Of DEI and the Devil

Top o' the Stack. Excerpt:

The hard Left, which now controls the Democrat Party, is evil at its core. I don't say that every  leftist, 'progressive,' and wokester is evil. Most of these folks are useful idiots. A large subset of them are superannuated, low-information, life-long Democrats who are pissing away their 'golden years' in empty socializing, hitting little white balls into holes, and other forms of Pascalian divertissement.

Comments

[EG]

Hi Bill,

Interesting post. What do you think of the god Janus? Is he "Evil" too?

Also, per Solzhenitsyn, the (ever oscillating) line between Good and Evil runs through every human heart, and is an ineradicable element of our being/creatureliness; does this not then just devolve into an unresolvable "Us vs Them" drama?

There is here at least two distinct senses of evil, one of which is tied to our own nature, rather than anything attributable to the Devil, except as he plays towards evoking one over the other.

As usual, a lot of excavate here.

[BV]

Solzhenitsyn is right: the capacity for both good and evil is in every one of us, and is ineradicable by us. The exercise of either capacity, however, is each individual's free choice.

But this dual capacity in each one of us need not lead to any Us versus Them.

In actual fact however, certain ideologies make entire groups worse than other groups. Leftist ideology, for example, makes leftists (who now form the cadre (core, skeleton) of the Dems) worse than conservatives, taking the term broadly. And so at the present time there is no moral equivalence between Left and Right in the USA and in the world.

Communism and National Socialism are ideological superstructures that have the power to corrupt otherwise half-way decent human beings and transform them into moral monsters.

[BV]

And so it is Us versus Them: the forces of civilization versus the anti-civilization forces of destruction. Recall the 'summer of love' of 2020?

[EG]

Hi Bill,

Thanks for the reply, you write:

"Communism and National Socialism are ideological superstructures that have the power to corrupt otherwise half-way decent human beings and transform them into moral monsters."

This brings to mind the great Hannah Arendt and her magisterial work on Eichmann, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, especially the banality of his evil with respect to a lack of "intentions," an "inability to think" and to coherently and correctly empathize (in the right moral sense of this word.)

[She further explores these themes in an incomplete work that was published post-humously: The Life of the Mind (1981), I have not finished reading this...]

Further, it seems salient given recent world events...and indeed, I think you may find much useful in extrapolating some of her theses to buttress your positions on the "political evil" of Leftists.

[EG]

Here an excerpt from the Introduction pp. 3-5 (which should be read carefully in toto.)

"Factually, my preoccupation with mental activities has two
rather different origins. The immediate impulse came from
my attending the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. In my report of
it* I spoke of "the banality of evil." Behind that phrase, I held
no thesis or doctrine, although I was dimly aware of the fact
that it went counter to our tradition of thought—literary, theo-
logical, or philosophic—about the phenomenon of evil. Evil,
we have learned, is something demonic; its incarnation is
Satan, a "lightning fall from heaven" (Luke 10:18), or Lucifer,
the fallen angel ( “the devil is an angel too”—Unamuno)
whose sin is pride ("proud as Lucifer"), namely, that superbia
of which only the best are capable: they don't want to serve
God but to be like Him. Evil men, we are told, act out of envy;
this may be resentment at not having turned out well through
no fault of their own (Richard Ill) or the envy of Cain, who
slew Abel because “the Lord had regard for Abel and his
offering, but for Cain and his offering he had no regard."
Or they may be prompted by weakness ( Macbeth). Or, on the
contrary, by the powerful hatred wickedness feels for sheer
goodness (lago's "I hate the Moor: my cause is hearted"; Clag-
gart's hatred for Billy Budd's "barbarian" innocence, a hatred
considered by Melville a "depravity according to nature"), or
by covetousness, "the root of all evil" ( Radix omnium malorum
cupiditas). However, what I was confronted with was utterly
different and still undeniably factual. I was struck by a mani-
fest shallowness in the doer that made it impossible to trace the
uncontestable evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or
motives. The deeds were monstrous, but the doer—at least the
very effective one now on trial—was quite ordinary, common-
place, and neither demonic nor monstrous. nere was no sign
in him of firm ideological convictions or of specific evil motives,
and the only notable characteristic one could detect in his past
behavior as well as in his behavior during the trial and through-
out the pre-trial police examination was something entirely
negative: it was not stupidity but thoughtlessness. In the set-
ting of Israeli court and prison procedures he functioned as
well as he had functioned under the Nazi regime but, when
confronted with situations for which such routine procedures
did not exist, he was helpless, and his cliché-ridden language
produced on the stand, as it had evidently done in his offcial
life, a kind of macabre comedy. Clichés, stock phrases, adher-
ence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and
conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us
against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking atten-
tion that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence.
If we were responsive to this claim all the time, we would soon
be exhausted; Eichmann differed from the rest of us only in
that he clearly knew of no such claim at all.
The question that imposed itself was: Could the activity of
thinking as such, the habit of examining whatever happens to
come to pass or to attract attention, regardless of results and
specific content, could this activity be amorig the conditions
that make men abstain from evil-doing or even actually "con-
dition" them against it? (The very word "con-science," at any
rate, points in this direction insofar as it means "to know with
and by myself," a kind of knowledge that is actualized in every
thinking process.) And is not this hypothesis enforced by every-
thing we know about conscience, namely, that a "good con-
science" is enjoyed as a rule only by really bad people, crimi-
nals and such, while only "good people" are capable of having
a bad conscience? To put it differently and use Kantian lan-
guage: after having been struck by a fact that, willy-nilly, "put
me in possession of a concept" (the banality of evil), I could
not help raising the quaestio iuris and asking myself 'by what
right I possessed and used it."8"

