Book Description: In this highly acclaimed work of intellectual history, Andrew Delbanco argues that Americans, who once pictured their history as an epic struggle against the devil, have become indifferent to the reality of evil. Notes, index
Comprehensive, and Thorough Books about the History of Ideas usually raise the ire of Conservative Christians; this book is no exception. However, it provides a very good analysis of the concept of Satan over time. The Conservatives who pretend to be Christian, whilst eschewing some books like this one, have no qualms in titling a very pro-Republican book THE GREAT RIGHTWING CONSPIRACY so that they can attract, or annoy people of differing political persuasions. This work is a must read for those who want to start understand the form of conceptual interpretation about the nature of evil. As to what is actually behind the evil in the world, I think this book makes no pretense to understand that; it does enlighten on what the conservative, rabid-christian enclaves have placeD into popular culture and how it has fared over time. An excellent book.
to the brink, but no further [...] So we reach the denouement, and Mr. Delbanco describes the previous world--in which we still had imagination, rather than pure reason--but then concludes :
Although there would be a certain satisfaction in living imaginatively in such a world, on balance it is probably a good thing that we have lost it forever. Whether we welcome or mourn this loss, it is the central and irreversible fact of modern history that we no longer inhabit a world of transcendence. The idea that man is a receptor of truth from God has been relinquished, and replaced with the idea that reality is an unstable zone between phenomena (unknowable in themselves) and innumerable fields of mental activity (which we call persons) by which they are apprehended. These apprehensions are expressed through language, which is always evolving, and which constitutes the only reality we recognize. Our world exists in the ceaseless movement of human consciousness, a process in which the reception of new impressions is indistinguishable from the production of new meanings: 'mind's willful transference of nature, man, and society--and eventually of God, and finally of mind itself-- into itself.'
Where Mr. Delbanco had begun by telling us "we cannot do without some conceptual means for thinking about the sorts of experiences that used to go under the name of evil," now he tells us that instead :
[T]he story I have tried to tell is the story of the advance of secular rationality in the United States, which has been relentless in the face of all resistance. It is the story of a culture that has gradually withdrawn its support from the old conception of a universe seething with divine intelligence and has left its members with only one recourse: to acknowledge that no story about the intrinsic meaning of the world has universal validity.
From here on, things get really muddled, as having just surrendered to a worldview that even he has acknowledged leaves us with a gaping void in our lives and fuels our inhumanity toward one another, we next find him telling us that the "party of secular humanism, of which I consider myself a member, has deluded itself into believing that human beings can manage without any metaphor at all" and then that "the idea of evil is not just a metaphor that 'some people find...useful'; it is a metaphor upon which the health of society depends."
This really leaves him no other option but to try and construct a secular metaphor for evil. Tellingly, he turns to (and apparently misinterprets) St. Augustine for help. He says that St. Augustine rejected the idea that evil could be objectified (as Satan or as some other person or group of people), and instead identified evil as 'an essential nothingness.' Mr. Delbanco has decided that the "nothingness" of which this version of evil consists is a kind of absence of sufficient love for others in our own hearts. Of course, the objections to this idea are too numerous to address completely, but a few will do. First, having rejected the idea of universal truths, how does Mr. Delbanco decide what actions are evil to begin with? What is wrong with the Holocaust or the Killing Fields or Jim Crow if there are no universally valid meanings of good and evil? Second, note that by defining evil as an absence of something you, in effect, deny the existence of evil. The lack of something can not be that thing. Hunger is the lack of food, not the absence of hunger. Third, when St. Augustine spoke of evil as a lack of something he didn't mean some generic kind of thing, but the absence of good, or godliness. Unfortunately for Mr. Delbanco, when he earlier in the book disposed of universal truths and of evil, he necessarily threw the concept of good away too. Fourth, the very essence of the story of Man's Fall is that evil lurks within us all. Strongly held religious beliefs may sometimes lead to unfortunate prejudices, and they will necessarily lead us to harsh, but often just, judgments about the behavior and beliefs of others, but Judeo-Christian (which is to say American) religious beliefs also recognize the evil that is an immutable part of our own souls. In the words of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn :
If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart.
In his purblind secular humanist resistance to even his own analysis, Mr. Delbanco simply can not admit the power, never mind the truth, of the Judeo-Christian metaphor, that Man is Fallen, and has within him not only the capacity but the barely controlled (and not always controlled) desire to do evil to his fellow men. It is important too to note that this metaphor lies at the heart of conservatism but must be utterly rejected by liberalism, for if Man is not essentially good, then, all things being equal, he can not be trusted to behave well, as all philosophies of the Left assume that he will. Mr. Delbanco's political philosophy lies smoldering in the same ash heap as his attempted metaphor.
