Encountering evil as the storms rage

   Encountering evil as the storms rage

The storms are raging here, there, and yonder. And No, it’s not what you are thinking. I know it’s that season–with politicking and the storm that comes with it. But just as man is not made for bread alone, so the thinking one is not made for politics alone.

It’s a different storm that I have in mind. It’s the storm of life with its unknown source but what surely appears to be its unfair destination. Strong, fierce, and hostile, they are unrelenting. They hit with ferocious precision. They strike without mercy. But why? Why is it our desert? Unpardonable sin, is it? But don’t the Holy Books assure that sin is the lot of everyone? So why target some but leave others untouched if in fact the billows are tools of divine judgment?

Evil abounds! That’s an uninspiring cliché, you say. And I agree. After all, we have been warned ad nauseam that the world is evil. If that is true, what new knowledge is added by simply stating the obvious that evil abounds? I give you that, for sure!

Can the world ever forget Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the modern reenactment of Sodom and Gomorrah, except that one was divine judgment for sin and the other was human punishment for what? A utilitarian justification of the least evil? But for the bomb, the Second World War would have continued indefinitely with unquantifiable tragedy, they argue. How’s that for the innocent victims of the bomb?

How about the millions of innocent women and children that our own civil war took away from us? The slow death of starvation and disease occasioned by the atrocities? And to what end? We chanted “to keep Nigeria one is a task that must be done.” I need someone’s heartfelt and boldfaced assurance to me that we are now more united than we were back then. Any takers? And those lost lives? We don’t even have the moral conscience of a grateful memorialization of their sacrifice.

Remember the Ogunpa flood disaster of 1980 when more than 250 people lost their lives during a rainstorm that lasted twelve hours? Even President Shagari was so moved that he paid a visit to Ibadan to commiserate with the people. That is so long ago. Nowadays, disasters no longer move us, including leaders in high places, to compassion. Again, many of the victims were innocent babies and children, without blemish. Was the sin of their forebears visited on them? But didn’t God promise long ago that he would no longer punish children for the sin of their parents and grandparents?

And of course, we are living witnesses of evil in our time. Hundreds of the Chibok girls are still unaccounted for, wasting away in the wilderness of despair in the evil clutches of their captors. Evil Boko Haram says Western education is evil and they are out to redeem for Allah the soul of anyone so possessed. But aren’t they the evil ones for not trusting Allah to do the work of soul redemption for himself? There’s a good reason that many faithfuls have taken exception to Boko Haram’s unilateral interpretation of the divine injunction to redeem souls.

From the above historical and contemporary illustrations of evil, we can see that it is not of one piece. There are typologies and varieties of evil. For instance, our people talk of amuwa Olorun, literally “what God has ordained or brought into existence”. Can we then talk of divine evil? But this is anomalous because evil is incongruent with the nature of God. If God is by nature good, how can God allow, not to even suggest, cause evil?

There is a Yoruba verse that we learnt in the primary school which confirms this point about God’s goodness. It is a repudiation of the “amuwa Olorun” idea:

Bi omode ba ku, won a ni amuwa Olorun ni

Bi agbalagba fo sanle ti o rehin eku, won a ni amuwa Olorun ni

O wa dabi pe Olorun ko ni ohun ti yoo se mo

Afi ki o maa sebi kale aiye kiri.

Bee Olorun ko sebi

Ire lo nse.

When a child dies, they’d say, it is God’s doing

When an adult passes on, they’d say it is God’s doing.

It would appear that God has nothing else to do than

Commit atrocious evil around the world.

Yet God doesn’t cause evil.

God executes good deeds.

Of course, believers of all faiths understand that there is punishment for sin. That was the justification for the Great Flood in Noah’s time and the Sulphur and acid rain that destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah in Abraham’s time. There was forewarning in both cases. There were other cases however when God is deployed as pretext for a preconceived self-regarding action. It’s hard to come to terms with such as divine punishment.

Natural evil, as in evil caused by nature, is another type. Many would classify Ogunpa Flood disaster and Katrina hurricane of 2003 as natural evil. Yet it is unclear how we can attribute evil to nature. Evil not only presupposes agency, it also implies intent and motive. We talk of natural evil then just as a manner of speaking.

What we refer to as natural evil is nature functioning in its own way according to its character. If humans don’t domicile close to the ocean, they won’t experience flooding from hurricanes. If they don’t build on rivers and block river basins, they would not experience flooding from the movement of the water. And if they don’t ignore warnings of climate change, they would be prepared for nature’s conduct of its affairs.

As for famine, Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen has demonstrated that “no famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy.” So, again, even when rain is natural occurrence, if it ceases for a while, the evil of famine is averted by functioning democracies.

What about human-made evil? This is the heart of the matter and if the above observations make sense, it is what we need to worry about. For even what we usually see as natural evil, aka natural disaster, can be pinned down to human agency at work. Add this then to clearly human-made evil, and you begin to understand the potency of human evil.

Let us also break human evil into its two classes: self-inflicted and other-inflicted. The former would include, for instance, suicide. Suicide is evil because it is taking one’s life. To observe that it is evil, we don’t even need a Kantian argument on the self-contradictory nature of its motive. We only need to see that it is not natural for anyone to want to end his or her life. It almost always has to do with mental sickness or emotional anguish arising from some life’s circumstances. A well-ordered society will have a functioning system that mentally disturbed members can have access to in times of need.

For other-inflicted human evil, we may also classify further into two: intended and unintended. An example of the latter is a strayed bullet killing and innocent bystander. We know that this happens a lot in our society with gang and cult activities as well as with our trigger happy police and military officers. The incessant episodes of killing by stray bullet can only be because we have little or no regard for human life.

The above observation doesn’t apply only to our society. As I tap the keyboard now, the trending news on mainstream and social media in God’s Country is the killing of a young man in Minneapolis by police officers with a “no-knock” warrant to search. The man was sleeping in his bed covered by a comforter. Within 9 seconds of police entry, he was a dead man.

If human life has value, such extrajudicial killings cannot be justified. But assume that, somehow, the police had reason to shoot in the course of discharging their duties, how about ordinary human beings emptying bullets from AK47s into the bodies of fellow human beings? Bandits, kidnappers, and hired assassins kill without hesitation. Evil abounds indeed!