Reckoning with evil in social life

ABSTRACT

Any conceptualisation of evil, arguably, has to empower us to resist or transform it in our lived worlds. The latter concern motivates this paper much more than a thorough analysis of evil itself. Drawing on Jewish and Christian thought, I tentatively consider evil as resulting from (or, being exacerbated by) the incomplete or failed cultivation of the humane. Along this line, evil is the opposite of humanity; it is the antihuman, the subhuman (Buber), or the demonic (Heschel). Gratuitous violence, hatred, resentment, and malice manifest this dark ‘power’ of evil. In the aforementioned traditions, peace and justice are conceived as being dependent on the inner order or unity of the soul. Conversely, iniquity – as the manifestation of evil – in the world reflects conflicts or disorders in individual souls (‘selves’). Hence the need to constitute one’s personhood. Such continuous creation takes place through genuine human encounters, where and when love, friendship, and gratitude are allowed to unfold themselves. These ‘dispositions’ are conceived as counterweights to evil. I will work out this argument, but also briefly examine how education, rural and urban planning, economic and political ‘systems’ can either breed or curtail evil.

KEYWORDS:

• Encounter
• humanisation
• love
• objectification
• responsibility

Introduction

In his Farewell to European History (1947), Alfred Weber points to a ‘strong toning down, a sort of abstract levelling out of the bottomless depth-dimensions’ of evil in the works of various philosophers. According to him, the latter failed to recognise the ‘innate powers of evil in man as such, as independent entities.’¹ In Leibnitz’s theodicy, Weber sees a ‘virtually grotesque justification of evil’; Rousseau ‘merely projected these perversities onto society’; for Kant ‘radical evil was ultimately only a conceptual negative,’ a ‘perversity of heart.’² These ‘logical dogmatizations,’ Weber claims, ‘ousted the former meta-logical view of the background of life.’³ Consequently, since then, there has been a tendency for evil, the ‘dark world,’ to become inexistent.⁴ I do not wish to side either with or against Weber in his critical analysis of these philosophical discourses on evil. Yet, I do think that he is right in holding that evil has become unreal, though not so much in academic discourses as in the thinking behind the social organisation of our lives, which includes economic and political systems.⁵

The purpose of the present paper is therefore twofold: first, at the risk of stating the obvious, to insist on the necessity of reckoning with evil in political and economic matters, and in urban and rural planning – that is, in the organisation of our physical environments; second, to outline what it would mean to take evil seriously on both individual/personal and collective levels. Given the old fact that evil, whenever evoked, is all too often projected onto others, it seems safer to assume that it is inherent to human nature.⁶ Besides this qualification, my own position with regard to the question of evil tends to agree with Martin Buber’s response when questioned on this matter, namely, that ‘I do not know evil “as such,” but only as a condition and attitude in the life of individuals.’⁷

The underlying premise of this paper is that individual propensities to evil can be transformed. This faith in transformation, rather than simple repression, belongs to a humanist philosophy, both secular and religious (and, to the Nietzschean alternative, which does not fit into either of these two categories). According to the religious humanist perspective, which I am here putting forward, the so-called natural realm and the divine or transcendent realm are not mutually exclusive. As a result, the sources of the aforementioned transformation are not conceived to be merely human since the human is essentially porous⁸; or as Abraham Heschel puts it, the human is called to ‘transform the soul into a vessel for the transcendent.’⁹

The manifestations of evil in personal, interpersonal and social lives

Evil, like so many concepts, is elusive. Sickness and natural calamities are sometimes referred to as evils. Yet, unless one considers mortal life itself as an evil, it is necessary to distinguish between the suffering and decay that are inherent to being mortal/earthly beings and the suffering, including humiliation and oppression, inflicted by other human beings. The latter type of inflicted suffering can be considered as manifesting evil. Yet, also in this case, the difficult task of distinguishing between sufferings inflicted wittingly and unwittingly is incumbent upon us. But even such categories might not help us understand the mysterious reality of evil. The phenomena of wilful ignorance (or, blind eye knowledge) and simple carelessness point to the blurry line between evil and the mishaps of earthly life. Ignorance or carelessness does not necessarily qualify as stupidity or ‘innocent.’ In other words, evil in the lives of individuals and of collectivities, I hold, manifests itself not only in deeds and thoughts, but also in the failure (unwillingness) to act and to think.

