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Being Evil vs. Doing Evil
I have been considering Fred’s post from last week, and there is an element to it that I find lacking. It is a weakness of language that we can often conflate similar or related concepts in such a way that important points of meaning are lost or mangled through an ill choice of words, or a misplaced punctuation mark, or a mis-reading of context.
Are the Democrats, Progressives, Socialists, or their allies actually evil, or are they “just ordinary people” doing evil things (or misguided, destructive, “just wrong”, or counter-productive things), and is the difference between “being” and “doing” important enough to draw a distinction? Are not our actions a light upon our souls?
@fredcole – The fact of the matter is that the overwhelming majority of Democrats and progressives are just ordinary people, trying to live their lives according to the things they value.
Yes, they sometimes have horrible ideas that sprang from horrible ideas in the past, sometimes created by despicable and even evil people. But that doesn’t make those individual Democrats or progressives evil. They just have ideas that are wrong.
And that’s what it comes down to: these people aren’t evil. They’re just wrong.
If we are actively participating in evil activities, are we evil? Even if we think ourselves morally justified in doing so? What do we say of the liberal who reliably donates generously to Planned Parenthood? Who reliably votes in representatives who, as in Oregon, put the taxpayers on the hook for all abortions? What if that person is otherwise law-abiding and loving towards their own family? Are they evil, funding abortions on the one hand, and joining their PTA to demand the firing of a child molesting teacher on the other hand? Can we weigh and balance such acts?
And can we judge someone less harshly because they, on their own moral spectrum, are convinced they are doing the moral, the just, the right thing? Rule of Law alone dictates that we cannot do so if those actions rise to the level of crimes. We do not forgive a PETA zealot for destroying a mink farm just because PETA thinks it is doing the right thing by the minks. We do not forgive a gang member who murders a rival because the rival broke the code and disrespected him. On smaller issues we may give a “pass” for transgressions whose enforcement is merely social, but those transgressions are nonetheless wrong and harmful.
Fred argues that equating Democrats all across their spectrum to their worst representatives (currently embodied in Antifa and their rancid ilk) is unfair to the many who do not hold to such nonsense – those who pay their taxes, work their jobs, raise their families, and bother no one. I see the point, but the point is limited. Of course one could turn the argument and say that of course we on the right should likewise not be tainted with the neo Nazis, the racists, and the anti-semites. Where this falls apart is that we on the right are not the ones claiming any such association, even if the neo-Creeps keep attempting to press their claim upon us. I see no disassociation, no denouncement of Antifa or BLM from the Left. The difference is telling.
And of course the vast middle may want nothing to do with either group, may want to go on with their lives in peace, yet they return to voting in the very leadership who repeatedly drags their party leftwards, who ever seeks to make all Americans complicit in abortion, who ever seeks to silence free speech, who ever seeks to confine religious practice to narrow grounds where it will have no voice, and who will gainsay nothing of the violent Left. When you vote for someone the first time you may be forgiven if they are other than advertised. When you then re-elect that person you are tacitly approving of at least some of what they have done, while disapproving of whatever the opposition is promising to do, and you are definitely agreeing to go along with more of the same. You are involved. You are, in some degree, complicit.
So is it unfair to equally yoke the moderate Left with the Antifa violent socialists? No, not entirely. For if the Antifa zealots migrate from their position today of tacit favor to a point where the Democrat party begins to embrace their, frankly, evil goals, then the moderate Left, who might have stopped them had they acted or spoken up, has made itself complicit. Further, many of the Democrats are actively defending the Antifa goons. If their voters do not turf them out for this, then they share in the blame for the violence.
The rest of this essay may be the living embodiment of Godwin’s Law, but in this case it is well worth the time to examine the case of the Nazis and Germany. As Antifa rather boldly declares against capitalism, private property, free trade, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, while frequently advocating the blanket punishment of whites and tearing down statues (they may be starting with the Confederates, but they will not be content with them), so too did the Nazis declare against religion (while advancing their own neo-paganism), freedom of speech, rule of law, and against racial and religious undesirables. Yes, we all know that the Nazis gained power despite not having a majority mandate, but in the 1920s, before they fought their way into power, they could have been vigorously opposed. They were not. “Good people”, “normal people”, put off by the violence and militarism of the Nazis, still stood by, believing either that they would burn out, or that other good people would step forward to stop them. None did, and in the chaos of the Weimar Republic the Nazis were invited in.
