FACING PUBLIC EVIL
A Handbook for Citizens of Active Integrity
30 April 1994 @ Raymond Lloyd
Draft Chapter 1 Introduction
Just as among human beings there may be two main types of intelligence, so there may be two kinds of goodness. Intelligence may be considered creative or critical, the one which builds towers above the jungles of ignorance and nonsense to view a more enlightened land, the other which swathes through that jungle to arrive at a similar goal. A critical intelligence is often rewarded in academic life, a creative one in business. Most of us combine both, to a greater or lesser degree. The types of intelligence often coincide with the two basic types of personality, the depressive or up-and-down person, and the schizoid or in-and-out person. The one is mainly interested in people, the other in things. Many of us recognize these natural tendencies, and so choose as more challenging a subject or profession opposite to our nature.
Goodness, too, may be of two kinds, that exemplified by those who go about doing good, and the other by those who stand up to evil. If differences in personality and intelligence derive to a large degree from heredity, differences in goodness may derive much more from moral education, and even more from suffering and our moral interpretation of suffering. To do good, either from natural generosity or by discipline, is a prerequisite for standing up to evil. But it is not sufficient. In doing good a person may well recognize evil, because her or his action may consist of alleviating its symptoms or consequences. But to stand up to evil is also to recognize its causes and articulate its progression, with the awareness that it may be isolated only temporarily, before it raises its head in a new form in another generation.
A definition of public evil
Evil is lying, stealing, wounding and killing, not as ends in themselves, but to gain or maintain power over other persons, to hold others in my thrall or, if I am unsuccessful, as acts of spite. Evil succeeds either through my own power, as an adult over children, or when others, such as parents or citizens, abdicate responsibility for those in their charge. With private evil I hold individuals in my thrall, with public evil the polity or community.
Privately I may lie about my civil status in order to put an end to another's curiosity: that is a lie and, sometimes, a sin or even a crime. But if I say I am single when I am married, and say this to entice a person further into a relationship, that is not only a lie, but evil. I am obtaining an unjustified, or evil, hold on that person. And here I have been obliged to repeat the word "evil", because the concept cannot be reduced to any other category. Evil is evil is evil.
Public evil usually begins with a lie. Sometimes a downright untruth, sometimes the concealment of a required truth. Persons who go into politics or public administration have one major aim, to obtain power, or political authority, over others. Most, in my experience the great majority in democracies, do so with noble or laudable aims, for example, to champion various freedoms or to improve the material conditions of human existence.
But many persons go into politics with a lie, either with untruths about qualifications, or concealment of past misdemeanors. Sometimes such persons rise to high office, where they obtain the power to perpetrate new untruths or further concealments. Lies may develop into theft and, occasionally, murder. This happens often enough in a democracy: it is a feature of every single authoritarian regime, and of many bureaucracies.
Why public evil succeeds
There are many reasons why public evil succeeds, or why we, as citizens, are deceived, or allow ourselves to be deceived, by public liars, thieves and murderers.
A first reason why public evil succeeds is that evil persons are often highly intelligent, and quite capable of fooling us. We prefer to associate intelligence with wisdom, reducing the intelligence of the evil to cleverness. We do this at our peril. Intelligence does not entail goodness, or even humility. Indeed we recognize many intelligent people as arrogant, an overbearing attitude that may become evil. There is only one essential characteristic of evil, hatred of one’s fellow human beings. Some hateful people try to get away from their fellows; others try to dominate them, in power.
Second, many if not most evil persons are astute enough to seek power by seizing on a genuine public grievance, thus compelling us to concentrate on their, and our, cause, and ignore the moral record of that cause’s principal champion. We too become obsessed with the end, not the means. Often the grievance is alleviated because, being genuine, the cause obtains concessions from the conscience of the powerful. We then vote in the champion, and turn a blind eye to his or her subsequent dubious methods. In an open polity these methods, when they become extreme, are challenged by the institutions that, over many years, have established themselves in a democracy. It becomes clear that the lies or half-truths perpetrated in support of a grievance were in fact methods to obtain power, and are continued to perpetuate power. In non-democratic polities, the lies are given institutional protection, and in totalitarian countries, the polity itself becomes a polity of the lie.
A third reason why politicians or public administrators get away with lies is that they themselves no longer consider them as lies, and therefore do not put a brake on their development. A desirable end is often obtained through compromise, which may mean concealing positions from friends and colleagues. But instead of being straightforward about this necessity, many lack the courage to face colleagues, so that concealment becomes a habit, and can spread easily from a vital cause to an expedient one. Lies are rationalized, even justified. And recently this habit has taken another turn, that of political amnesia, where minds grow duller as noses grows longer.
