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Evil and the Oval Office: A Spiritual, but also Naturalistic, Perspective on the Bushite Regime
By Andrew Bard Schmookler (about the author) Page 1 of 2 page(s)
For OpEdNews: Andrew Bard Schmookler - Writer
THE CONCEPT OF EVIL, RECAPITULATED
I've said many times that the most important deepening of my understanding in my two-plus years of this anti-Bushite mission has concerned the phenomenon of evil. It was toward the end of the summer of 2004 that I began thinking of the Bushite forces in terms of evil and I continued to grapple with the subject into the summer of 2005. My explorations culminated in my writing the essay, "The Concept of Evil: Why It is Intellectually Valid and Politically and Spiritually Important."
(That essay can be read at www.nonesoblind.org/blog/?p=91 and the video of my giving a talk about those same ideas can be seen at http://nonesoblind.org/video3.html
I argued there that our religious tradition's vision of there being at the core of the human drama an ongoing battle between good and of evil is not, as many of us have supposed it to be, a case of "primitive," "black-and-white" thinking. It is, rather, a profound insight into a level of reality that is more vast and deep than we can generally perceive in our usual frame of mind.
My own envisioning of this battle of good against evil did not affirm the traditional ideas of God and Satan, i.e. of supernatural conscious beings who command vast forces in that battle. Rather what I believed visible --in the large perspective of human cultures moving through history-was the persistence of forces that work either to create those structures that serve the needs of life or to destroy those structures. "These forces seem comprehensible in naturalistic terms," I wrote, "but also so vast and enduring that they require an expansion of our usual narrow perspective for us to perceive them; so subtle and transcendent in their operation that they do seem of a spiritual nature-acting as if they were animated by benign or malign intention."
The phrase "as if" figured several times in my presentation of evil, particularly when I described the "opportunism" of the forces of evil. I described the breakdown in recent decades in America of many of the important moral structures of goodness, and then spoke of how that breakdown created an opportunity that "evil" forces and patterns have seized, "as if they were animated by some spirit of darkness looking to expand its empire."
Much of the time, this vision of things remains too deep and too vast for me to encompass with my mind. But at moments of what feels like fuller insight, I again see evil working in this way. It is in one of those moments that, a couple of weeks ago, I felt that I grokked a dimension of how and why it is that the evil forces of the Bushites have arisen in America in this time.
THE NATURALISTIC EQUIVALENT OF SATAN
On one point I would like again to be clear: I do not believe in Satan. At those moments, however, when I am most able to encompass in my mind the complex and interlocking patterns of destructiveness, and envision their interactions and unfolding over time, I believe I glimpse the naturalistic equivalent of the Evil One: an opportunistic force that plays to win.
If you were the Evil One, and your goal was to extend the dominion of the forces of darkness and destruction as far across the world as you could, what would be the most important points on the playing board of the world to control? Surely, a big part of the answer would be: those points from which the most power is wielded. That's because it is because it is the nature of power that for better or for worse-it can impose its imprint upon what it touches.
The nodes of power are, therefore, central battlegrounds in the struggle between good and evil in the world. For that reason, if one grants the premise of evil's opportunism, one would expect that any governmental power anywhere in the world would be a continual temptation and target for any "naturalistic equivalent of evil." But this would be especially so with regard to the Oval Office in recent years, i.e. since the end of the cold war, when the United States was left as "the world's one remaining superpower."
With no power on the planet powerful enough to check that American power, the Oval Office presented evil with an exceptional opportunity to spread its broken ways across the world.
From the Oval Office, a great deal can be broken in the world, as we have lamentably witnessed.
And, such are the workings of the multi-dimensional patterns and forces that comprise evil that, in the United States, the Bushite forces coalesced, gathering forces on the fringe of the political arena, and proceeded to march their way into almost a degree of control over the American superpower that seemed for a time virtually unchecked.
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