I just finished watching Shake Hands with the Devil, the documentary about Canadian Lieutenant-General Romeo Dallaire who led the UN peace mission in Rwanda throughout the 1994 genocide. A friend had mentioned that what impacted her about Dallaire's reflection on the genocide was Dallaire's comments that when he shock hands with the Hutu extremists he saw no humanity in their eyes. He felt he was shaking hands with the devil, in both an immediate sense and a broader metaphysical/metaphorical sense. Later in the film, Dallaire mentions that while in his office one night during the genocide he felt something come through the window and settle in the room. A presence which gave him strength to carry on, to continue the mission, to hope. Dallaire's evaluation of these experiences was that in the face of unspeakable, unimaginable force of evil, there must be (and for him there was) a force of (for) the purist good.
I find this moral dualism relatively easy to relate to. The idea that there are both good and evil forces in the world, both working in different ways, is a very Christian idea. However, these forces are not presented as equal within Christianity, and in my understanding, evil itself is not really personified, it is a state of chaos and destruction, but is ultimately subservient to God and his plan for the world to be united back to him. All this is very well, yet i struggle with the idea so much. The very reasons i feel convinced that there is a good God out there somewhere who does want good things for us all can easily be inverted to demonstrate maybe the God that is up there is a malicious God, revealing in humanity's chaos and suffering. Or, more likely, no theistic type of God at all. For all the demonstrable evidence about the lack of God's intervention in world (see: humanity; history), i still found Dallaire's experience harrowing, hopeful and honest. And, at times, I can't help but feel the same way as Dallaire. The capacity for human grace and hope is unfathomable, and yet, as Hannah Arendt has discussed, evil can be so banal, that each of us holds the capacity for unimaginable evil. Are we, then, split? Concepts of sin/brokenness etc all point to something around this idea. But i don't think explain it completely. The capacity to sin/or sin itself is not, at least in my mind, the same as this sense of evil, which is different from a lie, from a broken promise, from a vengeful comment, from a lustful thought, from a hateful thought. (Or is it?) Are we just animals, killing each other in our own ways (colonisation, politics, religion, power)? Why do I not feel completely satisfied with these naturalist/humanist explanations, as convinced as I am of them?
"We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice", said Martin Luther King Jr. during his speech on Vietnam in 1968. This makes my bones shiver, and my heart fill. All my education and deconstruction of how constructed my reality is, my thoughts which create the universe, all compete for hold over my convictions when i feel stirred like this.
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I think about this nearly every day and become generally more confused. But it's a self-perpetuating concoction of questions that seem to have a commonality. And that for me at the moment centres on what exactly is the nature of God, and what is His role in all of this. And possibly what is good and evil and is there a ratio...
ReplyDeleteThe Rwandan genocide is one of the most clear-cut evils ever to manifest itself in the history of this world. Never has such an intensity of killing occurred in such a short space of time. 100 days and over 800,000 people ceased to exist. [Side note: it's a nicely rounded statistic for the world to market and shake their heads over... 15 years late but who's counting? I'll keep my cynicism in check] It is shocking, and nothing will justify it or make it ok that such a huge amount of people have suffered and are still suffering from the trauma of this event and the many before April 1994 .. and ongoing [see: DRC].
But an evil I am finding more subtle, but pervasive and insidious, is the not so black-and-white cases plaguing our planet. The fact that they don't seem to be recognised make them so much more frightening. Better the devil you know than the devil you don't, right? Don't get me wrong, this isn't an evil-o-meter, what happened in '94 could never be quantified. One innocent death cannot be quantified or justified. But what about the evil that is the international community hardly giving a dam about Rwanda before and for a long time after the genocide? Rwanda was not a geo-politically strategic country to give a dam about, for oil, for its vote in the UN, or for its resources both natural and human. It was just another small country in the 'country' of Africa, inhabited by black people who had 'ancient tribal hatreds' [omit 'colonialism' here] that were of no concern to the rest of the world. What I find evil is not just the deformed priorities of the internationalcommunity/passive populace/'steal from the future, sell it now and call GDP' world we live in, but the fact that reality is dressed up as something else, suffering is largely ignored and discarded, and we kid ourselves into thinking it's ok to be concerned with not having a sufficient wardrobe (I'm guilt-tripping myself here, it did cross my mind today). This is the evil, along with the more black-and-white, that is starting to trouble me beyond words.
Enter its antagonist. Dallaire experienced this pure good come into his room a night where he could hear the screams of civilians being massacred below on the street. It was the earlier days of the genocide and he was exhausted and demoralised (being ignored and then abandoned by the world and his bosses in the UN). It revived him and gave him hope and he attributes it to allowing him to go on for the duration of the genocide. And his 'if pure evil exists then so must pure good' logic makes so much sense. I think the existence of good is the only answer to the covert evil mentioned above. I'd like to propose that the reality of pure good is what is needed to shed light on this hidden evil.
Shock tactics must be a chapter in the text book of marketing 101. Following the funding streams of aid must surely prove that the shocking one-off natural disaster pulls people's purse strings more than the relentless, grinding, future stealing, '1 billion people are going hungry' reality of poverty does. Everyone is tring to shock us. Shock us essentially into prioritising 'things' and 'happiness' [you know the drill, name a product...] which will bring us fulfilment, purpose, meaning... heck is philanthropy a product? But I think it's reductionist to address evil with well marketed, shocking images or articles... or well rounded genocide figures. This evil should not need to compete for our attention or concern along with i-phones.
Part of me thinks.... and this is only a thinking... that to bring restoration, bringing the evil, chaotic, broken world to a place united back to God, bringing heaven to earth - is going to take a belief in the pure good. Otherwise what is the point?