowledge, I enter into a different community—a community of presence, awareness, responsibility, and consciousness.
I have learned that as a white American, I must face the conflict that erupts between whites when compulsory fragmentation of knowledge begins to break down because remedial education has taken place. This engagement among whites needs to take place with directness, wisdom, and a sustained commitment to build a new communion not dependent upon violence. It involves a spiritual practice of nonviolent resistance and non-avoidance of conflict.
Soul Work: To sustain the journey beyond the garden, those of us who are white must turn inward as well as outward. We must form a new relational capacity, less hindered by the fragmentation, silences, and splits in our souls. We must find the path that takes us beyond the narcissistic need to have people of color approve of us, tell us we are good, or be the prophetic and moral compass that is absent from ourselves.
The construction of white identity involves the suppression of aspects of the self as unacceptable and shameful. This internal violation of the wholeness of the self becomes, for many whites, symbolically represented as the internal suppression of that in oneself which is imagined as dark. This part of the self is the unjustly abused and despised aspect of the white person's own experience. At the same time, it is the suppression, often, of the white person's passionate feelings, sense of connection to others, ability to love, and ability to inhabit one's own body. Whites then project onto people of color the lost part of themselves: the silenced and abused "darkness," and the A Liberal Religious Investigation of Evil A course by Rev. Anya Sammler-Michael 93 exiled and suppressed passion, emotion, and body. For whites, people of color come to represent the lost aspects of the self. Ambivalence and need emerge for whites who feel better about themselves if they have intimate association with people of color. But such intimacy may lack the quality of an authentic I-Thou relationship.
The inner journey for whites involves learning to withdraw our negative and positive projections from people of color. Whites must become relationally committed to meeting people of color as themselves, not as symbolic extensions of ourselves. To love more genuinely, whites need to do the internal work to recover and integrate the lost parts of ourselves—to find the silenced, suppressed, and fragmented aspects of our own being and to create internal hospitality to the fullness of our own lives. This work cannot be done by others for us. We must find an internal blessing, not seek a blessing from those we use to symbolize our loss and our shame.
Men who have projected their own exiled capacity to feel onto women need to recover the lost part of themselves rather than bond with women who will carry their emotional burdens for them. Likewise, whites need to accept the personal task of spiritual healing rather than project onto people of color our own loss of humanity, asking people of color to carry the burden of this loss. The soul work that whites need to do turns us to the sources of spiritual transformation that are transpersonal—to the presence of a deep reality of wholeness, connection, and grace that supports us beyond our brokenness and urges us toward a more daring communion.
Engaged presence: Racial injustice is perpetuated by the passive absence of whites who are numbly disengaged with the social realities of our time. Conversely, racial injustice will fail to thrive as more and more of us show up as present and engaged citizens.
Racism is a form of cultural and economic violence that isolates and fragments human beings. Engaged presence counters violence by resisting its primary effect. As a white, the cure for my education into ignorance is remedial education. The cure for my fragmentation of self is hospitality to myself. The cure for my cultivation into passivity is renewed activism. Social activism becomes a spiritual practice by which I reclaim my humanity, and refuse to accept my cultivation into numbness and disengagement.
The narcissistic preoccupation of whites in our present society is a symptom of how well established racism is. Hope lies in our ability to renew our citizenship through engaged action. Meaningful participation is advanced by specific concerns and sustained work. One does not have to take on the whole world at once. Racism takes specific forms in specific fields—education, health care, the justice system, economics, theology. Holistic engagement in any field offers significant opportunities for the sustained address and redress of racism. As a theological educator, I take heart from what is accomplished when students do field work in the community: working on environmental racism, homelessness, HIV/AIDS, cultural survival, youth at risk, the prison-industrial complex, public education, or economic justice. In this engaged work, I see our white students move beyond the limits of their enculturation into ignorance and passivity. A Liberal Religious Investigation of Evil A course by Rev. Anya Sammler-Michael 94
Congregational life can provide a similar base community for the restoration of humanity. In my childhood, the church was the primary institutional setting in which racism was publicly named and its effects actively resisted. When church members took to the streets, we changed an unjust practice in our community. We also changed ourselves. Social action is an incarnational event. It mends the split of mind from body, individual from community, neighbor from neighbor.
