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| Preface: No Stranger to Evil | xi | ||||
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| Selected Bibliography | 239 |
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"Where was God when the towers fell?" The ABC reporter's question to me, only two days after the horrific slaughter of the innocent thousands in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, went straight for the jugular, and it was meant to. Or as a National Public Radio interviewer asked me the same day, "I saw a woman running through the acrid smoke crying, 'God, are you here?' What should I have said to her?"
With television making the atrocity a local event for untold millions around the world, questions like that must have been asked in countless ways that day -- sometimes with heartbreak, sometimes with anger, and sometimes with mute incomprehension. But the concern was surely the same. On a clear blue, peaceful Tuesday morning, the deadly terrorist strike laid bare the two deepest issues of human life: the raw evil of the inhumanity of humanity and the agonizing question of the place of God in human suffering.
These two issues, and the piercing questions they raise, are the central theme of this book. Together they lie at the heart of our human existence. Each requires the other for an adequate response, and both are surrounded by a dangerous ignorance and confusion today. The first can be expressed as: "Why do bad things happen to good people?" And the second: "What does it say of us as human beings that the worst atrocities on planet earth are done by our own species -- in other words, by people like us?"
Needless to say, these issues and questions are far older and have far wider application than the events of September 11. For one thing, while thousands died at Ground Zero, thousands of others across New York and hundreds of thousands across the world also died that day -- of cancer, stroke, hunger, accidents, murder, AIDS, suicide, and for many other tragic reasons, not to mention old age. Each of these deaths was accompanied by its own grieving family and friends, and each was a dire event that, for them as individuals, was as bad as the terrorist strike was for the United States as a whole.
A basic fact of life is that any of us may suffer and all of us will die.
For another thing, while a televised attack on two of the world's most famous buildings was shockingly extraordinary, and designed to be so, far more people in the world suffer today under the heel of grinding evils that are numbingly ordinary and will never make the newspaper headlines or the television news. Few of us, for instance, give serious thought to the millions of young girls forced into prostitution, to the women abused by their husbands, to the widows driven from their homes and their rightful lands, to the men convicted and imprisoned without justice, or to the millions of families kept for a lifetime in bonded slavery.
Another basic fact of life is that countless human beings live in abject daily fear of evil and the brutal people who abuse power and oppress them. For much of the world, evil is -- and always has been -- a daily fact of life.
The Lisbon Earthquake of Our Time
These two ancient issues are dark and difficult enough in themselves. But there is a modern twist to the discussion that makes it harder still. The events of September 11 hit America and the West at large at a time when intellectual and moral responses to evil are weaker, more controversial, and more confused than they have been for centuries. Put simply, we no longer have a shared understanding about whether there is any such thing as evil. Some even question whether it is proper to speak of anyone as our enemy. The consequences of our uncertainty damage us on all sorts of levels.
Thus, whether September 11 was viewed as a disaster, a tragedy, a crime, an act of war, or a symbolic spectacle on the grandest scale -- "the greatest work of art of all time," as the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen put it -- the force of the hijacked planes hit the Western intellectual world as damagingly as it did the World Trade Center. The lethal challenge of evil at the beginning of the twenty-first century exposes the core confusion of modern thinking just as the Great Lisbon earthquake in 1755 challenged traditional European views in the eighteenth century -- but in the opposite direction.
In the mid-eighteenth century Lisbon was the capital of the far-flung Portuguese empire and one of the most powerful and beautiful cities in the world. But on November 1, 1755, it was devastated by a triple shock: an offshore earthquake lasting ten minutes that was felt as far away as France, Italy, Switzerland, and North Africa; a gigantic killer wave that unleashed a fifty-foot wall of water pounding across the city; and a series of fires, set off by the tremors, which devastated what was left of the city. The combined death toll of all three disasters was more than 60,000 people, and the shock and horror were felt right across Europe. To the eighteenth century the mention of "Lisbon" was the equivalent of the mention of "Auschwitz" today.
The parallels between New York 2001 and Lisbon 1755 are evident at once: an autumn day; sudden, total, and appalling devastation; buildings destroyed; skies dark and thick with dust; thousands hideously slaughtered; heroic human responses; civilized life drastically disrupted; weeks following filled with a lifetime's worth of grief and funerals; and intense intellectual debates set off around the centers of the educated world.
But the difference between 1755 and 2001 is crucial too. The outcome of the Lisbon earthquake, as interpreted by Voltaire and others, was to weaken traditional faith in God and providence and strengthen the new confidence in Enlightenment progress -- God is dead and the future of humankind is one of our own making ...
Unspeakable
Excerpted from Unspeakable: Facing up to the Challenge of Evil by Os Guinness
All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
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