In interpersonal relationships, evil manifests itself in the objectification of the other – so that the other becomes an It, to borrow Buber’s terminology; in the will to domination; and in the passive or active participation in such established relationships. At the collective level, too, oppression and injustice are evil’s most visible faces. Evil is exacerbated and sustained by political and economic systems that either ignore its reality, and hence allow it free rein; or, actively foster it by institutionalising or normalising all that which breeds evil. We can, for instance, think of the normalisation of greed and envy, of the insatiable desire to acquire more wealth or material goods, for fame and power.

In certain strands of Judaic and Christian thought, the personal, interpersonal and social manifestations of evil are conceived as being interrelated. Indeed, justice and peace in the world are seen as depending on the inner order, state or wholeness of human souls. In other words, justice – in the common sense of giving everybody his or her due, also at the collective level – cannot be detached from just persons or just personal dispositions. Society is therefore conceived as essentially relational, and not primarily as an order depending on an equilibrium of power. ‘Due,’ however, should not be confused with ‘merit.’ Instead, it refers to the absolute needs of human persons as humans, and hence not to the relative needs that correspond to socially ascribed identities (slaves, women, men, citizens, nationals, or illegals).¹⁰

If one assumes that the human generally ‘prefers his own happiness to that of all other sentient beings put together’ as Reinhold Niebuhr puts it, then interpersonal and hence social justice are bound to be rarities in the human world.¹¹ Justice, indeed, often requires the transcendence of one’s own (immediate) interests or giving up privileges acquired through natural or social conditions. This is the reason why Simone Weil defined justice as the refusal of power, and hence as ‘the Christian virtue par excellence.’¹² However, such attitude is so contrary to the human condition, namely, the rule of the strongest and submission to the strong that she thought it to be a ‘supernatural’ virtue.¹³ Evil and its manifestation in injustice are therefore as natural as the force of gravity. Along this line, evil can be countered by individuals who are rooted in religious and philosophical traditions that promote self-denial, the contemplation of beauty, the patience of job, or amor fati.

Collectivities, on the other hand, are immune to grace. Collective self-denial has yet to happen. This also means that individuals who owe their personal identities to a collective identity can more difficultly resist the temptation of evil. Collective egoism, Niebuhr warns us, is far worse than individual egoism: ‘As individuals, men believe that they ought to love and serve each other and establish justice between each other. As racial, economic and national groups they take for themselves, whatever their power can command.’¹⁴ Hence, while the individual can transcend his (her) natural egoism and the urge to dominate, ‘the moral obtuseness of human collectives,’ Niebuhr notes, ‘makes a morality of pure disinterestedness impossible.’¹⁵ This view of social, organised, life might seem extremely pessimistic, but cannot be disproven in the light of past and present social and political perversities as well as the repeated manifestations of the ‘selfishness of nations.’¹⁶ However, as I will argue later, collectivities should not be destroyed. They are not simply necessary or inescapable evils, but they are human ‘goods’ that ought to serve individual souls.

Self-transcendence, the unification of the soul, or metanoia

There is much disagreement on the nature and source of the commitment to justice. Some thinkers believe that reason can check or order selfish passions; others are convinced that the latter are countered by benevolence and sympathy, which are allegedly part of human nature. In both cases, what justice requires is the cultivation of reason, good will, and love, which is similarly the way to deal with evil. Yet, both secular and religious humanism can commit the mistake of believing that there are no limits to the growth of reason, good will, and love. This is the warning of Niebuhr in his Moral Man and Immoral Society (1963). Secular humanism is even more vulnerable to this illusion for several reasons. For one thing, the idea of an ineradicable evil that cannot be countered by any form of human progress is a frightening and paralysing thought; like being imprisoned, unarmed, with a dragon in a room without opening. Hence, according to Jacques Maritain, the misjudgement of our ‘harsh natural realities’ reflects the lack of courage to ‘face the existence and power of evil because [philosophy] does not feel within itself the strength to overcome them.’¹⁷ For another thing, the presence of evil in what seems to be the progress of humankind is easily overlooked. ‘Darkness,’ Heschel reminds us, ‘may be encountered everywhere, and the abyss of absurdity is always only one step away from us.’¹⁸

Jewish and Christian thinkers have consistently affirmed the belief that man is not alone. This is also the title of one of Heschel’s books, in which he notes that ‘all existence is coexistence with God.’¹⁹ Far from being some form of consolation for children who are afraid of adulthood, such faith, according to Heschel, entails the acceptance of the responsibility of being God’s ‘partner in the drama of continuous creation. By whatever we do, by every act we carry out, we either advance or obstruct the drama of redemption; we either reduce or enhance the power of evil.’²⁰ In a strong sense, for Heschel, the resistance to evil begins with reverence or awe, and the corresponding capacity to see ‘behind the appearance of things a trace of the divine.’²¹ In other words, what is being demanded is the love of a world that does not seem made for human happiness and that instead elicits envy and resentment.²² Conversely, hatred of a world that hurts opens the gates of hell. As Charles Taylor points out:

