“The line dividing good and evil cuts through
the heart of every human being,” wrote the Russian author and historian Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
Mary Chapin Carpenter expanded on that pithy statement in her song “A Dream Like This,” written for the “Dead
Man Walking” album:
We’re neither light nor darkness
We’re neither night or day
We’re neither kind nor heartless
We’re neither lost or saved
We’re neither still nor moving
We’re neither held or free
Oh to be so human
Oh to be
We
all want to—maybe even dream that we can—transcend that often-fine
line between good and evil, harboring only good, or at least only good intentions, in our hearts. But if we look
carefully and consider honestly, few among us would deny that less noble impulses
sometimes creep in. Solzhenitsyn and Chapin may have something here.
That
line between good and evil has been much debated in the public sphere of late.
The recent dispute about the meaning and merits of the film “American Sniper” has
inspired lots of thoughtful people to examine what it means to
celebrate an “authentic American hero” who killed a record of number of people
during his tour in the Middle East, and by doing so, saved countless lives of
American service members and of local civilians. Or to denounce the
glorification of killing, even (or especially) by one of our own. To honor the
warrior, perhaps especially because he was subsequently murdered by a vet he
was trying to help, or to insist that war is rarely glorious and that these
wars have certainly not been. An interesting piece in the New York Times
encapsulates the arguments about this film between “hand-wringing
lefties and chest-thumping righties.” It’s worth a read,
and you’ll find it right here.
Left unaddressed in most of this is the complicated urge to
claim that both arguments can be true—or, correlatively, that both can be
false. The line between good and evil runs through the heart of this nation just
as it does through each of ours.
A
similar ruckus, which has simmered for several years within the American
Psychological Association, my own professional org, has recently spilled out
into the mainstream media. In this case, the issue is the participation of psychologists
in torture—in the originally denied, later acknowledged, and subsequently
forbidden program of torture enacted against “enemy combatants” held at
Guantanamo and several “dark sites” around the globe. If you haven’t followed
the story of some psychologists' role in this, you’ll find a pretty thorough overview of it in this New York Times article.
This
controversy, too, pits “good” against “evil.” Early revelations of psychology’s apparent organizational
complicity several years ago inspired many to withdraw from the association in protest. Then, as
now, many people insisted that psychologists’ participation in the program of “enhanced
interrogation” violated psychology’s core ethical principles, not the least of
which is the ancient medical dictum to “first, do no harm.” Others insist that
psychologists’ participation in interrogation ensured that prisoners would be
treated humanely and that their well-being would be of primary concern. How
much worse would it be, these folks asked, if there were no one there who
understood such issues? In those early years and even since this controversy reached
the public sphere, these claims and their advocates have failed to convince
those representing either position of the rightness (the righteousness?) of the
other.
Left
largely unaddressed here, also, has been the possibility that both positions
are justified in some sense, and both are flawed, that neither side can know
all the things that the other side knows, that even knowing everything about
everything, one can be left ambivalent about such complicated issues. That the
line between good and evil cuts through the heart of this discipline as it does
through each of ours.
Oh,
it’s easy enough for each of us to be sure that she is Right and the “other side”
(as if it were that simple) is Wrong. I made that very claim when I resigned
from APA in protest over the organization’s failure to confront this issue
directly, and I remain convinced that my decision was right. But what do I know—and what do I not know—from my safe and
comfortable vantage point as a concerned but distant observer? What would I
think if I were actually there, in the actual mortal battle or in the position
of making decisions that would determine the fates of countless people?
How
can I possibly know what I would know
with great certainty then?
I
had thought about this occasionally over the years, even though I was clear that snipers are not my heroes and torture is not OK. And then I was reminded
how simplistic my absolute conclusions might be when I saw a play by George Brant called “Grounded.” The play has just one character—a woman pilot
who leaves her position flying fighter jets in the Middle East to have a child.
Back in the States, she finds that despite the joy she takes in her marriage
and her daughter, she misses flying terribly. Well, actually, she misses the
sky and the feel of flying. So she re-ups and gets assigned to a base in
Nevada, where she will fly drones long-distance all day, 7 days a week. She’ll
technically live with her family, but that possibility quickly morphs into
added stress as she tries to live two very disparate lives—think loving and
gentle vs. intentionally lethal. During the day, she “flies” drones by watching
a screen and manipulating a stick that guides a drone over the desert 7500
miles away. By night, she sees her daughter and husband briefly and sleeps. The
commute across the desert—a different one, to be sure—is her only break between
those two lives.
Early
on, although she’d deadly bored with “flying,” she is pleased, even jubilant, at
opportunities to take out “guilties.” Then she starts noticing body parts
flying from the blasts. Slowly, initially subtly but increasingly blatantly,
her world begins to unravel. She is less sure, less committed in her work as a
long-distance warrior, more disconnected and distant from her nearby family.
She searches, painfully, for some sort of solace, maybe even some resolution to
this impossible dilemma she faces: killing “guilties” by day and nurturing a
family by (brief) night. Especially when the bad guys turn out to have body
parts, and then friends, and then families. I don’t want to tell the whole
story in case you get to see it. (Watch for it! I would go again, and then
again in an instant if it returned.) It’s just that it all comes together—or apart—as
she confronts this awful dilemma of finding both good and evil in herself, in
her government’s actions, in her enemies, in the world.
I
saw the play at the Dairy Center in Boulder, where the pilot was played by Laura
Norman, who occasionally performs with the Boulder Ensemble Theater Company.
She was just extraordinary in her depiction of this woman—her early thrill at
flying, her delight in her new family, her begrudging move to piloting drones,
and her gradual descent into … what? The line between good and evil. As one
reviewer wrote, Grounded “lets no one off easy… Clap all you want—and you’ll
want to clap a lot—but the game stays with you.” The game stays with you.
None of this makes a sniper a heroic figure for our children or torture an acceptable strategy in my mind. But I have to consider the likelihood that reality is not as simple as my mind.
A
fuller rendition of the Solzhenitsyn quote above goes like this:
If only
there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were
necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. 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?
I imagine that if he saw Grounded
or read about the flap surrounding American Sniper or APA’s now-public turmoil,
Solzhenitsyn would be stroking his beard and nodding, knowingly.
© Janis
Bohan, 2010-2014. Use of this content is welcome with attribution and a link to
the post.
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