Daily Verse | Job 24:13
“There are those who rebel against the light, who do not know its ways or stay in its paths.”
Thursday’s Reading: Job 25-28
Thursday and yesterday I wrote that we are living in evil times. This is, of course, a biblical concept.
Be very careful, then, how you live—not as unwise but as wise, making the most of every opportunity, because the days are evil.
— Ephesians 5:15-16
What’s astounding to me is that even those whom we would consider coming at life from a secular perspective (i.e. following Jesus or seeking what God wants are not priorities) are seeing the evil and, more than that, sounding the alarm. As I mentioned, Dr. Naomi Wolf is on some kind of a spiritual journey, and it’s because she has no categories in which to explain what she sees happening in society.
I told the group that I was now willing to speak about God publicly, because I had looked at what had descended on us from every angle, using my normal critical training and faculties; and that it was so elaborate in its construction, so comprehensive, and so cruel, with an almost superhuman, flamboyant, baroque imagination made out of the essence of cruelty itself — that I could not see that it had been accomplished by mere humans working on the bumbling human level in the dumb political space.
I felt around us, in the majestic nature of the awfulness of the evil around us, the presence of “principalities and powers” — almost awe-inspiring levels of darkness and of inhuman, anti-human forces. In the policies unfolding around us I saw again and again anti-human outcomes being generated: policies aimed at killing children’s joy; at literally suffocating children, restricting their breath, speech and laughter; at killing school; at killing ties between families and extended families; at killing churches and synagogues and mosques; and, from the highest levels, from the President’s own bully pulpit, demands for people to collude in excluding, rejecting, dismissing, shunning, hating their neighbors and loved ones and friends.
What does it say when the collective behavior of a society is so abhorrent, so unimaginable—so wicked—that someone who wasn’t taking God seriously is suddenly forced to reconsider their position and recategorize what they’re seeing in biblically moral terms?
And she’s not the only one writing about evil. Here’s noted columnist Daniel Greenfield in a piece called, “Uvalde and the Problem of Evil.”
What do people who don’t believe in evil do? They blame inanimate objects. Guns.
19 years ago, a middle-aged unemployed taxi driver carrying two milk cartons full of gasoline walked onto a South Korean subway and started a fire that killed 192 people.
That was not a milk carton problem. Nor was it a gasoline problem.
6 years ago, a Muslim terrorist drove a truck into a Bastille Day event in Nice, France killing 86 and wounding over 400 other people. Body parts were being pried out of his wheel wells.
That was not a truck problem.
Across the long stretch of human history, millions of people were killed long before the invention of firearms, in often cruder and far more brutal ways. Back then we lacked CNN, but people generally understood that this was not due to the invention of smithing, but the problem of evil.
The problem with evil is that it requires us to believe in good.
Modern people are unwilling to believe in G-d, and so they believe instead in government. And they are convinced that the god of government can fix everything if we only give it the power.
The trouble is that while people may not believe in evil, evil very much believes in them.
Another favorite essayist is Michael Walsh. He’s written about the moral collapse before in (dense) books such as The Devil’s Pleasure Palace and The Fiery Angel. (Be sure to set aside plenty of time to absorb his perspective.) He also writes at the popular level in opinion columns at The Pipeline. Here’s some of what he wrote in his most recent column, which focuses on the lack of masculinity in our society.
No, the fault, to paraphrase Shakespeare, is not in our guns but in ourselves, and specifically in our men. For half a century masculinity has been under concerted attack in this country—fish, bicycle is one of the more benign forms, although still passive-aggressively hateful—until today it has been deemed “toxic” by the harpies of fourth-wave feminism and their very strange bedfellows in the QWERTYUIOP+ brigades. The unsurprising result has been the diminution and removal of genuine masculinity from the public square— even in the military, which now prizes women and trans-wokeness over men—and its replacement with sundry culturally unacceptable substitutes.
