TIGHTENING THE RIGGING
“That’s evil,” we say. “That’s an evil act if there
ever was one.”
Then we close our eyes and hear the sound of
water-soaked bodies—babies, children, adults, and animals—thudding into the
hull of the ark in which Noah and his family ride out the flood.
Where is the tipping point between “I know evil when
I see it,” and “His ways ain’t our ways?”
Can we depend upon our numerologist friends? Is
evil quantifiable? We read of Joseph Stalin overseeing the execution on nearly 800,000
of his countrymen (not including deaths attributable to imprisonment,
starvation, disappearance, etc.) during his reign, under his “no man, no
problem,” view of leadership.
“That oughta do it,” we might think.
But wait. What about the character in the Charlie
Chaplin film, Monsieur Verdoux? His most famous line stops us in our
numerical tracks. Henri says, “Wars, conflict - it's all business.
One murder makes a villain; millions, a hero. Numbers sanctify, my good fellow!”
Years later, Bob Dylan voiced a similar thought in
one of his classics when he observed,
“Steal a little and they throw you in jail.
Steal a lot and they make you king.”[i]
Let us forget numbers as well as stature. As the Galilean
himself observed, “Whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and
sisters of mine, you did for me."[ii]
Would we be safe, then, in stating that evil, however we choose to define it, can be a phenomenon exerted upon an individual, a group, a sect, a nation, or an entire planet?
Good. Let us trim our rigging and sail on in our quest.
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