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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
There are a lot of people with more or less charisma than Hitler or Stalin, but they don’t all become Hitler or Stalin. When you have a system or social conditions under which the most ruthless person will come out on top, then the most evil and ruthless person at hand will come out on top.
If Stalin had never lived, that would have meant that someone else would have had to become Stalin. Solzhenitsyn did good work in this direction by pointing out that the evils of the Gulag system preceded Stalin himself. It’s perhaps less definitely clear that the same would have happened in Hitler’s case, but a case can be made for that, too (and I think some historians have made the case that the evils of Nazism were not just Hitler’s).
The reason this is important is that we all need to be responsible for our own behavior and our own possible contribution to these evils, and shouldn’t just explain away the evils of Hitler and Stalin by saying those were exceptional people whose evils bear no relation to our own.
I concur with this. There may well be a way to discern those who are evil, those who purposefully commit evil acts, those who inadvertently support evil acts, and those who blithely go about their relatively benign lives ignorant of the evil going on around them–even though they should be aware and have little or no excuse for their ignorance.
That culpability scatter-gram goes pretty broad and deep in today’s Leftist population.
Exhibit A is Operation Fast & Furious. There is no argument that can make the case that this was not an evil endeavor, costing hundreds of innocent lives. There is no excuse for continuing to support the regime that engendered this opn once the (bare-bone) facts of it came to light. The yawns that this mass murder evinced from the Left lead me to use some pretty broad brush-strokes spreading the Paint of Evilness.
Yes, that could be the case. But is science a moral issue? If science, or persuasive pseudo science, is helping that decision along then it becomes much less a moral issue and more a practical one.
There are people like PETA who are trying to claim that animals have some rights, and they might use similar moral reasoning as you have – deciding who lives, dies, gets experimented on, gets eaten crosses a line and takes on the role of God. Obviously it’s absurd, but aside from preference they will point to science finding ever more evidence of feeling and perhaps consciousness. At that point there is no arguing with the unprovable givens and the best I can do is to oppose.
I’m not seeking to explain them away, my point was that they don’t inform us much when it comes to everyday people. They are outliers.
Indeed. FAF is a case in point of a string of “ordinary” people within the government failing to stop a truly nasty and vile operation, and “ordinary” people in the media turning a blind eye to a deliberate corrupting of law enforcement.
This is where the moral plumb line is required. For western civilization it has been the Judeo-Christian plumb line. This is why absolute judgements could be made at Nuremberg. Now the west no longer respects this plumb line. This is why the west is dying.
People learn of these things from novels, movies and stories and there is plenty of material. It’s that the left dominate those medium and don’t tell the story. On the other hand we know about the holocaust because a lot of Jews who knew the stories first or second hand and there were lots of skilled novelists, story tellers and film makers who knew it was vital to tell the story. I don’t know if other evil empires aren’t being written about or it’s harder to publish and make films about them. We have had some good stories about Pablo Escobar and others who started out with nothing as did his sicarios and colleagues, but that doesn’t fall on a left right spectrum, or rather the story can be told without the political dimension. He was popular because he pretended to be a man of the people and ran as a liberal. For instance the Netflix production “Narcos” told the story of Escobar without mentioning the FARC as the major growers and integral to his operations. My point was about accountability. He wasn’t accountable. The political dimension was just PR and tactics, the core of evil flowed from his lack of accountability and the power he had by not caring about what he did to others.
Agreed. Can it be saved? O all of us who wish it saved, let us guard against doing evil in the name of good.
While the real truth of the matter lies with the Divine, the law does find it necessary to make distinctions between, at one end, “malice aforethought”, and at the other end, “honest mistake”.
Traffic cops do, indeed, sometimes let “good people” off with a warning for minor offenses. Moreover, even killing another person with your car may be an accident not aggravated by criminal negligence.
Intoxicated driving is indeed criminally negligent. There was a time when some states, especially southern states, considered intoxication behind the wheel exculpatory, not incriminating, but fortunately that has changed. Except for a tiny number of pranks, where someone is unwittingly slipped an intoxicant for another’s “fun”, consuming intoxicants recreationally is a choice with moral valence: a person who, by choice, permits himself to become so intoxicated that he loses the judgment necessary to know he shouldn’t be driving should of course be culpable.
