Let’s start with an approximation: Last I looked, there were about 7.9 billion people. All the countries continue to procreate, that is, probably less the Vatican, though that might not be true, so let’s make it an even eight billion. Ten percent of eight billion is 800,000,000. Keep that in mind.
I watched a two-part episode of the British Silent Witness in which one of the pathologists, Harry, gets involved in the life of a teenage boy whose life circumstances seem dire at best. * The boy’s single mother is a marginal addict with a baby that she leaves with the boy when she goes clubbing, and the three of them live in an apartment building in what the English call an “estate,” essentially the equivalent of American public housing projects and Russian Khrushchyovka. Certainly, not an “estate” in the American sense of big house on spacious grounds.
The main plot—there are usually two or more intertwined in Silent Witness episodes—is a drug war centered on a night club outside of which one gang eager for increased territory, does a drive-by shooting that results in deaths, thus warranting the examination by pathologists. The boy is peripherally involved as a drug distributor, bicycling them around the neighborhood for the gang responsible for the drive-by. The full plot sequence is not, however, my focus, but rather the discovery Harry in his innocent compassion makes at the end of the story. Suffice it for me to give the spoiler that at the end of the episode, the police prevent another violent confrontation between the two gangs. Ah! Yours truly, seeing that, thought, “Great, poetic justice. The world ends well. The bad guys are prevented from perpetrating a shooting incident. Peace reigns.” But the story does not end with butterflies and flowers. As Harry approaches the apartment building in an epilogue, maybe to see how the boy and his mother are faring, he witnesses from across the street and to his shock the boy dealing drugs. The innocent victim of circumstances is not really innocent as Harry had thought. He will grow to become a drug dealer and continue a lifestyle that the police quashed between the two gangs. What happened in a preceding generation will happen in an ensuing one. Evil will persist, jumping as it does from generation to generation, always the same evil, only incarnate in different bodies.
Do you think ancient Egyptians had to deal with continuing, call it generational, evil? Did they for thousands of years and during different dynasties discover that the forms of evil their parents and grandparents encountered persisted into the generation of their children? Sure, you do. You know that all the efforts to quash evil in ancestors of any era fail to affect, to diminish, evil’s presence among descendants. There’s another Nero out there, another ruthless Tamerlane, another Hitler. And that begs the question: “Is the good we do all for naught?”
I think of the recent release in the Florida Keys of genetically modified Aedes aegypti, the disease-carrying mosquito. The hypothesis behind the experimental release is that this new generation of mosquitoes will suppress the proliferation of their disease-carrying offspring with a gene that programs them for death. Maybe the experiment will work. Maybe it will, as the experimenters hope, reduce the mosquito population by as much as 90%. But then…
But then, that means 10% will survive to reproduce the next generation of disease carriers. It seems that disease, like evil, finds a way to continue through generations regardless of the effort each generation makes to quash its expression. “Certainly, there’s some room for optimism,” you say. “Ninety percent is better than what’s happening now. We’re saving people from Zika, Dengue, Chikungunya, and yellow fever, aren’t we? We’re eliminating an evil in the Here and Now. That’s gotta count for something.”
Yes, you’re right. It does account for something, a temporary respite, a diminution, even a noticeable decrease in mosquitoes and the diseases aegypti carry. It’s not a total elimination strategy because there is no total elimination strategy. That one female mosquito that escapes the death-by-breeding scheme will have offspring that will do what mosquitoes have done, spread the old diseases and possibly spread new ones in a proliferating population. And yes, you’re right in thinking as you read this that such a pessimistic view can’t be good for the psyche and that you want something that fosters optimism. “Give me something, even something little to hold on to, something good,” you plead.
And that takes me back to Harry and the episode of Silent Witness. In the TV series, the silent witnesses are the victims the pathologists have to examine for clues, all, as we eventually discover, victims of crime, that is, of evil. But Harry, in silently witnessing the drug deal the boy makes, is a living witness. The story ends with Harry just watching as the boy, seeing that Harry has observed him, gives him an evil glance of ingratitude for his compassionate efforts. There is no poetic justice. The story doesn’t end with Harry enrolling the boy in some rehabilitation program. Recidivism prevails. Evil continues, wending its way from the older generation of drug dealers into the younger one. The episode ends with a silent and bewildered Harry just staring as the boy walks away.
From ancient Egyptians through Aedes aegypti, to today’s eight billion people, no generation has solved the problem of evil, and no one has adequately explained away its presence. It will follow us; it will persist. The best we can do is to quash the evil we see, saving the moment, others, and even ourselves from evil wherever we encounter it. We’ll have to let the next generation handle the evil they face. Maybe we can affect 90% of those in the next generation just as the experimenters hope to affect 90% percent of the mosquitoes, but there will always be that ten percent that for whatever unexplainable reason, choose evil over good. Ten percent of eight billion is 800,000,000.
