Good and Evil

Tom Raum, of the Associated Press, wrote yesterday (in the Sacramento Bee), that "President Bush sees the world as a struggle between good and evil," and that at the UN Bush "depicted the U.S. as leading the charge to defeat the forces of darkness and to spread freedom and democracy".

And today the White House denounced the coup in Thailand, saying "It is a step backward for democracy" and "The most important thing is to see a restoration of constitutional rule as soon as possible".

But this is an odd sort of good vs evil, an odd sort of spreading of democracy. After all, if the people have the nerve to elect someone unacceptable, we denounce them - witness Hamas, for instance. And remember back in 2000, when Bush was unable to remember the leader of a recent coup in Pakistan General Musharraf's name ... but he did know that he was a general, and he did say that the important thing was that he'd bring stability to Pakistan - and in 2002 he said that "General Musharraf is a leader of great vision and courage." Democratically elected governments, who needs 'em? - at least when the strong man is on our side. Perhaps if General Sondhi Boonyaratkalin takes a page from Musharraf's book, he too can be lauded as bringing 'stability' to the region.

In the struggle between good and evil, good always faces the temptation to become evil - to believe that you can do good by doing bad things and that the ends justify the means. But the means shape the ends. In Serenity, the Operative told Mal that he would not live in the new world he was creating out of the blood of Mal's friends, that there would be no room for him in a good world because he was a monster. He acknowledged the bitter truth that his horrific deeds were no less horrific because the cause he committed them for was noble. It's an interesting philosophical dilemma: can one indeed build Paradise on the bodies of those who disagree with your definitions? Or does one only pave the road to Hell that way?

Bush, however, doesn't engage in this debate. Instead, he redefines good and evil: good is what we do, and evil is what they do, even if the actions are the same, because we are good and they are not. In Bush's mind, good people cannot do evil things, by definition.

This is a genuinely scary belief. It absolves you of any and all guilt connected with what you do. If you define yourself as "good" and then further say that good people can't do evil things - that anything they do is good - how do you distinguish the good from the evil at the end of the day?

Yes, I agree that there is good, and evil. I just don't think there's some sort of by-definition, impermeable boundary between the two.

I know. Liberals are often accused of not believing in evil. Atheists are always accused of it, near as makes no difference. I don't know how representative I am, but I am a liberal. In Europe, I might vote Social Democrat, and in fact I am a democratic socialist ... not that they're a political party, but you get the point. And I do believe in evil.

Oh, not Capital-E Evil, existing in dual tension with Good, either as an equal or doomed to lose. For that matter, I don't believe in Capital-G Good. But I do believe in evil.

Evil is doing deliberate harm to others. It's minimizing happiness - lowering the net happiness, the net comfort, the net good. That means it requires a certain amount of self-awareness to do evil - just as it does to do the reverse. You have to know what you're doing - you have to understand the concepts of good and evil to be able to do them. (Sound Biblical? Nope. The reverse. Think about it.)

So, for instance, viruses aren't evil, no matter how many hosts they kill. How about a chicken-killing dog, slaughtering for the fun of it? I don't think so. The dog may know it's doing something you, its owner, don't want, but evil? That's a stretch. The chimpanzee that murders a member of its group? Yes, I think so.

People? Oh, yes.

Oh, we can do good as well as evil. That's a given. If we couldn't do both, we couldn't do either.

But we can do - we do do - evil. We're doing evil now.

We have to! We're under attack. Our way of life - our country - is threatened! We have to fight back, do everything necessary, anything we can. Anything at all...

Anything at all?

Is it just about survival, then? That's a brute instinct - anything to survive, to just stay alive. Viruses do that, stay alive. Survive.

Throughout history, is that what we've venerated - mere survival?

Who do we praise: the man who stands on the shore watching a drowning child, or the one who jumps in to try to save it, risking death himself, even dying? How about the one who throws the child overboard to save himself?

I used to watch "Rescue 911". One of the things I loved was its celebration of what we might call the masculine virtues - strength, courage, self-sacrifice, the willingness to die to save others. Pretty much every week featured some man doing that. Some hero.

It's not just survival.

And yet survival - mere survival - is being held up as the reason for us to do whatever it takes. We have to be as bad as they are, if not worse, so we can survive this epic struggle.

At what point is that not enough? At what point do we not deserve to survive? When our president goes to Congress to demand the right to torture in secret? When we become what we're fighting? When the hypothetical Man from Alpha Centauri couldn't find a difference between us except the name of our god, and maybe the way we dress?

But we're not evil - we just have to do evil things. (Is that it? Is that what we're telling ourselves?)Once we've defeated our enemies, we'll be good again - no, we're good now, we'll be able to show it again. We'll do good again. This is temporary.

It's an argument, I'll give it that. I'm not at all sure it's valid, but it's an attempt to address the issue. "Yes," it says, "yes, we are doing evil, but the ends do justify the means. This is the only way we can win. If they win, it will be worse. We may be evil, but we're the lesser of two evils." It's not a good argument, perhaps, but it does look the problem in the eye. It doesn't answer the question of how much evil we can commit before we are evil, but it admits the deeds, at least, are. But it does presuppose that our survival is by definition good, even if we no longer are...

And even if we accept that premise, the argument is undercut by two things. The first is the ease with which we humans fall into doing evil. It's not just fun or exciting, it's worse than that - it's banal. It's trite. It becomes commonplace. Remember those soldiers - the ones at Abu Ghraib and others? They got found out because for them evil had become commonplace - so usual, so acceptable, so accepted that they took pictures of themselves having fun and sent them around the world. They didn't understand how anyone could look at those pictures and react with repulsion. They still don't seem to understand. See, that's the problem: evil isn't that easy to stop doing.

And the other thing is that, as I said earlier, we don't want to admit we are doing evil.

We have redefined evil as good.

Once you do that, you can't go back.

We can't stop doing it, because that would involve admitting what we were doing. Bush and his crowd don't offer that rationale, because in their minds we genuinely are not doing evil. We can't. We are Good in this clash for civilization, this epic battle with the forces of darkness, and it's impossible, by definition, that we do evil. There's no danger of us being seduced by the Dark Side - there's no way for it to happen. No matter what we do.

Bush retains a certain amount of sensitivity. He knows he has to use euphemisms. But he, and Cheney, and Rice, and Rumsfeld, and Gonzales - all of them - also know what those fine or those vague words are hiding. And they don't care.

Because this is a fight between Us and Them, and We are Good and They are Evil.

And Good and Evil are just another set of euphemisms.

Edited on Oct 18 to add this link to a speech by Hilary Clinton, which I've only just seen... an eloquent defense of a position that lost.