Chief among the missing males have been fathers: real, biological, spiritual, emotional, disciplinary fathers. Not “baby daddies,” to use the ghetto term that has percolated its way up and into the larger culture. Not transient sperm donors, who wouldn’t exist in the first place without trampy women to enable them. Not semi-functioning biological males embedded in the transgressive woke community who take an “X” for the team. But real men, who not only take responsibility for their children but impart responsibility to the next generation, especially to their sons …
… No, the problem isn’t “gun violence,” it’s the enforced emasculation of teenage American males via liberalism, feminism, academia, psychiatry, pharmacology, and the media, which all too often explodes in inchoate rage. Innate female impulses and values are critical to civilizational formation, but they are antithetical to civilizational preservation, prizing collectivism over individuality, shared instead of personal responsibility, and constant, generally irrational fears for physical and emotional safety. (“Safety” on line? Twitter can instantly “suspend” you permanently and Facebook can send you to Sugarmountain Prison on the spot for unspecified “harassment,” but the Uvalde shooter can yap on social media about his desire to assault a school and nothing happens to him, algorithmically speaking.) There has never been a successful matriarchy in Western history and there never will be. Neither sex would or should want it. And as for the 19th Amendment and its effect on American history, don’t get me started…
… [O]ur forefathers would have dubbed such behavior as “evil,” which is what the shootings in Texas and in Buffalo—and the weekly carnage in places like Chicago—are. Please don’t “judge” him, said the Texas shooter’s mom, “he had his reasons.” No real man cares what his “reasons” were. Indeed, the sooner we get the shrinks out of the criminal justice system entirely, and replace them with morality, the more justice we’re going to get for criminals. Some people are just born to be bad and no amount of shrinking is going to help them; it only excuses them.
All of this reminds me of what C.S. Lewis wrote about relativism and “men without chests.”
In his book, The Abolition of Man, Lewis was prophetic in pointing out that relativism—the idea that there are no absolute truths—would lead to the decay of morality and a lack of virtue within society. Without a belief in and the teaching of universal moral laws, we fail to educate the heart and are left with intelligent men who behave like animals or as Lewis puts it, “Men without Chests.” Read slowly to follow Lewis’s apologetic:
As the king governs by his executive, so Reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the ‘spirited element’. The head rules the belly through the chest—the seat, as Alanus tells us, of Magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. The Chest-Magnanimity-Sentiment—these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man.
It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal. The operation of The Green Book (a book promoting relativism) and its kind is to produce what may be called Men without Chests …
In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.
What he’s saying here is that we can’t criticize and destroy our moral foundations and then turn around and expect men and women of integrity, dignity and honor.
When you lose any sense of moral structure, here’s where it leads:
Not only does the assailant not have a “chest,” but neither do any of the men on the train. Instead of intervening on behalf of the terrified woman, who whimpers “help me,” they whip out their phones and … take videos of the assault.
That situation infuriates me. Not because I’m a hero, but because none of them were. It was so unjust, so repugnant, so offensive to civil society.
Where are the men?
Evil is a human void. It’s the egotistical emptiness that remains in the absence of good. To defeat it, we would have to conceive of good. We would have to retell the stories of the mass shootings, of crime in general, as a struggle between good and evil. Not all that long ago, we had a society capable of telling that story. These days we are more likely to celebrate evil.
The Left believes that government is god and it conceives of evil as disobedience to government. The gun control debate reduces evil to the NRA and anyone who won’t obey and hand over their guns. “Do you want more kids to die?” the gun controllers demand.
But good and evil don’t come from a gun. Nor do they come from the government.
The reduction of individual choices to mechanical abstractions, shootings to guns, individual acts to society, is the mark of elites who want to rule the world, yet can’t understand people.
There’s no formula more likely to convince people that their acts have no value, their lives no purpose, and that whatever they do doesn’t matter in any larger sense. And so evil is born.
Here’s the truth: evil is a reality.
When tempted, no one should say, “God is tempting me.” For God cannot be tempted by evil, nor does he tempt anyone; but each person is tempted when they are dragged away by their own evil desire and enticed. Then, after desire has conceived, it gives birth to sin; and sin, when it is full-grown, gives birth to death. (James 1:13-15)
There is evil in the world, and people are beginning to discover that truth. But as Christ-followers, we’ve known that truth for a long time, even as it’s gone out of fashion.