Sure, that’s pessimistic. I’ll admit it. Are there 800,000,000 bad people, evil people, living contemporaneously with us? Too high, I hope, way too high a number. Maybe only one percent are bad. That reduces the number to eight million. Eight million! Is that still an overestimate? Make it a half percent. Four million. That’s equivalent to the entire population of Los Angeles.
You now say, “Well, that isn’t too bad. There are 57 million square miles of land surface on the planet. Four million spreads that group out pretty thin, like only one bad guy for every 14 square miles of Earth’s land.”
Of course, you have a point. Maybe evil is spread sparsely, except, maybe no, it isn’t. It tends to concentrate because evil is a human characteristic. Those four million or more we include in the evil population walk among us—assuming that the “us” are “we who are good.” Or, even if they don’t walk among us, they find their ways into our lives through cybercrime.
From Job’s wondering why bad things happen to good people to the ponderings of philosophers and theologians, no one has yet contrived a strategy for eliminating persistent evil except in local and immediate circumstances. But maybe we want an all-or-nothing strategy. Maybe we should aim for something in the 90-plus percentages, hopefully 99.5%. That would put one bad person on each 14 square-mile plot. We just have to figure where each of those plots should be located. You know, if we could transport all the bad guys to Antarctica, each of them would have more than a square mile. And except for a few dozens of scientists working there, they would have only themselves to bother. Of course, Britain tried that with Australia with little success. One could argue that the Brits merely exported evil to the indigenous Australians.
Again, there’s always that problem of the next generation of mosquitoes and humans. I wish I could offer a solution, wish I could solve what no one yet seems to have solved, that is, the problem of evil’s persistence. But I can’t. You?
I suppose we are all like Harry in that episode of Silent Witness. We witness but remain as powerless as the bodies that the pathologist examines for clues about their demise by evil. We can affect the living, but not all the living. Yet, like all those who tried before us to stop evil from persisting, we are compelled to try even in a world with more people than any of us can ever influence. We cannot for the sake of the living, stand as silent witnesses.
Notes:
*Season 9, Episode 3, Parts I and II.
Don't want to depress you, but in Washington, D.C. in the first five months of 2021, there have been more than 200 carjackings and dozens of juveniles arrested for the crime.
I watched a two-part episode of the British Silent Witness in which one of the pathologists, Harry, gets involved in the life of a teenage boy whose life circumstances seem dire at best. * The boy’s single mother is a marginal addict with a baby that she leaves with the boy when she goes clubbing, and the three of them live in an apartment building in what the English call an “estate,” essentially the equivalent of American public housing projects and Russian Khrushchyovka. Certainly, not an “estate” in the American sense of big house on spacious grounds.
The main plot—there are usually two or more intertwined in Silent Witness episodes—is a drug war centered on a night club outside of which one gang eager for increased territory, does a drive-by shooting that results in deaths, thus warranting the examination by pathologists. The boy is peripherally involved as a drug distributor, bicycling them around the neighborhood for the gang responsible for the drive-by. The full plot sequence is not, however, my focus, but rather the discovery Harry in his innocent compassion makes at the end of the story. Suffice it for me to give the spoiler that at the end of the episode, the police prevent another violent confrontation between the two gangs. Ah! Yours truly, seeing that, thought, “Great, poetic justice. The world ends well. The bad guys are prevented from perpetrating a shooting incident. Peace reigns.” But the story does not end with butterflies and flowers. As Harry approaches the apartment building in an epilogue, maybe to see how the boy and his mother are faring, he witnesses from across the street and to his shock the boy dealing drugs. The innocent victim of circumstances is not really innocent as Harry had thought. He will grow to become a drug dealer and continue a lifestyle that the police quashed between the two gangs. What happened in a preceding generation will happen in an ensuing one. Evil will persist, jumping as it does from generation to generation, always the same evil, only incarnate in different bodies.
Do you think ancient Egyptians had to deal with continuing, call it generational, evil? Did they for thousands of years and during different dynasties discover that the forms of evil their parents and grandparents encountered persisted into the generation of their children? Sure, you do. You know that all the efforts to quash evil in ancestors of any era fail to affect, to diminish, evil’s presence among descendants. There’s another Nero out there, another ruthless Tamerlane, another Hitler. And that begs the question: “Is the good we do all for naught?”
