"What is Evil"

READING
Chris Hedges
"Losing Moses on the Freeway: The Ten Commandments in America"

Packard spent a year as an army lieutenant leading platoons. He and his men killed in each encounter anywhere from 12 to 15 North Vietnamese, Vietcong and perhaps Chinese mercenaries. They did it clinically and efficiently. He said he stopped counting how many young men and boys he killed. "But with about thirty ambushes and firefights you can do the math," he said.

He was good at what he did. It horrifies him now, but there was a part of him that enjoyed it. There was a part of him that liked to kill, that sought out the high of combat like a junkie heading down to the park to find another fix. War was at once revolting and seductive.

"I violated the commandment, 'Thou Shalt Not Kill.' Nothing will be gained by intellectualizing this. I killed other people. I took lives. It was exactly that. I became in Vietnam a professional killer. I was proud of what I could do. There are days when I meet with people, trying to do what is good for the church, for others, and think I am probably the only person here who has killed another human being."

He received the Silver Star and two Bronze Stars for valor. He spent his last months in the army teaching ambush tactics to army rangers. But he returned home disillusioned, "hating the war." . . . He began to look back on what he had done. He felt guilty.

Bishop Packard discovered in the war the capacity we all have for evil. He discovered the darkness that allows us, when the restraints are cut, to commit acts of brutality against the weak and the defenseless, including children. He discovered the ghoulish delight soldiers can take in killing. He discovered that all is not right with the world, as he had been taught, that honoring nation and family and a God that leads us to victory and righteousness and success, does not mean we will be saved or indeed victorious or even successful. He discovered the lie he had been told, the idolatry of our civic religion, one that grafts the will to power onto the will of God. And in this knowledge he made a painful self-discovery, not only about himself but about the human race. His naive belief in the goodness of the nation and the individual, one that gave him, as it gives all of us, comfort and moral certainty, was obliterated in Vietnam. He peered into the American soul and what he saw looking back horrified him. But out of that pain and alienation came knowledge, a need to reclaim life. The darkness he confronted became his cross. He carries it every day.

He learned that few wanted to hear what he had endured, what he had learned. The antiwar activists attacked him for going to Vietnam, but in their self-righteousness did not understand that the darkness he encountered was the darkness that dwells in all of us. He challenged the myth of a great and moral nation, a nation ordained by God to carry out a civilizing mission through violence. He angered believers, those who sought their meaning and identity in the myth of war as noble and glorious. He and other Vietnam veterans found they were unwanted in local VFW halls. He was lonely, able only to relate to those who had been in Vietnam. But he had returned home like a biblical prophet, to speak a painful truth about us, a truth few wanted to hear. The cost of this knowledge was catastrophic.

SERMON

Bishop George Packard looks back on his war experience with horror now, but when he enlisted many years ago, he only knew that he liked the Boy Scouts. "I was not reflective about it," he said. "I liked the outdoors, being part of a troop, being a body in a platoon. I liked that feeling of corporate identity." With that slim self-knowledge and the local draft board knocking on his door, he hoped that the military would be an adult version of summer camp, and that war would be an adventure. Instead, Chris Hedges writes, "War brought [him] the power to give or deprive human life."

Packard became a professional killer. "Compassion was a luxury he could not afford," Hedges adds. "Human beings became objects. Life was reduced to a vortex of pain or ecstasy. Law was of no consequence. In a firefight, afraid and pumped up with adrenaline and excitement, [he] became [an agent] of death." Bishop Packard "received the Silver Star and two Bronze Stars for valor." It's not such a long distance from Boy Scout badges to military medals, as it turns out.

That is true for us all. Packard was an ordinary young man, who grew up in a churchgoing middle-class home on Long Island, and became intimately acquainted with his own capacity for brutality and violence. He was - and is - one of us.

Chris Hedges observes, "We all have the capacity to commit evil. It takes little to unleash it. For those of us who have been to war this is the knowledge that is hardest to digest, the knowledge that the line between the victims and the victimizers is razor thin, that human beings find a perverse delight in destruction and death and few can resist the pull." Grim thoughts, but grounded in Hedges' own real life experience in places like Bosnia, El Salvador, and Iraq, where destruction and death were every day occurrences.

You don't always need to go far away to make this discovery. Victims and victimizers grow up in what should be the safest and most loving of places, the family home. Those who suffer from violent abuse as children are susceptible to becoming offenders themselves.

I have a good friend who conducts psychological interviews of convicted violent criminals, as part of the sentencing process. She once told me that every criminal she has interviewed had a history of abuse, violence, and neglect. "What they do to others," she said, "is what has been done to them."

The capacity to commit evil surfaces in the cycles of violence we perpetrate as a society, often out of a misguided sense of necessity. We go to war, convinced we must do so to survive or to defend our values, only to set in motion a tragic series of consequences. Kicking open the doorways in places like Fallujah leads young soldiers to surrender not to the enemy, but to the forces of destruction within themselves. Intense pressure, poor training, and mixed messages from above all seem to lead to dehumanizing actions to live down the rest of their lives.

