ALL-GOOD
Within the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition, god has historically been understood as entirely good. As children of this all-good god, we sometimes assume ourselves to be perfectly good. While the sins of others represent their evil identity, our own sins are vindicated by the excuses that make them permissible and in some cases even admirable. One can observe this tendency in our attitudes toward torture and civilian casualties in our war efforts. When performed by an enemy, they represent acts of terror, but when performed by us, our allies, or those that we have trained we assume that such acts are justified.
Our attachment to the need to be viewed as all-good can leave us devastated by criticism. Rather than acknowledge our need for conversion, we might become unnecessarily defensive or respond with a condemnation of the criticizer.
A good reputation is one of the most treasured possessions a person can have; however, it is worth noting that popularity, the widespread assumption of a person’s goodness and value, has not always translated to the service of humanity. Some of the most infamous world leaders came to power and maintained it with a great degree of popularity.
Jesus places no value on the appearance of goodness. He seems indifferent to people’s perception that he is a sinner when he is described as a “drunkard and a glutton.” However, he responds sharply when someone calls him “good teacher,” stating “no one is good except God.” He tells his disciples they are blessed when people insult, persecute, and hate them yet criticizes the religious leaders who cultivate an external image of holiness. Jesus’ prescription that almsgiving, fasting, and prayer be done outside of public view indicates that he recognized the dangers of seeking public affirmation and the appearance of sanctity. Popularity and apparent goodness have little place in the Gospel. The crucifixion and accompanying abandonment by the crowds, as well as Jesus’ disciples, are perhaps the most profound statement of Jesus’ detachment from popularity. Some of his followers in our own times have not fared much better than Jesus. Shortly before Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed, his popularity had been declining due to his new emphases on addressing racism in the north, confronting poverty, and ending the Vietnam War. Similarly, the Jewish prophets, from whom Jesus drew inspiration, were not models of popularity. Appearance is appealing because it’s easier to promote an image of goodness than it is to live ethically. People’s perception can be easily controlled and manipulated. Malcolm X claimed, “The media is the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and the guilty innocent… they control the minds of the masses.” This is not to say the media is bad; however, it must be understood that its power to shape opinion should be accompanied by a sense of responsibility to accurately educate the public. At its best the media can be a prophetic voice, challenging us to be attentive to the problems in our world and deconstructing the certainty that results from our limited perspectives and experiences. At its worst it can become a tool that the powerful and wealthy use to promote a simplistic self-serving narrative about who is good and who is bad. We must learn to identify whose interests are being sold. We should pay attention to the commercials on our news programming and who is funding educational initiatives to identify the interests that may be shaping the information we are receiving. Consumers of media also must recognize their own responsibility in creating demand for programming that re-enforces their assumptions and promotes demonization rather than understanding.
God and religion, like media, can become tools for assuring us and others of our goodness rather than being realities that challenge us to strive for personal conversion. God and religion can also be useful tools in assuring us of the evil and guilt of the other. The assumption of our own goodness is often a pre-requisite for judging someone else. Anyone who has honestly embarked on a path (humanistic, psychological, religious, spiritual, or philosophical) to try to be a better person learns that it is very difficult to overcome ego. Inevitably, we become aware that personal growth is demanding, which makes us more sympathetic to the imperfections of those around us.
Assumed goodness, which requires no self-awareness, is unable to see how the demonization of other people often is less a reflection of who those people are than an expression of our demand that they meet our, sometimes self-serving, expectations. Often those who most easily resort to hate are not so different from those they hate. Anthony de Mello pointed out that “you see people not as they are, but as you are.” I can attest that occasionally when I find myself in an argument with my wife, I decide to bring up something that is bothering me about her. As I prepare to score my point, it occurs to me that she could say the same thing about me. (Usually, I go for the point anyway, gambling that she hasn’t noticed my mild hypocrisy.) Such instances are reminders that the things about others that frustrate us are often true of ourselves as well.
Humility is an alternative to the all-good assumption. It allows us to see the truth of our limitations and to become more understanding of the limitations of others. Jesus encouraged humility. We all have stakes in our eyes; our task is identifying our own stakes and trying to remove them. At the very least we must work to correct the distortion those stakes cause in our vision by becoming aware of their existence. This awareness allows us to move beyond the inadequate designations of other people as either good or evil.
