The Weight of Evil

Sometimes it is really difficult to get motivated. It seems that the overwhelming weight of evil in the world will crush all efforts at goodness. Just think about people like the late Wangari Maathai and Wes Jackson, and all the good that they have done and do. Think about the people who change the lives of prisoners by teaching them to garden. There must be tens of thousands of such people who have made the world better. (Oh, by the way, Mitt, remind me again: what exactly is the good that you have done for the world?) But for each one of these people there are thousands of selfish people, and thousands of people who have lost all hope. In the past decade or so, over 200,000 farmers in India have committed suicide, mostly using the pesticides that they can no longer afford. Industrial agriculture is considered progress, and it is a relentless force. And it is just one such force in the world. There’s mountaintop removal, and…I’d rather not go on. What can good people possibly do against such odds?

Those who are evil will trounce those who are good almost by definition: the evil people believe in using power to trounce others, and good people believe that this is wrong. Good people believe force is wrong and that reason is right; therefore force is almost always on the side of evil.

For example, Christians who believe in a Jesus who has a sword sticking out of his mouth and believe that they can take whatever they want from gullible followers overwhelm the Christians who believe that these actions are wrong. Consider the arrogant Christian who cuts down every tree he can (I have met one), and the meek one who defends trees: perhaps even more trees get cut down because the presence of the meek Christian affronts and emboldens the arrogant one. The forces of industrial agriculture are relentless; and against them, there is Michelle Obama’s little organic garden. The forces of industrial agriculture even get stronger because many conservatives are offended at Michelle’s garden. (Chemical companies wrote letters to her urging her to use pesticides when she started the garden back in 2009.) Climate scientists explain the scientific evidence of global warming. But climate deniers use force and lies: they literally threaten the lives of climate scientists (see Popular Science, July 2012). The Heartland Institute, which is dedicated to climate denialism and is funded primarily by a single donor, issued a poster that proclaimed climate scientists to be the equivalent of Ted Kaczynski the Unabomber. Senator Jim Inhofe claims that climate scientists may be criminals.

Those in power got where they are by using simplistic thinking and force. It has always been this way. Intellectual honesty has always been the weaker party. It was their logical thinking, rather than their disastrous love affair, that proved the downfall of Heloise and Abelard in 1115. (And it was almost certainly their bracing intellectual honesty, honesty they found so rare in the world, that made them fall so much in love with one another.) Then as now, conservatives (like Bernard of Clairvaux) wanted to control the minds of everyone else and thus found it necessary to keep Heloise and Abelard as silent as possible.

And if there is a powerful, personal God who is present in the world, then he is allowing powerful evil people to be his spokesmen. I can either believe that God wants them to be his spokesmen, or that a powerful personal God does not exist. These appear to be my only two choices. I choose to remain agnostic about the existence of a powerful personal God rather than to believe God is evil.

All I can do is to encourage people of any faith or of no faith to make their world better. I do this through my teaching and writing and personal contacts. I must put these ideas out into the web, where they might do some good, rather than simply writing them down where they can be destroyed. In my teaching, I tell students about the ecological problems of the world. But many studies have shown that they do not listen, because bad news makes them just feel powerless. This is, as this essay attests, understandable. But what can I do? I decided to revive an idea I used a couple of years ago: I had the students make contracts with themselves to reduce their carbon footprint in some realistic but meaningful way. The problem is, I never followed up on it. This fall, I will have them make such contracts with themselves, and then report (as one of their required papers) how much success they had or did not have, and what they learned in the process.

It is easy to feel like Qoheleth, the author of Ecclesiastes, who is nearly immobilized by thinking about the weariness of the world and its weight of evil. “This too is vanity…” And if you feel overwhelmed into inaction, I cannot criticize you, for I almost feel that way myself. But we have one life in which to try to make some difference in the world. And it might work, a little. The world, at least, has not forgotten Heloise and Abelard.