A person of faith, seeking out of love and desire for life to inhabit his or her country, needs to be engaged in incarnational social action. Activism returns one to the actual world as a participatory citizen and an agent of history. Through activism, compliant absence is transformed into engaged presence.
Conclusion: The struggle for racial justice in America is a struggle to inhabit my own country, a struggle to become a participant in the actual history and social reality of the land in which I have been born and to which I belong. The struggle for racial justice is a struggle to overcome the numbness, alienation, splitting, and absence of consciousness that characterize my life as a white and that enable me to unwittingly, even against my will, continue to replicate life-destroying activities of my society. It is a struggle to attain a different expression of human wholeness: one in which my inner life is grounded in a restored communion with the transpersonal source of grace and wholeness, and the primordial fact of the connectedness of all life.
The struggle is imperative. Racial injustice is not only a tragedy that happened yesterday, whose aftereffects can be safely viewed from behind the glass windows of one's high-powered vehicle; racial injustice is currently mutating and re-creating itself. Its dehumanizing effects are harming hundreds and thousands of lives.
Within the past seven years, we in California have dismantled affirmative action; pulled the plug on public funding for bilingual education in Spanish and English in a state that is more than 50 percent Hispanic, and passed "three strikes" legislation that has dramatically increased the number of people in jail, a disproportionate number of them people of color. New prisons are being built as a high-profit industry, and prisoners are being used to provide industrial labor at below minimum wage. We passed a referendum to restrict immigrants' access to education and health services, and last spring we passed a referendum extending "three strikes" legislation to teenagers. If you are fourteen and you steal a bike, the crime can be counted as a first strike against you. With this law in place, youth of color are most at risk of becoming slave laborers in the prison-industrial complex. Meanwhile, public high schools in the Bay Area show a marked difference in the kind of education they offer. Schools with a majority of students of color provide few college preparatory classes and only a small percentage of their graduates go to college. These statistics are reversed for the predominantly white high schools, where there are many college prep classes and a majority of graduates go on to college.
This is my country. Love calls me beyond denial and disassociation. It is not enough to think of racism as a problem of "human relations," to be cured by me and others like me A Liberal Religious Investigation of Evil A course by Rev. Anya Sammler-Michael 95 treating everyone fairly, with respect and without prejudice. Racism is more: It is a problem of segregated knowledge, mystification of facts, anesthetization of feeling, exploitation of people, and violence against the communion/community of our humanity.
My commitment to racial justice is both on behalf of the other—my neighbor, whose well-being I desire—and for myself, to whom the gift of life has been given but not yet fully claimed. I struggle neither as a benevolent act of social concern nor as a repentant act of shame and guilt, but as an act of desire for life, of passion for life, of insistence on life—fueled by both love for life and anger in face of the violence that divides human flesh.
The habit of living somewhere else rather than here, in a constructed "reality" that minimizes my country's history of both violence and beauty and ignores the present facts, keeps me from effectively engaging in the actual world. I have the sensation of being a disembodied spectator as structures of racism are recreated before my eyes. But involvement in the steps of conversion—theological reflection, remedial education, soul work, and engaged action—moves me from enclosure to openness.
I step out of an insular shell and come into immediate contact with the full texture of our present reality. I feel the rain on my face and breathe the fresh air. I wade in the waters that spirit has troubled and stirred. The water drenching me baptizes me into a new life. I become a citizen not of somewhere else, but of here.
The struggle for racial justice in America calls those of us who are white to make this journey. Our presence is needed. We have been absent too long.
If you are here unfaithfully with us, you're causing terrible damage. If you've opened your loving to God's love, you're helping people you don't know and have never seen.
— Rumi, "Say Yes Quickly," translated by A. J. Arberry and Coleman Barks
Excerpted from an essay by Rev. Dr. Rebecca Parker originally published in Soul Work: Anti-Racist Theologies in Dialogue, eds. Marjorie Bowens-Wheatley and Nancy Palmer Jones, 171-98. Boston: Skinner House Books, 2003. Used with permission.
