Evil is not good's absence but gravity's
everlasting bedrock and its fatal chains
inert, violent, the suffrage of our days.
-Geoffrey
Hill, De Iure Belli ac Pacis
I've increasingly come to believe that the inability of the more honest denizens of the Left to reconcile their political beliefs with the pathologies that those beliefs cause is inducing a kind of schizophrenia in many of them. Some examples we've looked at here in the past include : In Defense of Elitism (1994) (William A. Henry III 1950-1994)andLiberal Racism: How Fixating on Race Subverts the American Dream (1997) (Jim Sleeper). Andrew Delbanco's nearly good book, The Death of Satan, falls into this category too. Mr. Delbanco is infamous for a statement he made in The New Republic several years ago, that "[religious] belief is really not an option for thinking people today." The contempt and close-mindedness evident in that snide remark unfortunately end up deforming this book too and prevent him from following where his own analysis has led, leaving the reader with a serious sense of anticlimax.
I first saw Mr. Delbanco in a PBS interview with Bill Moyers on September 12th, 2001, discussing the awful events of the day before, and was immediately struck by how rare it was to hear someone in the liberal media talk about evil as a reality. You'd expect it on Fox News or in the pages of National Review, but with PBS and Moyers you expect to hear a lot of inane chatter about root causes and how someone can't really be blamed for their own actions. But here was a guy unequivocally stating that evil exists in the world, and that we'd just seen an example of it:
BM: Do you believe in evil?
AD: I don't see how anyone can have experienced even
indirectly as you and I sitting here
have the events of the last day and not take seriously
the existence of evil. One of the
things that a number of writers have said about
the devil-- some people believe in him as a
literal being, some people believe in him as a metaphor
or an image or a representation of
these dark, human capacities-- one thing that a
number of writers have said is that the
cleverest trick of the devil is to convince people
that he does not exist. We saw evil
yesterday. We have to confront it. We have to face
it.
BM: Evil is defined as?
AD: Well, for me I think the best I've been able
to do with that question is to try to
recognize and come to terms with the reality of
the fact that there are human beings who
are able, by convincing themselves that there's
some higher good, some higher ideal to
which their lives should be dedicated, that the
pain and suffering of other individuals doesn't
matter, it doesn't have to do with them or that
it's... That they're expendable, that it's a cost
that's worth making in the pursuit of these objectives.
So evil for me is the absence of the
imaginative sympathy for other human beings.
BM: The absence of a moral imagination, the ability
to see what the consequences of your
actions are to someone else?
AD: Yes, the inability to see your victims as human
beings. To think of them as instruments
or cogs or elements or statistics but not as human
beings.
BM: You have written about your concern that Americans
have lost the sense of evil. Is
what happened in the last 36 hours going to bring
us back or is it too deep for that, our
absence, our loss of memory.
AD: I think it simmers. It's dormant in all of us.
We don't want to acknowledge it. We want
to explain it away. We want to find [an explanation]
for it. In a modern world we mostly live in
a place where the terrible suffering of the world
seems far away-abstract and unreal and we
can somehow imagine that it hasn't anything to do
with us. It came home yesterday. I think
a lot of people in this city and in this country
are searching their souls.
That's pretty strong stuff, especially from a network dedicated to bringing us such drivel as John Bly and Joseph Campbell and P.O.V. specials about evil Christian evangelicals. So Mr. Delbanco's book seemed like a worthwhile read. Well, it is, and it isn't.
Mr. Delbanco frames the issue of Satan's death as follows :
[T]he work of the devil is everywhere, but no one
knows where to find him. We live in the most brutal century in human
history,
but instead of stepping forward to take the credit,
he has rendered himself invisible. Although the names by which he
was once
designated (in the Christian lexicon he was assigned
the name Satan; Marxism substituted phrases like 'exploitative classes';
psychoanalysis preferred terms like 'repression'
and 'neurosis') have been discredited to one degree or another, nothing
has come to
take their place. The work of this book is
therefore to think historically about the shrinking range of phenomena
to which
accusatory words like 'evil' and 'sin' may still
be applied in contemplatory life, and to think about what it means to do
without them.
I have written it out of the belief that despite
the shriveling of the old words and concepts, we cannot do without some
conceptual
means for thinking about the sorts of experiences
that used to go under the name of evil. Few people still believe
in what the British
writer Ian
McEwan has recently called the 'malign principle, a force in human
affairs that periodically advances to dominate and
destroy the lives of individuals or nations, then
retreats to await the next occasion.' We certainly no longer have
a conception of
evil as a distributed entity with an ontological
essence of its own, as what some philosophers call 'presences.' Yet
something that
feels like this force still invades our experience,
and we still discover in ourselves the capacity to inflict it on others.
