The new form of life (civilized society) that arose inevitably precipitates a new kind of disorder into the human world. And this new kind of disorder delivers a powerful and lasting impetus of a new kind of brokenness into the human world.
We will soon be looking at how that brokenness moves through the human system. An essential concept for understanding the reality of "an evil force" (or "a destructive force") is the idea of "a pattern of brokenness."
What do a war and the people traumatized by that war have in common? One can see in each of them something that's broken, and not whole. One displays brokenness at the level of the intersocietal system, while the other is brokenness at the level of the psyche of individuals.
Very different manifestations, but they share something essential that makes them kindred. That "something" can be conceived in terms of a "pattern of brokenness."
But of course, they have another connection (beyond this shared structure of "brokenness"-- because it was the war that transmitted that brokenness to the traumatized people.
So the second conceptual step in understanding evil is to follow the pattern as it gets transmitted through the system over the course of time.
The brokenness continually changes its particular manifestations. Whether the brokenness is in Form A or Form B, whether it is in a society or a family or an individual, the pattern of brokenness is discernible, as is that pattern's tendency is to transmit itself to whatever it touches, at whatever level, in the human world.
This impetus of brokenness, therefore, can be seen moving through the human system through time like a wave through water. Our attention tends to be on what is specific and concrete. With a wave, what is concrete is the water itself, which just bobs up and down. But there is another dimension of reality -- the wave.
The wave works through the water but is not the water. The wave we see moving cross-wise, even if the water itself does not. Each bit of water does its thing, in place. While the wave moves on. It works similarly with brokenness in the human world.
We tend to look at the brokenness at the concrete level. Like, say, Donald Trump. Brokenness on the human scale, and thus readily visible. Important, and certainly interesting.
But to understand evil, we must perceive more than the water we're standing in. We must look at the wave moving through the system over time--the wave that transmits the energy derived from some impetus that entered the sea.
It is in terms of such "impetus" that, as we will see, the inescapable ongoing dilemma described by the parable of the tribes contributes to the understanding of evil. As a consequence of
- the inevitable anarchy, and thus
- the inevitable struggle for power, and thus
- the inevitable selection for the ways of power, we get
- the brokenness of civilized societies shaped by the requirement for power,
- a requirement that imposes demands sometimes hostile (and in any event indifferent) to the needs and well-being of the human creature,
- demands that get internalized and thus put the human creature at war with itself.
This powerful impetus put the wave -- the force that transmits the pattern of brokenness -- into motion.
As the list above suggests, the matter of the initial impetus must be seen together with the ways that the wave gets transmitted through cultures over time. Together these two components will help reveal that central drama in the human story in which the force of wholeness contends with the force of brokenness to shape the human world.
Cry the Benighted CountryThe mention of that "central drama" in the human story provides an apt place to share with you the opening part of a piece, written in 2015, bearing the title, "Cry the Benighted Country" (and the subtitle "What's Gone Wrong in America").
It was this piece I chose, after much thought, to be the op/ed for a purpose very important to me. My intent with this piece was to draw people in, wanting to check out my then just-published book, WHAT WE'RE UP AGAINST, to see what it had to say about our national crisis.
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