A friend of mine recently asked me whether I felt a racist could be a good person. Initially, I didn’t want to answer his question. As I reflected on it, I found it to be a very useful question. Clearly racism is sinful; it causes suffering and division in the human community. Therefore, I reconsidered the question asking instead, “can one be a good person and sinful?” The obvious answer seems to be yes. If the answer is no, then one would likely assume that everyone in the world is a bad person because none of us are perfect. However, as I have reflected on these questions, I have come to believe it is more useful to think there are not good people and bad people. There are only people who sometimes have good behavior and sometimes have bad behavior, whose attitudes and values are sometimes healthy (good) and sometimes, as in cases of racism, are destructive (bad). Suffering should not be understood as the result of bad people but the result of bad actions performed from faulty, ego-centric perspectives.
One critique of this perspective might involve challenging me, “So, you don’t think Hitler was a bad person?” This is a difficult question to answer in any way other than yes. However, one could argue that Hitler’s success was less rooted in people’s unwillingness to judge him as evil than in Hitler’s ability to manipulate people’s tendency to judge. In other words Hitler’s evil designs were enabled by his ability to convince people to judge him as good and the enemy as bad.
The simplistic division into good and bad people also allows us to escape a challenging lesson of Hitler, his followers, and his allies. If the Nazis are seen as normal people who did awful things and had crazy ideas, we might become suspicious of our own actions, ideas, and lenses. When we consider that the greatest evildoers in history viewed themselves as the good guys, we might not be as reassured by the belief that we are the good guys.
If you are finding it difficult to understand the inadequacies of simplistic designations of good and evil, permit me a simple exercise: Imagine that in the late 18th century you were dominated by a powerful people who used you without considering your interests (think taxation without representation). You toiled away in order for these overlords to acquire great wealth. First, would you fight for your independence in the face of this evil and oppressive reality? Second, would you view the ones who would not grant you liberty as evil? Americans are taught to think, like the brave colonists, “Yes, we would have fought for our freedom against the evil British exploiters.” However, if you were George Washington’s slave, Harry, and your answer to the first question was “yes, I would have fought for my freedom,” then you would have fought against the American revolutionaries whose general, George Washington, was denying you your independence in order to supplement his wealth and power. Other than Harry, only one of Washington’s 317 slaves attained freedom. Harry fought for the British because they offered to grant slaves freedom in exchange for their loyalty. If your answer to the second question is “yes, I would view those who refused to grant me liberty as evil,” and you were Harry, then you would have viewed George Washington, the American hero, and those who fought with him as evil. In fact if George Washington applied his own values in Harry’s context, like Harry, he would have opposed the American revolutionaries to earn freedom. Superficial designations of good and evil are clearly inadequate.
The aim of this exercise is not to argue that Washington was bad but to help us be aware that our perceptions of good and evil are often conditional. Our convictions about goodness and evil might not hold up as absolute truths if reality was viewed from a different perspective. We must be aware of the relative nature of our perspectives, contexts, experiences, and judgments. A person, institution, or policy may benefit us but exploit, oppress, and harm other people; therefore, we must search out different perspectives and become increasingly aware of the invisible people whose experiences are ignored. Observing different experiences inevitably will complicate our thinking, but this does not mean we must become relativists who don’t stand for anything. Instead, it allows us to take a stance informed by more than a consideration of our own limited good. An awareness of multiple perspectives also increases our capacity to identify our blindspots.
I like to remind my classes that history often leaves people asking, “Can you believe people thought that was OK?” and “How could they think that?” History demonstrates the human capacity for ignorance. As one of my friends likes to say, “Too often we don’t know what we don’t know.” Unfortunately, ignorance has not been conquered. One day people will wonder the same things about us and be shocked that we held some of our assumptions. If we find this hard to accept, we might ask ourselves, “At what point in the last fifty years did we transcend this tendency to have blind spots?” The harmful tendencies that we so often invoke to demonize or scapegoat others are universal. Everyone sins. As Pope Francis frequently points out, “Who are we to judge?” Who are we to define ourselves or others as good or evil?
Humbly accepting that we don’t need to be defined as a good person or a bad person but simply as a person is liberating. It becomes more natural to identify with the other. We don’t become as frustrated about the imperfections of our brothers and sisters. We also don’t need to berate ourselves because we aren’t perfect or respond with defensive anger when someone questions our assumptions or points out our imperfection. Humility, fully embracing our humanity and accepting that we are not the godly center of the universe, is a starting point for true conversion. It allows our lens to transcend an arrogant or insecure focus on self, so that we can experience and respond to reality more compassionately. Humility helps us to become more cautious, intentional, and wise in identifying what to stand for and against. Rather than standing for the “all-good” members of humanity and against the “all-bad” people, perhaps we can strive to stand firmly against injustice and stand for an inclusive human community.