Christopher Hayes offers a very thought-provoking column in The Nation. He writes how the term "bad guys" has become ubiquitous in political discourse and has led this nation to embrace the concept of unending war.
As Hayes sees it,
When we divide the world into "good guys" and "bad guys," we create a rigid picture that rarely resembles reality. The "bad guys" always are seen in a negative light -- it seems that nothing good can come from them. On the flip side, everything the "good guys" pursue is deemed good, even when it isn't any different from what the so-called "bad guys" are pursuing as well.
If we look into our own hearts, we know that each of us has good AND bad inside (as far as externally accepted mores go). On some occasions, we do the good thing. At other things, we choose to do the bad thing. We aren't one or the other; we are both.
This is as true of nations and societies as it is for each individual. The most vile people still can perform acts of great love and beauty. The most loving and compassionate people still can perform acts that are hateful and injurious.
As Hayes sees it,
The phrase is self-consciously playful but also insidious. An adult who invokes it is expressing a layered set of propositions. What “bad guys” says, roughly, is this: “I’m an adult who has considered the nature of the moral universe we live in and concluded that it really is black and white. I’ve decided that my earliest, most childlike conception of heroes and villains is indeed the accurate one, which only later came to be occluded by nuance and wishy-washy, bleeding-heart self-doubt. I reject that more complicated, mature conception as false. I embrace the child’s vision of the world.”But we should all know that the world is NOT black and white. As today's post in the Line by Line series tries to illustrate, what is ahead sometimes is behind and what is behind sometimes is ahead!
When we divide the world into "good guys" and "bad guys," we create a rigid picture that rarely resembles reality. The "bad guys" always are seen in a negative light -- it seems that nothing good can come from them. On the flip side, everything the "good guys" pursue is deemed good, even when it isn't any different from what the so-called "bad guys" are pursuing as well.
If we look into our own hearts, we know that each of us has good AND bad inside (as far as externally accepted mores go). On some occasions, we do the good thing. At other things, we choose to do the bad thing. We aren't one or the other; we are both.
This is as true of nations and societies as it is for each individual. The most vile people still can perform acts of great love and beauty. The most loving and compassionate people still can perform acts that are hateful and injurious.
"At other things (times), we choose to do the bad thing."
ReplyDeleteCOnsciously choosing to "do the bad thing" is what is generally regarded as sin.