Good And Evil, Part 1: Keeper of My Brother’s Tin-foil Hat

The seventh season of Fox-TV’s 24 just began, and it promises once again to be one, long breath-catching bang. In past seasons, terrorists have attempted to assassinate a candidate for president, detonate a nuclear bomb in Los Angeles (twice, once successfully), kill the president (two of them!), release a biological weapon in the US, had a weasel of a president conspire with terrorists, have shadowy groups with the government conspire to overthrow it, and on and on.

While entertaining on one level, 24 is melodramatic and incredibly over-the-top. In season after season, in order to maintain suspense throughout the 24 episodes of the season happening in “real time”, one bad guy (or woman) is revealed to be connected to someone further up the Baddy Food Chain, with allusions to a worldwide network.

This is quite the popular theme/plot in movies and TV shows going back to James Bond or even earlier. The criminal is part of a larger, organized crime group giving him orders – perhaps ultimately there is an Evil Genius like Dr. No or Blofeld, or an organization like SPECTRE, pulling all the strings. Or consider the wild popularity of The X Files: a shadow government behind our own, secretly plotting with or against alien invaders…a mysterious, hidden, vast, malevolent organization of people out there controlling us, a “shadow government” or “secret new world order” or whatever…run a search at Google and you’ll get tens of millions of hits on those and similar terms.

To borrow from Colonel Jessep in the movie A Few Good Men, deep down in places we don’t talk about at fancy parties, we want there to be a conspiracy, we need there to be a conspiracy because if there’s no conspiracy, then how different are people like Osama bin Laden or those who commit genocide in places like the Balkans or Darfur, from you or me?

We want to believe that evil happens because there are other people who are evil, and they, unlike us, are capable of doing unspeakable things. We want to believe the murderers and rapists and drug dealers we lock up or put on death row are reprobate, unreachable, irredeemable. We don’t want to think that we, at a fundamentally human level, have anything in common with “those people”.

Yihiel Dinur was a survivor of the Nazi concentration camps who was asked to identify Adolf Eichmann at his trial at Nuremberg. When he looked on the man who was called the Nazis’ “Jewish Specialist”, he collapsed, stricken by the realization that Eichmann was not some monstrous aberration of humanity, but that he and Eichmann had a lot more in common than anyone would want to admit. “I saw that I am capable to do this…I am he,” Dinur explained later in an interview with 60 Minutes‘ Mike Wallace (“The Devil is a Gentleman”, Feb. 6, 1983). “Eichmann is in all of us.”

The bottom line is that there are no über-evil organizations of malevolent geniuses; we have more in common with those who made children soldiers in Sierra Leone or the butchers of Dachau than many of us will ever want to admit. This is the nature of our universe, of the world in which we live and act. Ours is a broken creation, flawed, doomed to fly apart at the seams without the grace of God. “All have sinned, and fall short of the perfection of God,” the apostle Paul reminded us [emphasis mine].

Cain asked of God, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” when he damned well already knew the answer to that. The apostle Paul answered how much we have in common with those who frighten us when he said “This is a saying worthy of true acceptance: that Christ Jesus came into this world to save sinners, of whom I am the worst.”