And it is not as if all Germans were bad once the Nazis took over. Indeed, they went on with their lives, paid their taxes, raised their families, and led ordinary lives. More troubling still, many of the actual monsters who worked for the Nazis were otherwise seemingly normal people. Take the case of Rudolph Höss. Those who knew him described him as a good family man. He was a devoted father who tried to raise his children.
At the dining table, the children were allowed to speak only if they were asked. But he was never angry. At the table he spoke of family things and what we would do on weekends for excursions.
This is a quotation from Brigitte Höss, describing her father Rudolph Höss, commander of the Auschwitz death camp during WWII.
Now, speaking in detail for the first time, she has revealed how she was eventually forced to accept that her father – who she’s previously described as ‘the nicest man in the world – was a killer and what was happening next-door as she enjoyed her idyllic family life.
But as a father, Ingebirgitt said he even once reprimanded the children for threatening to tear down the fence, removing the veil of the atrocities, during a game of cowboys and indians and told them they should never hurt people. [ibid.]
So he was a loving father to his own children, even while he orchestrated the deaths of approximately 2.5 million souls.
Of course the Nuremburg prosecutors had their own impressions of the man, yet they do not outwardly describe a monster either:
First, there was the British war crimes investigator, Captain Hanns Alexander, my great-uncle Hanns, the German Jew turned British soldier, who had arrested the kommandant. Alexander had expected Höss to be a monster and was surprised to find him to appear “normal.”
Then there was Whitney Harris, the American prosecutor (and member of the OSS) who took Höss’s affidavit in Nuremberg. Harris said that Höss appeared like a “grocery clerk,” someone you would pay no attention to if you met him on the street.
Similar accounts abound of the seeming “normality” of many other mass-murderers. Outside of their work in the war, outside of their extermination work, they were “ordinary”. I am sure many of the Antifa protestors could be described in the same way. Away from the riots, away from the protests, individually they may well be the nicest people you could meet. But on this one issue, they are wrong, they are dangerous, and they are practicing evil, even while they think it moral and just. We hear the same so often after some criminal is shot – that he was a loving brother, a loving son, took care of his kids – and yet he was beating someone senseless, and yet he was robbing a convenience store, and yet he was mugging a stranger, and yet he was dealing drugs. Was he evil? Or was he just wrong?
It lies with the Divine to render final judgement on whether a human is evil or not, but are we not known by our actions? Can we weigh the balance between the myriad of “good” we have done against our transgressions? Will a traffic cop let you off with a warning because you are otherwise a “good person”? Even if you killed someone while driving drunk? The full answer to the question of “wrong” versus “evil” is perhaps beyond us, but we do judge a person by their actions, and a few poor choices, especially when those choices lead to evil acts, seems to count for more. Most Democrats may be repelled by Antifa, but if they are and yet do nothing, what then? If they have the ability to stand up against them and do not, or even secretly cheer them on as a way to get even for Trump, have they not chosen to back evil? We may not be able to just their being evil, but they may well be doing it, and perhaps the difference is not that important.
Published in General
The biggest difference between the Left’s view of Antifa and our view of neo-Nazis is that no one supports neo-Nazis except neo-Nazis (well, and people who are essentially neo-Nazis but call themselves something different). No, I don’t think all liberals or progressives are evil, and I think that painting them with that brush isn’t going to change hearts or minds. At the same time, when the Left voluntarily embraces Antifa’s violent fascism in droves, they can’t exactly complain when everyone assumes they’re probably pro-Antifa.
Perhaps the middle step is what is missing: what goes on with most people of all and any beliefs relating to politics is that often the necessary examination of what is presented by “their party” as a decent ideology does not occur. Or maybe it cannot occur because the individual does not at all have any training in logic.
