SOMETHING EVIL THIS WAY COMES
It has been a strange year. The winter came early and lingered late. Snows fell
in November and continued at frequent intervals until early April. In March, bedraggled
robins, listening for worms in the still-frozen ground, shuffled disconsolately
beneath the barren branches of reluctant trees and under the forsythia which stubbornly
refused to bloom. Foolhardy crocus was buried in late snow or encased in sudden
ice. When blossoms did burst upon the scene, it was almost as if they came as the
result of some determined force of will, with March, April and May blossoms appearing simultaneously.
Even my friends who insist that winter is their favorite season, and who think a
snow-covered landscape one of the great beauties and blessings of life, could be heard, at odd moments, whistling "It Might As Well Be Spring."
In an earlier age, an age of enchantment, religious leaders would have been trying
to read the portents, the message written in these signs from the non-human world,
seeking to decipher the meaning behind the events and to uncover the relationships
between disparate circumstances. But we live in a disenchanted world--a world in which there
is no dimension other than the obvious, the surface reality. For us, a long, lingering
winter is explained by the track of the jet streams and the presence or the absence of el nino and the meaningless juxtaposition of multiple, mindless forces. In
our world there is no interior message to be read--only a chronicle of statistics
comparing this year to other years and awarding prizes for earliest and latest and
most. For us, a winter is a winter is a winter, and this one is over and gone and there is
no arcane message for us to read.
Why, then, do I find it so difficult this year to move from winter to spring? Why
do I awake in the still night with an ominous sense that something is trying to whisper
a message too subtle for my ears to comprehend? Why is there this icy construction
about my soul? Why do I lie awake, this early spring, gripped by a sense that something
powerful and important is slowly slipping away from us, eluding our comprehension?
Why, in the midst of the hope and promise that is spring, do I find unbidden tears
gathering? Somewhere, deep inside me is a voice which will not be denied warning
me--of what?
In a recent book entitled THE DEATH OF SATAN,
Andrew Delbanco, who teaches at Columbia, discusses the process by which our culture
over the past two centuries or more has become disenchanted. He chronicles the gradual
process by which God and the sacred has withdrawn from our consciousness and our
awareness until the only remnant is a symbolic idiom which the cynical manipulate for
political purposes. He suggests that the same process has removed from us a vivid
sense of the reality of evil. Just as God is dead in our culture, so, too, is Satan,
and with the loss of the realm of enchantment has gone our ability to confront the full
reality of evil.
After reading his argument, it occurred to me that Delbanco has missed an important
aspect of what has happened to the concept of evil in our culture. It is not so
much that evil has disappeared, or that we can no longer recognize it. Rather, in
our age, evil has been disenchanted, has been privatized and personalized. One need only
visit the news broadcasts and the newspapers and now the internet to be oppressed
by the sense of evil everywhere. Children abused and murdered by those whose responsibility it is to protect them; terrorists murdering the innocent; muggings and shootings
and rapes and mindless violence in the centers of our cities and family violence
in quiet suburbs; serial killers engaged in random mayhem. The evidence of evil
is everywhere, but like the long winter passed, it has no interior meaning. It is the consequence
of the meaningless juxtaposition of multiple, mindless forces. It is a chronicle
of statistics, comparing rates, comparing place to place, event to event, circumstance
to circumstance--safest and most dangerous, best and worst. And, as a consequence,
we deal with evil in a privatized and personalized way--offer the victim restitution
or vengeance, imprison or execute the offender. An eye for an eye and evil is wiped
out in blood.
I would not want to belittle the evil which we do each other on a personal and individual
level. Every story of an infant murdered by parents; of a child abducted and abused
and murdered; of a woman raped and beaten; of violence within the sanctity of the home; of serial murders and terrorist attacks and mindless shootings and senseless
beatings shakes me to my core. For nearly forty years I have preached the Universalist
gospel that love is stronger than hate; that no one is beyond the reach of compassion and concern; that every human personality is of worth. And daily, the news media
challenge that fundamental faith to which I have given my life.
But it is not this evil which wakes me in the dark night. For all of written history,
there have been those among us who inflict needless pain and death; for as long as
we have walked the earth, we have known that risk and danger are our daily companions. There is nothing new about the evil which occupies so much of our field of vision.