Driving impaired by therapeutic treatment (or lack thereof, if therapeutic treatment is required to make you safe to drive) is culpable to a lesser extent. For instance, ideally, people in intense postoperative pain would not drive at all. But since it’s difficult to arrange avoiding driving altogether, in practice, a lot of postoperative people try to find a sweet spot between impairing pain and impairing painkillers if they have to drive. Are these people culpable in the sense that they haven’t done all they could to avoid impaired driving? Yes. “All they could” would be not driving at all. Feelings of culpability at being placed in this scenario can be intense, and yet I think many of us would find a good-faith effort to balance the impairing effects of both pain and pain control reasonable and noncriminal.
And sometimes there are just accidents, where the driver is not impaired, is not reckless, is not culpably negligent in a reasonable sense. For example, if you killed another person through your car’s mechanical failure, it’s possible better maintenance of your car could have prevented it, so you could be culpable in that sense. But unless the maintenance problem rendered the car obviously unsafe, people tend to believe you when you say it was an accident, it was an honest mistake.
All these states of mind:
might result in the same action: killing someone, perhaps multiple someones. And yet intent matters very much to degree of guilt and appropriate punishment. At one extreme is malice aforethought, at the other is honest mistake.
People may use “evil” to describe malice aforethought. People may also use “evil” to describe honest mistakes that nonetheless result in unspeakable evil. And people may use “evil” to describe any state in between. In context, “evil” often means considerably toward the “malice aforethought” end of the spectrum, especially when it is contrasted with “just being wrong”. It is, admittedly, a difficult word to pin down.
The fight is not over. However the forcast doesn’t give comfort.
Agreed, never do evil in the name of good.
I think the “Nazis as textbook evil” crutch has outlived its utility, in part because the arc of 20th century German history is more the outlier than the norm.
I currently live in Germany. Yesterday on the train two very elderly women were blabbing very loudly about the superiority of the German race and how it was being held down by the influx of so many inferior races into the country over the last few decades, along with other unvarnished Nazi philosophy. Within 5 minutes, nearly the entirety of the train car was yelling at the women to stop with their drivel and was pointing out the evil of the Third Reich.
This type of situation doesn’t occur in most other countries with evil deeds in their recent past. A traincar full of Russians would never denounce Stalin’s purges. A traincar full of Turks complaining about the Armenian genocide would find said train car quickly diverted to the local jail.
Point being: most countries try everything possible to cover up or downplay evil events in their recent past. Germany did a great job about coming clean, and as a result has become the standard for “evil”. But the very fact that they have come so clean means that they are anything but a standard case – despite their history still being, indeed, incredibly evil.
That is a fair point. As I noted earlier, we cannot easily use the Soviets or China as examples precisely because they have never (and likely never will) come clean.
To add to Midge’s point, a big problem I have with labeling someone “evil” is that there are far too many graytones to draw an obvious line.
To return (again) to the Nazi example: so Hitler was evil. Edith Stein and Bonhoeffer were about as far from evil as possible.
But the rest of the population was somewhere in between, with numerous subtle gradations. Some were SS members or card carrying NSDAP members. Some voted for Hitler/NSDAP but were internally queasy. Some didn’t vote for Hitler but secretly sympathized with his racist ideology. Some fled the country to avoid having to take a stand. Some voted for Hitler but helped their Jewish neighbors escape the Nazis. Etc. etc. etc.
Where does one draw the “evil” threshold in such a population? No matter where one places it, it will be arbitrary. For me, that is enough reason to say that determining who “is” evil is simply a fool’s errand.
I’m not sure they were “normal” people. People can make themselves appear to be different characters than who they really are–as actors prove every day.
Furthermore, as my husband and I were just talking about the other day, with all of our medical gizmos and gadgets, looking at a human brain tells us nothing about what it is thinking. :) That’s really astounding.
I think the reason God has been so clear on numerous occasions that we should leave judgment to him is that only God can do that. Only God can see into the human mind and heart and soul. It’s a simple fact of our human existence.
