The Nature of Evil: A Social Disease or the Result of Original Sin?

Yesterday at coffee after Mass I was talking to someone about a difficult situation and asked if she was familiar with the book, People of the Lie by M. Scott Peck published in 1983. I read it years ago and decided to reread it which I've started. The first chapter, about a man who made a pact with the devil, got me thinking about the nature of evil. Christians have no difficulty recognizing the source of evil. While the secular world often wants to reduce it to environmental issues, bad parenting, trauma, psychological factors, etc. Christians go back to the source in the Garden of Evil when Adam and Eve freely chose to rebel against God and say "Yes!" to the devil. 

Every one of us has the capacity for great evil. We also have the capacity for great good. It's all dependent on our "freedom to choose." God didn't want little robots so He gave us free will. Don't mistake that with the belief that God and the devil are like "The Force." They are not equal adversaries with God unable to prevent evil. Not at all! God only allows evil for the good He brings about through it. That's the absolutely amazing thing about God. He can take the murderer and, through grace, make him a great saint. A friend gave me the letters from prison of Servant of God Jacques Fesch who murdered a police officer and went to the guillotine on October 1, 1957 at the age of 27 after a profound conversion in prison.

Many saints came from terrible backgrounds. Poor little humpbacked and blind Margaret of Costello was rejected, locked up out of sight, and then abandoned by her parents in a strange city. She had the blessing and guidance of a kind priest who helped to form her character as a little one which was cheerful and happy despite her disabilities. And what a precious little beggar she was who brought so much courage and joy to her fellow beggars and residents in Castillo. We don't know what happened to her parents, but we know she prayed for them. 

Mother Angelica's father abandoned her and her mother when she was still a toddler. As a result she grew up dirt poor in Canton, OH. But what a dynamo she became building EWTN from the ground up with the courage to defy men like the disgraced Cardinal Roger Mahony who attempted to have her silenced and denied the sacraments. EWTN has never been the same since Mother Angelica stepped down from its leadership. She was a powerhouse for good! These holy women, raised in challenging circumstances could have reacted by embracing hatred and revenge. They didn't. They freely chose to follow the scriptural dictum to return good for evil. 

The world, on the other hand, enables it. Look at all the violent criminals released from jail who seem to get a free pass which often ends up in their murdering someone.  After being released for dozens of violent crimes, are their murderous acts a surprise? It isn't just the criminal who behaves in an evil way, but the lawyers and judges who with a cavalier attitude toward the community put these evil people back on the street. They seem to have the view projected so graphically in the film West Side Story by the Jets and their song Gee, Officer Krupke.

Peck wasn't the first psychiatrist to talk about the nature of evil and how to address it. A decade earlier, Dr. Karl Menninger published, Whatever Became of Sin? Even earlier, Dr. Fredric Wertham published A Sign for Cain: an Exploration of Human Violence. After his release from a Nazi camp, Viktor Frankl addressed the nature of evil in his 1946 book, Man's Search for Meaning. All these psychiatrists shifted the focus at least a bit to human accountability and free will. They also, mistakenly I believe, think that man (particularly the psychiatrist) has the capacity to eliminate evil. Fix the bad social situations, encourage man to take accountability and we will progress to a non-violent Utopia. Even psychiatrists can be delusional.

Peck, for example, treats evil as an illness:

The only valid reason to recognize human evil is to heal it wherever we can, and (as is currently most often the case) when we cannot, to study it further that we might discover how to heal it in specific instances and eventually wipe its ugliness off the face of the earth.

When I read that, the only thing I could think was "What hubris!" And, in fact, Peck dealt with his own demons later in life before he died in 2005.

What is particularly appalling in the psychiatric community are unethical experiments in the study of evil. Two were, in my opinion, so evil that they could be described as diabolical. One, the Stanford prison experiment headed by Philip Zimbardo as research head, designated volunteer participants as either prisoners or guards. The experiment ended after six days as the guards became more and more brutal toward the prisoners. In some ways the study was rigged to get the results the researchers wanted, but they treated the volunteers with a brutal disregard.

A second study, even worse in my opinion, took place in the early 1960s. The Milgram Experiment tested the response of participants to authority figures. Those being studied were told to administer electric shocks to "volunteers" who simulated pain and distress since they were not really being shocked. Despite their pleas to stop, the authority figure ordered the shocks to continue and escalate in strength. Some of the volunteers obeyed while they openly wept. Was there a long term impact on the subjects who believed they were deliberately inflicting pain on others? I don't know if there was any followup. At any rate, the experiment was evil in itself.

And that, perhaps is a lesson about the willingness of psychologists to do evil in their proposed quest of eliminating evil and achieving good. Every tyrant on the planet has claimed to be creating a Utopia for the masses. When the antichrist comes, he will do the same and back up his claims with the power of Satan.

The real answer to the problem of evil is found in faith in God. The closer we draw to the Creator Who is love Himself, the more we will flee evil and choose good. Yes, psychiatry can have a place, but there is a real temptation for those in positions of power and influence, like psychiatrists, to mistake themselves for God. Only those who are grounded in humility will have any possibility of truly helping others. 

If you really want to understand the nature of evil, a good place to start is with The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis. Lewis never wrote a followup book because getting into the mind of the devil was so dangerous. And that's something about which he and Scott Peck would agree.

And now, I'm going to pray the Litany of Humility. Have a blessed Monday!