Our world is a beautiful, broken place, and we are beautiful, broken people.
A fascinating thing is at work in our generation. On the one hand, the humanistic idealism of the modern age – that conviction that with just enough technology, social progress, and western-style democratic politics, the problems of the world will eventually be taken care of – is being questioned in a new way. Maybe it’s just because globalization and the instant, world-wide spread of information that we have at our fingertips has opened our eyes too wide; maybe we’ve just seen too much, and been exposed to too much complexity to really believe that we here in the United States have the answer to the world’s ills. Genocide, disease, imperialism, corporate greed… Maybe it’s just that we’re overwhelmed. (Some would say that modern optimism ought to have been overwhelmed and killed off by the European horrors of WWI and WWII, respectively, but it has proven remarkably persistent…) Whatever the reason, though, our generation is willing to recognize that all is not right with the world, and we’re beginning to realize that ‘progress’ isn’t going to solve our problems. We recognize that our world is broken.
So, on the one hand, we recognize a paradox in our world; so much beauty, goodness and potential, marred by so much brokenness and conflict. On the other hand, while we are eager to point our fingers at global and systemic brokenness and injustice, we have seemingly lost our ability to talk about genuine personal responsibility. We pay our token regard to it, of course, usually through the positive lens of ‘doing our part’ to be ‘part of the solution’. The modern phenomenon of ‘armchair activism’, or ‘raising awareness’, comes as a result of this; we sign petitions, start and join Facebook ‘causes’, hold candlelight vigils… things which satisfy a certain feeling of responsibility within us in a comfortable and minimally inconvenient way. Not that there is anything wrong with such things, in and of themselves, except that rather than being genuine attempts at serious solutions to the worlds ills, these are often simply exercises by which we justify and strengthen our previously held assumption that we, personally, are not part of the problem. We tend to engage just enough to let our consciences off the hook, and then live our lives however we want to.
So, to use slightly different language, the fascinating thing about our generation is that we recognize that ‘evil’ exists in the world, but we are very uncomfortable trying to name the source of that evil. ‘Judgment’ feels like the only real sin in our society; we feel that everyone ought to be free to live as they see fit without criticism. We believe that evil exists ‘out there’ somewhere; in some violent system or faceless corporate greed. We believe that there are a handful of hypothetically ‘evil people’ in the world – mostly child rapists, murderers and oil tycoons – we just don’t personally know any. But we are embracing a very real paradox when we judge the state of our world, and certain faceless people in it, by a certain standard, a ‘true north’ of some kind, in order to be able recognize that things are not as they should be, while simultaneously taking offence at the idea that there might be a ‘true north’ by which our own lives and choices might ever be interpreted.
You see, our generation recognizes that we live in a beautiful, but broken, world. What we often fail to recognize is that we are beautiful, but broken, people. ‘Evil’ is not something that exists ‘out there’ in a hypothetical system or person… it exists in me. It isn’t just ‘the world’ that’s broken; it’s we, people, who are broken. Beautiful? Yes. Full of potential and goodness? Yes. But it is a marred beauty, a distorted goodness, and an unfulfilled potential.
Let’s put it in terms of music. To say that there is a ‘true north’ in the world is like understanding that there is a true musical scale; there is a true pitch, a true frequency of resonance by which all our playing is evaluated. We can be in tune, or out of tune, depending on the relation of our voice or instrument to that one true scale. From experience, you know that listening to one person play or sing out of tune is bad enough. But a whole band or orchestra with every player both out of tune with themselves and the players around them? That’s just painful to think about. The dissonance of the whole is essentially a function of the dissonance of the parts, even though the collective dissonance of the whole seems to take on a character all its own. This, in many ways, is a picture of our world.
Every one of us is out of tune to one degree or another, and real humility and maturity in thinking about our world comes when I realize that about myself. It comes when I realize that my brokenness, my dissonance; my pride and greed and selfishness and apathy are part of the overall cacophony. We’re all out of tune, and when we’re all playing at once, it’s a pretty awful performance. This is really what we’re talking about when we talk about ‘evil’; big picture ‘Evil’ and personal evil. They are intimately related, and we can’t genuinely engage the big ‘E’ until we’re willing to face the small ‘e’. We need to get our own instruments tuned.
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