Rather, what wakes me in the night is a sense I cannot shake that by focusing on
the evil that individual people do to one another and by failing to see any connection
between those isolated and disparate events, we are blinding ourselves to a greater
evil which is destroying our common world. That is one of the consequences of living
in a disenchanted world--we tend to see the immediate, the obvious, the surface realities and are strangely blinded to the underlying structures in which they are rooted.
Over the past few weeks I have heard reports of a debate within the New York state
over what to do with an anticipated surplus of funds which are largely the result
of major cuts in the state programs which support the poor, and particularly poor
children. The governor would like to see those funds used for further tax cuts. While the
news media focus our attention on the deaths of children who have been abused by
those who should have protected them, no one seems able to call proposals to fund
middle and upper class tax cuts by reducing state support for the poor and especially poor children,
proposals which would increase the case-loads of those who work with the poor and
seek to protect children what they truly are--evil.
In state after state, one of the major growth industries in recent years has been
the building and running of prisons. Economically distressed communities now compete
with one another for the privilege of having a prison located near by. Somewhere
I have read a report that we spend more on prisons than on schools. We lock up a larger
percentage of our people for a longer period of time than any other major developed
country, and we are one of the last to use the death penalty. Much of the crime
rate seems to be related to pockets of poverty and despair. Poor people, uneducated people,
marginalized people fill our jails in disproportionate numbers and are executed in
disproportionate numbers. The news media terrorize us with stories of paroled killers
and robbers but have not the courage or the insight to name a policy which builds prisons
rather than housing and schools for what it is--evil.
In corporation after corporation in recent years, decisions affecting the lives of
unnumbered human beings have been made on the basis improving the company's bottom
line--not of saving the company but of increasing the profits of already profitable
concerns. Those decisions have included mergers, acquisitions, the moving of facilities
to cheap labor states or even out of the country, the "down-sizing" of the labor
force and deliberate attempts to break unions. Those decisions have often resulted
in the payment of millions of dollars to CEO's and other officers as reward for having wreched
havoc with the livelihoods of thousands of nameless, faceless individuals. The media
focus our attention upon rapes and muggings of individuals here or there, but no
one seems willing to name these corporate muggings and rapes for what they are--evil.
In Washington, both of the major political parties are committed to a program of deregulation.
They disagree with each other on the details, but both, in recent years, have been
committed to getting the government off the back of business. In an effort to free the business community from government regulations they have contributed to
an anti-government paranoia which has left employees, customers, and the environment
with less and less protection in the face of the economically powerful. The news
media regale us with tales of redundant regulation and inept bureaucrats and fail to remind
us that a legitimate function of democratic government is to protect the people against
the consequences of unhampered greed. No one seems willing to name unregulated greed for what it is--evil.
What is at the root of this corporate evil in which we are all involved and which
no one will name? Somewhere along the way, we have lost a vital sense of being part
of a larger community, we have lost our willing assumption of mutual responsibility
and obligation and duty beyond the boundaries of our own immediate, personal interests.
Increasingly we live in virtual community while we actively associate with people
primarily for negative reasons--to keep watch on strangers in the neighborhood, to
enforce strict zoning regulations, to protect our interests. But the sense of a common interest
uniting us with people who are not in our neighborhood, in our ethnic community,
in our faith tradition grows weaker with every passing day. Perhaps that is the
ultimate definition of a disenchanted world--a world in which we live without any firm
sense of the ties which bind us to the larger human community, a world in which we
are no longer able to feel the invisible roots of our humanity, a world in which
we no longer understand ourselves as embedded in and responsible to a larger reality than this
moment, this time, this place, this urge.
In a book entitled JIHAD AND MCWORLD,
Benjamin Barber, Whitman Professor of Political Science at Rutgers, suggests that
this disenchantment of the world is an inevitable consequence of the triumph of the
free market in a world which is becoming a single culture. He suggests that free
market forces have no loyalty beyond the maximizing of profit. Free market forces are not
loyal to place or to people or to system. They respond to one major imperative--to
create a context in which they can function and compete unfettered. All the propaganda
to the contrary notwithstanding, the triumph of the free market is not the same as
the triumph of the people or of democracy. Indeed, the author suggests that while
democracy cannot function without citizens, the free market cannot function without
consumers and these two quite different needs are often in conflict.