Since this
is true, we have an inescapable problem: we feel
something that our culture no longer gives us the vocabulary to express.
Now, as a threshold matter, it is important to note that there's a huge portion of the society for whom the existence of evil has always remained a central tenet of both religious and political beliefs. Much of the American populace is, after all, still Judeo-Christian, and has little doubt that Man is Fallen and prone to succumb to Satan's blandishments. But beyond the religious believers, conservative political philosophy (including that of the Founders, which means the philosophy upon which our republic rests) proceeds from the understanding of Man as a selfish, acquisitive, and violent beast whose basest impulses must be restrained by religious, governmental, and social institutions. These may not be the kinds of circles that Mr. Delbanco travels in, but it seems odd, even arrogant, to discount the beliefs of at least half of his countrymen. Still, he's off to a good start as far as analyzing what has gone wrong with the other half of society, so we're intrigued, eh?
Much of the book that follows is quite good and parts of it are really insightful. But in other places his disdain for any Republican verges on the psychotic, as when he compares Ulysses S. Grant to a character from a Jim Thompson novel and refers to him as a "modern monster". This is an outrage, of which Mr. Delbanco should be ashamed. A finer, more decent, man than U. S. Grant has never graced our public life. That he was willing to accept the responsibility for the butchery that ended slavery and destroyed the Confederacy in a few short years puts us all in his debt. He deserves better treatment than this. Elsewhere, discussing the defeat of Communism, he says condescendingly that Ronald Reagan "confidently" named the USSR the 'evil empire.' One wonders if Mr. Delbanco, no matter how Democratically orthodox, still seriously thinks that it was not. But, at any rate, he walks us through the crises and trends--from the Civil War to industrialism to racial struggles to postmodernism--that served to loosen the grip of religion and of the certainty of evil upon our minds. And, as the grip loosens, the times get bloodier and bloodier, until we can not doubt that Mr. Delbanco has identified a serious problem with our modern world. We have been sorely diminished and our society catastrophically degraded by the failure of imagination that has killed Satan (and God) and, in the process, done away with the basis for morality. We are more than ready to hear his solution. Lead on, MacDuff!
So we reach the denouement, and Mr. Delbanco describes the previous world--in which we still had imagination, rather than pure reason--but then concludes :
Although there would be a certain satisfaction in
living imaginatively in such a world, on balance it is probably a good
thing
that we have lost it forever. Whether we welcome
or mourn this loss, it is the central and irreversible fact of modern history
that we no longer inhabit a world of transcendence.
The idea that man is a receptor of truth from God has been relinquished,
and replaced with the idea that reality is an unstable
zone between phenomena (unknowable in themselves) and innumerable
fields of mental activity (which we call persons)
by which they are apprehended. These apprehensions are expressed
through
language, which is always evolving, and which constitutes
the only reality we recognize. Our world exists in the ceaseless
movement of human consciousness, a process in which
the reception of new impressions is indistinguishable from the production
of new meanings: 'mind's willful transference of
nature, man, and society--and eventually of God, and finally of mind itself--
into itself.'
Where Mr. Delbanco had begun by telling us "we cannot do without some conceptual means for thinking about the sorts of experiences that used to go under the name of evil," now he tells us that instead :
[T]he story I have tried to tell is the story of
the advance of secular rationality in the United States, which has been
relentless
in the face of all resistance. It is the story
of a culture that has gradually withdrawn its support from the old conception
of a
universe seething with divine intelligence and has
left its members with only one recourse: to acknowledge that no story about
the intrinsic meaning of the world has universal
validity.
From here on, things get really muddled, as having just surrendered to a worldview that even he has acknowledged leaves us with a gaping void in our lives and fuels our inhumanity toward one another, we next find him telling us that the "party of secular humanism, of which I consider myself a member, has deluded itself into believing that human beings can manage without any metaphor at all" and then that "the idea of evil is not just a metaphor that 'some people find...useful'; it is a metaphor upon which the health of society depends."
