“I have set
before you life and death, blessing and curse.
Therefore
choose life, that you and your offspring may live.”
(Deut 30:19)
This
quotation came to mind as I was thinking about the issues surrounding a recent
video that was posted by one of our students to express his frustration with
those who choose to stereotype others and who use anonymous (or not so
anonymous) means to be hurtful and mean, especially via current social media. Another
word that might be used to describe the gratuitous, intentional act of
demeaning another person is the word “evil” and all that it implies.
While this word
may bring to mind images of fierce-looking beings from Gustave Dore’s drawings
for Dante’s Inferno, in actual fact
some of the more evil people in the world are and have been, to all
appearances, the most common of men and women (characters from The Hobbit notwithstanding). It’s only
in police photos that suddenly those who commit crimes look glum,
expressionless, unappealing and ruffled; sort of like we look when we look at
ourselves in the mirror each morning, which in itself is a good reminder that
there is this same capacity for evil within each of us, and we neglect paying
attention to it at our own peril. “Men do not differ much about what things
they will call evils; they differ enormously about what evils they will call
excusable.” (GK Chesterton)
Traditionally,
committing a sin is doing something evil, whether to a smaller degree (venial
sin) or to a great degree (mortal sin). The three conditions that are given for
deciding whether something is a mortal sin are also good gauges to see whether
something is just a really bad thing to do. First, it must be something that is
a grave matter, something that has serious consequences and truly breaks
relationships with others and with God. Secondly, it must be something that is
done with full knowledge, with a clear notion that this is something that will
hurt others seriously. Thirdly, it must be something that is done with
deliberate consent, with the conscious decision to do something that you know
to be bad. The Catholic Catechism gives a straightforward definition: “Sin is an offense against
reason, truth, and right conscience; it is failure in genuine love for God and
neighbour caused by a perverse attachment to certain goods. It wounds the
nature of man and injures human solidarity.” (CC1849) Bad is bad even for the
bad, because it is the good that defines our core.
Hiding
behind an anonymous identity makes evil easy and even appealing. If others
cannot hold us responsible, and if we don’t have the capacity to hold ourselves
responsible, then all those hidden parts of our nature, the dark corners where
the bad bits dwell, have an opportunity to come out.
Gollum
wasn’t a bad guy when he started his life, but things went from bad to worse
when what he thought was precious wasn’t, and what he thought was evil wasn’t.
That’s the glamour of evil. When rain-water discovers a hole in the roof, it begin
to drip into the house and ends up making things quite messy, uncomfortable and
finally unliveable for everyone. But some people just get used to it.
The fact is
that we have a choice, that we can make a choice. That is what the quotation on
top is all about. The fact of being able to choose makes it possible for us to
drift towards the evil side of things or to the good side of things. The habits
of choice that we develop, drip by drip, shape the character we become. Things
like anonymous identities, letters or postings, spoken words (gossip), and the
like don’t have to be used for bad things, but they are unfortunately more
likely to be used that way. It’s a problem that is related to what the church
calls the “Original Sin” that is part of our nature, whereby we are “subject to
the laws of creation and to the moral norms that govern the use of freedom.”
(CC396) The tendency to doing bad things draws us with a thousand shiny
baubles, while that of doing good things seems to require more work. The moral
life is not reached for free.
We move our
souls each day by the choices we make, online or not, and so change our world
and the world of others for good or ill and in ways unknown and unimagined. It
pays to pay attention.
