Ian on Sunday

I cannot escape the terrible feeling that such pitiless cruelty goes beyond brutality and mad violence. An element of pure evil enters the equation

The English poet Thomas Lowell Beddoes wrote a play called Death’s Jest Book which he began in 1828 but which was not published until his suicide in 1849. In this tragedy one of the characters declares the whole world dammed:

Nature’s polluted
There’s man in every secret corner of her
Doing dammed wicked deeds. Thou art, old world,
A hoary, atheistic, murdering star.

The litany of horror that fills the news day after day is endless and numbing.

In our small corner of this murdering star there seems to be no relief. I thought the worst in a lengthening dossier of atrocious domestic crimes was when I read a month or two ago of the torturing, beating and stabbing to death of Sharmin McKay of Bare Root. The man battered her to a pulp, forced kerosene down her throat and stabbed her with a long fork and knife until they broke in her. Blood runs cold.

But such horror soon meets its match in these terrible times. Lately, I have learned of Kathleen Mo-A-Lin who had three children – she was bludgeoned and poisoned to death, her mouth glued shut to prevent her spitting out the poison. Who knows what new horror awaits around this corner of our murdering star?

I cannot escape the terrible feeling that such pitiless cruelty goes beyond brutality and mad violence. An element of pure evil enters the equation. It is easy these days to share the dark and baleful view of the poet/priest John Donne who saw man as sinful through and through even from the first moment of his conception: “There in the wombe,” he wrote in one of his sermons, “we are fitted for workes of darkness, all the while deprived of light. And there in the wombe we are taught cruelty, by being fed with blood…”

The ancient question must be asked again: Can this be God’s work? Throughout history nobody has answered satisfactorily the eternal conundrum: Either God could prevent evil but doesn’t hence He is not good, or God wants to prevent evil but can’t, in which case He is not all-powerful. Faced by such a dilemma, the words of the playwright Edward Bond come to mind. “If you look at life closely it is unbearable. What people suffer, what they do to each other, how they hate themselves in hating others. But you must turn back again and look into the fire. Listen to the howl of the flames.”

The universe, it seems, is ruled by the principle of symmetry. In any stable system the positive electrical charges must be balanced by the negative electrical charges. The forces of attraction balance the forces of disruption. Newton’s Third Law of Motion decrees that any action must produce an equal and opposite reaction. Vishnu, the Preserver, could not exist without Vishnu, the Destroyer.

Theologians and philosophers use much the same argument in explaining the problem of evil to despairing victims:

“It stands to reason,” they say, “that without knowing evil you would not know the meaning of good; without pain you would not know joy; without knowing the taste of sour you would not recognize the sweetness of honey; without having seen some hideous hag you could not appreciate the beauty of a Boticelli virgin.”

On this basis, at least we poor mortals could be sure that the total quantity of evil in the universe should not exceed the quantity of good; and likewise that the total quantity of suffering should not exceed its equivalent of joy. For every unbearably cruel murder of a child, we might console ourselves, there should be somewhere a marvellous birth of joy.

But there are times such as these when I wonder whether this universal law of parity between good and evil has not broken down irretrievably. All around us, instance after instance, there is a growing dehumanization of human relations. It is as if a fundamental loss of innocence has come to pervade all human existence.

In that great Clint Eastwood film, The Unforgiven, the sadistic sheriff shoots a man lying defenceless on the floor. An onlooker says, “But that man is innocent!’ and the sheriff says, “Innocent of what?” In a flash he summarises perfectly the condition we all endure.

Beyond the desperate need to find solutions to the pandemic of domestic violence in our midst, beyond the awakening of the whole justice and law enforcement system to do something to halt the terror and the deadly abuse – there is a terrible, helpless, personal, heartfelt sense of pity for these victims, human beings like ourselves. Some lines from canto 33 of Dante’s Inferno captures one’s own desperate sadness:

The very weeping there forbids to weep,
And grief finding eyes blocked with tears
Turns inward to make agony the greater.