I think of the recent release in the Florida Keys of genetically modified Aedes aegypti, the disease-carrying mosquito. The hypothesis behind the experimental release is that this new generation of mosquitoes will suppress the proliferation of their disease-carrying offspring with a gene that programs them for death. Maybe the experiment will work. Maybe it will, as the experimenters hope, reduce the mosquito population by as much as 90%. But then…
But then, that means 10% will survive to reproduce the next generation of disease carriers. It seems that disease, like evil, finds a way to continue through generations regardless of the effort each generation makes to quash its expression. “Certainly, there’s some room for optimism,” you say. “Ninety percent is better than what’s happening now. We’re saving people from Zika, Dengue, Chikungunya, and yellow fever, aren’t we? We’re eliminating an evil in the Here and Now. That’s gotta count for something.”
Yes, you’re right. It does account for something, a temporary respite, a diminution, even a noticeable decrease in mosquitoes and the diseases aegypti carry. It’s not a total elimination strategy because there is no total elimination strategy. That one female mosquito that escapes the death-by-breeding scheme will have offspring that will do what mosquitoes have done, spread the old diseases and possibly spread new ones in a proliferating population. And yes, you’re right in thinking as you read this that such a pessimistic view can’t be good for the psyche and that you want something that fosters optimism. “Give me something, even something little to hold on to, something good,” you plead.
And that takes me back to Harry and the episode of Silent Witness. In the TV series, the silent witnesses are the victims the pathologists have to examine for clues, all, as we eventually discover, victims of crime, that is, of evil. But Harry, in silently witnessing the drug deal the boy makes, is a living witness. The story ends with Harry just watching as the boy, seeing that Harry has observed him, gives him an evil glance of ingratitude for his compassionate efforts. There is no poetic justice. The story doesn’t end with Harry enrolling the boy in some rehabilitation program. Recidivism prevails. Evil continues, wending its way from the older generation of drug dealers into the younger one. The episode ends with a silent and bewildered Harry just staring as the boy walks away.
From ancient Egyptians through Aedes aegypti, to today’s eight billion people, no generation has solved the problem of evil, and no one has adequately explained away its presence. It will follow us; it will persist. The best we can do is to quash the evil we see, saving the moment, others, and even ourselves from evil wherever we encounter it. We’ll have to let the next generation handle the evil they face. Maybe we can affect 90% of those in the next generation just as the experimenters hope to affect 90% percent of the mosquitoes, but there will always be that ten percent that for whatever unexplainable reason, choose evil over good. Ten percent of eight billion is 800,000,000.
Sure, that’s pessimistic. I’ll admit it. Are there 800,000,000 bad people, evil people, living contemporaneously with us? Too high, I hope, way too high a number. Maybe only one percent are bad. That reduces the number to eight million. Eight million! Is that still an overestimate? Make it a half percent. Four million. That’s equivalent to the entire population of Los Angeles.
You now say, “Well, that isn’t too bad. There are 57 million square miles of land surface on the planet. Four million spreads that group out pretty thin, like only one bad guy for every 14 square miles of Earth’s land.”
Of course, you have a point. Maybe evil is spread sparsely, except, maybe no, it isn’t. It tends to concentrate because evil is a human characteristic. Those four million or more we include in the evil population walk among us—assuming that the “us” are “we who are good.” Or, even if they don’t walk among us, they find their ways into our lives through cybercrime.
From Job’s wondering why bad things happen to good people to the ponderings of philosophers and theologians, no one has yet contrived a strategy for eliminating persistent evil except in local and immediate circumstances. But maybe we want an all-or-nothing strategy. Maybe we should aim for something in the 90-plus percentages, hopefully 99.5%. That would put one bad person on each 14 square-mile plot. We just have to figure where each of those plots should be located. You know, if we could transport all the bad guys to Antarctica, each of them would have more than a square mile. And except for a few dozens of scientists working there, they would have only themselves to bother. Of course, Britain tried that with Australia with little success. One could argue that the Brits merely exported evil to the indigenous Australians.
Again, there’s always that problem of the next generation of mosquitoes and humans. I wish I could offer a solution, wish I could solve what no one yet seems to have solved, that is, the problem of evil’s persistence. But I can’t. You?
I suppose we are all like Harry in that episode of Silent Witness. We witness but remain as powerless as the bodies that the pathologist examines for clues about their demise by evil. We can affect the living, but not all the living. Yet, like all those who tried before us to stop evil from persisting, we are compelled to try even in a world with more people than any of us can ever influence. We cannot for the sake of the living, stand as silent witnesses.
Notes:
*Season 9, Episode 3, Parts I and II.
Don't want to depress you, but in Washington, D.C. in the first five months of 2021, there have been more than 200 carjackings and dozens of juveniles arrested for the crime.
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