What is Evil in a Modern Society? Many people who have abandoned religious thought struggle with the word “evil”. I think many of our modern business and political leaders certainly do. But the ideas behind morality and evil still live in our culture and our laws despite our modern ambivalence towards evil and its affect on the human condition today.
Even without faith, the great dogma behind morality and evil yet lives on in our shared legal system which is still based on old English Common Law and its religious underpinnings. It seems we cannot escape our views of right and wrong without laws and religious faith. Evil is still very much connected to religion. And religion has defined our laws.
And yet our good or evil nature remains in us via the sum of our acts in this world. We are still evil or not evil. Society decides such fates and can condemn an individual to “being evil”, despite our resistance to that idea. It lives beyond our faith and our laws. Yet it can rely on our criminal acts. We don’t get to decide if we are evil. Our peers do. So beware should you be judged to be an evil person!
But evil is also tied to the spirit and the heart. You can say science and reality disavows itself from the mythology of evil. But it still lives in us and in the larger society Humanity has defined. Whether it is a false or true construct cannot be decided by measurement or science. It is a greater concept that lies deep in our psyche and in the much caster history and legacy of human acts.
I’ve lectured on morality in my YouTube Mythopoeia series on modern fiction and how we have failed in 2021 to help our young people understand good and evil by rejecting the idea that all people are both good and evil.
There’s been a trend in the current generations in power (past 50 years) to demote all evil to some otherworldly abstract truth separate from ourselves. It’s called moral relevancy and is a false idea. From this idea that there is no real “evil” comes distortions of motivation as but selfish acts that are ok as they tie back to survival. Evil has also been rejected as a relic of religious thought, which is also utterly false. And so a form of dark “morality” has taken over people in the current generations in America that has allowed bad people to do bad things and it be ok. It’s ok if you are flawed, or don’t get caught, or you do what everyone else does anyway, or because it’s phony religious dogma it’s meaningless. All are false ideas.
It is this refusal to draw a line in the moral sands between good and evil that may doom Western culture to decline, decadence, decay, and death if we do not address its delusions now.
As a generation that’s largely rejected the modern religious beliefs of their parents, many today have struggled with the idea of being “evil”, failing to not even recognize it in themselves but only see goodness in their institutions, their social contracts, or their government no matter how vile the crime committed. Or they may see the opposite. Seeing nothing “good” in religion or government, yet idolizing evil men and their crimes, they lay waste to the idea of morality in article after article, hoping to gain enough traction in rationalizing their selfish lives.
As a young man growing up in a normal American society, I spent many summers with my Grandfather. Born in 1905, Bentley Sloane had known the early American west and was raised in a time that defined the very birth of America and its pioneer promise to so many of his time. From this early America came the optimism of Modernism. That 1900 belief in the goodness of Man was about the making of American society better for all Men. My grandfather was very much a hopeful Modernist and so a good man.
He was also a church educator and minister for over 70+ years in the Methodist Church. I respected his wisdom and huge generous heart, tremendously. Towards the end of his long life, I asked him many things on our trips together to south Louisiana. He was very much into exploring the last of his childhood stomping grounds in those days. My curiosity about his faith was ever present on those trips. Growing up in the drug and party culture of America in the 1970’s, I saw in him a man so radically different from the men of that age, a man I longed to embrace that yet would not fit in with the fallen views of my peers. I knew yet that his faith however was key to his very being. And so we talked often in the car about Christianity and his views.
One time I asked him, what is Hell? He used to say to me, Hell is not a place but simply “the absence of God”. But then what is evil, I asked him? He told me once the ultimate evil is making good men and good acts to be evil and evil to be good in a world that has lost its bearings. And so Evil, he said, would not just deny the existence of a Creator but reverse its central message and make the Creator out to be Evil incarnate. This flip-flopping of Truth by so many Americans is what has been very scary to watch in 2020, as it reflects perfectly on what my Grandfather had told me. This reversal of evil and good, the confusion of those two truths, would be what threatens our very identity as moral Human Beings. It is an embrace of evil again.
Viewing evil people as good seems so widespread today. We have taken good and decent leaders and made them into some great evil persona that doesn’t exist. In other times we have worshipped evil dictators and made them to be our saviors when in truth we see our own fallen selves in evil men, men who like us we feel deserve a second chance. We sympathize with evil people now, we rationalize their crimes and ours. We then hide behind our Machiavellian selfishness by quoting Friedrich Nietzsche or Ayn Rand. But we cannot deny our evil acts.
In Virginia, racists have been viewed as victims by our political leaders, youth are taught by evil men to see evil in others, and racism is rationalized as a necessary act by evil presidents. And so my Grandfather was right. Evil not only exists but it exists in a form that is contradicting. It is the distortion of fact and truth that drives evil people now.
But this perversion of evil into good also goes on unchecked in entertainment, too. I read RR Martin saw good in Hitler because he said he “liked dogs”. No, Hitler was Evil with a capital “E” for murdering millions! And so the idea we now twist and distort evil into good is troubling. Our politicians do it all the time, by denying us gun laws that might prevent death of hundreds of thousands of adults and children, or voting to deny poor children health insurance so the rich can get more tax breaks. Evil yet lives unchecked and unseen because greed now drives the new value systems in America. Yes evil exists in monetary policy, too.