And so, Mr. Delbanco concludes :
My driving motive in writing [this book] has been the conviction that if evil, with all the insidious complexity which Augustine attributed to it, escapes the reach of our imagination, it will have established dominion over us all. ... I have felt compelled to insist that Satan, always receding and always sought after, has had two very different meanings in our history. Sometimes he has been used for the purpose of construing the other as a monster, and sometimes...he has been a symbol of our own deficient love, our potential for envy and rancor toward creation. Since the experience of evil will not go away, one or the other of these ways of coping with it sooner or later always comes back.
The former way--evil as the other--is, at least at first, physically rewarding. The latter way--evil as privation--is much more difficult to grasp. But it offers something that the devil himself could never have intended: the miraculous paradox of demanding the best of ourselves.
As near as I can tell, the suggestion here is that the religious metaphor for evil gives us racism, xenophobia, sexism, homophobia, etc., but that his secular metaphor shows us that all we really need is more--more love, more stuff, more whatever... In the end, Mr. Delbanco has achieved nothing more than to bring us back to where we started. Having started out by telling us that we can't exist without having a framework by which we understand evil, he ends by offering one that, though compatible with his science, is totally inadequate to our needs.
Mr. Delbanco is fond of citing examples from popular culture, but there's one artifact that he's somehow missed : The Exorcist. It's absence from this book is particularly noticeable because his predicament so resembles that of the hero. If you'll recall, Father Damian has lost his faith in God, but is suddenly confronted by a monstrous evil. As he gradually comes to believe that the evil is a manifestation of Satan, so too is he able to once again believe in God, and this gives him the strength of will to defeat the evil. In a strange way, it takes acceptance of the antithesis to restore his faith in the thesis.
But really, it's not so strange; if you accept that evil is real, how can you not accept that good is real? And if pure reason suggests that these are merely words, just definitions and not realities, but every fiber of your being tells you that they exist and that you can differentiate the one from the other and that one is preferable to the other, then who will not choose to believe and who will not choose good over evil? And having just this once chosen to doubt the efficacy of reason and its baneful cosmogony, mightn't we eventually be willing to make a kind of Pascal's Wager and once again embrace the transcendent wisdom of the religious metaphor, despite its superstitious taint? If subjecting ourselves to the thralldom of reason leaves us abandoned in a world that we find atavistic and repulsive, mightn't we choose to view reason as a useful but limited tool, ultimately incapable of explaining existence or our purpose in life to our satisfaction? It may be true that the "beliefs" that most of us hoi polloi share and upon which Western Civilization was erected are not an option for the "thinking people" with whom Mr. Delbanco consorts, but if he is so unhappy with the option they've chosen instead, perhaps the problem lies not in our "beliefs" but in their "thinking".
GRADE : C
who is to blame? This book was obviously titled to sell books and not explain what the book is about. First the book talks about the history of slavery in the United States. The author seems to talk forever about slavery. From this point the author talks in circles about the blame game. Since our society does not believe in the devil as we once did, we have diseases and disfunctions to blame for the evil we do. The author is right in his presumption that people people look for and need a scapegoat. The author argues that satan served as one easy scapegoat for all that is wrong with the world. The rules of socirty have went askew since Satan died. As a result the author argues we hunger to get the devil back. Because the book talks in circles for so long about the same vaguely realted points, I would only recommend this book as a paperweight or a reference for hardcore fans on the subject. It is merely stating what most already know.
A great synthesis of History and Literature This book takes an interesting look at the way in which the modern world has steadily lost its fear of perpetual damnation since we have begun to pull ourselves out of the pit of a lost history. And, in some regard, Delbanco's thesis holds strong. He points out that the loss of fear and belief in the idea or actuality of Satan (depending on how you look at it) has steadily lost its power since the pilgrims landed on the proverbial Plymouth Rock. This book looks at various ideas about fear, evil and modern cynicism, and it leaves the reader with a choice that seems somewhat miniscule at first, but monumental in the long run: What are we to believe about a concept of evil when our Norh American culture works so hard to rid the world of it? Delbanco points to the rise in trully horrific and violent forms of entertainment in the past century.
Overall, it's a great book, with a lot of insight into who we are. Probably, it will be better recieved by religious liberals than cynics and fanatics.
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