Who You Gonna Call?

The calling of Simon and Andrew.

Aside from the Beatitudes, there is a second way the New Testament typifies the good person—or rather, a third, for there is the obvious criterion of objectively moral acts. Look at whom Jesus selected as his special followers, his apostles.

Not the conventionally moral. He chooses Matthew, a tax collector—rather as if he had chosen a used car salesman today. Not well-educated, wealthy, upstanding citizens: carpenters and fishermen.

Matthew 4:18-22 New International Version (NIV): Jesus Calls His First Disciples:

18 As Jesus was walking beside the Sea of Galilee, he saw two brothers, Simon called Peter and his brother Andrew. They were casting a net into the lake, for they were fishermen. 19 “Come, follow me,” Jesus said, “and I will send you out to fish for people.” 20 At once they left their nets and followed him.
21 Going on from there, he saw two other brothers, James son of Zebedee and his brother John. They were in a boat with their father Zebedee, preparing their nets. Jesus called them, 22 and immediately they left the boat and their father and followed him.

There are a few striking things here. First, note that in both cases, brothers are called as a group. This implies that there is something in their family situation, as siblings, that makes them suitable. Now note too that they abandon their family situation with alacrity. “At once.” In the case of James and John, they actually abandon their father sitting in the boat. If he was not absolutely furious about this, he must at least have wondered what was going on. But he gets no explanation. “They left their father Zebedee in the boat with the hired men and followed him” (Luke).

So leaving the family situation seems to involve specifically leaving the father, or the parents.

To drive the point home, a little later, a man approaches Jesus asking to become a disciple, as soon as he has buried his father. Jesus refuses him: “Leave the dead to bury their own dead.” When his own mother appears and asks him to come home, he responds “What have I to do with thee, woman?” And he tells others, “Call no man father but your father who is in heaven.” This is often taken as a rap against the Catholic Church, for calling priests “Father.” This misses the plain meaning of the phrase, which is far more radical. So much for family values.

Jesus discourages another potential follower with the cryptic observation “Foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests, but the son of man has nowhere to lay his head.” This seems to make leaving one's home the essential feature of Christian discipleship. Instructing his apostles for their evangelizing mission, he says “Brother will deliver brother over to death, and the father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death” (Matthew 10:21). “I have come,” he warns “to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law. And a person's enemies will be those of his own household. Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.” (Matthew 10:35-7). This is sometimes translated as “he who does not despise his father and mother is not worthy of me.”

The Twelve: Romanesque.

This is surely a consistent message. One can only go so far with it: the Old Testament does say “honour thy father and thy mother. And Jesus himself reaffirms the Old Testament commandment to “honour thy father and thy mother.” The apparent conflict can be explained, at least in part, by understanding the Old Testament commandment to refer specifically to an obligation to care financially for your parents in old age, as they provided for you in childhood. Even given this, however, surely it is too much to say that there is something wrong with families and parents as such. Like anything else in creation, they are an intrinsic good; but a good too easily transformed into an idolatry, preventing a greater good. It seems that the New Testament and Jesus hold that there is something terribly wrong with some families, and, specifically, with the families of those especially called to be Christians.

In other words, the sheep, the good people to whom Christianity is in the first place addressed, are those who are products of abusive and dysfunctional families.

The fact that those Jesus calls are ready to drop everything and leave their families at once to follow him—to run away-- is, to him, prima facie proof that they are indeed the ones he is seeking. They have been seeking an opportunity to escape.

Remember all those worries about religious cults in the sixties and seventies? Remember parents hiring “deprogrammers” to kidnap their own children? Early Christianity must have been like that. Kids from dysfunctional, overly controlling families, are naturally and properly called to a religious life.

It does seem as though there must be a large middle ground, between those who have suffered abuse from dysfunctional families, on the one hand, and the hypocrites and Pharisees on the other. Doesn't that leave a lot of people out?

Maybe not. Nothing in the New Testament promises salvation to the vast majority. Quite the reverse, in fact.

Narrow is the way ...

