Something Wicked Comes This Way.
Evil is an inversion of the good. The philosopher Jacques Maritain likened it to a parasite clinging to a healthy body; it draws its lifeblood from the repudiation of all things wholesome. It feeds itself by attacking the people and standards that hold them accountable to higher obligations and virtuous behavior.
Thus, evil speaks eloquently of tolerance and compassion when it’s weak, but switches effortlessly to intolerance and contempt when it gains the upper hand.
It cannot bear to be “tolerated.” It demands to be affirmed and its critics punished.
Evil can never live peacefully with truth and sacrificial love because its very existence burns it, an ongoing indictment of evil’s destructive perversity.
The American writer Matthew Crawford captured the undercurrent of so much of today’s self-described “progressive” thought in a recent posting: It’s anti-white, anti-male, anti-straight sexuality (unless abortion is involved), cynical toward religion, and anti-normal. Normalcy – the everyday lives of average people doing ordinary things informed by a broadly Biblical moral sense and a simple measure of contentment – is the target of a peculiarly venomous hatred.
Modesty is mocked, and the normal is cast as “weird.” Meanwhile, political luminaries hobnob with drag queens. As Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz might say, “We’re not in Kansas anymore.”
How best to understand our present moment?
Humans have a hunger for stories. It’s in our DNA. A good story can teach about the nature of the world and our lives in it more effectively than any classroom. Like young boys growing up, I had an appetite for works of fantasy and science fiction.
Bradbury, in “Something Wicked", presents a circus with Mr. Dark, who has an uncanny ability to read people’s deepest desires and grant them – for a price. Every selfish wish is satisfied, and every selfish wish is a trap. A woman desperate to be younger is returned to her childhood. . .but left friendless and miserable. Along with its blandishments, he turns everything he touches into division, conflict, and despair.
Look around at American life as we now know it. If we don’t see at least a few grasping and fractious parallels, we haven’t been awake.
Bradbury offered up a way to resist evil. It’s the deliberate choice to love when it’s easier to hate; to be grateful; to take joy from the gifts we already have in life despite its burdens and disappointments – these are what defeat Mr. Dark. These things give us peace, make us happy, and keep us fully human. Which is why they’re so infuriating to the chronically restless and dissatisfied.
Something wicked this way comes. It’s been coming for decades, pushed along by our appetites, choices, and the leaders we’ve selected. But we can change.
But if we claim to be Christians, let’s remember who we really are and what we really need before entering their circus tent.
Excerpts from Francis X. Maier
Video: