A Few Thoughts on Good and Evil

What is Evil? Or if you are a modern American, what isn’t Evil? I was compelled to answer this question in my Composition course this past Tuesday and, not having expected to confront such a complicated issue, I thought that I looked absurd discussing it with the others students. But why? Like many people, the defining moment, the one which has trained my notion of how depraved and cruel people can be, was the mass murder of the Jews by the Nazis; this was, of course, what several members of the class brought up to illustrate their points, from whatever perspective they represented, however convincingly they made their points. The Holocaust is, however, quite unique to the American imagination; there are more Holocaust museums in the United States, though it took place in Europe, than there are museums and memorials commemorating the mass murder of Native Americans (Columbus Day is still celebrated), the enslavement of countless African Americans, as well as the unjust “internment” of roughly 2 million Japanese, German, and Italian Americans during World War 2. While observing this startling phenomenon, of American citizens unwilling or unable to account for their countries’ crimes, I cannot help to ask myself: Why, on the one hand, can Americans be so indignant towards crimes committed by governments in other countries while remaining largely indifferent to its own historical atrocities? The answer is, in part: A lack of activism and community.
When I say, “largely indifferent to its own atrocities”, I am, of course, overdrawing my point. More conscious than they once were, Americans have made, in the instance of the Indian case, some sort of general recognition of that genocide. In the instance of Black Civil rights, there have also been made great strides; the election of an African American president will attest to that. In fact, just looking at the frontrunner candidates for a major party, a black man and a woman, ought to convince one of the strides that have been made in the United States in the past 40 years.
But how were those strides made? Was it a gift from an angel? Or did a bureaucrat decide one day “I think I’ll get rid of segregation for them”? No. The reason, which isn’t supposed to be discussed, incidentally, is because of the hard work of the mass activism that took place in the 1960s, in large part; people formed together in groups, began to develop ideas and determined what they thought and wanted to see done, and carried out plans to see those ideas come to fruition.
“But hasn't that lack of discipline, that wanton disregard for authority, led to the current breakdown in values”? Yes, without a doubt, there are many failures to point to around us. But I am not convinced, as I experience the political climate around me each day , that that is purely, or to even a small extent, the result of the activism in the 1960s.
First of all, we must acknowledge that the activism of the 1960s was, for the most part, crushed. There is a very rich record that we could look at which lays out in detail the White House’s anti-dissident agenda, both at home and abroad; the most shocking is the COINTEL (Counterintelligence) Program [1], perhaps the most dramatic attempts by the political class to crush free thought since the Palmer Raids [2] four decades earlier. My question is: Why did those movements require our representatives to crush them? Here, we come back to the problem of evil.
The activism of the 1960s, all progressive activism in fact, has a particular goal: Making people aware of oppression. The activist tells us: Oppression is not foisted on people, it is learned. For instance, a major pro-slavery intellectual, George Fitzhugh [3], made, to the comprehension of Americans in the late 1800s, many highly compelling arguments for slavery. He said to the Northerners, in essence, “We Southerners aren’t racist because, unlike you, we take care of our slaves. Where you have a system in which the capital is concentrated and people are forced to rent themselves to survive, we don’t dispose of them when we are through; Here, slaves aren’t debased or humiliated, they are treated with respect, fed, educated, allowed to live in peace.” Reading the record now, many workers took that argument quite seriously. Generally speaking, when people want to make arguments, they don’t try to simply snub people, but rather develop their idea along lines that would be generally agreeable to everyone else. That is what Fitzhugh did, that is what his counterparts in the North did, and the result may be that, if unchecked, a lot of oppression could be ingrained in people’s consciousness'. The activist, therefore, calls for a circumstance, or an arrangement, in which people can argue and be skeptical in as free a manner as possible or necessary, in other words, democracy.
The case of slavery in the United States is interesting, actually; If we were to ask the typical slave owner if what he thought he did was evil, it is my assurance that he would not; he would probably think, for the reasons that I enumerated above, that he was free of blame, that he regarded himself as good and obeyed the law. I can sense myself coming closer to a trap, so I must jump back: Because I am saying it appears obvious that values are incredibly variable and indistinct, seeming to come without in as many instances than from within, does not mean that I believe a person’s capacity for good or evil is just as changeable.
When observing people, we see they have many ostensible traits, ones that lead us to conclude that they have a moral faculty; what that faculty is, however, is a complete mystery. What we look at may indicate things, but the possibilities are so varied and complicated, no definitive conclusions could be made now about the idea of something like a human moral faculty. On the one hand, there is cruelty, sadism, genocide, sexual abuse; by the same token, there is kindness, mutual support, respect for human rights, mass democratic movements. My contention is that if people are ever to begin to discover the moral faculty, they must by necessity develop a mutual arrangement, one which would maximize the opportunities and incentives for healthy human behavior. I’m speaking, of course, about democracy.

1. http://www.icdc.com/~paulwolf/cointelpro/churchfinalreportIIIa.htm
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_raids
3 http://reactor-core.org/cannibals-all.html