The capacity to commit evil may be part of human nature, but it is not confined to hand to hand combat on the battlefield, or to violent crime on our streets. We institutionalize it. Those who know nothing of war personally - politicians and heads of state - but do not hesitate to commit others' lives to battle, also perpetuate a cycle of violence. They may conceal it in a fog of rhetoric about democracy, values, and security, but it is still systematic destruction. "These killing projects," psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton says, "are never described as such. They are put in terms of the necessity of improving the world, of political and spiritual renewal. You cannot kill large numbers of people without a claim to virtue."

The human capacity for evil is readily unleashed. As the Cherokee tale put it, all you have to do is feed it, like a wolf. We feed our capacity for evil with denial and deception, convincing ourselves and others of its virtue or its necessity. We say that war is unavoidable, something we must do for a larger good, even though war is responsible for wholesale destruction and shattered lives. There is something very wrong with this thinking; its dissonance alone tells us that.

Bishop George Packard has spent his life haunted by his guilt. Now serving as the Episcopal bishop to the military, he has found a way to transform his war experience into a healing ministry to others. "When my life is over," he told Chris Hedges, "when in those last 30 seconds that I am fighting for breath in some room, I will make a plea to God. I will say that I did the best I could in the oddities life gave me. I will ask to be forgiven." He seems to have a struck a balance between taking responsibility for his actions, exercising compassion for himself, and leaving the final judgment to a higher power. Too bad the higher powers of the military could not have spared the naive young man he once was and those he killed in the service of war.

What is evil? An aspect of human nature. Apply enough pressure to any of us and something ugly will surface. Mental illness, addiction, a history of abuse, even religious extremism may exacerbate the tendency, but these conditions do not cause it. Evil isn't some dark power floating around in the universe, waiting to penetrate some unsuspecting soul. We do it all by ourselves.

We'd rather not think about it. To acknowledge our capacity for evil is to see something we don't want to see. We all cultivate a somewhat idealized view of ourselves, admitting only those flaws that others find endearing.

Self-knowledge takes hard work. Resisting it, however, is dangerous too. Like many soldiers, George Packard was young when he went to war. He could not have known that he would develop a taste for killing, and that this knowledge would trouble him for the rest of his life.

In this respect, George Packard is fortunate. He knows a certain kind of truth about himself and that keeps him honest. But his story is tragic, leaving him with regrets over the suffering he caused. We can learn from his story too. Coming to terms with evil begins with being honest with ourselves, with knowing ourselves, and understanding our weaknesses. Self-knowledge teaches us how to live without hurting others.

Reckoning with evil is more than an internal struggle, however. We may be spared from having to fight for our survival in a war or even in a tough neighborhood. Our lives can be protected in such a way that we don't have to contend with a mean streak, let alone the capacity for evil. We can be lulled into thinking that evil is something out there, and that it is our enemy, to be fought in a just war by good people like us.

Such an assumption, unfortunately, is just another way that evil can surface. It is a studied ignorance that keeps us not only from examining ourselves but also from looking critically at the institutions we create. We sit passive and mute, while the cycle of violence recreates itself in one tragic scenario after another, because we think we have nothing to do with it. I watched a film this week that explores this capacity in a series of interviews with a woman who was Hitler's secretary. She was young and unsophisticated when Hitler hired her to live and work in the bunker where he conducted his operations. Despite - or perhaps because of - the pleasant domesticity of life in the bunker, the shared meals, Hitler's beloved dog Blondie, and the absence of news from the outside world, this woman really never understood what was happening all around her. It was not until Hitler knew he had lost, and rather than deliver himself to the enemy, committed suicide, did she realize that she was somehow involved in an atrocity.

She never revealed her identity until old age, when the urge to seek the truth about her life was stronger than her shame. The interviews take place shortly before her death. She is still struggling to understand how she could not have known, because she wants to forgive the young woman who made the thoughtless and uninformed decision to work for a man like Hitler.

Our capacity for evil can take the form of ignorance as readily, perhaps more so, as our tendency towards violence. The power to overcome evil has as much to do with overcoming our passivity, numbness, and helplessness about what is wrong in our world as it does with mastering our impulses. When we open our minds to the painful truth about war - especially this war - and to the suffering and ruin it has caused, we acquire the knowledge that makes change possible.

Whether humanity will ever be free of war and the cycle of violence, we cannot say. It doesn't look good. But we should know that the change begins - for all of us - when we are willing to learn the truth, and dedicate that fearful knowledge to the struggle to be good.

Resources used to prepare this sermon include Chris Hedges, "Losing Moses on the Freeway: The Ten Commandments in America" (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005, and "Blind Spot - Hitler's Secretary," a movie.