More evil is done in our daily lives through trying to be good than trying to be evil. We are created to do good and love a good God and so our natures are repulsed by embracing evil. A few deeply disturbed humans openly embrace the dark side while most of us do dark deeds and then forgive and forget we have done them.
What happens in our thought life, we think, stays in our thought life as if there are tight compartments between our thoughts and our deeds. There are compartments, but they are no more fool proof than the water tight compartments on Titanic. Fill them enough and they will overflow into areas we wished to stay dry.
How can we fool ourselves into thinking that an evil action is good?
We are an inventive species and so quite adept at this survival skill, so there are many tricks. A particularly insidious lie is what my family has taken to call “the GG” from its frequency in the mouths of television characters about to spin off into violence or vice. What is the GG? It is the appeal to the “greater good” in the face of a difficult moral choice.
The GG allows me to do evil to avoid a greater evil that somebody else might do.
The GG is tricky because it is a useful tool for thinking about a certain kind of choice. Most of our choices are not between Sauron and Gandalf: they are between one perfectly fine action and another. It is useful to ask: “Which car should I purchase, not just for my own sake, but for the greater good?” Used this way the GG becomes a way to check selfishness . . . the sort of “moral American” who doesn’t do anything wrong, but never thinks of anyone other than self. He follows the advice of Scrooge and thinks his moral obligation is fulfilled when he minds his own business.
The GG can also be useful when there are no good choices. The doctor can save the mother or the child,but she cannot save both. She might use the GG to help form her choice. When my grandfather faced such a choice, unable to ask my grandmother, he believed the GG meant the doctor would have to save my Nana. Blessedly, God saved my aunt, too.
So in a broken world the GG is a helpful and powerful. Like all helpful and powerful thoughts, tricksy thinking can turn it to bad ends. The GG is dangerous when we use it to justify doing something bad to a person for the good of our company, abstract masses of people (“the children”), or for any object. The GG can sooth us into forgetting that a single person is more important than the legal fiction (so useful!) of “company.” Christians can never forget: no cause or company is worth a single human life.
We can take life to save life if we must, but we cannot take life to save an abstraction or stuff. No church, school, nation, or idea is worth a dead man. In a wicked world, Christians realize that a policeman might have to shoot a criminal to stop him killing other people, but even this action costs the officer and the community. Shedding blood comes with a soul cost to the brave policeman, removes any hope of mercy for the criminal, and so we avoid lethal force when we can.
Christians do not kill to protect mere property. Why? That church building, even one as great as the Hagia Sophia, is not worth the lives of our sons and daughters to get it back from the Turkish conquerors. Turkish people have more value than even the sacred and holy bricks of Hagia Sophia because they are even more in God’s image.
Equally tricky for me is beauty and the GG. I am often tempted through the siren voice of beauty to do harm to people to make something “beautiful.” The owner of an estate built on the slave’s lash is an extreme case of this evil. The estate is soaked in blood but looks beautiful. Men like Ruskin could trample the people in his real life for the aesthetically perfect vision.
When any company or cause begins to exist for its own sake, it forgets that the company or cause (if moral) was built to serve people and not people to serve the company or cause. The businessman who builds his empire on the backs of his workers or his career on his colleagues may have acted for the GG of the company, but he has destroyed his soul. The GG whispers in his ear that his sweatshop is giving jobs, that other places are worse, that long term abuse of his workers will benefit the world. He certainly exploits his labor in the hope of the GG to come. Of course, when the day of the GG comes, the businessman often uses the good that comes to further exploit his workers. His soul has become unfit for good deeds. At best, some workers receive some paternalistic compensation for pains they did not choose, while other workers are left ruined so others may profit.
The GG can make us forget that doing evil so that someone else might not do evil means that we certainly have done a bad thing just in case someone else might have chosen badly. We had better be very sure of the probability of the evil we are preventing. When faced with an armed man shouting he will kill her children, a mother should fire. She is not doing a good deed, but doing the least harmful deed. However, I cannot come to suspect my neighbor might commit a crime and go shoot him preemptively.
We must always weigh the certainty of the evil we are doing against the fact that the criminal, tyrant, or devil is the one doing the bad thing we are trying to prevent. We are not. We must be careful that we do not become evil to avoid evil.
And so the GG as a throw away line in a television show can help the viewer justify what he or she would be horrified by otherwise. And yet if the show is well written enough, acting for the GG will come at a cost of innocence. See the wonderfully written Blacklist for this lesson. The evils men do for the GG or their “cause” or their “morality” rob innocence, freshness, and hope from the characters. They may find the truth, but then be unable to enjoy the knowledge.
Today I will do good to the people I see. I will do it because they are people and it is good. I will be kind to my co-workers and put their needs above any company or cause knowing that that they are the reason for the company or cause. We exist to serve people not programs.
I will beware the power of the GG.
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