Good and Evil

Umair Haque has written an article entitled, The Case for Being Disruptively Good.

In it he discusses the way in which businesses who used to get away with bad practice are now far more exposed than they used to be, due to the information age - news travels fast, in other words. Purely from a shareholding viewpoint, he notes: being a good guy pays. The best corporate citizens list, which includes Hewlett-Packard, Intel, General Mills, I.B.M. and Kimberly-Clark, had a total return on shareholder value of 2.37 percent over three years. But the 30 worst had a negative 7.38 percent return".

But this is far more than an article about shareholders. It's about the fact that big businesses that are thriving are doing so more because they have decided to follow 'good' practices more than 'evil' ones. But even those who are doing good vary in the extent to which they're doing good.

He lists a ladder with five steps and shows how various well-known companies are learning the ropes of doing good: Pepsi's on the bottom rung, having done a "marginal bit of good"; Nestle is on the next rung, having got itself a 'black eye' for not being as open and honest as it claimed (thanks for Facebook!).

Google's just got itself back on the third rung by pulling out of China, avoiding the compromises that would have been required of it, if it had stayed. Apple's on the fourth rung - though Haque doesn't seem convinced it'll stay there, and Wal Mart (surprise!) is on the fifth rung due to its Sustainability Index which 'lays down new rules for every single supplier in its vast, globe-spanning ecosystem.'

Haque doesn't see anyone on the top rung as yet, but is waiting.

The ladder image is only part of what he has to say. Check out the rest: the historic viewpoint, the revolutions, the changes.

And another brief post:

The satan, it seems, is a nonhuman being, a type of angel, perhaps in some accounts an ex-angel or fallen angel, and he or it (somehow feminists never campaign that the satan should be referred to as 'she') comes to be opposed to humankind, and then to Israel, and hence, not surprisingly, to Jesus.

From Evil and the Justice of God, chapter 4 (pg 108 of the hardcover edition), by N T Wright.

Evil and Postmodernity

Postmodernism, in recognising that we are all deeply flawed, avoids any return to a classic doctrine of original sin by claiming that humans have no fixed 'identity' and hence no fixed responsibility. You can't escape evil within postmodernity, but you can't find anybody else to take the blame either.
We should not be surprised that one of the socio-cultural phenomena which characterize postmodernity is that of major disasters for which nobody takes the blame, such as when a horrific train crash is traced to faults in the line which were well-known and not repaired months in advance but for which no single company executive, nor even a board, can be held responsible.
Postmodernity encourages a cynical approach: nothing will get better and ther'es nothing you can do about it. Hardly surprisingly, this has produced a steady rise in the suicide rate, not least among young people who (one might have thought) had so much to look forward to, but who had imbibed postmodernity through every pore. not that this is new. Epictetus, that hard-bitten first-century philosopher, would have understood, even though he would have scoffed at the intellectual posturing underneath it all.

N T Wright, page 33 of Evil and the Justice of God (hardcover edition, IVP 2006).

Curiously, in the last year Dunedin has experienced a similar public example of no one wanting to take the blame. The metal flaps on a goods train container passing under the Railway Station's overbridge hit the bridge and took out the central section of it, nearly killing a person who was on the bridge at the time. Even though, Toll Holdings Ltd admitted its error at the time, for months afterwards no one would take responsibility for paying for the bridge to be restored.

The idea that we have an obligation to society beyond the demands we ourselves wish to make of it is
becoming unfashionable. Utilitarianism – the greatest happiness (or welfare or benefit) for the greatest
number – is a philosophy now held in severe disrepute.
Individual endeavour is adulated, as is personal autonomy. Utilitarianism might deter the huge efforts, for
huge gains, of the talented entrepreneur. Thus society looks less at the welfare of the whole, and more at the welfare of the individual. And the intervention of the state is seen as less than desirable, and often less than benevolent to boot.
Meanwhile, the old sense of mutual obligation, somewhat fostered by war-time, has taken a battering. We are into understanding ourselves, into selfimprovement: improving our homes, our looks and our minds. And our view of faith is also increasingly individualistic. We choose the elements of faith that suit us – we may go to church, synagogue or mosque. Individual salvation is part of the appeal of the evangelicals. Personal salvation is the carrot held out. But the requirements our faiths put on us to consider and care for others may get less than their fair attention.
We look at ourselves, not beyond. And despite all the surveys demonstrating widespread belief in God,
despite the huge readership of religious books and the increasing attendance at evangelical churches, our
views about social solidarity, evening up the inequalities and making a difference to groups or individuals who suffer, have taken a battering.

From Unkind, risk averse and untrusting – if this is today’s society,can we change it? - the latest (Sept 2008) report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation's series on social evils.

