Becalmed

 We find ourselves becalmed now in a sea of doubt. If we are to study evil, we must tackle some headwinds in our pursuit of its actual nature.

The first item we find floating past is the concept of context. Anyone who has dealt with modern religious aficionados knows that this is a common defense of doctrinal contradictions. The “taken out of context” explanation ranks only second to the “his ways ain’t our ways” dodge.

Some modern “theologians” would no doubt find themselves unable to speak if forbidden the use of the phrase “out of context.”

An anecdotal story from my own life can set the stage for an explanation of how tricky the concept of context becomes when applied to real-life situations.

Someone who was very dear to me was taken from a rural life on an Arkansas farm in the mid-1940s and mustered into the United States Army to go and fight the Axis powers in Europe. There, he survived unspeakable horrors before his side won. He would speak of artillery attacks in which he, “would want to live one second longer, just one second.” He also told of a stray shell, listlessly fired by Germans during the last days of the war, taking off the head of “the shortest man standing in line for chow.”

The Army disbanded his division, the 79^th Infantry, after VE day and he moved to the First Infantry Division.

Yes, that First Infantry Division: The Big Red One.

Remember that the U.S. was still at war with Japan at that time, and that country’s leaders had vowed resistance to an invasion by every man, woman, and child in the country, using every cannon, gun, plane, knife, sword, implement, stone, and stick available. Not a pleasant scenario for a member of a unit renowned for being assigned to “the first wave.”

When evil prevents evil, is evil sanctified by context? Was the vaporizing of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians through the first use of nuclear weapons—an evil end that eliminated further resistance and obviated the end of plans for further military invasions—justified?[i]

We will be debating that question when the remaining homo sapiens take their last breaths, sigh and say, “Look what our hands have wrought.”

Spoiler alert: The man in question survived the war and occupation, returned home, married, and helped produce a beautiful daughter to whom I am still married after 49 years.

It gets murkier, not the story but the consideration of context.

We drift along and encounter some complicated concepts. They are far beyond the scope of this amateur analysis but deserve mentioning.

The first is one currently in play with regard to the idea of sexual orientation. We shouldn’t tack anywhere near that emotional squall, or must we? We’ll see.

The concept is one called “social constructionism.” This is a theory stating that characteristics typically thought to be immutable and solely biological—such as gender, race, class, ability, and sexuality—are products of human definition and interpretation.[ii]

It only requires a look at how the female of our species fares in an historical context to see the ideas creating social construction as a valid concept. In early creation myths, woman is sometimes simply a catalyst for the development of man.[iii] Later, she becomes property, the earliest forms of marriage simply being a contract by which a man protected his harem from theft or, uh, invasion.[iv] In some later societies, woman enjoyed the simple definition of a thing possessing ovaries. We follow a tortuous path of supporting roles to modern times wherein, as a social construction, we create “categories based on certain bodily features; we attach meanings to these categories, and then we place people into the categories by considering their bodies or bodily aspects.”[v]

Let us steer from the dangerous shoals and drop in on the Wannsee Conference outside Berlin on January 20. 1942. There, with the aid of a translator no doubt, we hear high-ranking Nazi officials determining what some historians call “the final solution,” i.e. which innocent humans deserved to be slaughtered by the regime and how. We hear them deciding if a person’s “Jewishness” (a major standard for extermination) relied on a fractional portion of racial “blood” or perhaps whether an individual considered herself, himself, or, one supposes, their children, Jews. What is particularly terrifying is that their production goal (11 million) relied on countries which they hadn’t yet conquered but would get to as soon as they finished with Russia.

Those decisions were social constructs, not fact-based. The evil was not that the victims were Jews. The evil was that the Nazis slaughtered six million of them. Perhaps (almost) all of us can agree that this was not an act perpetuated by “some fine people."

Ahh. A breeze. Let us sail away from this dreadful spot.

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[i] See: Hersey, J. (1946). Hiroshima. New York: A.A. Knopf.

[ii] Saraswati, A. P. L. A., Shaw, A. P. B., & Rellihan, H. (2017). Introduction to women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. Oxford University Press.

[iii] Genisis: 2:4-25 NIV

[iv] Durant, Will, and Ariel Durant. The Story of Civilization. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1935.

[v] Saraswati, et al, op cit