But it may also be that there is a reasonable distinction to be made between apostle and disciple. It may be that abuse conditions you for a position of leadership, of priesthood, like the apostles, while simply avoiding hypocrisy is sufficient for lay discipleship. The apostles, as the first priests and bishops, are given special charisms and a special mission: to heal the sick, cast out demons, and raise the dead. Not your everyday “good deeds,” as the boy scouts understand it. They are, like the survivors of the Dymphna complex in literature, spiritual healers and spiritual heroes.

Not incidentally, we have an obvious solution here to the current shortage of priests in the Catholic church. God may be sending us the shortage to alert us that we have been looking for vocations in the wrong places. Perhaps we should leave our recruiting pamphlets in the psychiatrists; offices.

Second, this suggests that the depressed, and perhaps the mentally ill in general, are a valuable resource we have been simply squandering. Instead of being shunned and put in institutions or on welfare, they should be consulted by those who are ill, especially those who are “mentally ill.” They might well, as the traditions suggest, have the charism of healing.

I note that this is the common assumption in shamanic societies. Even in modern Korea, I discovered that those showing symptoms of mental illness, indeed psychosis, commonly go on to make a profession and a living for themselves as mudangs, shamans. Leading comfortable, “normal” lives. In our culture, some make a life for themselves as “artists,” using their special sensitivity to the spiritual. But due to a very small market for the arts, that can only be a small minority of the abused.

Which is a waste.

People of the Lie

Eve's temptation, as imagined by Gaugin.

We don't like to admit the very existence of human evil. We want to deny that hell exists, that the devil exists, or that anyone is bad to the marrowbone. We even hate those, like the Catholic Church, who remind us of the possibility of evil. This is strange, because the twentieth century can best be understood as a massive eruption of human evil: Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and their many imitators. There were no doubt genocides before the twentieth century, but they were rather rare. Now they are commonplace.

But we even have trouble accepting this overwhelmingly obvious fact. Just about everyone agrees that Hitler was evil; but probably only because he lost that big war, and got himself safely killed. In his day, he had a lot of ordinary Germans on his side. Stalin and Mao still have their admirers; Mao still has many. Feminism and abortion have killed and crushed more than either, yet it is highly controversial to say that they are evil. Someone has rightly said, that no bad government ever gets overthrown because it is evil; governments only get overthrown because they are incompetent.

The principal reason for this is an unspoken pact among us. If we deny the existence of evil, we get a free pass on our own actions. We need no longer worry about whether we have done right or wrong.

This is the verdict: Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light because their deeds were evil. Everyone who does evil hates the light, and will not come into the light for fear that their deeds will be exposed. -- John 3:19-20.

War in heaven: Bosch.

Some of this too, no doubt, is a natural fear reaction: speak of the devil, and he may appear. You don't want him to notice you, so you pretend not to notice him. It may not be terribly logical, but it is a typical human gambit: whistling past the graveyard.


Some too is the much less creditable hope that, by remaining silent, or even by cooperating, the evil will pass you by and turn their glance on someone else.

The man looked frantically round at the other prisoners, as though with some idea that he could put another victim in his own place. His eyes settled on the smashed face of the chinless man. He flung out a lean arm. 

‘That's the one you ought to be taking, not me!’ he shouted. ‘You didn't hear what he was saying after they bashed his face. Give me a chance and I'll tell you every word of it.He's the one that's against the Party, not me.’ The guards stepped forward. The man's voice rose to a shriek. ‘You didn't hear him!’ he repeated. ‘Something went wrong with the telescreen. He's the one you want. Take him, not me!’ - George Orwell, 1984.

Hence the Stockholm syndrome, the trusty kapo of the camps, the Uncle Tom. The now-famous Milgram experiment seems to prove that, confronted with a case of clear evil, most ordinary folks will willingly cooperate. Sixty-five percent of us, in fact, given the chance, will obey to the point of apparent murder. In other words, society is no protection against evil.

Adolf Hitler as the messiah.

Another discreditable but routine human reaction to evil is victim blaming. It is unfortunately reassuring to convince ourselves, whenever we see another suffering, that in some way they brought it upon themselves. This relieves us of the stress of fearing that the same thing might happen to us; and it relieves us of the moral responsibility of either helping them or risking standing up to evil. This is no doubt extremely helpful to the evil among us. It is also the underpinning of the doctrine of reincarnation endorsed throughout the east: if some poor wretch is being stabbed at your feet, it is no doubt because he tortured spiders in some past life. No call nor point in helping him out now.