That fact unfortunately makes it very hard to protect ourselves from normal-seeming evildoers like Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Saddam Hussein, Idi Amin, Yasser Arafat, . . .
Accept where it is clear cut. Imho
The exterminator who declares you not human for example.
Just a brief thought, Skip: I’m reminded of the phrase: “the banality of evil”, as I read your post. More later, maybe…
Yes, from Hannah Arendt. I used that phrase in an early draft but had to cut it as it was already overlong.
I disagree from beginning to end with your analysis, but I endorse your sentiments, to say nothing of Chesterton!
I’d believe you unstintingly if Americans could stop talking about Nazis or Hitler for even a few days, not to say a few years. But we all know, that’s never gonna happen. In my gloomier moments, I’m even thankful for this tendency that seems reprehensible to me, because I fear WWII would otherwise be forgotten by the public discourse, to say nothing of so many schools…, along with WWI & Korea…
Amoral to describe an action by a human being is factually incorrect. An animal is amoral it acts on instinct. Human actions or a decision to act is either moral, or immoral. An animal does not have a conscience. A dog may know that it has displeased you, but it has no idea why it displeased you.
Some decisions and actions are more serious than others for a human being. Telling yourself I don’t need tell someone the full truth, or another piece of cake won’t hurt me if you are struggling with your weight are not amoral decisions. Obviously one is more serious than the other.
In this age of moral relativism the refusal to determine if an action is good or evil does not change the fact that good and evil exists. Choosing not to exercise your conscience does not relieve you of any responsibility for the decisions you make, or the actions you take.
We hope every human action has a wholly-determined moral valence from the God’s-eye view. However, we do not have the God’s-eye view, and must act on the knowledge we have, which can be scant, confused, and contradictory.
Maybe I sense this more than most because of the whole driving-with-an-involuntary-usually-mild-but-not-always-impairment. All choices I face when driving a car – including the decision not to drive at all – are immoral to some degree. (Yes, refusing to drive at all is also immoral, if it excessively burdens others to pick up the slack.) Deciding which is the more moral action? Often, it’s just a crapshoot. And I defy anyone to tell me they’ve got the God’s-eye view on this.
Acknowledging that we live in a world of incomplete information isn’t succumbing to moral relativism. It can mean admitting actions may be morally indeterminate given the information we have.
The Edmund Burke quote ” The Only Thing Necessary for the Triumph of Evil is that Good Men do Nothing” seems very apt to this discussion.
Too many moderate Republicans and Democrats all too often want to do nothing in the face of evil. That sin of omission is evil in and of itself. Edmund Burke was absolutely right; the appeasement and acquisance to evil in a multitude of small ways will only lead to the triumph of evil, which we may see very soon.
This coddling of evil was apparent in George Bush the first’s administration and before, but it reached epic proportions in Dubya’s administration, because Dubya, due to some very misguided ideas about bi-partison cooperation, never , after the Second Gulf War, seemingly wanted to never criticize the Democrats or the Left.
This lack of a rhetorical pushback from the Republicans for so long left the impression among many that the Left was overwhelmingly right in their comments and attacks. Many now as a result have no appreciation of the protections granted us by our Constitution or the disaster that awaits us under Socialism.
Furthermore, because of the highly unconstitutional, anti-religious, marxist indoctrination given our young in our schools, few even believe in the concept of evil anymore, particularly pertaining to anyone except conservatives, religious or genuine Republicans.
It also seems true that during this period where our Establishment Republicans refused to criticize the Left appropriately, a very destructive, very widespread , and very haughty and socially condescending habit developed among certain Republicans where these moderate Republicans like Fred feel with this snobbish almost puritanical rectitude that any honesty about the evil the Left or Islam perpetuates is somehow unbelievably rude or impolite and simply not proper in a civil discussion. Horrific consequences can only come from this reluctance to face the truth. In fact, the damage from this habit has already laid low our our economy and done untold damage to our civil rights as a result.
Yes, God can sort our the good from the evil at death and that knowledge helps keep the Christian on moral footing. However, these jackals are atheists and won’t be deterred from doing evil by a fear of how God will judge them. Their morality is self-made, self-serving, and without a good foundation. Society must tell them they are engaging in evil. Those that can be deterred will change their behavior. The rest must be shunned by us and punished by authorities. Sorting good and evil is a religious exercise. Sorting legal and illegal is a matter for government. Not everything legal is moral and good. For example, abortion is legal but immoral.
