On "The Souls of Black Folk" in "Post-Racial" America Part II

Last night, reading through Cynthia Ozick's book of essays, "Quarrel & Quandary" I came across the following passage in her essay on "Public Intellectuals:"

"Thinkers... are obliged above all to make distinctions, particularly in an age of mindlessly spreading moral equivalence. "I have seen the enemy and he is us" is not always and everywhere true; and self-blame can be the highest form of self-congratulation. People who are thinkers are obliged to respect exigency and to admit to crisis."

This is what I was getting at yesterday when I argued that understanding often leads us to accept compromises as unreasonable as the compromises Booker T. Washington asks of the freed blacks. It has become politically correct recently for us to reject the idea of absolute evil; and yet absolute evil exists, and has always existed; and coming to "an understanding" of evil is nothing less than making a deal with the devil.

Before this is taken in a strictly religious way, I think it's necessary for us to establish a definition of evil. The problem with doing that involves setting up moral absolutes, and any time someone goes about the task of setting up moral absolutes, they find themselves in a quandary: how do you establish a moral absolute when so many previous attempts to do so have only been the misunderstandings between cultures? Christianity found evil in the heathen religious and spiritual practices of the first African slaves; no doubt the African slaves found evil in the colonists who enslaved them. Who was the more evil, absolutely? Pederasty is an absolute evil, no doubt; and yet, the Ancients Greeks - the first lights of our culture - practiced it openly and joyously. Were they as a society evil - and only those, like Plato, who practiced chaste pederasty absolved from this evil? Is it really possible to completely understand both points of view? The moment we begin talking about absolutes, it seems the conversation ceases, and there's only anger, misunderstanding and resentment left in its place.

And yet, we have to talk about absolutes, because we are social creatures, and have to live within societies of others, and live within the absolute rules of those societies.

When African slaves were dragged into the American colonies, we have to wonder about the mindset of the slave masters: On the one hand, DuBois informs us, these slave masters were only too happy to introduce Christianity to these pagans; but if they were happy to do this, then they must have been open to the fact that these were human beings with souls that could be saved like any European soul.

For these Christian colonists, submitting to the pagan religions of their slaves would have been an absolute evil; and yet isn't it more evil for these Christians to introduce these pagans to a religion that so brazenly touts its own hypocrisy? It would have been better had the pagans never had to come to an understanding of these Christians at all, because the Christians, trapped in their culture of institutions, had built up a society that requires hypocrisy to function, and every one among them understood that, even if subconsciously. This to me, is evil: to (understandably) submit to a social system that forces one to act against one's principles; and since institutions are living things, but not human things, they demand individuals make sacrifices for them in order that they (the institutions)may survive; and yet they have no moral conscience.

Understanding between individual and individual is never an evil thing. DuBois gets at this when he writes:

"In a world where it means so much to take a man by the hand and sit beside him, to look frankly into his eyes and feel his heart beating with red blood; in a world where a social cigar or a cup of tea together means more than legislative halls and magazine articles and speeches,—one can imagine the consequences of the almost utter absence of such social amenities between estranged races, whose separation extends even to parks and street-cars."

It is when man becomes involved in institutions that he becomes evil. DuBois writes of his own text in 1953, fifty years after it was first published: "But today I see more clearly than yesterday that back of the problem of race and color, lies a greater problem which both obscures and implements it: and that is the fact that so many civilized persons are willing to live in comfort, even if the price of this is poverty, ignorance and disease of the majority of their fellow men."

To my mind, institutions carry the germ of evil, and the larger they grow, the more they estrange man from man; and the more we come to accept and understand them, and others as agents of them, the more evil we grow. It's true that an individual can be truly evil on his own - but this is rare - and generally only true of the sociopath. Institutions, by their very design, are sociopathic entities.