This really leaves him no other option but to try and construct a secular metaphor for evil. Tellingly, he turns to (and apparently misinterprets) St. Augustine for help. He says that St. Augustine rejected the idea that evil could be objectified (as Satan or as some other person or group of people), and instead identified evil as 'an essential nothingness.' Mr. Delbanco has decided that the "nothingness" of which this version of evil consists is a kind of absence of sufficient love for others in our own hearts. Of course, the objections to this idea are too numerous to address completely, but a few will do. First, having rejected the idea of universal truths, how does Mr. Delbanco decide what actions are evil to begin with? What is wrong with the Holocaust or the Killing Fields or Jim Crow if there are no universally valid meanings of good and evil? Second, note that by defining evil as an absence of something you, in effect, deny the existence of evil. The lack of something can not be that thing. Hunger is the lack of food, not the absence of hunger. Third, when St. Augustine spoke of evil as a lack of something he didn't mean some generic kind of thing, but the absence of good, or godliness. Unfortunately for Mr. Delbanco, when he earlier in the book disposed of universal truths and of evil, he necessarily threw the concept of good away too. Fourth, the very essence of the story of Man's Fall is that evil lurks within us all. Strongly held religious beliefs may sometimes lead to unfortunate prejudices, and they will necessarily lead us to harsh, but often just, judgments about the behavior and beliefs of others, but Judeo-Christian (which is to say American) religious beliefs also recognize the evil that is an immutable part of our own souls. In the words of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn :
If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously
committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them
from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line
dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.
And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own
heart.
In his purblind secular humanist resistance to even his own analysis, Mr. Delbanco simply can not admit the power, never mind the truth, of the Judeo-Christian metaphor, that Man is Fallen, and has within him not only the capacity but the barely controlled (and not always controlled) desire to do evil to his fellow men. It is important too to note that this metaphor lies at the heart of conservatism but must be utterly rejected by liberalism, for if Man is not essentially good, then, all things being equal, he can not be trusted to behave well, as all philosophies of the Left assume that he will. Mr. Delbanco's political philosophy lies smoldering in the same ash heap as his attempted metaphor.
And so, Mr. Delbanco concludes :
My driving motive in writing [this book] has been
the conviction that if evil, with all the insidious complexity which
Augustine attributed to it, escapes the reach of
our imagination, it will have established dominion over us all. ...
I have felt compelled to insist that Satan, always
receding and always sought after, has had two very different meanings
in our history. Sometimes he has been used
for the purpose of construing the other as a monster, and sometimes...he
has been a symbol of our own deficient love, our
potential for envy and rancor toward creation. Since the experience
of evil will not go away, one or the other of these
ways of coping with it sooner or later always comes back.
The former way--evil as the other--is, at least at
first, physically rewarding. The latter way--evil as privation--is
much more
difficult to grasp. But it offers something
that the devil himself could never have intended: the miraculous paradox
of
demanding the best of ourselves.
As near as I can tell, the suggestion here is that the religious metaphor for evil gives us racism, xenophobia, sexism, homophobia, etc., but that his secular metaphor shows us that all we really need is more--more love, more stuff, more whatever... In the end, Mr. Delbanco has achieved nothing more than to bring us back to where we started. Having started out by telling us that we can't exist without having a framework by which we understand evil, he ends by offering one that, though compatible with his science, is totally inadequate to our needs.
Mr. Delbanco is fond of citing examples from popular culture, but there's one artifact that he's somehow missed : The Exorcist. It's absence from this book is particularly noticeable because his predicament so resembles that of the hero. If you'll recall, Father Damian has lost his faith in God, but is suddenly confronted by a monstrous evil. As he gradually comes to believe that the evil is a manifestation of Satan, so too is he able to once again believe in God, and this gives him the strength of will to defeat the evil. In a strange way, it takes acceptance of the antithesis to restore his faith in the thesis.
But really, it's not so strange; if you accept that evil is real, how
can you not accept that good is real? And if pure reason suggests
that these are merely words, just definitions and not realities, but every
fiber of your being tells you that they exist and that you can differentiate
the one from the other and that one is preferable to the other, then who
will not choose to believe and who will not choose good over evil?
And having just this once chosen to doubt the efficacy of reason and its
baneful cosmogony, mightn't we eventually be willing to make a kind of
Pascal's
Wager and once again embrace the transcendent wisdom of the religious
metaphor, despite its superstitious taint? If subjecting ourselves
to the thralldom of reason leaves us abandoned in a world that we find
atavistic and repulsive, mightn't we choose to view reason as a useful
but limited tool, ultimately incapable of explaining existence or our purpose
in life to our satisfaction? It may be true that the "beliefs" that
most of us hoi polloi share and upon which Western Civilization was erected
are not an option for the "thinking people" with whom Mr. Delbanco consorts,
but if he is so unhappy with the option they've chosen instead, perhaps
the problem lies not in our "beliefs" but in their "thinking".
(Reviewed:28-Jan-02)
Grade: (C)
