Evil
A sermon preached for the congregation at Eliot Unitarian Chapel
in St. Louis, MO by the Rev. Dr. Daniel Ó Connell on March 9, 2008
One of our high school youth was wearing a tee shirt last Sunday. It was in Kirkwood colors: red and white. And it said: Brave enough to live in America’s Most Dangerous City.
Although that phrase is tongue in cheek, it reminds us that we don’t really live in Mayberry, we don’t live in some fictional TV town.
We can read about it in the newspaper. We can watch the endless clips on TV. Acts of violence, acts of evil. A man kidnaps two young boys, abuses them for months, and is finally caught. Another man storms city hall, killing 5 and injuring two more. And that’s just in Kirkwood.
But we can also read about acts of bravery, acts of heroism. A man dangling from a helicopter helps fish a drowning person out of a stormy river. In World War II, families hid jews from the Nazis even though they knew if they got caught, their own family would be killed.
How to explain such things? Unitarian Universalists like to emphasize the individual– individual rights, responsibility, conscience. We look at individuals as normal, as sociopaths, as altruists. When crimes happen, we ask “who questions”– Who did it? Who was the victim?
Another way to look at is to look at situations that can create violence or evil.
We can compare this to the health model. A medical model looks at individuals, the source of a disease. A public health model looks at environmental conditions.
It won’t do much good to treat they symptom’s of a child’s learning disability with medicine, if we don’t bother to remove the lead paint from the child’s bedroom.
Philip Zimardo in his book on evil, called The Lucifer Effect notes that in
In 1915, Ottoman Turks slaughtered 1.5 million Armenians. The Nazis killed at least 6 million Jews, 3 million Soviet POWs, 2 million Poles, and hundreds of thousands of “undesirable” peoples. Stalin murdered 20 million Russians. China killed up to 30 million of its own citizens. The communist Khmer Rouge killed off 1.7 million people of its own. Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party is accused of killing 100,000 Kurds in Iraq. In 2006, genocide has erupted in Sudan’s Darfur region” (12).
killing from 200 to 400,000 people. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darfur_conflict.
And much of this killing is being done by ordinary people. How can ordinary people– men and women– get involved in so much butchering and raping of civilians?
Zimbardo writes about how ordinary people sometimes turn evil and commit unspeakable acts. As part of this account, He is the psychologist who conducted the Stanford Prison Experiment, in 1971.
“In that study, normal college students were randomly assigned to play the role of guard or inmate for two weeks in a simulated prison, yet the guards quickly became so brutal that the experiment had to be shut down after only six days.”
Could you be convinced to intentionally injure innocent people?
You and I might like to think we could not, but we have to be careful about jumping to that conclusion. How we act can have a lot to do with our environment.
Researches set up an old, but okay looking car with its hood raised, and its license plate missing in several locations. In the Bronx, it took less than 10 minutes for an ordinary family to arrive and begin stripping it down. Passers-by, walking & driving, stopped to carry off items, until vandals arrived to demolish it. All pretty quickly.
In suburban Palo Alto, pretty much the same car was left untouched for a full week. Finally, when it looked like rain, some kind soul put the hood back down. When the researchers drove the car away, 3 neighbors called the police to report a possible stolen car.
Two very different kinds of community feeling there. We who live in Kirkwood might like to think we live in a place like suburban Palo Alto, where neighbors look out for each other, where overt evil doesn’t exist.
A couple months ago, many of us had an unconscious assumption we lived in Lake Woebegone– where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.
Consider that 86% of Australians rate their job performance as ‘above average.’ Or that 90% of American business managers rate their performance as ‘superior’ to that of their average peer. 261.
We like to think that in the face of fascism or violent “group thinking,” we would not participate, we would speak up, we would resist!
We would not do what the majority does, but “this makes us even more vulnerable to situational forces” because we underestimate the power of persuasion we overestimate our power to resist.
There are experiments where you are shown a series of three lines, each the same length or different from the rest. And the vast majority of people will to change their minds about line length, if the people they are with, do also.
People will even begin to see a blue as more of a green– or vice versa– if they are with others who do this, even when the others are fakers as part of an experiment. As one neuro-scientist put it: “we like to think seeing is believing, but [studies] conclude that seeing is believing what the group tells you to believe.
Consider the ‘wrong answer’ shock test. There is an experiment with 15 volt switches– moving up to XXXX volts. You get a 45 volt shock to see what that feels like, not too bad. Experimenter exhorts you to keep pushing the switch. Subject messes up. More volts.Your subject passes out, more exhortation, you are crying, tears down your cheeks, but you keep pushing the switches. You are pressing the 300 volt switch to an unconscious person. The experimenter insists you give 2 more shocks for good measure.
