Fighting Evil

"Light has come into the world, but people loved darkness instead of light. They loved darkness because what they did was evil."

— John 3:19

Trump indictment politics have created “an alliance between different groups that have a history of being discriminated and dispossessed against, whether they are Jews, or black Americans, or LGBT folks that might come together to push back against the white Christian assault on American democracy.” [emphasis added]

— Peter Beinart, CUNY, MSNBC
from “Tucker Carlson” @ :05, 4/4/23 

“If we look through history, people who were advocating for social justice, for example, if they had only used the legal methods, then we wouldn’t be where we are today.” 

— Greta Thunberg, Environmental Activist
from “The View,” ABC 2/17/23

America’s sharp political division today is, at base, conflict between believers and non-believers in God. In John’s terms, it’s those seeking to follow the way versus those who reject any religious moral code. Where John talks of evil, Beinart defines “democracy” as the dispossessed fighting off presumably racist, anti-gay “white Christians.” Thunberg flat-out advocates breaking the law in the name of “social justice.”

In today’s America, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd is more famous than the Bible’s John. Here’s part of her recent reaction to Christmas:

a church with Mary at the center of its founding story could suffocate women’s voices for centuries. The cloistered club of men running the church grew warped.   .   .  more concerned with shielding the church from .   .   . boys and girls being preyed upon by criminal priests. It is simply immoral to treat women and gay people as unworthy.   .   . partial humans.

To Dowd, the faith of her birth is defensive, sexist, anti-gay, and no longer deserves the fuss Christmas creates.

Dowd, Beinart, and Thunberg seem humanists as the Oxford Dictionary defines the term. They attach prime importance to human over divine matters. They stress the potential goodness of all humans, emphasize common human needs, and seek solely rational solutions to human problems.

Moral relativism, according to Ethics Unwrapped, is the idea that there is no absolute set of moral principles. It advocates “to each her own.” Followers say, “Who am I to judge?”

I like Compassion International’s definition of faith: a belief and trust in God based on evidence but without total proof. It’s associated with Martin Luther’s “leap of faith.”

 

Paul Tillich

Paul Tillich was America’s famous mid-20th Century theologian, active in the post-war period when church attendance reached its peak (1956). Tillich at the time made TIME’s cover (March 16, 1959). In the cover story, Tillich warned that “existential anxiety” can lead to idolatry and away from his “Protestant Principle,”  which “does not accept any truth of faith as ultimate, except the one that no man possesses it.” 

The only way a person can cope with existential anxiety is with the "courage to be," self-affirmation in spite of threatened nonbeing. This “courage to be” is the spark over the gap between existential and essential, philosophy and theology, man and God. For believers, self-affirming courage—not Nietzsche's Will to Power—gains power from "divine self-affirmation.” 

Tillich’s hope was human transformation into a "New Being.” It’s derived from the Apostle Paul's second letter to the Corinthians (II Corinthians 5:17): "Therefore if any man be in Christ, he is a new creature: old things are passed away; behold all things are become new.”

Tillich’s theology answers these existential questions: (to problems of Being) God, (to problems of Existence) the Christ, and (to problems of Life) the Spirit. These correspond to the 3 in 1 Trinity — Being, Existence and Life, a human.

From The Courage to Be (1952):

We display courage when we first identify our sin; despair or whatever is causing us guilt or afflicting condemnation. We then rely on the idea that we are accepted regardless. "The courage to be is the courage to accept oneself as accepted in spite of being unacceptable” (p. 164).

[Nonbeing] threatens [one]’s spiritual self-affirmation, relatively in terms of emptiness, absolutely in terms of meaninglessness" (p. 41). We display the courage to be when facing this anxiety by displaying true faith, and by again, self-affirming oneself. We draw from the "power of being" which is God for Tillich (pp. 172-73).

In his sermon "You Are Accepted” (PDF), Tillich says, “Without the help of modern psychology, Paul expressed ‘For I do not do the good I desire, but rather the evil that I do not desire.’  .   . grace .    .    . happens; or it does not happen.” We find "sin" and "grace" whenever we look into ourselves with searching eyes and longing hearts. They determine our life.

Tillich’s morally clear message: We control (or not) our destiny, with our actions helped by faith and underpinned by grace.

Paul Tillich was born in Starzeddel, Prussia, German Empire, in 1886. He emigrated to the U.S. in 1933, as Hitler came to power in Germany. Tillich brought us hope in the aftermath of two horrible world wars with a Great Depression in between (1914-1945).

Isaiah Berlin

The great philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin was a contemporary of Tillich’s. Berlin was born in Riga, Livonia, Russian Empire (now Latvia) in 1909. He and his family immigrated to the U.K. in 1921, escaping the Bolshevik Soviet Union. At age 49 in 1958, Isaiah Berlin delivered his inaugural lecture at Oxford entitled “Two Concepts of Liberty.” CBS News’ Dick Meyer, writing in 2006, called Berlin’s paper “one of the most influential essays in political philosophy written in English in the 20th century.”