Dostoyevsky’s Devils is one of the great documents of modern times, because it lays bare the way in which an ideology of universal love and freedom can mask a burning hatred, directed outward onto an unregenerate world and generating destruction and despotism.²³

Quite similarly, Buber writes about the ‘holy intercourse with the little world entrusted to us.’²⁴ According to him, we thereby ‘help the holy spiritual substance’ contained in living beings and things, including the tools we use, ‘to accomplish itself in that section of Creation in which we are living.’²⁵ This line thinking is consistent with Buber’s lifelong plea for the transformation of dominant I–It relationships – between humans themselves, between humans, on the one hand, and animals, nature and the world, on the other – into I–Thou relationships. Such transformation, in fact, entails giving up the urge of mastery over others, and instead, accepting the responsibility of an I for a Thou.²⁶ But, as Buber notes, only the one who ‘takes his stand in love, and gazes out of it’ is able to treat the other in a holy way, as a Thou.²⁷ Such a person thereby allows the unification of his (her) soul to take place; and such wholeness is the precondition for just interpersonal relationships.

The soul, Buber explains, is ‘the whole man, body and spirit together’; this means that ‘the soul is not really united, unless all bodily energies, all the limbs of the body, are united.’²⁸ The unification of conflicting forces within the individual soul takes place when ‘the core of his soul, the divine force in its depths’ is allowed to act.²⁹ The Jewish, spiritual or believing humanism of Buber and Heschel has resonated with many a Christian, for good reason. Indeed, conversion or metanoia is an essential, if not the fundamental, dimension of various strands of Christianity. Taylor aptly refers to such a continuous process of re-creation as ‘God’s pedagogy.’ What is involved, he notes, is not simply a change of mind or attitude, but the transformation of the aggressive drives, ‘not just their repression, or suppression’; what is going on is ‘some real turning of them from within […]; the love powers agape, the aggression turns into energy, straining to bring things back to God, the energy to combat evil.’³⁰ Such transformation, Taylor remarks, cannot be brought about by the mere inculcation of good habits. Instead, it is much more mysterious.³¹ Christian metanoia not only involves the whole human person, but also extends itself to human relationships.³²

Building for human encounters

The unification of the soul, that is, metanoia, takes place within a particular human community that enables and supports it, providing the motivation necessary for perseverance. However, the physical environment also plays a role. It is widely known that ghettos are breeding grounds for evil precisely because they are environments in which humans cannot live a human life. The same holds for the great trade and financial towers in various cities of the world.³³ These are luxurious versions of factories; instead of industrial machines, computers demand the uninterrupted attention of young men and women. The effects of staring at screens, numbers and graphs day and night on the human soul should not be underestimated. Neither should the isolation. Buber has repeatedly pointed out the importance of ‘building for human contact, building surroundings that invite meetings and centers that shape meeting.’³⁴ Such ‘immediacy’ between humans, ‘between human house and human house’ has to be restored for the sake of a human world.³⁵

However, where there is no human home, there is no immediacy. In fact, there is no human life in this case, as Arendt reminds us. Mass society, she observes, ‘deprives men not only of their place in the world but of their private home, where they once felt sheltered against the world.’³⁶ The effects of such uprooting have been worked out in detail by Weil. It is not without reason that she considered it to be ‘the most dangerous illness of human societies.’³⁷ Uprooted humans either fall into ‘an inertia that resembles death’ or they actively try to uproot others.³⁸ Uprooting creates nihilism, the context in which Hitler and other notorious men of the twentieth century came into power, and in which twenty-first century terrorism arises. However, it is not simply an economic issue, as if prosperity and the elimination of poverty would get rid of evil. Both poverty and wealth can breed evil if they alienate humans from themselves, their fellow beings and from the world. The advocates of progress or economic growth tend to overlook this insight.

