Deliver Us From Evil?
Either “good” or “evil” implies there are only two impacts an act can have, and provides no room for forgiveness through understanding
Written by Michael Dea
Christians, in a common prayer called “The Lord’s Prayer,” ask God for protection from evil with the words “and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil,”; but the prayer does not specify what exactly “evil” consists of. Each member of any given population has a concept of what constitutes “good”, and what constitutes “evil”, and overlap frequently exists when it comes to protections for one’s person. This overlap allows society to exist, as it allows cooperation between individuals towards the goal of a peaceful society. This overlap, however, provides only part of the story, and in ignoring the places where consensus fails, evil flourishes.
“Good” and “evil” are two labels with competing moral valences that are attributed to a person’s actions. They have value in differentiating what benefits and harms society, but fail to account for the gradient that societal benefits and harms can fall along. Denoting something as “good” or “evil” implies automatically that there are only two possible impacts an act can have on society, and provide no room for the cultivation of forgiveness through understanding.
Understanding of an evil action does not mean that the act should be excused; “understanding” the action in this context means to understand the reasons and causes leading up to the act itself. The purpose of this understanding can result in forgiveness for transgressions, both large and small, but regardless of if the act is forgiven, knowing where it came from allows steps to be taken that would minimize the chances of recurrence, and allocate responsibility for the action appropriately.
For example, if Person A perpetrates an act against Person B, then there are likely reasons why that action was taken. This does not imply that Person A was justified in committing the act, nor that they are not responsible for their actions, but the circumstances surrounding the action taken against Person B can provide an opportunity to minimize the chances of the action occurring again and potentially harming others. Labeling the act as evil does not suffice; it paints Person A’s action as a stable part of their character in a diametrically opposed system, rather than something that has resulted from misguided interpretation of his or her life’s circumstances.
Due to the inability of labels to stop evil from perpetuating, the circumstances and experiences of Person A that led them to harm Person B becomes the most likely road to combating evil. To do so, it becomes necessary to look at Person A’s experiences with compassion, and accepting Person A’s resulting interpretation as a valid one. Accepting Person A’s crime as a potentially valid outcome of bad life experiences understandably poses a problem: accepting the validity of an act often gets painted as excusing the act itself, but in reality it allows Person A’s agency to be respected, and diffuses the polarizing combativeness established by the divide between good and evil. In diffusing the combative nature of the divide and honoring Person A’s individual agency, the likelihood of Person A to change his or her perception of the world increases.
No one accepts an idea or world view that gets imposed on them by a hostile force. In dividing all actions between good and evil, and then failing to accept an act as a valid, if highly misguided, course based on a unique experience, the discourse about how to change the action or prevent it from reoccurring becomes a battle of value systems. On the one side lies good, and on the other, evil, each seeking to convert the other while simultaneously viewing such attempts as hostile to a way of life. This hostility makes individuals less inclined to change their ways or views on how life could be, since it comes from a group or individual that seems to want to destroy a unique experience of the world. Stripping the moral valence of good and evil away from potential reforms, however, removes some of the hostility; the hostility gets eradicated only through accepting the individual’s experience as valid, regardless of other potentially viable courses of action they could have taken.
Once Person A’s course of action gets validation and the moral valences of good and evil are stripped away from the act against Person B, it becomes possible to move towards repairing what damage was done by the act itself. No one may change the past, and therefore little can be said of repairing the damage done by Person A’s acts, but looking towards future conduct presents an opportunity to prevent future harm from occurring. In understanding the actions of Person A, validating the misguided interpretation of that person’s experiences, society can take steps to prevent future harm from occurring in repairing broken social systems — as the case may be in poverty, criminal activity, access to medical care, and similar — or, in some cases, removing Person A from society in order to prevent future harmful actions from being carried out. By doing so, the evil action does not become normalized in society, which would allow evil to flourish.
Psychopathology can be treated, crime can be contained, but what often gets labeled as evil cannot be actively stopped unless society at large, as well as individuals, are willing to look at what historically caused the harmful action to occur in the first place. This does not change an action’s effect, and may not even effectively reform the perpetrator, but it offers the best road to preventing the creation of future agents of evil from ever coming into existence, let alone giving victims the need to be delivered from them.
