I just started reading a book I borrowed from my good friend Tim, entitled "Evil and the Justice of God" by the great theologian N.T. Wright. I am currently concluding chapter 1, which was a synopsis of the problem of evil as defined by modern and postmodern culture. Wright, with the backing of other great
philosophers and theologians from the past and present, insists that we have come to look at the world as slowly getting better, it seems as if there tends to be less evil in out midst. We are progressing towards utopia, even if it means there must be violent means to get there.
Progress.
Progress.
Progress.
Wright goes on to discuss the common thought that Western civilization ("Westernization") and democracy are looked at as the solution to end the evil that is in the world. After the
terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 President George Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair declared that there was an "Axis of Evil" that needed to be dealt with and that it was the their (the politician's) job to "rid the world of evil".
Wright then states that he has seen three things that characterize the "new" problem of evil. First we ignore evil when it doesn't hit us in the face. This is seen greatly in our response to the
AIDS epidemic, the genocide in
Darfur, the illegal sex trade, sweat shop labor, and many other important global
issues that are destroying our world. We are not responding to these
desperate pleas because they
aren't directly effecting us.
Second, we are
surprised by the evil when it does actually hit us in the face. This can clearly be seen in our response to the attacks of 9/11. We were aware of the terrorist groups and knew of the damage they were causing in their own areas, but did not think to look into non-violent ways of stopping it before it was to late. Also, we should have known and acted as Christians on the sanctions the U.S. put on Iraq from 1991-2003, which by 1998 had already caused 1 million deaths due to mass starvation and lack of medical supplies. (Read more here at
http://www.globalissues.org/Geopolitics/MiddleEast/Iraq/Sanctions.asp) It is certain that these sanctions caused
severe unrest among the civilians and aided to continued conflict between U.S. and the Middle East. During the imposed sanctions, which included banning imports of food, medicine and educational supplies, we offered them the generous "Oil for Food" program. "You give us oil, we will give you some food...but not til you give us OIL!"
Disgusting.
Anyway...I'll rant more about that on a later post.
Third, after the evil does hit us in the face, we react in immature and dangerous ways. Wright goes on to site our response to the attacks of 9/11: "One of the most obvious and worrying instances of this phenomenon was the reaction to the events of September 11, 2001. That
appalling day rightly provoked horror and anger. But the official response was exactly the kind of knee-jerk,
un-thinking, immature lashing out which gets us nowhere." He continues that the event was
un-imaginably evil and that thousands of innocent victims died an undeserved death. "But the astonishing naivety which decreed that the United States as a whole was a pure, innocent victim, so that the world could be neatly divided into evil people (Arabs) and good people (Americans and Israelis)..."
Near the end of the chapter, Wright,
referencing Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, deconstructs the idea that there are good people and there are bad people. This idea of good and evil people permits us to have a "us" and "them" mentality. The line between good and evil runs
trough each one of us.
Reflecting on a terrible tragedy such as 9/11, how do we react to obvious evil that is in the world? How do we take seriously things like
Darfur? How do we deal with "Natural" evil (floods, hurricane) compared to "Moral evil (war, genocide, rape)?