This isn’t you, right? You wouldn’t fall for this, right? 40 psychiatrists were asked to estimate the number of Americans who would go through all 30 levels of this experiment. They estimated less than 1%. Only sadists would do such a thing, and they represent less than 1% of the population.
They thought most people would drop out at the tenth level of 150 volts. But 2 out of 3 or 65% went all the way to 450 volts, the maximum.
“The vast majority of people shocked the ‘victim’ over and over again despite increasingly desperate pleas [from the victim] to stop.”
Most of the perpetrators kept going because the experimenter said that the experimenter would “take responsibility” for what happened.
But can anyone else really take responsibility for your actions? Sometimes, we can’t see our way out of a situation, so we keep on doing things we hate.
Here’s another example. For a number of years, a former corrections officer was involved in a strip-search scam. This person would call a fast food restaurant up and say he needs urgent help with a case of employee help. He would identify as a police officer and say that a young person could either be strip searched in a back room or down town for some incriminating evidence.
The young person– knowing they had not committed a crime– would usually decide to do the strip search in a back office of the fast food restaurant, rather than wait for the cops to show up and take them “down town” to the police station.
And it only got worse from there. A voice on the phone. And there would be naked people and mangers doing body cavity explorations– and worse. A voice on the phone. That’s the power of authority and conformity.
And we might like to think these are a few isolated incidents. But this scam was conducted in 68 restaurants in 32 states, with male & female victims.
And we’ve probably read or heard about experiments conducted in high school or even elementary school classes where one group of students was made guards and another prisoners. Or one day all the blue eyed children were privileged and on another day– with a whole different set of explanations, the brown eyed children were the top dogs.
It turns out that our disbelief that we can be so easily manipulated– plays right in to how easy it is to manipulate us. And with the right verbal persuasion, most people can be turned into tyrants. Ouch.
In March of 1942, 80% of all Holocaust victims were still alive. Eleven months later, about 80% were dead. How did the Nazis do this?
Good German soldiers were at the Russian front. Most Polish Jews lived in small towns. But then Reserve Battalion 101 was recruited. They were old men. Ordinary men, too old to be drafted. They were raw recruits sent to Poland without any training. Zimbardo says:
“In just 4 months they shot to death at least 38,000 Jews and had another 45,000 deported to the concentration camp at Treblinka. Initially, their commander told them that this was a difficult mission, but anyone could refuse to execute the men, women, and children. “
At least half refused at first. But peer pressure took over. Guilt induced persuasion. In the end, 90% were blindly obedient. Many posed for photos, just like the ones we saw of our own forces in Iraq– trophy photos of soldiers basically committing torture.
You and I would tell ourselves that we are immune. That we would never allow ourselves to end up like those executioners. And yet history would question that.
But there is some good news about this research into evil. Once researchers found out the sociological and psychological factors that led ordinary people to commit evil acts, they were also able to find out factors that pushed people the other way.
In fact, the experiments revealed a whole host of things researchers had not thought to ask before. And they were able to manipulate the results from 90% compliance to an authority figure telling them to torture someone– to down to 10%.
These are things like: learning to question authority, or taking a mini-time out when things begin to feel a little strange. Or just interrupting the series of events you are in to ask questions. Or supporting someone else’s dissent. Little things can interrupt evil, and move us toward the good.
And not just reacting to immediate evil, but getting involved in a larger picture. You can be one of 1,000 people being led to shock innocent people in an experiment, but if you figure this out and simply walk away, you leave 999 people in line behind you to shock the next victim.
Bravery and heroism comes when you try to convince others to abandon evil, also. And ordinary people can commit extraordinary acts of goodness, too. We are not consigned to evil.
Dissonance theory says: beliefs follow behavior. In other words, if you do evil acts, if you do evil deeds, you will find justification for them. You will develop beliefs that support your evil deeds.
But the reverse is also true: if you do evil acts, if you do good deeds, you will develop beliefs that support your good deeds
People who commit acts of kindness influence other to do the same. People who point out the good deeds of others, encourage everyone to do good deeds.
Consider the case of John Woolman, a Quaker. In Woolman’s day, all Quakers owned slaves. But over the course of 30 years, Woolman visited and talked with his fellow Quakers, and after 30 years of discussion, the Quakers were well on their way to having freed all their slaves.
We are reminded of the reading from the anthropologist Margaret Mead: “never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed it’s the only thing that ever has.”