I heard an Antifa jerk stating what he would not allow on the campus and making demands. If the Board of Trustees had any balls, the members would respond with their own demands and what they won’t allow on campus. They can let the anarchists know they will be expelled permanently. You can’t tell me those Berkeley students don’t have scholarships. Revoke them.
I respectfully disagree with the OP. The tactic of demonizing one’s political opponents as “evil” is the signature tactic of the left. The left does not distinguish between evil ideas and evil people. That is why they see Washington and Jefferson as “evil” because they were slaveholders. The right, in contrast, sees the institution of slavery as evil, while recognizing that Washington and Jefferson were great, if flawed, men.
Why does it matter? It matters because different tactics are justified in opposing an evil idea and opposing an evil person. The tactics that are justified in opposing an evil idea are argument, reason, and persuasion. They are political action, free speech, peaceful protest, assembly, and petition. They are, in short, the tools of the Enlightenment and of Judeo-Christian morality. The tactics that are justified in opposing an evil person are, in the favorite words of the left, “by any means necessary.” Grab a club and take to the streets to bash heads. Silence debate. Throw molotov cocktails. Toss the evil ones in prison, or in gulags. Or just kill them. While I will steer clear of invoking Hitler, I would say that you don’t try to reason with Charles Manson. You just stop him. Period.
I understand the appeal of adopting the “win at all costs, abandon all principles” approach. Sometimes it seems that the decent and principled approach is losing. Maybe we need to adopt the tactics of the left. Maybe the only way to defeat evil ideas is to destroy everyone who supports those ideas. Maybe. But I (for one) am not convinced. At least, not yet. If we adopt the tactics of the left, then we are very much at risk of becoming no better than the left. And if that happens, then we will all be evil.
Beating people to a pulp, destroying property, denying speakers access to the campus, hating white people, hitting police horses with poles with embedded nails, looting, attacking officers…..labeling these as evil is not the moral equivalence of what the left does.
Those are evil acts. Without a doubt. As is driving a car into a crowd of protesters, killing a young woman. Calling everyone on their same side of that political debate “evil,” is an entirely different matter. Again, this is the signature tactic of the left. We are not all Nazis. But they are not all Antifa. They will call us all Nazis. The best way to lend credence to their charge would be to adopt Nazi tactics. Which is to say, their tactics.
I completely understand. I don’t feel I have the right answers here, but I do feel that with Antifa we are confronting something very dark indeed, and that we, as a nation, are revisiting old demons, and so it is important to explore this.
True, and I’m not advocating that we do so. And yet we are up against people committing despicable acts, and they’re being ginned up to do by some very dangerous manipulators.
“we” are not antifa, Nazis, or people who drive cars into crowds. “They” applies to all three. It may well be a tactic of the left but I will not allow their tactics to prevent me from identifying evil when I see it. They already hate me. I have nothing to lose.
Almost none of us are Nazis or Nazi sympathizers, the same simply can’t be said about Antifa and the Left.
It would help if many on the right were not quick to lend credence to such claims themselves, by agreeing with the Left to designate a position held by an overwhelming majority of their base in the most Republican region of the country, as essentially akin to Nazism. I’m obviously referring to two particular instances (reactions to Charlottesville and Charleston) of importance to myself, but every cultural and/or religious conservative (many of whom are also Constitutional and economic conservatives) knows a similar story of betrayal, in which the Establishment or Conservative inc., at best, failed to challenge slanders and narratives of the Left, and at worst quickly adopted their position (in milder form) as their own.
The best way to make sure conservatives continue to fight the good fight and not become the monsters we battle would be for the ostensible allies of angry conservatives to…….actually fight when their political coalition is attacked, instead of throwing them to the wolves. Most of us probably developed our political principles before taking an active interest in politics, but for the majority of the electorate who didn’t…….fecklessness and betrayals on issues of concern for them is what leads many of them to populism or even (broadly defined) the alt-right, even more so than anything the Left does or accomplishes.