The fact is, the fight against evil is both in our laws and in our hearts, despite religion. And we seem to have no way to measure it in ourselves nor the courage to draw lines in the sand without threatening our own fallen views and past immoral acts we all still hide behind. Stripping faith from society, evil now runs rampant. Only the thin blue line of a police officer stands between the evil of others and the unchecked evil of strangers in riots. Only a few Paul try laws hope to stop the trillions scanned from our government or the poor by the rich. Only the will of a few good men save an innocent child or save a woman from drowning.
What is left of American goodness often is only the rare human heart of a stranger that somehow knows the difference between good and evil on the streets enough to stand before a drooling mob that doesn’t.
Our so-called moral leaders, many of them, hide from the ugly truth that they too are flawed human beings like all of us, and flawed enough that they too must fight evil in themselves they we do. For the fight to contain our own evil is a war we all must fight and win silently alone. But how can many of us fight without faith, without older and wiser men, without a guidebook to what defines men and women as evil? What line must be crossed?
Many today think money defines goodness, that they are above evil and seem perfect people because they are rich, which somehow entitles them to new powers and innocence from crimes with endless pardons available and fancy friends and lawyers with money to endlessly defend them. They use their money to grant themselves freedom from their own evil ways but worse, the ability to judge others like they are Gods.
As the article states so well….evil may not be our intention. We all have flawed views and perverse realities, at times but seemingly strive to do good. But evil is simply our acts; not the acts judged by a Creator but acts that are judged by our sense of right and wrong and then our peers in court. Fighting evil is the equivalence of embracing our natural Goodness in private and cultivating a life of good acts. But it also plays out in the public sphere. Good and evil love there if we as a society define it. It’s that current lack of definition that is troubling.
The fact we all have sensitivity to extreme acts of evil, like murder, means some goodness lives in all of us. We seem to do newbie have those lines. It is some spirit of something beyond ourselves and yet within the world that lives in us and yet around us in society that we sense. It is religious belief but also something inherent in mankind itself. It has many expressions….religious, natural, or otherwise. Therefore, there is a line in the sand between good and evil, good people and evil people in our minds. And that line is the defense of life or it’s destruction. That is what defines evil to me. And it is selflessness or giving of oneself for others that defines our true goodness. That is Christian faith in a nutshell, as it is the basis for many religions around the world the speak of a God of Love.
And so we must not forget the fact that evil is there for us to embrace or reject in our choices and in our daily lives today. No, evil has not left the human sphere because a few arrogant youth or radical thinkers say it has died. We have forgotten that truth for many years in this country, it seems. But today many uneducated people have revisited faiths once glorious hold on the definition of morality and evil and embraced a more secular religious betrayal regarding the good and evil in people. The result is a divided country with the belief in some that in the fight for money, taxes, and culture wars that the end justifies the means. From that we now live with two moralities. One half can rationalize their evil acts and ideas this way. But there can be only one truth regarding evil. It lives in all men if they choose it.
You are either good or you are evil.
In the end, evil and morality are metaphysical Truths like I have argued, that primitive Mythology has Truth in the modern culture and the many creative minds that still use it. Such truths may seem to float on the outer sphere of outdated religious expression and abstract philosophy. But they yet remain signposts to our shared Humanity; something in our brains and our various cultures that is divine and eternal, and will not nor cannot die. Evil is real.
We need not be like our leaders and politicians and the generations today that seem to have lost their way in the old Postmodern world of rebellious ideas and moral relevancy. We just need to see what other men and women wrote and thought 50 years ago, 100 years ago, a 1000 years ago to see what we have forgotten about ourselves and the continued existence of evil in our Humanity these past few decades. These mighty truths still lie hidden in all of us just like our greed, our racism, our hate, and our lack of empathy for our fellow Man increasingly exists in many people today.
Evil can live in us and in you, if you choose it. It is simply a choice, as my Grandfather once told me. It is up to you to resist its temptations or pay the price for your evil ways, thoughts, and acts. Do not cross its line and not know it was always there as a choice. Don’t be naive! I want you to define yourself as a “good person” bu your choices. But only a new faith, a belief in a loving Creator, or a profound religious view will help you in defining evil in your life enough to avoid it, and therefore in the evolving and vital future that is your existential life.
I ask you to discover and define what is evil to you, though, not just in the wider society. For it is that last step that decides what evil truly is and whether you have become an evil person. You must do this before you rationalize your own crimes as beyond reproach by history, the society, or your nobler peers who in a courtroom or by public opinion on social media may disagree and condemn you.
Evil exists. But only you define it. Only you can decide what evil is as it must define your boundaries. But you just first know it exists. Believing in that one truth is the first step in leading a good life ruled by good acts, which I profoundly hope you will have.
– the Author
Created Oct 8, 2017, 4:02 AM
