Confronting Evil Today

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Confronting Evil Today

• Understanding Evil
• St. Jeromes Centre for Catholic Experience
• January 16, 2009
• David Seljak, St. Jeromes University

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Understanding Evil

• The Sociological Imagination
• The Social Construction of Reality
• Social Sin
• Evil in the Modern World
• The Revolutionary Society
• The Role of Ideology

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Understanding Evil

• The Sociological Imagination

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Dimensions of Sin

• Traditional concepts of sin
• Individual sin
• Cosmological e.g. Satan, demons, etc.
• Communitarian e.g. Israel, the nations, etc.
• The social dimension of sin
• Linked to sociological imagination

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The Social Dimension of Evil

• The social unconscious
• Institutions and structures
• Cultures, values
• The social construction of reality or world

World
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The Social Dimension of EvilPeter Berger, An
Introduction to Sociology.

• We are socialized into a culture.
• We experience the real world in terms of
  institutions and structures.
• They make our culture plausible.

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The Social Dimension of Evil

• The social construction of reality.
• We live in a world.
• We act according to our conception of the world,
  not as it actually is.

World
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SOCIAL SIN

• i) subject is collectivity
• ii) no sense of guilt
• iii) false consciousness
• iv) institutions that dehumanize

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BAUM FOUR LEVELS OF SOCIAL SIN

• Injustices and dehumanizing trends built into
  various institutions
• Cultural and religious symbols which legitimate
  unjust institutions
• False consciousness created by these institutions
  and ideologies
• Collective decisions generated by the false
  consciousness
• From Gregory Baums chapter Critical Theology
  in Religion and Alienation, 2nd ed. Ottawa
  Novalis 2006.

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The Social Dimension of Evil

3. World
4. Decisions
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World Hunger as social sin

• Nearly three billion people live on less than 2
  US a day.
• Over one billion people live on less than 1.25
  US a day.From http//www.globalissues.org/TradeRe
  lated/Poverty.asp
• Whats it like to live on less than 1 US a day?
• http//www.csmonitor.com/2005/0706/p01s05-woaf.htm
  l
• A useful website with good statistics
  http//www.learningafrica.org.uk/general_facts.htm
  

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World Hunger as social sin

• 1 billion children live in poverty (1 in 2
  children in the world). 640 million live without
  adequate shelter, 400 million have no access to
  safe water, 270 million have no access to health
  services.
• 10.6 million died in 2003 before they reached the
  age of 5 (or roughly 29,000 children per day).
• From http//www.globalissues.org/TradeRelated/Pove
  rty.asp

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World Hunger as social sin

• Over 9 million people die worldwide each year
  because of hunger and malnutrition. 5 million are
  children.
• Approximately 1.2 billion people suffer from
  hunger (deficiency of calories and protein)
• Some 2 to 3.5 billion people have micronutrient
  deficiency (deficiency of vitamins and minerals)
• Yet, some 1.2 billion suffer from obesity (excess
  of fats and salt, often accompanied by deficiency
  of vitamins and minerals)
• http//www.globalissues.org/TradeRelated/Poverty/H
  unger/Causes.asp

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World Hunger as social sin

• The issue is not food production but
  distribution.
• Food is distributed according to interlocking
  system of the nation-state and the free market.
• For the first time in history, over 50 of the
  world population lives in cities.
• Therefore, the central issue is income, that is,
  money to buy food for people who dont grow food.

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• The 1997 Human Development Report, for instance,
  showed that the world's 225 wealthiest people had
  a combined wealth of over one trillion dollars,
  equal to the annual income of the poorest 47
  percent of the world's people (2.5 billion).
• http//www2.hawaii.edu/majid/op-ed_articles/globa
  lization.html

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Can the free market deliver us from evil, that
is, world hunger?

• Yes
• Let the free market generate wealth.
• A rising tide lifts all boats.
• Must subject governments to the discipline of
  the market.

• No
• Corporations are created to generate profit
• Markets respond to effective demand
• Canadian Bishops therefore neither can respond
  to the demands of the poor to be fed.

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3. World Globalized capitalism
4. Decision Sell to the highest bidder
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Why free markets can not feed the poor

• The problem is structural not personal.
• Personal morality is not the issue moralizing is
  not the solution
• Social sin or structural sin requires a
  structural change as well as a cultural
  transformation.