A Gospel Approach for Postmoderns

We hear a lot about postmodern people these days, and how difficult it is to get the message of Jesus across to them.
One worker in college ministry in the States has come up with a simple way of doing this. James Choung believes that young people are well aware of something being wrong with the world. They may not call it sin (at least not before they become Christians), but they know that things are awry.
On one hand we have beauty and perfection and wondrous design; on the other we have ugliness and mess and distortion, things that upset our sense of balance in the world, and make us realise – even if we won’t say it – that things aren’t what they should be.
Choung’s simple way of taking people from that point of dissatisfaction through to belief in Christ can be drawn on a paper serviette.
First he talks about the longing in our hearts for a world that’s free of wrongdoing and evil and other garbage. People have an understanding that things aren’t the way they should be, and can easily agree that the thirst for a more perfect world may well be evidence that such a world has existed, or will exist in the future.
At that point they need to face the fact that in spite of their best intentions they all contribute to the mess in the world; no one is free from guilt in this regard. Their unwillingness to help others, to clean up the problems they create, to refuse to do good when they could - and a host of other things – all show that their failure to love others is also a failure to love God.
Choung says we still need to ask people to “repent” – literally, to change their mind” or to have a new way of thinking. They have to let their selfish lives die with Jesus – so they can have a new life of loving Him and their neighbour. Choung says, ‘That’s a huge call to faith for this generation.’
Jesus often simply said to people, Follow Me. He didn’t require them to be without sin before they did so; he wanted them to be willing to change. That’s the step postmoderns often want to skip: having realised the wrongness of things, they think they can get straight on and make things right on their own – without any help from Jesus.
But Choung tells them that only Jesus can put to death the selfishness of their lives. Without Him, moving onto ‘saving’ the world is just an empty dream.
The fourth step in his diagram is also important: once they accept Jesus, they need to see that He’s sending them on a mission; He’s not just giving them eternal life without any need to call others to Him. And within that call are all the areas of mercy, justice, acting rightly that Micah talks about.
On the surface, Choung’s approach isn’t particularly radical. Helping people face their understanding of a world gone wrong is maybe a slightly different but more ‘user-friendly’ starting point. It obviously works.

An article on Choung and his four circles appears in the July 2008 Christianity Today. It can be found online.

Solzhenitsyn

"We have to condemn publicly the very idea that some people have the right to repress others. In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousandfold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations."
Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Albert Mohler writes: He was a man of contradictions or, as Joseph Pearce argues, a man of paradox. In any event, he was a man of great moral vision who revealed the brutality of the Soviet regime and contributed greatly to its collapse. Edward E. Erickson, who wrote two major works on Solzhenitsyn, argues that the key to understanding Solzhenitsyn is Christianity -- the Russian Orthodox faith that framed Solzhenitsyn's worldview. Erickson argued that "in a day when secular humanism flourishes among the cultural and intellectual elite, he holds fast to traditional Christian beliefs."

A few quotes from 'a forgotten man'

"No man shares his life with God whose religion does not flow out, naturally and without effort, into all relations of his life and reconstructs everything that it touches. Whoever uncouples the religious and the social life has not understood Jesus. Whoever sets any bounds for the reconstructive power of the religious life over the social relations and institutions of men, to that extent denies the faith of the Master."

"Jesus did not in any real sense bear the sin of some ancient Briton who beat up his wife in B.C.56, or of some mountaineer in Tennessee who got drunk in A.D.1917. But he did in a very real sense bear the weight of the public sins of organized society, and they in turn are causally connected with all private sins."

There are: "six sins, all of a public nature, which combined to kill Jesus. He bore their crushing attack in his body and soul. He bore them, not by sympathy, but by direct experience. In so far as the personal sins of men have contributed to the existence of these public sins, he came into collision with the totality of evil in mankind. It requires no legal fiction of imputation to explain that 'he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities.' Solidarity explains it."

"Religious bigotry, the combination of graft and political power, the corruption of justice, the mob spirit (being "the social group gone mad") and mob action, militarism, and class contempt-- "every student of history will recognize that these sum up constitutional forces in the Kingdom of Evil. Jesus bore these sins in no legal or artificial sense, but in their impact on his own body and soul. He had not contributed to them, as we have, and yet they were laid on him. They were not only the sins of Caiaphas, Pilate, or Judas, but the social sin of all mankind, to which all who ever lived have contributed, and under which all who ever lived have suffered."

These quotes come from Walter Rauschenbusch, whose book Christianity and the Social Crisis was so immensely popular in 1907 when it was published it sold more copies for three years than any other religious text but the Bible .

Rauschenbuschian has entered the language as an adjective: for a review of the centenary reprinting of his greatest book, click here.