Devices of the Soul (Hardcover)

Chapter 16. Evil

I was raised a traditionalist conservative, and one of the rock-solid virtues of that mindset was a vivid awareness that the line between good and evil runs through every individual heart. This was why one distrusted all schemes for salvation by government and favored the notion of checks and balances. No excess of power should be vested in any one place, because no group of people can claim fully to have healed their own hearts of that fundamental schism.

When we begin to believe that we’ve fingered the true locus of evil “over there” rather than “in here”—when the battle between “us” and “them” is equated with the battle between good and evil—then we have placed ourselves above all evil. This is to make gods of ourselves.

Yes, we must resist evil in the world—resist it for all we are worth. We must strive to represent the good against the evil. This endless, internal striving—never wholly successful, never finished once for all—is, in fact, the decisive thing. But when the evil turns out, after all, to be over there, the striving is no longer necessary. We need only dial in the coordinates and call down the bombs.

This is how disastrous moral reversal occurs. To focus on the evil over there is to forget its strategic alliance with the evil in myself, and this in turn is to convert my own good—now untethered from modesty and rendered tyrannical—into a magnified power for evil. If we follow this path of arrogance, the destruction we call down upon the world may be ...