The ideal consumer is an isolate, an individual who lives in a world shaped by private
urges and wants. The consumer is never satisfied, can never be satisfied. Always
there is an unmet desire which is experienced as a need and which is both created
and supplied by the market. Delayed gratification or any sense of sufficiency are enemies
of the free market and of the consuming spirit. Long term consequences to the individual,
to the group, to the environment are off the radar scope of the free market and of the consumer who fuels the free market. Others exist for the consumer primarily
as competition in a game in which the person who dies with the greatest pile of things
is the winner.
Democracies, on the other hand, depend upon citizens--people who understand and accept
responsibility for the continuation of a community through time. The citizen understands
that the individual's life is enriched and enhanced and given meaning by being part of the on-going community. A citizen must be ever mindful of long-term consequences,
responsible for all other members of the community, willing to subordinate personal
interests when vital community interests are at stake. A citizen understands the importance of advocacy and of being able to compromise without being compromised.
A citizen understands that members of the community exist for each other and that
life is defined by cooperation and common effort. A citizen lives with a vital sense
of being part of something more than this moment, this place, this urge. Almost by definition,
democracy cannot exist in a disenchanted world. Democracy is rooted in a world in
which meanings beyond the obvious and the immediate are sensed and honored--a world which is richly enchanted.
If this hunch is right, then the world of the free market, of the isolated consumer
will inevitably destroy the democratic vision unless we can recreate a sense of citizenship,
unless we can renew and revitalize our understanding democracy. We are called to understand ourselves not as consumers, as users, as hoarders and accumulators,
but as partners in a global venture seeking the common good not for one community,
one people, one generation but now and always. We are called to reaffirm that government,
especially democratic government is an undertaking in which, for the common good we
regulate the market forces, allowing them sufficient freedom to function, but protecting
our brothers and sisters here and across the globe from the greed which would turn
most people of the world into serfs in a neo-feudal economic system, protecting the
earth from the short-sighted lust for profit which will make of this oasis in space
a fetid wasteland. The market focuses on profits now. Democracy focuses on creating
a sustaining and sustainable community. Democratic government seeks to maximize freedom
within the context of that sustainable and sustaining community.
Increasingly, I am convinced that the privatized evils which absorb so much of our
attention will never be transformed until we begin to understand them as localized
expressions of a larger reality. The rapes and the murders and the mindless, unnecessary
violence are all real and terrible. But they are also reflections of a larger, more
pervasive evil from which our attention is being diverted, which we are encouraged
not even to name. Evil, at every level, flourishes in the disenchantment of the
world. It can be confronted and transformed only when we enter again into the enchantment
of a world in which we understand ourselves as part of a larger reality existing
through time, in which we see ourselves as embedded in a web of enduring relationships,
in which we know ourselves as part of a reflexive universe in which each is part of all
and responsible to and for all.
These are the thoughts which drift through my mind as I lie awake in the soft darkness
of the spring night. Most of the time I am oppressed by the sense that we fail to
give attention to the fact that something evil this way comes, some terrible loss
which will leave us isolated and powerless before forces which can only be controlled
by the enchanted power of a vibrant and vital community.
After a while, I drift toward uneasy sleep, only to be wakened by the song of a bird.
Looking out the window, I see no sign of the morning, but somewhere out in that
darkness broken only by the feeble street lamp, a bird has begun to sing. And soon,
that solitary voice is joined by other birds who sing of a morning for which I can find
no evidence. And in time, as if called by the faithfulness of the birds, the sun
begins to rise over the hills. I lie still, holding my breath, trying to believe
the enchantment I feel, trying to be one with the birds and with the hills and with the sun,
trying to be one with neighbors who lie immured behind walls I have never entered,
trying to feel and retain the sense of a larger community to which I am responsible,
a community which gives my own life resonance and power and meaning.
I do not know how we came to lose the sense of enchantment, the sense of being tied
together, partners in a venture the beginning of which is lost in the mists of long
ages and whose destination is hidden in times yet to be. I do not know what it will
take to re-enchant the world. But I suspect that it begins by naming the evil and by
refusing to be distracted from great evil by its daily, banal expressions and, like
the bird, by singing in the dark an unshaken, if unproved, faith that there is more
here than meets the eye, that we are more than consumers of the world, that we are citizens
of a glorious golden city, that we are the inheritors of the an age old dream in
which each is responsible for all, that the common good is served through individual
fulfillment and idividual fulfillment is achieved only in the context of community.
It begins by seeing in this broken and bleeding world a vision of a blessed community
and trusting that vision as more real and more important than any other reality.