With World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, and the Cold War as backdrop, Berlin explained his times by reducing politics to two concepts of liberty.

Negative liberty is freedom "from" things; positive liberty is freedom "to do" certain things. Negative liberty means one is free from interference by the state and others, living within a zone of freedom where there can be no interference as long as one respects the liberty of others. 

Positive liberty argues life is meaningless unless a person has positive freedom — the power to transform. Why be left alone if you are unable to take positive action — get an education, earn a fair wage, live in a just society.

Negative liberty means classic liberalism. Negative liberty’s essence is, "I know what's best for me, leave me alone."

Positive liberty is idealistic, associated with grand political dreams. The positive libertarian wants people to do things that come from great minds, from Hegel, Rousseau, Marx. Positive liberty says: "I know what’s best for you.” This impulse is elitist and at its worst totalitarian. It is the impulse that allows Marxists, Communists, theocrats and nationalists to limit negative liberties and slaughter people – all in the name of the people’s best interests. 

Berlin’s brilliance included seeing good in both approaches. Though he leaned toward negative liberty out of fear of positive liberty’s “I know better than you,” he admired Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and strongly supported the British Welfare State. 

Conservatives believe in inalienable rights that come from God, rights enshrined in our Bill of Rights (negative liberty). Progressives seek to reshape an imperfect world along their “arc bending toward justice” (positive liberty).

Hannah Arendt   

Arendt at 33

Besides Tillich and Berlin, Hannah Arendt was one of the twentieth century’s most iconic thinkers. Arendt was born in Linden, Hanover, Prussia, German Empire, in 1906. At the University of Marburg, she studied philosophy under existentialist Martin Heidegger, with whom she had an affair. She later completed her doctoral dissertation Love and Saint Augustine at the University of Heidelberg under the supervision of Karl Jaspers, published as a book in 1929. Hitler’s Gestapo arrested her in 1933 for performing “illegal” research into antisemitism. On release, she fled Germany, living in Czechoslovakia and Switzerland before settling in Paris. Arendt married in 1940, and when Germany invaded France that year she was detained as an alien. She escaped and made her way to New York City in 1941 via Portugal.
 

Arendt’s seminal work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951 when she was 45 and a new American citizen, examined the roots of both Stalinism and Nazism, structured as three essays, "Antisemitism", "Imperialism" and “Totalitarianism.” Arendt wrote that totalitarianism is a "novel form of government," different from simple despotism and dictatorship. Totalitarianism uses modern terror on the entire population, not just political opponents. Arendt found Jewry was not Holocaust’s operative factor; it was a proxy for Nazism’s consistent use of terror employed much as  Stalin did. Arendt adopted Immanuel Kant's phrase "radical evil” to further define totalitarianism, with victims becoming "superfluous people.” 

Arendt attended a lecture by Tillich while living in Frankfurt before both left Germany. Tillich helped her get settled when Arendt arrived in New York in 1941 as a fellow émigré from Nazism. Hilde Fränkel, Tillich's secretary and mistress, was Arendt’s best American friend until the former's death in 1950.

But it was Berlin, a fellow Jewish refugee born in Riga just 240 miles from Eastern Prussia's Königsberg where Arendt lived from the year after Berlin's birth to age 15, whose paths significantly crossed. Hannah Arendt and Isaiah Berlin: Freedom, Politics and Humanity (2021), documents the duo’s disagreements. Berlin disliked Arendt intensely, saying she represented “everything that I detest most.” Arendt responded by mostly ignoring Berlin.

Arendt argued human affairs take place in three distinct spheres: the public, the private, and the social. Private life consists in those exclusive attachments that form between individuals as unique persons, such as love, friendship, and family. Public life is the realm of political equality, with votes granting the power to vote and to rule. By contrast, Arendt saw social life as a modern phenomenon, combining both public and private.

To Arendt, life outside the home and the public sphere — work, leisure, anything self-segregated as likes and interests — meant the social sphere. Here, free association and differentiation override political equality. This means rejecting the woke claim that every organization is public, subject to equal treatment. Politics should keep hands off social relations. 

“Equity” to Arendt isn’t anti-racist enough. Equality lifting up some brings others down. Achieve equality not by leveling to the bottom, but by elevating—along with accepted differences—to the political best. Arendt believed elevating requires better public institutions. It means insisting upon political life done well.

Arendt was more sensitive than was Berlin to assimilation’s destroying Jewish and other subcultures. Inside Berlin’s free zone of negative liberty, she would draw a protective ring around those threatened by any political master class. Whatever their differences, however, both Arendt and Berlin jointly feared the positive liberty that empowers an elite tending toward totalitarianism’s complete subservience to the state.  

Having also stared state-sanctioned evil in the face, Tillich joined Berlin and Arendt in hoping that free humans will have the strength to protect civilization against any return to the totalitarianism they and the world knew under Hitler and Stalin.