An age of evil or just of spiritual flabbiness?
This post is a response to Eugyppius' recent post
Calling the protagonists "evil" has always made me uncomfortable, although it is hard to deny the evil of the past three years' events. Eugyppius (see below)
https://www.eugyppius.com/p/why-we-must-mock-the-virus-pests/comments?utm_source=substack%2Csubstack&publication_id=268621&post_id=107797161&utm_medium=email%2Cemail&isFreemail=true&comments=true
has helped me to understand why - evil has, as he says, eschatological connotations that remove it from the quotidian "mundaneness of evil" we can more easily comprehend. Great crimes appear to occur in small steps. Each small immoral step becomes magnified in time and scope as its effects ripple outwards. The people committing these apparently petty crimes are not "evil" people. They are people who have been seduced, cajoled, browbeaten, or coerced into playing their roles. Often they do not often see the downstream implications of their moral lapses. In fact, misled by others in similar positions, most are apt to view their lapses as on balance, a moral plus, in spite of having misgivings about the means employed toward those imagined good ends. In this way, small moral failings grow to monstrous proportions, where unimaginable crimes naturally ensue. It is easy to see all this in retrospect, but to forecast them ahead of time is more difficult.
What I think can be said is that the moral slippages we have seen occur over the past three years can only occur when the society as a whole is morally weak. The past hundred or more years of history, possibly more, have seen a slow weakening of morality, as greed, the advancement of the individual at the expense of the community, and the weakening influence of religious teachings have advanced the secular mission of Western civilization. Western civilization has led to some major advances, not only in economic,, political and cultural realms, but also in moral realms, but our spiritual selves have grown weaker. We see this in the confusion of morals and identity that abound, and the moral relativism the Liberal tradition has unraveled into. It is high time for a renewal of our spiritual beings, along with a renaissance of integrity and higher moral aspirations for ourselves and our institutions. It's not about going to Church or Temple more. It's about inculcating into our children, our institutions and ourselves an attitude of open-minded inquiry about spiritual matters, not blind compliance with imposed orthodoxies. We need to be better people, and we need to want to be. I hope the disaster of the past three years will inspire us in that direction.