So far, so bad. But then too, I suspect some of the problem with recognizing evil for evil comes from the fact that evil is by its very nature ambiguous. God created all things in this world. He created all things essentially good. Evil is therefore not a thing in itself, but only a relative absence of good: evil occurs when a greater good is sacrificed to a lesser (privatio boni). This so, it is always possible to point to some good in any evil. Without a decent sense of proportion, therefore, the very distinction between good and evil can casually be lost. This is what we see in “moral equivalence,” for example. Every evil person can give some sort of justification, some superficially plausible rationalization, for every evil deed, to himself or herself or to others.

Another complicating issue is the Christian belief in the universal availability of salvation. God also created every person. He created no one evil, and no one to be damned. Salvation is available to everyone, even the utterly wickedest of us, given that we repent. So in this sense it is wrong to characterize anyone as “evil.” Their nature is good, for they were created good, and may still return to goodness. Their deeds are evil.

Still, the Bible does speak of sheep and goats. Hell is there for someone. At least at the point of death, some of us will have indeed become irredeemable, and there will no longer be any walking anything back. In fact, understanding evil seems to be one of the keys to the New Testament. There, Jesus and John the Baptist don't appear to hold back much in describing the scribes and Pharisees as evil in so many words. They are called “full of hypocrisy and wickedness,” and asked “How will you escape being condemned to hell?” Jesus blames them for “All the righteous blood that has been shed on earth,” and tells them “you do not enter the kingdom of heaven.” They are introduced as “children of hell” (Matthew 23:13). Not a sterling example of “gentle Jesus, meek and mild.” Denying evil, despite much propaganda by non-Christians and anti-Christians, is not a Christian virtue.

One of the Buddhist hells, in which the permanently evil torture mere ordinary sinners. Tiger Balm Gardens, Singapore.

So, God's truth, there does seem to be an identifiable group or class of people in the world who are rightly described as the bad guys. And it may only be cowardice or duplicity that keeps us from plainly seeing and saying it.

I have recently been reading the book People of the Lie, by M. Scott Peck. Peck, a psychiatrist and a Christian, argues that we need to accept the psychiatric reality of evil, as we do with other psychiatric diagnoses, so that we can study it. So someone can be diagnosed as “evil” in the same sense someone else can be “schizophrenic” or “depressed.”

I have problems with this approach, but that would, at present, be a tangent. The point is that he, as a psychiatrist, claims to encounter genuine evil regularly. If it is not a psychiatric diagnosis, it is the cause of many psychiatric diagnoses in others—its victims.

Mao Zedong as centre of the universe.

Peck does not give his own clear diagnostic criteria, so far as I can see, but he does make a distinction between those who are evil and those who are merely sinners. We are all, of course, sinners. He says that “evil people,” “people of the lie,” are distinct in the consistency of their evil. It is as if they have at some point, like Faust of legend, made a pact with the devil. They have made up their mind, whenever there is a conflict, to follow their own self-interest in preference to their conscience.

This does not, according to Peck, usually produce obvious and dramatic results. We are not talking here about serial killers. Perhaps the only person who consistently sees such cases, and sees them clearly, is the psychiatrist, through meeting their victims. Because the truly evil rarely end up in prison.

Most folks behind bars, Peck says, are merely mentally ill; while the truly evil are seen by others on the whole as good, upstanding citizens. This surely stands to reason. An evil person is a person who puts his or her own self-interest or personal desires above all else. It is in nobody's obvious self-interest to go to prison, or to be identified publicly as a criminal. Accordingly, anyone who is both evil and in prison must be significantly incompetent at being evil—of quite low intelligence. Most will have ended up there not because they are evil, but either because they are self-destructive or have been put in some desperate situation.