This lack of training in logic is even worse in the USA because most of the populace feels that any intellectual activity is superfluous and silly. We don’t honor critical thinking; an example is one friend telling me after I spent 20 minutes explaining with citations how vaccines need to be made safer, “Well, I like to go with my gut and my gut tells me they are safe.”
I hear from “D” friends that without the Democratic Party in charge, the entire required stance of activities relating to Global Climate Change will not be attended to. There can even be tears in their eyes while they discuss this. So you ask them, as one thinking person to another, exactly what activities the Dem Party leadership was promising us as the sensible solution to Climate Change? They don’t have any response usually. Although someone who is deeply brainwashed by that Party will say, “There will be the cap and trade activities.” I must end the conversation right there, as the cap and trade seems as ill begotten as any Ponzi scheme. Also, I’ll be damned if I lower my thermostat in winter or keep it higher in summer just so Al Gore can keep riding around in limos.
If the friend persists in discussing issues of Climate Change, I tell them the biggest environmental problem has been the tremendous air, soil and water pollution brought about by fracking activities. And that not only has the Dem Party been in power for 8 years, during that time, they did nothing about ending fracking. It was Ed Rendell who traded his citizens h2o away for Big Energy’s right to frack, and he took a job with one TX energy firm after leaving the PA governorship. If they won’t do a single thing about fracking, the Dems have no credibility. Anyone who refuses to clean up their own state and federal environment shouldn’t be deciding they can tell other nations what to do.
Antifa has been presented to Dems as the group who will lay down their lives for them, so Donald the White Supremacist doesn’t come through their bedroom door and grab their lady parts.
I praise the reflection, but I deplore that once more Americans cannot think of the problem of evil without the Nazis. I don’t think w’e’re achieving progress by moving on to the stage where we say, sure, I know this is overdone, but it’s ok when I do it.
Difficult questions, and the short answer to all is: “Yes.” And as you say, history has judged even the “ordinary, normal” Germans who, by failing to oppose the evil of the Third Reich, ultimately came to be passive participants in its evil works.
But ordinary people living in (what may appear to be) extraordinarily evil times can be, against their will, swept up in a tsunami of evil about them. Their (our) obligation then is to do right, despite the consequences. I personally don’t obsess about this (because there is no end to the evil about us), mostly focusing on living an “ordinary, normal” life, but one ought to be aware that circumstances may thrust one at any moment into a situation that requires action, when passive acquiescence becomes an active moral failure.
The third question emboldened above is particularly about morality, and is properly addressed by religion. We’d like to justify ourselves and are capable of great self-deception to do so. To counter that, we ought to judge our actions by a moral standard outside ourselves – one that we cannot manipulate for our own comfort. And to trust society to provide such a standard is to stand on very slippery ground indeed.
Those on all sides of western political spectrums go to Nazi’s every time the subject of evil comes up and that’s understandable because we all know the story, even people who are otherwise ignorant of history. We don’t use the Soviet Union, or Pol Pot, or other murdering soul destroying dictatorships, or just evil people like Mafia bosses such as Pablo Escobar, or their hit men, or even an individual street thug or kids who murder for the hell of it. I’m not sure it does us a service to always bring in the Nazi’s as if evil committed on a giant scale and against persons because of their ethnicity, religion or race is worse than evil committed for other political or personal reasons, or just for the hell of it, because it advances a narrow personal agenda, even if that personal agenda is a perverse sexual drive or just the desire for somebody’s wallet.
Evil happens when people are not accountable for the harm they do others and indifferent to that harm. When we call government “a necessary evil” we’re acknowledging that even local government are not fully accountable and if they are also indifferent and in a position to abuse their power they will do so because that is the nature of power and of not being accountable. So Nazism, Communism had no accountability and that is what made them evil. And there was no escape from them which is what made them so monstrously frightening. It was their power driven by an ideology that served their power and justified the harm they did.
