The permanence of evil
Crossing the line
A morality continuum exists in communal consciousness across cultures. We can move on the continuum from less moral or more moral and back again as we are learning and establishing who we are as human beings. Only mental health and consciously-embraced values along with certain laws, depending on the place or places we live, keep us from being all over the place on the continuum for life. But way down the scale there is a marker dividing cringe-worthy and callous and despicable from actual evil. And once that line is crossed, there is no return to other parts of the continuum.
Around that marker, ambiguity doesn’t exit. All the details are abundantly clear, and the core determinant of what is evil over against what is close to evil, but not quite there, is the impossibility of undoing whatever egregious offense has been done.
I can’t untell a lie; I can try to speak truth in its place, and that might help sometimes. Even if I cannot stop the effects of my lie, chances are that being a liar alone does not make me evil.
However comma
(as one of my beloved parishioners in New Orleans used to say)…
A murderer cannot undo a murder. Murder is evil. Period. Having to kill in self-defense is not murder and thus not evil. Cold-blooded murder, premeditated or not, is evil. Clearly, mass shootings are evil. A police knee to the throat in order to suffocate is murder, is evil.
Other ways of stealing someone’s life — causing permanent brain damage through physical ICE attack, for example — are over the evil line too. Starving infants and toddlers and adults presumed to be political enemies is evil. Withholding life-saving medications from those who can’t afford them especially while the medications are widely available and while the filthy rich become filthier is evil. Taking someone’s capacity to live by disappearing her or him, functionally erasing the person’s identity from the arena in which she or he once had relationships and responsibilities and dreams, is life-stealing and thus evil.
The enablers of an evil enabled person are just as evil. Making weapons available to killers is also evil. Capitol Hill complicity through silence and inaction as evil wipes out human life is evil.
Complicit evil rubs elbows with healthcare practitioners and executives and insurers. Complicit evil has countless friends in organized religion. Complicit evil is honored by pseudo-journalists. There are voters in democracies who bring complicit evil into the voting booths with them. Complicit evil, again, is found in political power grabs and politicians’s egos. (Damn! That one was too easy.)
When evil is embraced, acted on, there is no turning back. Evil cannot be undone. It cannot be beautified cosmetically; it cannot be baptized.
The good news is that becoming evil isn’t an accident. It’s impossible for us to be forced into it, and it doesn’t come for us. There is no devil so the devil never made us do it. And the wages of sin-that-is-evil are not exacted by God. If evil is done, we — individually and in groups — choose to do it; thus, the built-in consequences fall on us.
Sadly, evil never goes away. There are moments and eras when we may be less aware of it; certainly evil’s influence can be eclipsed for a while by good people and good deeds. Celebrating those glorious times and working our asses off to put more good to work in the world than evil, since it can be resisted and minimized by relentless opposition, isn’t deluding ourselves as long as we realize that evil is a lurking opportunist.