We are still surprised by evil. From Auschwitz to the events of September 11, we have been shocked into recognizing the startling capacity for evil within the human heart. We now know 9/11 revealed that our country was unprepared in terms of national security, but it also showed we were intellectually and morally unprepared to deal with such a barbaric act. Our language to describe evil and our ethical will to resist it have grown uncertain and confused. Many who speak unabashedly of evil are dismissed as simplistic, old-fashioned, and out of tune with the realities of modern life. Yet we must have some kind of language to help us understand the pain and suffering at the heart of human experience.

Author and speaker Os Guinness confronts our inability to understand evil -- let alone respond to it effectively -- by providing both a lexicon and a strategy for finding a way forward. Since 9/11, much public discussion has centered on the destructiveness of extrem-ist religion. Guinness provocatively argues that this is far from an accurate picture and too easy an explanation. In this expansive exploration of both the causes of modern evil and solutions for the future, he faces our tragic recent past and our disturbing present with courageous honesty. In order to live an “examined life,” Guinness writes, we must come to terms with our beliefs regarding evil and ultimately join the fight against it.

Guinness frames his study by exploring several questions:

• Where does evil come from?
• What are the questions raised by evil that we cannot ignore?
• Has the modern world made evil worse?
• How do the different ways of explaining evil affect how we respond to it?
• What must we do to fight evil effectively?
• What does the existence of evil tell us about our ultimate beliefs?

Addressing individuals as well as a traumatized culture, Unspeakable is an invitation to explore the challenge of contemporary evil, a call to confront our culture of fear, and a journey to find words to come to terms with the unspeakable so that it will no longer leave us mute.

Unspeakable

HarperSanFrancisco

Chapter One

Evil and the Examined Life

"Where was God when the towers fell?" The ABC reporter's questionto me, only two days after the horrific slaughter of the innocent thousandsin the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, went straightfor the jugular, and it was meant to. Or as a National Public Radio interviewerasked me the same day, "I saw a woman running throughthe acrid smoke crying, 'God, are you here?' What should I have saidto her?"

With television making the atrocity a local event for untold millionsaround the world, questions like that must have been asked incountless ways that day -- sometimes with heartbreak, sometimeswith anger, and sometimes with mute incomprehension. But the concernwas surely the same. On a clear blue, peaceful Tuesday morning,the deadly terrorist strike laid bare the two deepest issues of humanlife: the raw evil of the inhumanity of humanity and the agonizingquestion of the place of God in human suffering.

These two issues, and the piercing questions they raise, are thecentral theme of this book. Together they lie at the heart of ourhuman existence. Each requires the other for an adequate response, and both are surrounded by a dangerous ignorance and confusiontoday. The first can be expressed as: "Why do bad things happen togood people?" And the second: "What does it say of us as humanbeings that the worst atrocities on planet earth are done by our ownspecies -- in other words, by people like us?"

Needless to say, these issues and questions are far older and havefar wider application than the events of September 11. For one thing,while thousands died at Ground Zero, thousands of others acrossNew York and hundreds of thousands across the world also died thatday -- of cancer, stroke, hunger, accidents, murder, AIDS, suicide, andfor many other tragic reasons, not to mention old age. Each of thesedeaths was accompanied by its own grieving family and friends, andeach was a dire event that, for them as individuals, was as bad as theterrorist strike was for the United States as a whole.

A basic fact of life is that any of us may suffer and all of us will die.

For another thing, while a televised attack on two of the world'smost famous buildings was shockingly extraordinary, and designed tobe so, far more people in the world suffer today under the heel ofgrinding evils that are numbingly ordinary and will never make thenewspaper headlines or the television news. Few of us, for instance,give serious thought to the millions of young girls forced into prostitution,to the women abused by their husbands, to the widows drivenfrom their homes and their rightful lands, to the men convicted andimprisoned without justice, or to the millions of families kept for alifetime in bonded slavery.

Another basic fact of life is that countless human beings live inabject daily fear of evil and the brutal people who abuse power andoppress them. For much of the world, evil is -- and always has been --a daily fact of life.

The Lisbon Earthquake of Our Time

These two ancient issues are dark and difficult enough in themselves.But there is a modern twist to the discussion that makes it harder still. The events of September 11 hit America and the West at large at a time whenintellectual and moral responses to evil are weaker, more controversial, andmore confused than they have been for centuries. Put simply, we no longerhave a shared understanding about whether there is any such thing asevil. Some even question whether it is proper to speak of anyone asour enemy. The consequences of our uncertainty damage us on allsorts of levels.

Thus, whether September 11 was viewed as a disaster, a tragedy, acrime, an act of war, or a symbolic spectacle on the grandest scale -- "the greatest work of art of all time," as the German composer KarlheinzStockhausen put it -- the force of the hijacked planes hit theWestern intellectual world as damagingly as it did the World TradeCenter. The lethal challenge of evil at the beginning of the twenty-first century exposes the core confusion of modern thinking just asthe Great Lisbon earthquake in 1755 challenged traditional Europeanviews in the eighteenth century -- but in the opposite direction.

In the mid-eighteenth century Lisbon was the capital of the far-flung Portuguese empire and one of the most powerful and beautifulcities in the world. But on November 1, 1755, it was devastated by atriple shock: an offshore earthquake lasting ten minutes that was feltas far away as France, Italy, Switzerland, and North Africa; a gigantickiller wave that unleashed a fifty-foot wall of water pounding acrossthe city; and a series of fires, set off by the tremors, which devastatedwhat was left of the city. The combined death toll of all three disasterswas more than 60,000 people, and the shock and horror were feltright across Europe. To the eighteenth century the mention of"Lisbon" was the equivalent of the mention of "Auschwitz" today.

The parallels between New York 2001 and Lisbon 1755 are evidentat once: an autumn day; sudden, total, and appalling devastation;buildings destroyed; skies dark and thick with dust; thousandshideously slaughtered; heroic human responses; civilized life drasticallydisrupted; weeks following filled with a lifetime's worth of griefand funerals; and intense intellectual debates set off around the centersof the educated world.

But the difference between 1755 and 2001 is crucial too. The outcome of the Lisbon earthquake, as interpreted by Voltaire and others,was to weaken traditional faith in God and providence and strengthenthe new confidence in Enlightenment progress -- God is dead and thefuture of humankind is one of our own making ...

Excerpted from Unspeakableby Guinness, Os Excerpted by permission.
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