And should it be any surprise that this is just what the New Testament suggests as well? Without saying that their crimes are okay, the New Testament, and Jesus, make a point of never condemning criminals as criminals, as Jesus refuses to condemn the woman taken in adultery. Indeed, Jesus himself is executed as a common criminal; what could be a clearer statement of solidarity than that? The thief crucified next to him is also pointedly identified as good, indeed a saint, ready for heaven instantly, with time served, with no intermediate stop in purgatory. As if the point were not already made, at the very moment that Jesus insists that some people are good, sheep, and some people are bad, goats, he implies that those in prison are not among the goats. Jesus says that any man we might visit in prison is in some sense Jesus himself; and it is by visiting them that we show ourselves to be of his flock of sheep (Matthew 25).

Instead, according to both the Bible and Dr. Peck, the truly evil are to be found among the most “respectable” classes, those who are generally thought well of by society as a whole. The leaders, the city fathers. And this stands to reason. Thinking only of what is best for themselves, and holding that they are intrinsically wonderful, the truly evil are going to do what they can to amass both prestige and power over others. The devil, as they say, is a gentleman.

Jesus makes this point by describing them, as a class, as “hypocrites,” a term used in the original Greek to refer, among other things, to actors. They are people playing a social role, who are the opposite of the way they appear, “whited sepulchers.” Peck makes the same point by calling them “people of the lie.” They are probably not going to break any laws, and they are not going to attack anyone from the front. It will be the knife in the back, the sly manipulation, the short-of-criminal con. It will be hate disguised as love, evil disguised as righteousness, selfishness disguised as selflessness, black disguised as white. The lie must be their basic tool; this no doubt is why Satan is called “the father of lies.”

Satan's own sin, the fundamental sin of all sins, was to imagine himself as God. This is the archetype of evil: the ego elevates itself to godhood, imagines itself the true and proper centre of the universe. It is Adam and Eve's sin in turn: they ate the apple not just in disobedience to God and their conscience, but that “they might become as gods” themselves. Every evil person is a little self-proclaimed idol. (In this context, it is both telling and frightening that it is commonplace now for women of the feminist persuasion to refer to themselves as “goddesses”). This distinguishes him or her from the general run of sinners, who often will go against their conscience for their own self-interest, but will tacitly recognize the wrongfullness of this, later surrender to their guilt, and repent. In the end, most of us accept that other people have the same abstract rights as we do. The evil do not accept this to be so. Other people are things, put there for their benefit.

Atheists will here object that they are perfectly capable of being moral people without believing in
God, much less bowing the knee to him. And that is true, if by this they mean the traditional depiction of the Judeo-Christian God specifically. But in philosophical terms, bowing to God is the equivalent to bowing to the reality of objective truth and objective justice, objective right and wrong—which even the pagan Greeks would have recognized, as Dike. God is this personified: the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. As AA puts it, “A power greater than ourselves, however we might conceive it.”

Faust plays chess with Mephistopheles.

The next point is that this violation of the first great commandment, to love God (or justice) with your whole heart, leads automatically to the violation of the second, to love your neighbour as yourself. Satan's rebellion against God led him to seek harm to Eve and her children as well. Adam and Eve's transgression led in turn to the second great sin of Genesis, Cain's killing of his brother. When you reject God, or truth, you reject your fellow man as well. You begin to actively do harm. This is because truth as moral centre is automatically replaced by ego as moral centre.

Peck explains this as a need to scapegoat. In an effort to quell the voice of their own conscience, the actively evil need to project their sins onto someone else, and punish them, in order to feel righteous. So Satan stands in as “the accuser,” in for instance the Book of Job, justifying himself as a kind of prosecuting attorney ferreting out evil in us mortals, and supposedly punishing it in hell. This is also ther type of the scribe or Pharisee in the New Testament, who stand as judges over the people, laying additional burdens on them and making no effort to help. This is the universal bully. In practice, it can become sadism, deliberate cruelty.