[john doran]

It's "Us versus Them", because a very vocal and very powerful group have specifically and very publicly named themselves as "Us", and us, as "Them", drawn very clear lines of battle, and openly begun prosecuting the most outlandishly shameless political war against us on the basis of our being on the wrong side of those lines.

Good luck to them: I will happily work the fields and help them reap the whirlwind.

[Vito B. Caiati]

“The deeds were monstrous, but the doer—at least the very effective one now on trial—was quite ordinary, common-place, and neither demonic nor monstrous. [There] was no sign in him of firm ideological convictions or of specific evil motives, and the only notable characteristic one could detect in his past behavior as well as in his behavior during the trial and through-out the pre-trial police examination was something entirely negative: it was not stupidity but thoughtlessness.”

That someone responsible for radical evil is “quite ordinary, common-place” and that he lacks any “sign…of specific evil motives,” acting out of nothing but “thoughtlessness” cannot simply be taken, as Arendt assumes, as evidence of the absence of demonic inspiration. We must consider the possibility that the manifestations of demons among us are varied, sometimes but rarely taking the form of preternatural and frightening occurrences, as full or partial possessions and oppressions or infestations, but ordinarily through far more subtle ones, temptations and deceptions, the latter leading ultimately to acedia, which beyond sloth and listlessness, expresses itself more generally as indifference or a lack of concern. “Thoughtlessness” is thus precisely the sort of behavior that is possible from someone in this sinful state of spiritual enervation.

A few suggested readings on the preternatural and subtle signs of the demonic: (1) Richard E. Gallagher, M.D., [Prof. of Clinical Psychiatry, New York Medical College], Demonic Foes: My Twenty-Five Years as a Psychiatrist Investigating Possessions, Diabolic Attacks, and the Paranormal; (2) Fr. Vincent Lampert, Exorcism: The Battle Against Satan and His Demons; (3) Adam C. Blai, Hauntings, Possessions, and Exorcisms

[BV]

That's a good point against Arendt, Vito.

While we ought to be chary about reaching for supernatural and preternatural explanations, and ought to first exhaust natural explanations, it would be foolish and indeed thoughtless to rule out *ab initio* the two categories of non-natural explanation -- especially given the wealth of putatively paranormal empirical data.

Of course, we will find a crapload of money-grubbing mountebanks in these precincts -- a fact which itself might call for explanation in terms of the praeternatural!

Thanks to EG for quoting the Arendt passage.

[james soriano]

Vito Caiati’s comment calls to mind the adage, “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

About Eichmann, Arendt found the absence of any evidence of a demonic nature, but that finding should not be construed as evidence of its absence.

The absence of evidence that vermin are in the attic is not evidence of their absence.

[BV]

James,

Your point is basically correct, but I think it needs a bit of nuancing. If I examine my attic and find no evidence of vermin, that non-finding is slight defeasible evidence that no vermin are present, but of course it does not conclusively show that no vermin are present.

[BV]

Vito,

Thanks for the book recommendations. I just now ordered Gallagher. The paperback is a paltry 13 semolians. Which of the three books is the best? Read 'em all?

[Vito B. Caiati]

Of the three, I would recommend the first two. The Gallagher is worth reading because it is written by an eminent psychiatrist, who, along with discussing the exorcisms in which he has participated as a medical advisor, discusses what distinguishes actual possession and oppression from various serious mental disorders. Lambert has interesting things to say about the spectrum of demonic activity, as well as the actual rite of exorcism and the role of Christ in it.

By the way, I am expecting a new little book on Pascal, Un été avec Pascal, which is also available in an English translation. I can't recommend it yet, having not read it, but if I think you would find it of value, I will let you know, since I know that you also have an intense interest in this French genius.

[BV]

I do indeed have an intense interest in the French genius. So please do send me your report on the new book

[EG]

Hi Bill,

Rereading this, I want to probably change the focus a bit and talk more about Evil. What is this? And is it a concept has salience only because human beings exist and it is something specific to us?