Throughout all of human
history this is a truth that men have taken into account as they have dealt
with one another, as they have conducted business, as they have passed laws,
and as they have built civil societies.
It is the first and most basic insight of both anthropology and sociology. Evil exists. It wrecks havoc on our best laid plans and our sincerest
intentions. The world is infected
by sin and populated by sinners.
No one ever had to teach a
child how to sin. No one was ever
dependent upon a bad environment to learn how to be cruel or selfish or
perverse. No one ever needed older
siblings to show them the ropes of greed, or pride, or dishonesty.
This natural inclination to
sin is no petty or trivial matter.
Evil is destructive. It is
bent on death and thus runs roughshod over everything and everyone—including
the person who perpetrates the evil in the first place. If left unrestrained, evil morbidly
embraces death. For, “there is a
way that seems right to a man but its end is the way of death” (Prov. 14:12).
The landscape of evil is all
too familiar to us. We have seen
it time after time during the course of the last century. Broken bodies. Cast off lives. Stark naked tragedy. Gore and devastation. Sadness and sorrow. There before us lay the vexing specter
of mortality and the awful stench of death. It is a gruesome panorama that defiles our senses and haunts
our every waking thought. It is a
nightmare come to life. The memory
of it is carved onto the fleshly tablets of our hearts with a dull familiar
blade—a blade variously wielded by Adolf Hitler, or Josef Stalin, or Mao Tse
Dung, or Margaret Sanger, or Ho Chi Minh, or Idi Amin, or Pol Pot, or Saddam
Hussein, or Osama bin Laden. Indeed,
the calamity of evil clutters the pages of human history. Its pathos persistently torments the
hodge podge ideals of human hope.
Replayed again and again and again, it has become a semeiotic symbol of
the end of man and the end of his doing.
Every great society and every
great institution has necessarily had to take evil into account. The simple fact is that relativism is a
practical impossibility because of the existence of evil. If freedom is to survive, and civility
is to prevail then evil must be restrained.
Robert Goguet, in his
authoritative history of the development of American judicial philosophy,
argued that the genius of the Constitution was that it took this fully into
account. The Founding Fathers
recognized that because evil was a present and horrible reality, they would
have to choose some identifiable objective standard of good upon which to build
cultural consensus. Though many of
them were not personally practicing Christians, the precedence they gave to
Biblical morality was a matter of sober-headed practicality: “The more they
meditated on the Biblical standards for civil morality, the more they perceived
their wisdom and inspiration.
Those standards alone have the inestimable advantage never to have
undergone any of the revolutions common to all human laws, which have always
demanded frequent amendments; sometimes changes; sometimes additions; sometimes
the retrenching of superfluities.
There has been nothing changed, nothing added, nothing retrenched from
Biblical morality for above three thousand years.”
The American Framers were
heavily influenced by the writings of Thomas Hooker, founder of the City of
Hartford in the Connecticut Colony and learned Puritan divine. Thus they agreed whole-heartedly with
his oft quoted maxim on the wellspring of law and order in society: “Of law
there can be no less acknowledged, than that her seat is in the bosom of God,
her voice in the harmony of the world.
All things in heaven and on earth do her homage; the very least as doing
her care, and the greatest as not exempt from her power. Both angels and men, and creatures of
what condition soever, though each in a different sort of name, yet all with
one uniform consent, admire her as the mother of their peace and joy.”
John Jay, the first Chief
Justice of the Supreme Court similarly affirmed the necessity of a standard of
virtue for the proper maintenance of civil stability and order: “No human
society has ever been able to maintain both order and freedom, both
cohesiveness and liberty apart from the moral precepts of the Christian
Religion applied and accepted by all the classes. Should our Republic ere forget this fundamental precept of
governance, men are certain to shed their responsibilities for licentiousness
and this great experiment will then surely be doomed.”
Constitutional provisions
such as the separation of powers, mixed government, checks and balances, jury
trials, and civil rights were all predicated on the notion that left to their
own devices men are helpless against the wiles of evil. In this poor fallen world both sin and
the sinners who sin must be restrained if justice is to prevail. In order for there to be law and order,
right and wrong not only must be defined, they must be accounted for in the
very fabric of our relationships.
Thus, a brash and cavalier
attitude toward any exclusive standard of goodness and morality is perhaps the
single most distressing trait of modern relativism. In the name of civil liberties, cultural diversity, and
political-correctness it has pressed forward a radical agenda of willy-nilly
moral corruption and ethical degeneration. Ironically, its brazen disregard for any objective standard
of decency and its passionately undeterred defense of perverse impropriety has
actually threatened our liberties and diversity because it has threatened the
foundations that made those things possible in the first place simply because
it has no mechanism for the restraint of evil. Unfettered evil is the enemy of any and all societies
because unfettered evil makes the very idea of society impossible.
Relativism wants the
privileges of civilization bestowed upon the citizenry as an unearned,
undeserved, and unwarranted entitlement.
But great privileges bring with them great responsibilities. Our remarkable freedom has been bought
with a price. And that price was
moral diligence, virtuous sacrifice, and ethical uprightness over and against
real and objective evil. The legal
commitment of relativism to any and all of the fanatically twisted fringes of
American culture is a pathetically self-defeating crusade that has confused
liberty with license.
Gardiner Spring, the eloquent
pastor-patriot during the early nineteenth century in New York, persuasively
argued that the kind of free society America aspired to be was utterly and
completely impossible apart from moral integrity: “Every considerate friend of
civil liberty, in order to be consistent with himself must be the friend of the
Bible. No tyrant has ever
effectually conquered and subjugated a people whose liberties and public virtue
were founded upon the Word of God.
After all, civil liberty is not freedom from restraint. Men may be wisely and benevolently
checked, and yet be free. No man
has a right to act as he thinks fit, irrespective of the wishes and interests
of others. This would be exemption
from all law, and from the wholesome influence of social institutions. Heaven itself would not be free, if
this were freedom. No created
being holds any such liberty as this, by a divine warrant. The spirit of subordination, so far
from being inconsistent with liberty, is inseparable from it.”
Similarly, Aleksandr
Solzhenitsyn, the brilliant Russian novelist, historian, and Nobel laureate,
has said: “Fifty years ago it would have seemed quite impossible in America
that an individual be granted boundless freedom with no purpose but simply for
the satisfaction of his whims. The
defense of individual rights has reached such extremes as to make society as a
whole defenseless. It is time to
defend, not so much human rights, as human obligations.”
According to James Q. Wilson,
the shabby ambiguities of relativism are a kind of riot of second-bests: “Many
people have persuaded themselves that no law has any foundation in a widely
shared sense of justice; each is the arbitrary enactment of the politically
powerful. This is called legal realism, but it strikes me as
utterly unrealistic. Many people
have persuaded themselves that children will be harmed if they are told right
from wrong; instead they should be encouraged to discuss the merits of moral
alternatives. This is called values clarification, but I think it a
recipe for confusion rather than clarity.
Many people have persuaded themselves that it is wrong to judge the
customs of another society since there are no standards apart from custom on
which such judgments can rest; presumably they would oppose infanticide only if
it involved their own child. This
is sometimes called tolerance; I
think a better name would be barbarism.”
The entire witness of Western
civilization bears this out. Thus,
through the ages faithful men have boldly cut across the grain of comfort and
convention, warning men and nations of their dire danger: evil lurks.
In the weeks and months
immediately after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington no one
doubted the reality of wickedness.
No one doubted that there was such a thing as sin. No one questioned whether or not our
world was stricken by evil.
Suddenly, we once again found consensus in the reality of the fall.
