Reviews, Interviews, News, Commentaries, Excerpts, My Top 5 Books, Wilson's Bookmarks, Book AwardsTragic Humanism
Two events happened this spring in New York City that flummoxed our sophisticated pundits.
First, a naturalized citizen failed to detonate a car bomb in Times Square. Why did Faisal Shahzad become a jihadist? Explanations included revenge for drone attacks in Pakistan, misery over the foreclosure of his home, rage against George W. Bush, Islamist hatred for infidels, and anger at the creators of South Park, a TV show that depicted Muhammad.
Second, after helping an assaulted woman, a homeless immigrant was stabbed in Queens and left for over an hour as dozens of passersby ignored him. A surveillance camera captured the whole scene. When firefighters arrived, Hugo Alfredo Tale-Yax was dead. Why were there no Good Samaritans? Explanations included bystander apathy, diffusion of responsibility, and desensitization to violence.
The pundits were reluctant to acknowledge the obvious presence of evil in both events, owing to our thin moral discourse and metaphysical uncertainties. Thankfully, British literary critic Terry Eagleton is alert: "We know nothing any more of choirs of heavenly hosts, but we know about Auschwitz …. Perhaps evil is all that now keeps warm the space where God used to be."
On Evil (Yale University Press), a superlative follow-up to Eagleton's Reason, Faith, and Revolution, argues against two prevailing viewpoints: "Either human actions are explicable, in which case they cannot be evil; or they are evil, in which case there is nothing more to be said about them." The first viewpoint besets our sanguine politicians, journalists, and social scientists who tend to explain away evil, while the second besets our dour theologians and ministers who invoke "evil" as a conversation stopper. Evil—like God—is neither fully comprehensible nor unfathomable, but partially explainable. Eagleton insists that our explanations of evil may sharpen or soften moral judgment.
Informed by the Marxist accent on class society and the Christian accent on original sin, Eagleton articulates a vision he calls "tragic humanism," which is honest enough to reckon with the brokenness of life, but hopeful enough to affirm the possibility of deep-seated transformation. "Soft-hearted liberals and tough-minded Marxists" need to hear Eagleton because he dares to name individuals and acts "evil," which they regard as an archaic category that has gone the way of the horse-drawn carriage. Otherworldly Christians also need to hear him because he confronts them with the material effects of evil (famine, nuclear weapons, financial malfeasance), which they miss because of their focus on "the spiritual forces of evil" (Eph. 6:12).
If social conditions are solely responsible for evil actions, we are puppets. If human behavior is solely responsible, we are monsters. And if the autonomous will of an individual solely chooses evil actions, we are like "the Satan of Milton's Paradise Lost, with his 'Evil, be thou my good!'?" Against all these dehumanizing responses that move us beyond good and evil, where we are not answerable for our actions, Eagleton contends for an interplay between environment and character, as there is "no absolute distinction between being influenced and being free."
La complejidad hispana: Todo cambió en el 2012
The Latest in Movie News, May 20, 2013
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Carlos Ramirez Trevino
“On Evil” is clearly a scholar's delight to read and marvel over the relationship he weaves between classical theologians and modern psychologists. Can it be said that evil can be viewed as institutional because of the nature of society and the fact that without a social structure, there would be no moral evil? But institutions are made up of individuals. Yet, moral evil is only manifest in social settings; whether that only involves a relationship with others or with God. The problem with the problem of evil is that we have been programed to think of evil as an eternal thing-in-itself that we are admonished to merely resist. But have we stopped to think that because evil was initially a necessary consequence of social interaction, God created man so that God could have a body (Heb 10:5) through which to annihilate evil (Dan 9:24)? While, of necessity, creation was subjected to evil (Rom 8:18, Rev 20:3), Christ came to perfect His works of creation by investing them with eternal incorruptibility (1 Cor 15:50).
Greg Peterson
"Why were there no Good Samaritans?" is really asking, "Why were there no compassionate outsiders?" Why was the despised outsider, the Samaritan, able to do what the Priest (the professional religious) and the Levite (of the landless tribe of religious and political duties &privileges) were apparently afraid to do? What compelled these two, no doubt deeply religious, men to look away? To see, but not see...To carefully ignore even the broken man who was on of their own? --My partial answer: the reasons the Priest and the Levite would have given for their non-actions & cultivated moral blindness, would have been to recite chapter and verse, as we say today, from "God's Law." They did not want to become ritually contaminated, ritually impure, in what they thought was God's sight, by touching a man who might be dead, or die while they were touching him. Rather than excessive zeal to follow chapter and verse, regardless of who dies, the Samaritan was following God's will.
Nemour cheney
The mistaken claim of Eagleton is the clue of his vision of evil. For him, for every coherente marxist, "most wickedness is institutional... the result of vested interets and anonymous processes, not of the malign acts of individuals". This argument is a blatant contradiction with the article of Benson and with Eagleton ´s other statements. Terry Eagleton calls to the collective subjects that are the world made across Marxist lens. If the individual, or the particular subject, is not the fountain of evil and good there is not true freedom for man because his determinations are responsible of his acts. All the magic of election is gone here. But firts Eagleton charms us with his Christian references.