Milbank and the problem of evil

John Milbank’s Being Reconciled is all about forgiveness, and the restoration of God’s generous relationship with the world. In it, he discusses the problem of evil. Traditionally, Christian theology has refused to see evil as a power or a thing in itself, arguing instead that it's a distortion, a parasite on the goodness of God’s creation, a falling away from life and from existence.

For Augustine, that means that free will isn’t about being able to choose between good and evil; it’s about being free to pursue God and to become uniquely ourselves whilst living a life of love. Sin isn’t about people using their free will to choose evil, because evil isn’t a ‘thing’ you can choose: it’s about people missing the mark, and rejecting God’s freely given grace. Evil doesn’t make any sense, and so Adam’s sin - the first sin that delivered us all into slavery, and means that we’re all born in a world where our ability to see God and to freely love him is broken – is a paradox. It’s hardly even worth trying to answer the question ‘Why did Adam sin?’ because the first sin simply makes no sense.

A similar view is that of Hannah Arendt, who talks about ‘the banality of evil’, by which she means that most people who do terrible things don’t set out to do those terrible things: they slide into it by making a whole series of bad but often pretty small decisions.

Some modern philosophers have blamed these views of evil for the terrible tragedies of the 20^th century, particularly the Holocaust. They have argued it’s because Christian theology and the philosophy of people like Arendt made it impossible to see evil as a positive force, and to imagine that people would actively choose and pursue evil that Hitler wasn’t stopped. They advocate a view of ‘radical evil’: the idea that it’s possible to deliberately choose evil, to set out deliberately to commit genocide, and they say that without this sort of understanding of evil, the same terrible things will happen again because we won’t be able to stop them.

Milbank argues that they’re wrong: that it’s actually the idea of radical evil which made the Holocaust possible. He argues that what makes the horrors of the 20^th century – the Holocaust, the Soviet gulags, the terrible things done as a result of US foreign policy and ‘liberal democracy’ - so terrible is that the law itself has been on the side of the mass murderers, and the resources of the State have been used to commit atrocities on a legal, organised, and bureaucratic basis. For this, he blames Kant.

For Kant, the goal of any particular moral action is irrelevant: all that matters is that it’s done out of duty, and that the principle it’s based on could be turned into a universal law. Lying to protect the Jews you’re hiding in your house is wrong, because if everyone lied all the time, where would we be? In this case, the right thing to do is to tell the truth, even if you know that the people you hand over will be killed in the gas chambers.

Kant won’t acknowledge that our will is broken: if something is the right thing to do, he thinks, it is possible. ‘Ought’ implies ‘can.’ He thinks that we go wrong when we give credence to the desires which arrive from our physical nature: when we act because we want to survive, because we love someone, because we are hungry, which is in contrast to the traditional Christian view, which says that, although our desires are all mixed up, there is something of God’s goodness and truth in them. Kant says that nothing in our experience of the world can teach us what is right, but then struggles to say how we can tell the difference between right and wrong. Worse, he thinks that evil is an inherent possibility of freedom. To be able to do the right thing is to be able to do the wrong thing, and so human autonomy necessarily implies the possibility of evil. Freedom comes first, before good and evil, and so good and evil are set up as equal and opposite positive choices. Freedom comes first, and so the ultimate value isn’t good or evil, but power. This view of freedom is problematic, to say the least: if freedom implies evil, how can it be possible to say that God, the source of freedom, is good?

Kant also argues that moral evil arises out of human community. Left on our own, to exercise our freedom, we are fine: in the context of relationships with other people, we get dragged into bad choices and our judgment is clouded. Ethics is all about doing your duty; none of this messy stuff about emotions. And because of his categorical imperative, it becomes impossible to resist something like the Nazi government. Would assassinating your leader work as a universal ethical principle? Hell, no? How about obedience regardless of your untrustworthy emotions? Hell, yeah. And that’s pretty much where Kant takes you, according to Milbank: the hell of the gas chambers.

All this, says Milbank, is the logical consequence of valuing human freedom above all else, and of making free choice, rather than goodness and love, the ultimate value. It takes you to the gas chambers; it takes you to the gulags; it takes you to to global devastation wreaked by unfettered capitalism and the ‘free’ market. Freedom to choose between good and evil is not freedom. Freedom is being able to love God, being able to do the good that we want to do but, in our slavery to sin, cannot; freedom is being free to enjoy the riches of God’s grace.

Photo credit: airpark on Flickr

Does theology make you happy?

A sociologist called Idler once (eventually) got round to proposing four ways in which religion might have an impact on people's well being:

1. providing a sense of comfort in times of trouble,
2. providing access to a large network of potential support providers,
3. discouraging behaviour which might lead to health problems (smoking, drinking, sleeping around, taking drugs etc. This could, depending on how you look at it, make religious people either happier or sadder),
4. furnishing a cognitive framework through which people can better understand the meaning of pain, suffering and death (that's the whole set of theological explanations for why bad stuff happens, including but not limited to repeated singing of Blessed Be Your Name).

Apparently, a lot of research has been done into 1-3, but not so much into 4, so a guy called Marc A. Musick did some research into the effect of Christians' theodicy on their life satisfaction, published in the Journal of the Sociology of Religion as a paper called Theodicy and Life Satisfaction among Black and White Americans.

Theodicy is about answering the question, 'How can there be a good God when there is so much suffering in the world?' Musick wanted to find out the effect of different theological answers to this question on how satisfied people were with their lives. He did this by getting hold of information from a national social survey, and comparing people's answers to questions about their wellbeing to information about their denominational membership (different denominations tend to have different theologies about the problem of pain), ethnicity (more on that later), how often they went to church, and how much they saw the world in terms of good or evil.

Musick identified one key difference between different theodicies: whether they saw the world in as fundamentally good, or as fundamentally evil, life being seen in terms of a spiritual battle against evil forces. He came up with four hypotheses about the effects of these different sorts of theodicy:

1. "Theodicies that place more emphasis on sin and evil are associated with less life satisfaction." If you're constantly aware of the gap between the way the world is and the way God intended it to be, you're more likely to be dissatisfied, and feeling like you're constantly threatened by the forces of evil is probably not that cheering.
   

2. "The negative effects of holding a sin theodicy on life satisfaction are stronger among Whites than Blacks." This one's less obvious. In addition to demographic differences between black and white Christians (Black Christians tend to be more religiously involved and committed, to view the Church more as one of the key institutions in their lives, and to be more deprived, which leads them to rely more on the church for different kinds of support), Musick thinks that a strong sense of the fundamental goodness of the world in African American Christianity was key to black American Christians' survival of slavery, segregation, and the long and difficult process of emancipation, and that it continues to shape their worldview.
   

3. "The effects of holding such a sin theodicy vary by levels of interaction with fellow believers such that the negative effect is strongest amongst those who interact less frequently." It's like the difference between walking round the haunted house on your own or going round with a friend.
   

4. "The effects of holding a sin theodicy vary by levels of stress such that the negative effect is stronger among people experiencing stressful circumstances." Well, duh.

So, he did his research, and all his hypotheses seemed to be supported by the evidence he found, but the strongest association he found was between service attendance and life satisfaction. Moral of the story: don't skip church, kids, it will make you sad. Overall, he found that religion seems to make people both happy and sad, satisfied and dissatisfied. This reminds me of something my dad once told me, church should 'comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable'. Which perhaps sort of answers an interesting question that this research raises for me: should theology make you happy?

Photo credit: Celestial Photography on Flickr.