A place in the world is more than simply a room or house. It is a place where one feels at home. The term uprootedness captures the condition whereby one might have a physical place and yet feels homeless. It is significant that the connection between ‘a sense of uprootedness’ and ‘antisocial behaviour and violence’ is taken up in the encyclical letter Laudato si.³⁹ A whole section is devoted to the ecology of daily life, whereby it is righty remarked that our ‘settings influence the way we think, feel and act.’⁴⁰ It is therefore suggested that those who ‘design buildings, neighbourhoods, public spaces and cities, ought to draw on the various disciplines which help us to understand people’s thought processes, symbolic language and ways of acting.’⁴¹ Rural and urban planning should aim at safeguarding personal dignity, fostering solidarity, the feeling or experience of belonging, rootedness, whereby others ‘will then no longer be seen as strangers, but as part of a “we” which all of us are working to create.’⁴² The temptation to project evil onto ‘others’ might then become less strong.

The ‘we’ of which it is here about might be nearly boundary-less, and hence transcend the mechanism of exclusion. However, the desire for a clear identity might mean that an open ‘we’ eventually becomes a closed ‘we.’ This seems to be the fate of social organisations. Weil therefore unambiguously perceives the social as the domain of the devil: ‘The flesh incites [one] to say me and the devil incites [one] to say we.’⁴³ Referring to the Church, she observes that ‘saints have approved of crusades and the Inquisition. They have been blinded by something that is very powerful, and that is the Church as social thing.’⁴⁴ Yet, collectivities (such as families and churches) are not only social; they are also a ‘human milieu,’ as ‘natural’ and essential as the air that one breathes. Such a ‘human milieu’ involves a ‘contact with nature, the past, tradition.’⁴⁵ Weil perceives a city rather than a nation as being such a human milieu. It is noteworthy that cities do not have clear identities and boundaries, and yet may enable encounters – unless they are (technologized) megacities. The idea of a boundary-less human milieu could inform the re-organisation of religious collectivities.

Despite these caveats, it has to be remarked that collectivities are necessary to prevent the evil that stems from uprooting. As Weil notes:

Rooting is perhaps the most important and the most unknown need of the human soul. […] A human being has a root through his real, active and natural participation in the existence of a collectivity that surely and certainly preserves living treasures of the past and presentiments of the future.⁴⁶

In order to prevent the commitment to a collectivity from turning into some form of collective egoism, Weil makes the illuminating distinction between the love and respect for a particular collectivity. The latter, she says, does not deserve more esteem than food. Only the universe deserves our unconditional love. She notes:

The children of God should not have any other homeland besides the universe itself, with the totality of reasonable creatures that it has contained, contains and will contain. That is the hometown that has the right to our love. The things smaller than the universe, among which the Church, impose far-reached obligations, but no obligation to love.⁴⁷

One owes respect to a collectivity (homeland, family, tribe, church) because it serves as ‘food for a certain number of human souls.’⁴⁸ This is why a collectivity should not be destroyed; each collectivity is unique and cannot be replaced. The duty towards a collectivity may involve total sacrifice if it is in danger, but it is never above an individual person.⁴⁹ In other words, it should not be allowed to absorb individuals in such a manner that they can no longer distinguish between their self-understandings and the identity of the collectivity. They do not belong to the latter.

Conclusion

Though evil should and can be resisted, it is prudent to bear in mind that it is part of the human condition, that is, a permanent temptation. It is therefore not possible to speak in terms of progress in this connection: evil does not become less with the so-called evolution of civilisation. Besides, there are no proven ‘methods’ – a terminology that belongs to the mechanical-technocratic approach to science and human affairs – to deal with it. Evil is not a technical problem or defect that can be resolved. The ‘therapeutic turn’ has resulted in the effacement of the pervasiveness and mysteriousness of evil. The urge to objectify – or the incapacity to deal with elusiveness, and in a way, with ‘transcendence’ – results in a dangerous oversimplification of the reality of evil. Such self-delusion can only backfire. Anyone who has felt envy and resentment knows how hard it is to deal with such emotions. There is serious reason, justified by precedents, for worry when they become collective emotions and start influencing political rhetoric and policies.

The emphasis on the ineradicability of evil does not imply that we are without resources to resist it, in the first place, within ourselves. Education, in the broad sense of the cultivation of the will, heart, and mind, is an absolute prerequisite for resisting what Buber called the ‘subhuman.’ Yet, since such type of education is a rarity, it would be extremely and dangerously naive to believe that education as such is the antidote to evil. The illiterate is certainly not more prone to evil than the highly educated, in the current sense of the term. The converse might hold if we are to believe Rousseau or Dostoyevsky. Educational reforms of the last few decades, informed by mechanical, technical, or instrumental reason, have not reckoned with evil since they do not, in any sense, contribute to the formation of the heart, will and mind – that is, to the unity of the person. Correspondingly, the idea that ‘politics is “the art whose business it is to care for souls”’ will seem incoherent to contemporaries.⁵⁰

