Should the warning attributed to Edmund Burke – that all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing – itself cause us some concern? The answer depends on how we interpret the warning: in particular, what we mean by the implied “something” that good people must do else evil triumph.
We can find the idea that evil might triumph over the whole world at play in a contemporary collective imagination, an imagination fed by the fears of terrorism, weapons of mass murder, the social and economic collapse of civilization, foreign ideologies, and even political opponents. In the world created by this play of ideas, images, and fears, we narrate evil as something exterior to us that resides in our enemies, and we imagine ourselves and our instruments and our ideas as forming the necessary weaponry in the fight against evil. We see ourselves as the true hope for the world, as the knights who will deliver us all from evil’s triumph. We, the good people, are the solution to the problem of evil.
In the Christian imagination, evil is seen as something both caused by us, all of us, and something (yet not a thing) already present before we exercise our freedom, before we are even born. Evil corrupts us, makes us less that what we ought to be, and separates us from God. From the Christian standpoint, the solution to the problem of evil is grace: God’s power, not ours. The ultimate response to evil, the divine response, isn’t destruction or prevention, but salvation. Though we are not saviors, we may participate in God’s act of saving grace, in his plan of salvation. We can, alas, also refuse salvation and embrace our own destruction.
If we understand the “something” that good people must do as in some way participating in God’s power, as living a life nourished by grace and marked by the virtues, as fundamentally responding to evil as a terror from which only God can save us, then Burke’s warning is of no concern. May good people respond to evil. May our good deeds help prevent the triumph of evil. On the other hand, if by that “something” we mean trusting in our own powers to defeat evil, we will only help push us along toward evil’s triumph. (EC)
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