GOOD AND EVIL: SYDNEY WILLIAMS
“In each of us, two natures are at war – the good and the evil. All our lives the fight goes on between them, and one of them must conquer. But in our hands lies the power to choose – what we want to be, we are.”
Robert Lewis Stevenson (1850-1894)
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, 1886
Just like good, evil lurks in all of us. It is our responsibility – to the extent possible – to contain it, to smother it, to let goodness overwhelm it. “Wisdom,” wrote John Cheever in his Journals, “is the knowledge of good and evil…” In The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote, “If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us…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.” This is a subject that has been on my mind, with Israel’s attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, and as I have been reading Jonathan Horn’s new book, The Fate of the Generals. It is difficult to reconcile the vile treatment of American and Filipino prisoners by the Japanese, with the Japanese I knew in business and socially. Two generations ago, German Nazis were gassing Jews. Today, they are an ally of Israel. In his 1860 novel The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins wrote: “The best men are not consistent in good – why should the worst men be consistent in evil?”
Today, evil is manifested in the anti-Semitism that has infested much of the West. Do college students, born sixty years after the genocide of Jews in Europe and who now accuse Israel of practicing genocide on Palestinians, have any knowledge of history? Battles between forces of good and evil, are as old as mankind. The Bible tells us that Jesus, as the son of God, is inherently good, while man is flawed, so must avoid temptations. Most of my generation have read Stephen Vincent Benét’s short story, The Devil and Daniel Webster, of Webster’s defense of Jabez Stone who sold his soul to the devil in return for seven years of good luck. The message: In moments of weakness, good people can make bad decisions.
This battle between good and evil is not limited to people. On March 8, 1983, President Reagan correctly referred to the Soviet Union as an “evil empire.” Evil manifests itself in nation’s where authoritarian leaders control their populations. In the past century, one can think of Mussolini, Franco, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao Zedong. Today Ali Hosseini Khamenei Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong Un serve that role, as their governments deny citizens their natural rights – “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Governments run by and for dictators disallow people the freedom to achieve their dreams. Yet good people can (and do) live in these countries. Nevertheless, the contrast of autocracies to democracies, where power rests with the people and their representatives, is stark. This can be seen today in Israel’s fight with Iran and Ukraine’s war with Russia. In this uncertain world, and because the United States is a ‘good’ nation, the projection of military strength is necessary to help preserve peace. In 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt sent sixteen U.S. Naval battleships (the Great White Fleet) on a 42,000 mile, fourteen-month world tour, making twenty port calls on six continents. On Flag Day 2025, President Trump ordered a parade celebrating the U.S. Army’s 250th birthday. “Peace is Our Profession” was the motto of the Strategic Air Command (SAC).
In his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Martin Luther King said, “I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. This is why right, temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant.” I believe what he said is correct for those of us fortunate to live in a democracy, but, sadly, it is not true for those who find themselves subjected to authoritarian governments, which, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit’s (EIU) Democracy Index for 2024, comprises 39.2% of the world’s population. Thus, more than three billion people are held hostage by evil leaders.
As a democracy of free-thinking people, we will always have myriad opinions, from religion to education, from culture to social welfare, and on a host of other subjects. Supporters of these differing opinions are not necessarily evil, nor are their opponents. The history of the United States could be written in protests. Among the successful ones: the Abolitionists of the late 18th and early 19th Centuries, which lead to the Civil War and the end of slavery; opponents of poor working conditions and low wages during the early years of the Industrial Revolution led to the creation of unions; Suffragettes of late 19th and early 20th Centuries led to the adoption of the 19th Amendment in 1920; the “Bonus Army” of 1932 demanded payment for service in World War I, and helped relieve poverty during the Great Depression; In the late 1930s, Isolationists battled Interventionists, yet all became unified after Pearl Harbor; Civil Rights’ protests in the late 1950s and early 1960s preceded passage of the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968; anti-war protests, fueled by the Vietnam War in the late 1960s and early 1970s hastened the end of that war.
On the other hand, some recent protests are driven by self-interest, counter-productive, pig-headed, or just plain silly: anti-Semites calling for the end of what they claim is Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians; the destruction of pipelines by those calling for the end of fossil fuels: Defund the Police, the consequences of which are harmful for those most vulnerable in our society; and the short-lived Code Pink: Women for Peace. Democracy, by definition, allows for civil disobedience. But change is best accepted when its progress is gradual. In 1849, Henry David Thoreau wrote Resistance to Civil Government, in which he argued that individuals had a moral obligation to protest unjust laws. Of course, one person’s definition of an unjust law may differ from another’s, but that is why we have courts to resolve such differences.
We are living through a period of political extremism, of assassinations and protests, not always peaceful and sometimes led by professional agitators. In our secular age, with its ‘smart’ phones, social media and artificial intelligence (AI), moral values have splintered. Evil is more ubiquitous when society is spiritually hollow and human connection absent. Wisdom, today, is in short supply; nevertheless, “the function of wisdom,” according to Cicero, “is to discriminate between good and evil.” Thus, while we should be unafraid to express our opinions, we should do so respectfully. We should avoid falling into the trap of hatred – of letting evil bury the good that is within us.
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