Here's how that piece opens:
"Make America great again," Trump [then just a Republican candidate] says. Not a bad idea, but first we need to understand what's gone wrong.
In every society, both constructive and destructive forces are always at work. But the balance of power between those forces is not constant. Such factors as the quality of its leadership and the impact of its national experience can strengthen either the best or the worst in a society.
Consider, for example, the peoples of Great Britain and Germany at two points in the twentieth century.
In 1910, a time of relative stability before the outbreak of World War I, British society and culture might have been judged moderately healthier than the German--as a result of a somewhat more orderly history over the previous several centuries and of the more democratic structure of power in Britain. But the difference between them was not dramatic.
Thirty years later, the balance of power between the forces of light and darkness in the two nations had become starkly different. In Britain, the words of a new leader, Winston Churchill, summoned forth the best in the British people-- their courage and their commitment to defend humane values.
In Germany, against which those values then needed to be defended, the leadership of Adolf Hitler was bringing forth the worst elements of German culture. While Churchill was inspiring his people to act heroically (in "their finest hour"), Hitler was turning many of his people into moral monsters -- his "willing executioners."
Many of us in America today sense an adverse shift in the balance of power between the elements that have made our nation great, and those that tear down what's best about our nation. Some dimensions of this shift can be seen in three key elements of the American body politic.
(I'll provide the rest of the piece later in this installment.)
What this story contrasting Britain and Germany suggests is that in civilized societies a battle goes on between two sets of forces. And in this battle, as in other battles, one side may play its cards more effectively than the other -- or may be bolstered by the impact of happenstance -- with the result that the balance of power between them shifts.
This power struggle between these opposing forces might reasonably be called "the battle between good and evil."
Evil DefinedI expect that -- from the various pieces of the picture I've presented in the course of this series --readers here have already been assembling in their minds how I'm conceiving of evil. But now seems like a good time for me to articulate more explicitly and systematically my answer to that first question at the beginning of this installment, "What is evil?"
(The following also works to answer "What is the force of the good?" They are analogous forces, working in somewhat similar ways, but working to take things in opposite directions.)
- We should think of "evil" as a force--meaning that it operates to move things within the system in a consistent and identifiable direction. (The same can be said of the force of the good, though the directions are opposite.)
- The direction toward which these forces move things--the consistency of their impact -- has to do with the nature of the order each tends to produce.
In the case of evil, the force works to impart a pattern of "brokenness" to the things it touches. Imparting "a pattern of brokenness" means breaking down those orders that serve and enhance the quality of life in the system. The force of evil works, for example, to replace justice with injustice, integrity with duplicity, peace with strife, ecological health with ecological breakdown, etc.
The force of the good moves things in the opposite direction: where the force of evil destroys the order that enhances life, the force of the good builds and strengthens structures that serve life.
- Each of these forces--the good and the evil--works to expand its domain in the world. Whether brokenness or wholeness gains ground in the world is a function of the balance of power between the two forces at a given time, and that balance can shift depending on how well the two forces operate on the board on which they contend with each other.
- The force of evil has coherence. A dense network of interconnected causes and effects makes it coherent at any given time, so that the different elements of brokenness moving through the system are causally interconnected. That interconnection enables the different elements to reinforce one another, and allows the force to move through time in a coherent way.
(I have written, for example, that the force that drove the nation to civil war has returned in our times -- by which I mean that so striking are the parallels between the characteristics and conduct of the GOP of recent years and those of the South during the 1850s, that we should recognize that what we see is a coherent pattern of brokenness that has managed to perpetuate itself through the generations. As in the 1850s, so also again in our times, that force has gained the power to wreak great destruction on the nation. To a meaningful extent, it is the same "It" that once propelled the United States into a nightmarish Civil War that now once again acts as a wrecking ball on the structures of wholeness of the nation.)
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