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SECTION FOUR, #2
The Dignity of Difference: Exorcising Plato’s Ghost
By Rabbi Jonathan Sachs
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5
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SECTION FIVE
1. Walker, Alice. “The Gospel According to Shug” The Color Purple
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The Gospel According to Shug by Alice Walker
HELPED are those who are enemies of their own racism; they shall live in harmony with the citizens of this world, and not with those of their ancestors, which has passed away, and which they shall never see again.
HELPED are those born from love: conceived in their father's tenderness and their mother's orgasm, for they shall be those - numbers of whom will be called "illegitimate" whose spirits shall know no boundaries, even between heaven and earth, and whose eyes shall reveal the spark of the love that was their own creation. They shall know joy equal to their suffering and they will lead multitudes into dancing and Peace.
HELPED are those too busy living to respond when they are wrongfully attacked: on their walks they shall find mysteries so intriguing as to distract them from every blow.
HELPED are those who find something in Creation to admire each and every hour. Their days will overflow with beauty and the darkest dungeon will offer gifts.
HELPED are those who receive only to give; always in their house will be the circular energy of generosity; and in their hearts a beginning of new age on Earth: when no keys will be needed to unlock the heart and no locks will be needed on the doors.
HELPED are those who love the stranger; in this they reflect the heart of the Creator and that of the Mother.
HELPED are those who are content to be themselves; they will never lack mystery in their lives and the joys of self-discovery will be constant.
HELPED are those who love the entire cosmos rather than their own tiny country, city, or farm, for to them will be shown the unbroken web of life and the meaning of infinity.
HELPED are those who live in quietness, knowing neither brand name nor fad; they shall live every day as if in eternity, and each moment shall be full as it is long.
HELPED are those who love others unsplit off from their faults; to them will be given clarity of vision.
HELPED are those who create anything at all, for they shall relive the thrill of their own conception, and realize a partnership in the creation of the Universe that keeps them responsible and cheerful.
HELPED are those who love the Earth, their mother, and who willingly suffer that she may not die; in their grief over her pain they will weep rivers of blood, and in their joy in her lively response to love, they will converse with trees. A Liberal Religious Investigation of Evil A course by Rev. Anya Sammler-Michael 123
HELPED are those whose every act is a prayer for harmony in the Universe, for they are the restorers of balance to our planet. To them will be given the insight that every good act done anywhere in the cosmos welcomes the life of an animal or a child.
HELPED are those who risk themselves for others' sakes; to them will be given increasing opportunities for ever greater risks. Theirs will be a vision of the world in which no one's gift is despised or lost.
HELPED are those who strive to give up their anger; their reward will be that in any confrontation their first thoughts will never be of violence or war.
HELPED are those whose every act is a prayer for peace; on them depends the future of the world.
HELPED are those who forgive; their reward shall be forgetfulness of every evil done to them. It will be in their power, therefore, to envision the new Earth.
HELPED are those who are shown the existence of the Creator's magic in the Universe, they shall experience delight and astonishment without ceasing.
HELPED are those who laugh with a pure heart; theirs will be the company of the jolly righteous.
HELPED are those who love all the colors of all the human beings, as they love all the colors of animals and plants; none of their children, nor any of their ancestors, nor any parts of themselves, shall be hidden from them.
HELPED are those who love the lesbian, the gay, and the straight, as they love the sun, the moon, and the stars. None of their children, nor any of their ancestors, nor any parts of themselves, shall be hidden from them.
HELPED are those who love the broken and the whole; none of their children, nor any of their ancestors, nor any of themselves shall be despised.
HELPED are those who do not join mobs; theirs shall be the understanding that to attack in anger is to murder in confusion.
HELPED are those who find the courage to do at least one small thing each day to help the existence of another - plant, animal, river, or other human being. They shall be joined by a multitude of the timid.
HELPED are those who lose their fear of death; theirs is the power to envision the future in a blade of grass.
HELPED are those who love and actively support the diversity of life; they shall be secure in their differentness.
HELPED are those who know. A Liberal Religious Investigation of Evil A course by Rev. Anya Sammler-Michael 124