Word: evil
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...faith in a loving Creator, it is the fundamental challenge to divine credibility: centuries of Christian theological cerebration have led to no more satisfying conclusion than that evil truly exists and that in some unknown way it will be conquered and made to serve the hidden purposes of God. For believer and unbeliever alike, Dostoevsky's riddle-"What am I doing on this earth where sorrow reigns?"-can only be solved provisionally or not at all. The collective historical experience of America is such that it has not really contemplated the question, much less tried to answer it; since...
America's Puritan sense tends to regard evil in stark terms of black and white. It has been pointed out endlessly, and correctly, that the western, with its crude division of good guys and bad guys, is the nation's archetypal art form. Evil has thus been transmogrified, whenever possible, into the definable, detestable enemy-like Hitler, say-who could always be defeated by the forces of justice. The national instinct to juxtapose good and evil is summed up with only a touch of irony by W. H. Auden's nostalgic reference to simpler times...
Then sheep and goats were easy to recognize, local fauna; good meant Giles the shoemaker taking care of the village ninny, evil Count ffoulkes who in his tall donjon Indulged in sinister eccentricities...
...argued that man could gain salvation without divine grace by his efforts alone. Put in secular terms, the Pelagianism of America means an unshakable faith in the righteousness of the U.S. "We tend to think," argues Roman Catholic Philosopher Michael Novak, "that it is not and cannot be evil at the center. We habitually believe that American intentions are good ones, that America has never started a war, that America is always on the side of democracy and justice and liberty, that Americans are unusually innocent, generous and good in their relationships with other people...
...stimulus to striving and hard work; no wonder that it gave way to its secular descendant, pragmatism-the uniquely American philosophy articulated by C. S. Peirce, Dewey and William James. Americans are the exemplars of pragmatism, of rational humanism. The pragmatist, of course, does not deny the existence of evil-although he likes to call it something else. But he optimistically assumes that it exists in institutions rather than men, and can therefore be legislated away. Thus evils, in the American experience, have always been seen as concrete problems that could be dissected and analyzed-like poverty or hunger...