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Evil and good have probably been more or less constant presences in the human heart, their proportions staying roughly the same over the centuries. And perhaps the chief dark categories have remained constant and familiar. The first time that death appeared in the world, it was murder. Cain slew Abel. "Two men," says Elie Wiesel, "and one of them became a killer." The odds have presumably been fifty-fifty ever since. The Old Testament is full of savageries that sound eerily contemporary. (The British writer J.R. Ackerley once wrote to a friend, "I am halfway through Genesis, and quite appalled by the disgraceful behavior of all the characters involved, including God.")
Petrarch's rant against the papal court at Avignon in the 14th century sounds like a hyperbolic inventory of life in certain neighborhoods of the late 20th century: "This is a sewer to which all the filths of the universe come to be reunited. Here people despise God, they adore money, they trample underfoot both human laws and divine law. Everything here breathes falsehood: the air, the earth, the houses, and above all, the bedrooms."
Western thought since the Renaissance has considered that the course of mankind was ascendant, up out of the shadow of evil and superstition and unreason. Thomas Jefferson, a brilliant creature of the Enlightenment, once wrote, "Barbarism has . . . been receding before the steady step of amelioration; and will in time, I trust, disappear from the earth."
/ In the 20th century, Lucretius' shores of light vanished like the coasts of Atlantis, carried under by terrible convulsions. The ascendant civilizations (the Europeans, Americans, Japanese) accomplished horrors that amounted to a usurpation of the power of God over creation. The world in this century went about a work of de-creation -- destroying its own generations in World War I; attempting to extinguish the Jews of Europe in the Holocaust, to destroy the Armenian people, the Ukrainian kulaks and, much later, the Cambodians -- all the reverberating genocides.
In any case, the 20th century shattered the lenses and paradigms, the very mind, of reason. The universe went from Newton's model to Einstein's, and beyond, into absurdities even more profound. An underlying assumption of proportion and continuity in the world perished. The proportions between cause and effect were skewed. A minuscule event (indeed, an atom) could blossom into vast obliterations. Einstein said God does not play dice with the world. But if there was order, either scientific or moral, in God's universe, it became absurdly inaccessible.
If evil is a constant presence in the human soul, it is also true that there are more souls now than ever, and by that logic both good and evil are rising on a Malthusian curve, or at any rate both good and evil may be said to be increasing in the world at the same rate as the population: 1.7% per annum.
The world is swinging on a hinge between two ages. The prospect awakens, in the Western, secular mind, the idea that all future outcomes, good or evil, are a human responsibility. John Kennedy said in his Inaugural Address, "Here on earth, God's work must surely be our own." When there will no longer be any place to hide, it becomes important to identify the real evils and not go chasing after false evils. It is possible that people will even grow up on the subject of sex.