We see this in history. It is said that those who sought to avoid the evil attentions of Vlad the Impaler were obliged to praise him as the “scourge of God,” doing God's work in ferreting out and punishing evildoers. That was how he wanted to see himself; and, since we all have some tendencies to evil, this ruse can always work. Idi Amin's system was to have one prisoner beat another to death, and then to ask a third prisoner to beat the second prisoner to death for this crime, and so on. By doing so, he kept his own conscience, presumably, clear. Each man was being executed justly in turn, for he had given in to temptation in hopes of saving his own life. As the evildoer's conscience becomes more and more insistent in telling him that he has done somthing wrong, he becomes more and more active in seeking and punishing scapegoats to alleviate his own guilt. Put him or in a position of supreme power, and the result will be a holocaust.

But this notion of scapegoating is not the whole story, surely. It is not clearly what happens in the story of Cain and Abel, which suggests that it is not the true, primordial genesis of brother-on-brother evil. Here, the problem is simply and clearly that Cain perceives God as liking his brother more. 

The scapegoat.

This too makes good sense. If an individual ego has made up its mind that it is and ought to be sovereign, any demonstration of any kind of attention given to or superiority shown by another being, however inadvertent, is a direct challenge to and attack on that sovereignty. It is, within this distorted view, itself satanic; it is an act of rebellion against the rightful God, who is, of course, John Doe. So the evil person can feel justified in doing any act of harm to another whom he or she considers a threat to his cosmic supremacy.

This is indeed what led to the crucifixion of Jesus the Christ. The keepers of the law could not tolerate the direct appearance of God himself, for it threatened their own authority. God himself was rebelling against them. He had to and in some twisted sense deserved to be put to death.

So too in Cain's deed, he is demanding that God, not just Abel, submit to his will. 

Cain and Abel, by Durer.

As with the Nazis and the Jews. Let's be honest: the real source of the Jews' problems was (and is) that they were too genuinely impressive in their accomplishments. There was certainly scapegoating too, but this original sin led to their choice as a scapegoat.

Put these two factors together, scapegoating and envy of the good, and you have a truly demonic force. You have a human wrecking machine.

You have the people of the lie. And we need to understand that they walk among us. We are sheep among ravening wolves, as Jesus said.

What Is Your Social Class?

Upper class Burmese couple, 1890s.

I recently tried a quiz offered by the Christian Science Monitor, “What is your social class?” It put me in the middle class, which is just about spot on. Ain't nobody here but us bourgeois. But I found the analysis behind the questions shocking. It turns out that the current American upper class, based on real science, is the "small slice of society that tends to feel the least bound by the legal and moral rules observed by other Americans” In other words, the US has a corrupt and immoral upper class. 

If this is news, it is bad news. It seems to me that keeping the upper class honest is the sine qua non of civilizational success. This is the whole ball o'wax. It is what codes of chivalry, Confucianism, gentlemanliness, honour, professional ethics, are all about trying to do. That fight is always an uphill fight, because there are always fewer practical constraints on an upper class; self-indulgence is an eternal temptation. And the New Testament is no doubt right that the poor are always more ethical than the rich. But I do suspect things have gotten much worse since the Sixties, which were largely a rebellion by the upper classes against any constraints on their desires.

Police lead upper class New Yorkers through the slums of Five Points, 1880s.

A corrupt upper class is the sole difference between the Third World and the First. I suspect as well that the New Testament's persistent warnings about the corruptabiltiy of the upper class are the secret key to the Christian West's tendency to keep ahead of the rest of the world on most measures of social success. The upper classes are now in open rebellion against all that, in a way we have not seen for almost two thousand years.

On specifics, the studies behind the CSM quiz show that the American upper classes of this day are 1) more inclined to envy; 2) less inclined to courtesy (i.e., stopping for a pedestrian); 3) more inclined to steal; 4) more inclined to lie; 5) less inclined to trust or think highly of others; 6) less able to read others' emotions; 7) more inclined to spoil their children; 8) vastly less inclined to enjoy gospel music; 9) more likely to be atheist or agnostic; 10) less likely to give to charity; 11) more concerned about status in buying clothing. 

Hunting tigers out in India.

All bad traits, it seems to me.

Number six is particularly interesting: it suggests that the upper classes have less empathy for others. It also suggests that one does not get ahead in this culture by being sensitive to the feelings of others, but by being insensitive to them: that "emotional intelligence," to the extent that it really is a key ingredient in personal material success, is not a matter of learing empathy, but of learning psychopathy.