Evil is a test of ends and means.
By that I mean any ends can become evil if the means used to achieve them reach a certain threshold. Sincere religious conviction and long-held feelings of oppression can be the fuel for something as good as the Civil Rights movement (right). These forces also fueled the fanatics of 9-11.
The key difference between them lay in means, not ends. This is a hard lesson to convey, perhaps the hardest in all of politics, where ideals and passion are the fuel of change, and where constant change is necessary for progress.
The same is true for selfishness. Selfishness can be harnessed to build great corporations and deliver great inventions to the market. It can also be harnessed for disaster capitalism, the deliberate creation and manipulation of horrible events by people who just want to make money off them.
Where is the border of evil? It is not in ends. There is no set of ends — even democracy, freedom, or God — which can not be twisted to evil result when the means become extreme. When religious conservatives condemn "moral relativism," I wonder if they even know what it means. In a world where every end justifies some means, but no end justifies all means, any absolute must be subject to question.
This is yet-another reason why political theses must change with each
generation. The assumptions, the myths and values we create in our
youth, can always be taken to extremes, no matter what they may be.
Individual liberty, for which so many sacrificed during the Depression and World War II, can become license, or, worse, a dismissal of
all others. The same is true for societal control. Keeping kids from
rioting in the streets is good. Seeking to control every citizen’s
actions in the name of fear is not.
Who can argue that Clarence Thomas did not feel real oppression,
throughout his life, culminating in the pain of his Supreme Court
confirmation hearing? I take him at his word, that he has spent his
life trying to follow the teachings of Martin Luther King Jr. But that
does not excuse a complete lack of judicial temperament, an
unwillingness to see any question as having two sides, and the
transformation of our highest court into a mere city council.
The balance of ends and means is the work of maturity. It is not
something young minds come to naturally. As in the case of Thomas, some minds don’t come to it at all. I have two young people at my
home, and both see the world mainly in black-and-white, without
many shades of gray, without the rainbow of color which surrounds all
of our world. So their ideals are set, and they move on with those
ideals for as long as they may guide them.
At which point they either see the gray, or as in the case of this
Administration, retreat into the self-delusion of ends justifying means which is at the heart of
evil.
