The Foreignness of Evil

“Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers; virtue is a vivid and separate thing, like pain or a particular smell. Mercy does not mean not being cruel or sparing people revenge or punishment; it means a plain and positive thing like the sun, which one has either seen or not seen. Chastity does not mean abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc.”


I once gave a group of high school juniors and seniors a writing assignment in which they had to respond to this quote from G.K. Chesterton’s essay, “A Piece of Chalk” by expounding on a specific example of acute, powerful goodness—overwhelming goodness that has the power, as Eleonore Stump says, to crack our heart open in contrast to the power of evil to close our hearts in defensive hardness.

Several students came up with great examples, the most salient to me being the story of two starving child brothers somewhere in Africa. Though both were emaciated, one was stronger than the other. Once he acquired food, the stronger one would put the food in his mouth, chew it for his brother who was too weak to do so, then put it in the brother’s mouth for him to swallow. Eventually the stronger brother died of starvation, but the weaker was nursed to health and lived because of his brothers loving sacrifice. (Sorry I can’t cite the specific time and location of this. It’s a fairly well-known story. I’d appreciate it if someone who knows would post the details on the comment board).

One particular student, however, wrote an essay explaining how she could not think of any examples of the type of acute, powerful goodness Chesterton and Stump describe, and this struck me as a very enlightening response.

It may seem grandly pessimistic at first for one to say she simply can’t think of any examples of goodness that could be on the same magnitude as the great evils in the world (the class had been reading literature of the Holocaust), and no doubt the piercing, white-hot type of goodness makes an eternal impression on us, but I think this seemingly pesimistic response reveals something very fundamental about our nature—at least our ideal nature—as human beings. It is true we often don’t notice kindness and courtesy as much as we do unkindness and evil. Imagine two scenarios: In the first, two people are walking—one several feet in front of the other—across a school campus. The first trips, falls to the ground and scatters her papers and folders. The one behind rushes up, asks if she’s alright, and helps her gather the papers. In the second, the fall and paper scattering happen just the same, but the person behind pays no attention and then even brushes the bottom of his shoe against the fallen woman’s head as he steps over her continuing on his way. Which of these two scenarios would get more attention from others on campus? Which would generate more comments about the behavior? In short, which would be most noticeable? The second, of course. The hard-hearted, inconsiderate act is the one which would impact people more, probably the one they would remember longest, by far.

Some might be tempted to say this is so because our tabloid hearts just naturally like to see bad things and hear bad news because it’s sensational. There’s certainly some truth to that, but I believe there is something more indicative and positive about human nature to be seen. Perhaps we don’t give as much attention to acts of kindness as we do acts of meanness because kindness is expected as a norm. We don’t make as big a deal out of one person going out of his way to help another as we do a person going out of his way to hurt another, because hurting is such an anomaly to human nature, or at least what should be an anomaly.

One might argue that this is all pie in the sky—that the reason why we notice evil so much is that there is so much evil to notice. But this only reinforces my point. If it’s true that evil makes the news because the world is so full of it, why then would it still be news? No matter how common evil becomes, it never becomes “normal.” Might this be because we were created to be good, and thus no matter our surroundings, nothing else will ever quite seem normal? You can take mankind out of the garden, but you can’t take the garden out of mankind!

MM