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Contributors
Bruce S. Thornton - Contributor
Bruce Thornton
is a professor of Classics at Cal State Fresno and co-author
of Bonfire
of the Humanities: Rescuing the Classics in an Impoverished
Age and author of Greek
Ways: How the Greeks Created Western Civilization (Encounter
Books). His most recent book is Searching
for Joaquin: Myth, Murieta, and History in California (Encounter
Books). [go to Thornton index]
 Denying Evil
Blaming the symptoms and not the cause...
[Bruce S. Thornton] 4/1/05
The commentary
on the recent murder of 9 people by a teen-aged gunman at a
Minnesota Indian reservation school tells us as much about
our cultural dysfunctions as
do the killings themselves. As the pundits pore over the killer's life, every
possible cause is analyzed except the one that really counts-the spiritual
problem of human evil.
Instead,
all the usual determinist suspects are rounded up by our secular
culture,
the usual symptoms confused with causes.
Violence in the media and video games, Internet hate groups,
divorce, social isolation, "Goth" fashion, flabby gun
control, inadequate self-esteem-boosting curricula and counseling
services in the schools-all are fingered as culprits, even though
millions of kids who watch violent television, surf disreputable
chat rooms, live in divorced homes, and have easy access to guns
don't kill their classmates.
No one seems
to think that perhaps the problem is not one the practitioners
of the
so-called "human sciences"--psychologists
and sociologists-- can adequately make sense of, let alone solve.
That is why the theologians, philosophers, novelists, and poets
who for twenty-five centuries in the West have meditated on the
stubborn mystery of human good and evil, are conspicuous by their
absence from the op-ed-page and TV-talking-head oracles.
To Christian
thinkers, for example, such acts, while horrific, are not literally "senseless." They
make perfect sense given humanity's fallen condition, our subjection
to the forces
of appetite and passion. Yet despite those restraints we are
still created free, and aided by the grace of Christ, we are
free and able to choose God or to choose ourselves. When we choose
ourselves, we make of ourselves a god and worship our own lusts
and pleasures, including the lust for power. And what greater
power is there for a human than the power to kill?
Nor need there always be material or rational causes for killing.
As Dostoevsky understood, we need no reason to choose evil other
than the mere fact that it exists as a choice, and making that
choice affirms our freedom and displays our power. As Dmitri
Karamazov says, there is war between God and Satan and the battleground
is the human heart, where every day we must choose either to
worship God or to worship ourselves and thus aspire to be god.
Such choices are part of the mystery of human good and evil,
as inexplicable by a material science as are unconditional love
and self-sacrifice and redemption.
Yet religion and theology are dismissed by our official wisdom
as mere superstition and irrational obfuscation. Good, evil,
free will-didn't Marx and Darwin and Freud, that modernist trinity,
teach us that those are all illusions, that our precious selves
are mere material bubbles floating on vast oceans of economics,
genes, evolutionary selection, environment, or unconscious forces?
The determinists have carried the day and have, as Hamlet put
it, torn the heart out of our mystery, leaving us all diminished.
The greater
problem, however, is that our whole civilization is predicated
on ideals
created by those who assumed that spiritual
reality indeed exists, that there is a God who created the world
and made us to be a certain way. That is, we humans aren't just
material things in the world, but transcendent souls that have
value because they are created by God in His image and imprinted
with a moral order not dependent on a material environment or
physical force. Even the Deists among the American Founders believed
in a natural law created and given to us by God, a law our political
structures must reflect and harmonize with. Freedom is the gift
of "Nature and Nature's God," not the consequence of
evolution or genes, the accidental result of random material
forces. So too with human rights--they are universal goods for
all humans because they are expressions of our souls, not our
bodies; gifts of God, not boons bestowed by other flawed men.
This disconnect between our political institutions and morality
created by a spiritual tradition, and our belief that science
can provide an alternative guide to action based on the assumptions
that all causes are material, explains the muddle most of us
find ourselves in when addressing difficult questions such as
abortion or the Schiavo case. For if we are just material things
in a material world, without freedom or responsibility, without
transcendent value and rights just because we are humans created
by God, then on what basis do we build morality other than a
utilitarian calculation that subordinates the individual to some
material good? Why not strangle a baby, then, to create utopia?
Why not slaughter six million to create paradise for many millions
more?
We modern
Westerners are what the Spanish poet Miguel de Unamuno called "spiritual parasites," living
off that rich spiritual tradition and the values and institutions
it created,
even as we discount those same spiritual values and look rather
to the high priests of materialist determinism to make sense
of our world. But is anyone truly satisfied with the chatter
of the determinists? Does anyone think that their reductive explanations
get at the horror of such acts? That science can ultimately say
anything meaningful about what we are, and why we do what we
do, that doesn't in the end depend on radically simplifying the
complex, intricate, unpredictable, quirky reality of our individual
humanity? In short, that doesn't ultimately dehumanize us by
turning us into mere material things in the world, a gob of meat
to be aborted or left to starve to death when it becomes inconvenient?
The frenzy of commentary about school shootings and other acts
of horrific evil suggests that we aren't satisfied, that the
answers can gratify only on the level of ritualistic formulas,
rain-dances that by day's end find us still in our spiritual
drought. Meanwhile, twenty-five centuries of powerful, imaginative
meditations on the human condition that respect its mysterious
complexity and its transcendent reality are ignored. And that,
ultimately, says more about our world as does murder in a high
school or a Florida hospice. tOR
copyright
2005 Bruce S. Thornton
Searching for Joaquin
by Bruce S. Thornton |
Greek Ways
by Bruce S. Thornton |
Bonfire of the Humanities
by Victor Davis Hanson, John Heath, Bruce S. Thornton |
Plagues of the Mind
by Bruce S. Thornton |
Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek
Sexuality
by Bruce S. Thornton |
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