A fourth reason is that liars cloak their lies with legal, religious or other institutional sanctions. A dictator will make criticism a criminal offense, a thief will court the company of archbishops, another will engage the most expensive lawyers specializing in libel, so that the citizen becomes unsure of the grounds on which s/he can expose public evil.
A fifth reason is that colleagues seldom check liars. Politics is now a paid professional career, and rare is the colleague who will protest, let alone resign, if a politician, especially a superior, deceives the public with a lie.
Why citizens allow public evil to succeed
One reason why citizens allow public evil to succeed is that we are not clear about the relationship between evil and power. Personal evil occurs when I deceive, rob or wound others to hold them in my power. Politics is the practice or profession of obtaining power to promote or administer the public good. Many politicians, once in office, come to prefer staying in power to promoting the public good. Then, to stay in power, some politicians resort to lies, theft and even murder, transforming into public evil what they may have shunned as personal evil in private life.
Also in an open polity, we may be either too trusting of politicians, or too cynical of politics, to believe them capable of no or of every possible misdemeanor. In fact, most politicians are like the rest of us, liable to temptation, except that their opportunities are magnified.
Another reason is that, in a secular age, we are only too prepared to explain away evil, to reduce it to other categories. We consider Hitler or Stalin to have been mad, and Mussolini and Qaddafi to be buffoons, as if doses of psychiatry or ridicule early in life would have forestalled the murders of Trotsky or Matteotti. We fail to appreciate that public evil is a direct attack on public morale, just as private evil is an attack, not only on a person's emotions, mind or body, but also on a person’s soul.
A fourth reason why we refuse to oppose public liars is that we are ashamed of our own lies, and so feel guilty or hypocritical when we take a public stand. There, but for the grace of God, go I. But this is another moral mistake. We have indeed all lied, nearly all of us have stolen or cheated, and many of us, if we have not killed, have allowed others to die. If we stand up to a political liar, persons more powerful than us, who can command police and intelligence facilities, or spread false rumours, to do this, may well write our private misdemeanors over the public blackboard. But the intent and outcome of our lies has been different: it has not been that of gaining power over our fellow citizens.
A fifth reason is that, unless it affects us directly, we are often fascinated by public evil. We gloat over the misdemeanors or downfall of public figures. We read political biographies to learn, not the good, but the bad things that statesmen and women write about colleagues. Such glee is an extension of, or substitute for, the pleasure, or Schadenfreude, we often take in the misfortunes of friends and colleagues.
A sixth reason is our reluctance to recognize that often the only way to oppose, or at least contain, evil is by force. Non-violent demonstration or passive resistance may work in a democracy but, under a repressive regime, the only method may be revolt or, increasingly, outside intervention. But, because revolt is often impossible, we may become inured to public evil in other polities, and so diminish our sensitivity to it in our own.
A seventh reason why we do not stand up to public evil in the modern polity is its very complexity, its institutional, legal, moral and social ramifications, and our consequent uncertainty or bewilderment as to whose responsibility it is to tackle evil. When in November 1976 I myself made a public stand against institutional evil in a United Nations body, I had waited ten months for the initiative to be taken by politicians, diplomats or colleagues with ranks up to five times senior than my own. The evil was complicated by the fact, and allowed to run on for many years, because two thirds of the diplomats were envoys of repressive regimes that similarly shunned public accountability, while many representatives of the democratic remainder were venal enough to suppress their opposition in return for wellpaid posts.
An eighth reason is that we seldom appreciate the special virtues needed to do stand up to evil. All that is needed for evil to succeed, said Edmund Burke two hundred years ago, is for the good to remain silent. This is a half-truth. Goodness does not entail the facility to perceive evil. Rather, goodness is associated with humility, or meekness, which the good often interpret to imply submissiveness to the powers that be. The German word for blessed, or "selig", is presumed to be cognate with the English "silly": it would seem that for some people evil thoughts never cross their minds, whereas to stand up to evil means being fully aware that evil thoughts exist in my own mind. To stand up to evil entails integrity, an awareness of one's own flawed integrity, but a determination nevertheless to persist. Evil succeeds, not because the good remain silent - the good often are silent - but because enough persons are not prepared to give up their lives, or nowadays their careers, to oppose it. We may be persons of integrity, but it is passive rather than the active integrity necessary to stand up to evil.
