Before we begin today’s sermon, I am obliged by the curious ethical system that guides modern journalism to declare an overt bias. I am in favour of good, and against evil. (And be warned: few with the opposite bias are prepared to declare it.) In my own defence, I will state that my “preferential option for good” is not entirely self-interested. In the longest view, I trust that it will be. But in the short term, and on this planet, I don’t see people getting points for it.
As John Milton discovered (and William Blake famously nailed), evil tends to win the theatrical competitions. Milton’s Lucifer was the livelier and more exciting cosmic presence in Paradise Lost. The journalist in Milton intuitively grasped what publishers have been betting through the intervening centuries: that the life of a sinner is easier to sell than the life of a saint. And this, perversely enough, even though the lives of the saints are often more interesting.
The Devil trades on plausibility, and his argument that “the saints are boring” repays the very little thought most people are willing to devote to the issue.
Another of his arguments is that people who publicly favour the good, often shy from it privately. (My own case comes immediately to mind.) Moreover—and here is an especially clever insinuation on the part of Old Nick—the people who boast most recklessly of their goodness, are least likely to deliver. (The Devil will even tell you the truth, when it is to his advantage.)
But the lies here are old ones, and the new ones—the lies I associate with the “postmodern” party of Marx, Freud, Darwin, Nietzsche, Sartre and descendants—have the advantage of being less undermined. The postmodern view, now settled into the academy, the media, and the other bureaucracies, is that “good” and “evil” are mere words; or if they mean anything at all, irrelevant.
From the Devil’s point of view, this is an improvement on the old system, in which everyone “believed” in some religious revelation, even if only nominally and for show, and no one wished to be seen taking the Devil’s side. Hypocrisy was of course endemic in the old system, as it is endemic in all human life. But better that hypocrisy than the kind that claims to make no distinctions, and yet does decisively persecute the good, and with a real vengeance.
“What is truth?” asked Pilate, who washed his hands. I was remembering this remark while listening to a snippet of the U.S. presidential campaign this last week. My less-favoured candidate was asked when human life begins. He replied, that this question was above his pay grade. (The other candidate replied, immediately and correctly: “At conception.”)
To the postmodern mind, it is a very low question that is above no one’s pay grade. The postmodern mind has the sophistication of Pilate. It will not stoop to using words like “evil” to describe anything at all. Therefore, it is in no position to identify anything at all as “good.”
When President Bush used the term “evil” to describe the perpetrators of the 9/11 terror attacks, and then followed this up by using the same word to describe all those supporting them, I was thrilled. Perhaps I thrill too easily: but it seemed a moment when, with a single word, a man in a position of real power had cut through generations of lies.
The sophisticated people were too stunned by the events, to respond immediately to that Texan’s quaint “lapse” of vocabulary. Soon, however, they recovered their poise, and accused the man of being “simplistic.” I do not carry any brief for simpletons, per se, but there are forms of “simplisme” that deeply appeal to me, and one of them is making the more obvious distinctions between good and evil.
But to make them at all requires a bit of courage, especially at the present day. The courage may well come from a moment of alarm—courage to one man, cowardice to another. That such distinctions can be validly made, I take for granted, though not from any empirical scientific test, for there is none that can be designed to test the proposition. The greatest truths are too deep for science.
Nor can anyone with a functioning mind believe that good and evil are always presented to us at face value, as starkly as they were juxtaposed on that memorable September morning. Under normal (and normally less urgent) circumstances, prudence dictates some analytical thinking. Under abnormal (and extremely urgent) circumstances, when there is no time to think, we must rely on the habits formed by a lifetime of analytical thinking on specifically moral questions.
Which is why so few of our contemporaries are prepared, as Boy Scouts and Girl Guides used to “be prepared,” to respond when the question suddenly arises: “What must I do?” For how does one respond when one has spent a lifetime avoiding just such questions?
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