I harp on the administrative state often because it promises to do things that a state simply cannot do, such as manage an economy toward better outcomes than would be reached if just left alone with clear law. But It is also by its very nature not accountable and the more remote and complex the less accountable it is and hence government in Washington hangs on becoming completely evil with just a change in attitude, a drift toward considering some people open to abuse, fair game. That can happen more easily as we leave our Judaeo Christian roots behind us and become ideological where political abstractions or political fads replace accumulated notions of right and wrong that hold civilization together. We are at risk and the left or any political party or faction that contributes to the accumulation of power in Washington is a threat and are taking us in an evil direction. Moreover, the left in this country has been sustaining a drum beat of hate for conservatives, and conservative groups for decades and having lost an election that hate is showing it’s ugly face. We must pay attention and not allow Washington to not do the job of dismantling the administrative state as rapidly and as completely as possible.
Hitler (or if you prefer, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Pol Pot) didn’t think he was doing evil. He thought he was doing good.
In my religious code, a person is not measured by their genetics – not by nature, or by nurture. Nor are they measured by their intentions. They are – and should be – measured solely by their words and deeds. The reason the “normal” Nazis were so well adjusted is because they did not believe they were doing anything wrong. Does the local exterminator have a hard time sleeping at night? I doubt it.
I think this post is excellent, and right on the mark.
Nonsense. If it is useful and instructive to talk about Jesus as a meta-hero (and it is), it is also useful and instructive to talk about the Nazis as an exemplary evil. In this case, because people who commit atrocities can appear so mundane — the local grocer. Evil doesn’t come dressed in a red body suit with horns on its head. Barack Obama could be a near-perfect avatar, if you believe his ideology to be evil (and I do).
The Left wishes to subjugate us to a massive, corruptible (if not already corrupt) administrative state. We should respond forcefully to its wicked ideas, which have already damaged and entrapped so many people —
even ifespecially if they are family and friends.To (nearly) quote Chesterton: The Christian warrior doesn’t fight because he hates what is in front of him; he fights because he loves what is behind him. Lovers of liberty must fight the Left, or perish.
There was a specific reason I used them. In 1930s Germany we have perhaps the best documented perversion of a society, and moreover it was a society close enough to our own to understand it. We also have (and this is key) the Nuremburg trials, and thousands of hours and pages of depositions, testimonies, interviews, and courtroom proceedings. We have no such records for the Soviet Union, only show trials. We have no such records for really any other nation at all.
For good reason – these were not ordinary people. The Russians have never truly faced the evil of the Soviet Union, and moreover were under its enslavement for 4 generations. We could not possibly go back and interview those who lived through the transition (not that Russian live circa 1910 would be instructive as Russia was warped even then), and interviewing and confronting those who grew up under and were molded by the Communists knew nothing else. Much the same applies to most other regimes – nations already wrecked by war, or developmentally well behind our own. The same applies to the gangs – what could we glean about “ordinary” people who were recruited from slums and the rural poor? Not much.
The taboo on comparisons to Nazis, including Godwin’s law and its corollaries, is a concerted effort by the left to hide the fact that the progressive movement birthed Italian fascism, birthed the eugenics that Nazis took so far, and has always endorsed the elitism that is the hallmark of all such statist movements.
It is a victory that we are more and more willing to expose the progressive left as the true Nazis, and apply the fascist label to the left, where it belongs.
I think there is a spectrum. One size doesn’t fit all but all fall under the two quotes above. Some outright choose evil. Others do evil because they have contempt for a moral code outside of themselves. They become their own god ,master of there own ship. This mixed with a corrupt human nature that they reject or don’t understand. Makes evil deeds seam good.
Evil —————moral failure ———-good
The other thing, sin can be fun for a season. People wouldnt do it otherwise. We are all subject to this one.
Another way to describe the issue, skip, is that we are judged by our choices–to act or not act. People forget that if we choose not to act, that is a choice. So we are complicit when we see evil and we don’t step in. And of course we are guilty of evil when we actively participate in it. That guilt or judgment wipes out any other positive attributes that we might point to. How we act, or don’t act, is key.