Safeguards against public evil
In a pluralist democracy or other open polity there are many institutional safeguards against public evil, but it may require one or both of two kinds of individual to activate them, the dedicated professional, and the volunteer citizen. The professionals may be opposition politicians, police, public prosecutors and judges, auditors and inspectors, and investigative journalists. Much of their work is taken up in dealing with crime, and, indeed, public evil is sometimes covered by the criminal law when, for example, lying becomes perjury.
The citizens comprise those who campaign against public evil of a massive or social scale, such as against slavery, anti-semitism, footbinding and other abuses of human rights, and those who attempt to expose the public evil of particular individuals or institutions. Such citizens include whistle-blowers, conscientious objectors, political dissidents, poets or historians. They also include the paid professional who puts her or his career, or life, on the line to expose public evil.
Such persons may be motivated by a genuine personal injustice, or imbued by a more general sense of public right and wrong, the first sometimes sparking off the second. In an earlier, religious age, as in Old Testament times, the latter often spoke with the authority of God, or were so perceived, not only by themselves, but also even by the persons they denounced. In subsequent history they would be described as prophets, but in their time they were considered at best a public nuisance, at worst, and often, a fitting case for lese-majesty, and execution.
There are at least two important reasons why today we do not have more prophets, or public truthtellers. The first is that many of us no longer have a conceptual language adequate to describe evil, its object the soul, or its opponent the truthteller. Religion still does this quite adequately for many people but, for others, religious language is encumbered with non-rational terms, or unrealistic problems.
In religion there is the problem of evil, how it can exist if God is both perfectly good, but tolerates it, and omnipotent, yet can not eradicate it. Religion, philosophy, and psychology have got around this problem, by stating evil to be apparent, not real. In a BBC radio interview marking his 90th birthday in 1992, even Karl Popper, one of the great political philosophers of modern times, when asked the question directly, said he did not believe in evil. One does not have to visit the barracks of Auschwitz, or the slave island of Goree, but only to view the shelling of citizens in Sarajevo, to understand that public evil not only exists, but is palpable.
Again, priests may praise prophets, but only a very brave few practise public truthtelling. Today persons articulating a prophetic calling would be categorized, along with many of the evildoers they denounce, as mad. They may indeed have had to risk their sanity, or even undergone a mental breakdown, for example, an undiagnosed clinical depression. Yet that will detract only temporarily from the public truths they are telling. Certainly a truthteller will simplify the complexities of modern public evil, but oversimplification will lead to a loss in credibility. Of course, we may not want to hear those truths, and so prefer to denigrate the truthteller, as we would have done the child who saw that the emperor had no clothes.
A second reason is our failure to see that public truthtelling usually originates in suffering, and that suffering is a sad but necessary condition of human existence, from which we have a moral responsibility to draw lessons. By suffering I do not mean physical pain, although this is sometimes involved. Nor do I necessarily mean personal loss, even that by a child, say, whose mother dies in childbirth. By suffering I mean the affliction of evil, of evil actions targeted at us personally, at our souls, an attack on our integrity, perhaps the disintegration of our personality, before we can rebuild the stronger, more active integrity necessary to stand up to public evil.
All of us have been targets of personal evil, of lies, deceit and other forms of destructiveness by those who envy or hate us. Some take our wrongs out on society, or become resentful or vindictive or develop a victim mentality. Most of us, in good nature, prefer to forgive or forget. In this we avoid a moral duty, at the least of understanding our suffering, and of helping friends stand up to evil.
How few of us who have suffered from envy have had help from others who before us have been the objects of envy. How few of us who, having so suffered, go out of our way to warn other likely victims of someone's envy and latent destructiveness. How many of us take refuge in confusing understandable jealousy with hateful envy. Even our language is afraid of the difference, inasmuch as envy is sometimes used as a synonym for its opposite, admiration.
If therefore we shy away from the recognition of private evil, how much more likely are we to bury our heads in the sand in the face of public evil?
In the following chapters I shall give examples of evil in history and contemporary society, and describe some of the persons who opposed such evil, and the suffering they had to endure first to recognize evil and then to stand up to it. I shall describe my own twentyfive years experience of standing up to public evil, and the books and other works which helped me with the necessary insights. In so doing I hope I shall encourage others to give their own suffering a positive outcome, and so enhance the quality of public life in our generation. Political democracy is founded on personal integrity.
But I should warn that there is no reward for truthtelling, only isolation, anxiety and, usually, penury and oblivion. There are no living prophets, and few posthumous ones. Yet public truthtelling remains one of humankind's highest moral callings.
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