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Understanding Evil

• The Unique Forms of Evil
• in the Modern World

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What is unique in the modern world?

• The Revolutionary Society
• The Role of Ideology

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Modernity The Revolutionary Society

• Robert Nisbet, The Two Revolutions, in The
  Sociological Tradition.
• Industrial Revolution
• Democratic Revolution

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Modernity The Revolutionary Society

• Ideological Revolutions
• The American Revolution
• The French Revolution
• The Soviet Revolution
• The role of ideology

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The role of ideology

• Modern societies seen as human-made.
• If we made society, we can change it.
• Society is understood as project.
• The myth of progress.
• All modern societies are revolutionary societies.

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Modernity The Revolutionary Society

• Restructuring of the entire society according to
  an abstract plan (ideology).
• Every element of human life is changed.
• Political organization
• Economic life
• Social relations
• Psychology

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Modernity The Revolutionary Society

• Our own society is a revolutionary society.
• Constantly replacing older forms with new ones.
• Constantly engineering and fashioning a new
  social order.

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Globalization of the Free Market

• Capitalism, then, is by nature a form or method
  of economic change and not only never is but
  never can be stationary.
• The fundamental impulse that sets and keeps the
  capitalist engine in motion comes from the new
  consumers, goods, the new methods of production
  or transportation, the new markets, the new forms
  of industrial organization that capitalist
  enterprise creates. Joseph A. Schumpeter,
  Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy
• (New York Harper, 1975) orig. pub. 1942, pp.
  82-85.
• http//transcriptions.english.ucsb.edu/archive/cou
  rses/liu/english25/materials/schumpeter.html

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Ideology and New Forms of Evil

• Alexander Solzhenitsyn concludes that
  Shakespeare's villains only killed dozens because
  they had no modernist ideology. He writes,
  "Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was
  fated to experience evildoing on a scale
  calculated in the millions" (Gulag 1, 174).
• The Soviet GULag system claimed 66 million lives
  from the October Revolution (1917) to 1959 (Gulag
  2, 10).
• Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. The Gulag Archipelago --
  1918-1956 An Experiment in Literary
  Investigation. Trans. T.P. Whitney. New York
  Harper and Row, 1973. Book 1.
• Solzhenitsyn, Aleksandr. The Gulag Archipelago --
  1918-1956 An Experiment in Literary
  Investigation. Trans. T.P. Whitney. New York
  Harper and Row, 1975. Book 2.

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Ideology and New Forms of Evil

• The European short century from 1914 to 1989,
  using Eric Hobsbawms apt characterization, was
  indeed one of the most violent, bloody and
  genocidal centuries in the history of humanity.
  But none of the centurys horrible massacres can
  be said to have been caused by religious
  fanaticism and intolerance
• Jose Casanova, The problem of religion and the
  anxieties of European secular democracy, in
  Religion and Democracy in Contemporary Europe,
  ed. Gabriel Motzkin Yochi Fischer (London
  Alliance Publishing Trust, 2008).

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Casanova on Europes short century

• neither the senseless slaughter of millions of
  young Europeans in the trenches of World War I
  nor the countless millions of victims of
  Bolshevik and communist terror through
  revolution, civil war, collectivization
  campaigns, the Great Famine in Ukraine, the
  repeated cycles of Stalinist terror and the
  Gulag nor the most unfathomable horror of all,
  the Nazi Holocaust and the global conflagration
  of World War II, culminating in the nuclear
  bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. All of these
  terrible conflicts were rather the product of
  modern secular ideologies.

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New Forms of Evil

• Total war and the world arms race
• Genocide
• The ecological crisis
• Poverty and world hunger
• Totalitarianism

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New Forms of Evil

• New forms of evil are made possible by the new
  improvements of modern society.
• Ecological crisis made possible by industrial
  production and consumption
• Total war and genocide made possible by new
  technology and tool of propaganda

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New Forms of Evil

• The ambiguity of modernity.
• It is not our weakness but our strength that
  allows us to do great evil.
• Often it is not our personal intent, but the
  structure of our society and the content of our
  culture that allows us to do evil.

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Religious Responses to Modern Evil

• Participation
• Religion inspires or reinforces social evil
• Denial
• Acceptance of and accommodation to modernity
• Isolationism
• Radical conservatism and condemnation of
  modernity
• Compartmentalization
• Privatization of faith.
• Engagement
• Critical engagement with modern society

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Critical engagement with modern society