Without a transcendent moral code, and surely the nazis and other modern other postmodern philosophies reject the transcendent absolute, evil doesn’t exist. There is only preference and utility for achieving that preference.
Looking from the outside, from within a solid Judeo Christian context, of course their actions were evil. Without that context, evil doesn’t compute.
Do evil acts make one evil? Not for me to say whether someone is evil. That’s God’s business. Actions, though, are different. I can think an action evil and therefore to be opposed and condemned. I never had much inclination to call people evil or good either.
Agree – it seems extremism is becoming the norm – and youth are grabbing onto very dark labels and practices of the past, without fully understanding history or the implications of resurrecting these labels. I also blame the university leadership in not addressing these imbalances to free speech – are people learning anything or just becoming more emboldened to create more chaos? This is an excellent post – much food for thought.
Excellent point – and modern culture is scrubbing hard to dissolve those solid Judeo-Christian boundaries.
We must be on guard here, though. There are competing impulses: one to say there is no such thing as evil and the other to apply the label to anything one doesn’t like.
True, Ed. But that is different from what I’ve said. Moral people know this makes sense; the Left will latch onto the definition you describe. We must always be vigilant to maintaining our values and make sure we’re not deferring to likes and preferences.
Agreed, Susan, and I’m not accusing you of diluting real evil. However, short of a common Judeo Christian context which increasingly doesn’t exist as the predominant background anymore, how do we stay pegged as a community or as a natuon? Heck, even with that common context history is filled with taking things much too far even in the name of morality.
I really don’t mean this as a counter to your point only as a warning: covering ourselves in morality is not a sufficient guard against rationalization of evil. (Though it is a necessary guard).
I’ve never much used the line of argument which says the left is not logical. I think they are as logical as anyone else. The trouble, as usual, lies in the assumptions people take as given. Nazis included, even to the extent that some theories about the rejection of rationalism and the embrace of romanticism are correct. Like iWe said, if one starts from the premise that while technically human a certain group is so biologically – scientifically – inferior as to be akin to vermin, it really shouldn’t be shocking that otherwise good people can be convinced that right reason and right morality necessitate actions we now view as evil because we have rejected the errant premises.
I think Stalin, Mao and Castro were sociopaths who just wanted power. They would have embraced any political philosophy to gain ultimate power. In a lot of ways that makes them more evil than Hitler.
Even Stalin once claimed that Hitler’s Nazism was a “twin” to Soviet Communism. He later changed his rhetoric, if not his mind.
This rational is the exterminator making oneself God. Deciding who lives, dies, who gets experimented on. When one crosses the line, deciding another is not human. They have become evil. I am comfortable making this judgement
I’m not sure I’m following this properly, because I agree with so much of what you’re saying. But one reason I continue to use Hitler and Stalin as examples in a “reductio ad absurdum” fashion is that they were ordinary people. These were not space aliens who did these terrible things, but ordinary humans like us, who were in situations where their worst impulses were allowed to rise to the top and overrule all else.
I suppose for me it’s irrelevant whether the person is evil, good, or neither. Either I will oppose the actions based on my own morality or I won’t, and in a limited and participatory system like ours I try to make plenty of room for others pursuing their own happiness and for me being wrong.
How familiar are you with their biographies? Have you ever been around a personality who naturally dominates a room? Around someone of rare talent and persuasion abilities? Or around someone who has a vision and insight into situations that you cannot grasp? I have. I have seen it and lived it. When such people exert their talents to productive ends you get people like Steve Jobs, or Bill Gates, or Henry Ford, or FDR. When they go the other way you get demagogues and manipulators.
Stalin early on showed a natural talent for subversion and domineering of others. He also very early showed genuine sociopathy. I cannot class him among normal people – he was exceptional in many ways and very talented. I would never call him ordinary in any sense, save in his base taste and alcoholism.
Hitler too had a natural ability to dominate others. Again, an exceptional man but with evil ends.
Yes, but neither Nazism nor communism would have happened without some element of ordinary people participating, not just unwillingly or as mesmerized dupes.
I do give quarter to those who’s lives are at stake to intervene. This I find understandable.