Despite the diversities of works on which I have drawn, it is possible to sum up the various dimensions of a counter-evil human formation; namely, getting over the obsession with happiness and hence no longer perceiving the world and others as instruments to personal happiness; a critical re-appraisal of some sort of ‘self-pampering’ culture; self-denial with proper care of the soul; learning the art of patience and attentiveness; learning to discern the will to dominate at an early stage, also in the child. Of course, such a formation should not be an excuse for viewing each other and the world with suspicious eyes. Taking evil seriously does not imply that we should mistrust each other; it is not a reason for misanthropy and self-hatred. A religious humanist philosophy, as Maritain once so aptly said, ‘has faith in the resources and the vocation of human nature. […] It is therefore betting on heroism and the spiritual energies’; it recognises the ‘power of truth and the power of love’; and, ‘it has respect for the soul and an awareness of the soul’s grandeur.’⁵¹

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Roshnee Ossewaarde-Lowtoo

Roshnee Ossewaarde-Lowtoo is a postdoctoral researcher at the Tilburg School of Catholic Theology, Tilburg University. Her research areas include moral, political and social philosophy, theology, Christian humanism and transhumanism, and more recently, political economy. In her publications, she addresses diverse issues that include personal integrity in organisations, resentment and character formation, self-creation in Nietzsche, and the dangers of both individualism and collectivism.

Notes

1. Weber, Farewell to European History, 47.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. Ibid., 48.

5. Hannah Arendt’s distinction between ‘private,’ ‘public,’ and ‘social’ is illuminating, and to some extent, informs the title and terminology of my paper. ‘The Latin usage of the word societas,’ Arendt notes, ‘indicated an alliance between people for a specific purpose, as when men organize in order to rule others or to commit a crime’ (Arendt, The Human Condition, 23). ‘Society,’ in the modern world, was initially the ‘organization of property-owners who, instead of claiming access to the public realm [the political realm] because of their wealth, demanded protection from it for the accumulation of more wealth’ (ibid., 68). Since both the public and private realms have, in the end, been absorbed into ‘society,’ that is, in the ‘household’ or the economy – hence the term ‘mass society’ – ; it is reasonable to speak of ‘social life’ tout court.

6. Cf. Bethke Elshtain, Democracy on Trial, xiii; Nedelsky, Law’s Relations, 205.

7. Buber and Friedman, “Interrogation of Martin Buber,” 114.

8. Desmond, Hegel’s God, 40; Matthews, For Love of Matter, 19.

9. Heschel, Man is Not Alone, 254.

10. The determination of these absolute needs is another matter. There are different possible answers to this question, depending on one’s anthropology. The materialist conception of the human, for instance, includes no spiritual needs. Likewise, an individualist anthropology may underestimate the need for human communion.

11. Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, 46.

12. Weil, Attente de Dieu, 130.

13. Ibid., 128.

14. Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society, 9.

15. Ibid., 272.

16. Ibid., 84; Cf. Whyte, The Organization Man.

17. Maritain, Christianity and Democracy, 56.

18. Heschel, Who is Man? 101.

19. Heschel, Man is Not Alone, 240.

20. Heschel, Who is Man?, 119.

21. Heschel, Man is Not Alone, 286.

22. Blake and Phelps, “History as social criticism,” 1332.

23. Taylor, Sources of the self, 517.

24. Buber, The Way of Man, 33.

25. Ibid.

26. Buber, I and Thou, 11.

27. Ibid.

28. Buber, The Way of Man, 18.

29. Ibid., 17

30. Taylor, A Secular Age, 668.

31. Ibid., 673.

32. Buber, The Way of Man, 21.

33. Strange, Casino Capitalism, 193

34. Buber, A Believing Humanism, 95.

35. Ibid.

36. Arendt, The Human Condition, 59.

37. Weil, L’Enracinement, 66.

38. Ibid.

39. Francis, Laudato si, §149.

40. Ibid., §147.

41. Ibid., §150.

42. Ibid., §151.

43. Weil, Attente de Dieu, 25.

44. Ibid.

45. Weil, Cahiers II, 239.

46. Weil, L’Enracinement, 61.

47. Weil, Attente de Dieu, 79.

48. Weil, L’Enracinement, 15.

49. Ibid., 16.

50. Cooper, Eros in Plato, Rousseau, and Nietzsche, 5.

51. Maritain, Christianity and Democracy, 56.