Yesterday– Saturday March 8, at 8 am, I was at the Kirkwood Ministerial Alliance meeting at the Kirkwood Baptist church on Adams and Woodlawn Avenue. Instead of the usual 8 white guys, there were about 25 ministers– two African American pastors and two other African American men who are part of a new group called Coalition for Peace.
There was a very pale Caucasian layman there. His family has been in business in Kirkwood since 1900. He wants to start business incubators in Meacham Park. He didn’t know where to start, but he called a friend at Wash U, who hooked him up with a teacher at St Louis U, who is involved in something called Habitat for Business, which is a group that tries to start minority owned businesses around St. Louis. Remarkably, instead of the normal 20% success rate for new business starts, this group has a 50% rate.
So now, an ordinary white businessman is trying to get something like that going for Meacham Park. He doesn’t know anybody, he may not have any particular experience at doing something like this, but he wants to do something. And so he is taking a risk. A risk to do good.
At the meeting, the pastors talk about what’s happened to our town. What can we do as ministers? The group decides to call for a day long fast on April 7th, the 2 month anniversary of the shootings. Each group will decide what such a fast would mean for them. We finally break around 9:30.
A half hour later, at 10 am, I’m over at St Louis Community College, Meramec. We fill the theater. The steering committee talks to us a little bit about the first meeting, and that we are to break up into groups.
This is the 2nd of 2 such meetings of a group called Community for Understanding and Healing. It is a “non-political, peace-making group” for reflective dialogue. The group will not take a stand on recommending the Kirkwood elections be delayed to June. The first meeting had 190 citizens, this one on Saturday looks more like 300. I see a dozen or so folks from Eliot.
We break out into 15 different small groups. I am relieved to find I am in a group with at least two African Americans. Frankly, I would think it a little strange to talk about race & class and what has happened in Kirkwood with an all white group.
Folks talk about race, class, the history of Meacham Park, segregation, white privilege. Almost all the participants are older than me. Most have been in Kirkwood for more than 20 years, many for their whole lives. Many remember segregated schools.
One of the African American men talks about in the old days Meacham Park was known for “roughness.” I ask what that means. Drug houses, open sewers, many people didn’t have indoor plumbing. It was patrolled by the county police, not the local police, it had “county housing.” When Meacham Park was annexed, when the development came in, the roughness went away.
We talk about how Kirkwood can seem a little like Mayberry from the old TV show. There were no black people on that TV show at all. And Kirkwood has seemed like that to some people, too.
I recall how “white bread” Kirkwood seemed to me when I first moved here from the east coast. Where were blacks? Where were Jews? Where were Latinos? Indians? Asians? I just didn’t see many.
The heartwarming thing about the meeting at Meramec was people’s attitudes. These are people who want to do right by one another. People who look to make a better Kirkwood, people who would like the evil of racism to go away, even as they acknowledge it seems to be all around, all the time.
Two men at the ministers meeting talked about a new group– Coalition for Peace. I invite you to walk with them on Saturday, March 15. Although, I will be in a previously set meeting in Louisville, Kentucky that day, I think this would be a good opportunity to meet with folks who seek peace, justice, and racial reconciliation.
Reverend Bonnie will represent us, and she is looking for some Eliot folks to walk with her.
People will assemble at Nipher Middle School on Kirkwood Road at 9:30 am and then walk to City Hall. The group would like some consideration about moving the election. But more importantly, they would like to get more black youth to register to vote.
They would like more mediation between the black and white communities. They would like to walk to show people want change. Our of this tragedy can come some great opportunities.
I am reminded that against the evils of segregation and racism, it was on this day, 43 years ago, the 9th of March, 1965, that Dr. King had called white liberal clergy to join him in marching from Selma, to Montgomery, Alabama to petition the governor for redress of grievances.
And I understand half the Unitarian ministers responded to the call. They faced police with dogs, fire hoses, and bull whips. The walk from Nipher Middle School to City Hall will undoubtedly be much tamer. But it will also be an opportunity for you to literally walk your talk.
There will be many opportunities to walk your talk in the weeks ahead.
On April 5th at 8 am Eliot will be hosting the Kirkwood Ministerial Alliance. Also, that morning, Al Roberts, the African America Rams Special Teams coach will speak at an “inspiration breakfast” at Kirkwood United Methodist about “winning through forgiveness.”
At one o’clock, St. Peter’s Catholic Church is sponsoring “Kilometers for Kirkwood” a 2k walk followed by a BBQ, with a donation entry fee, which goes to the Kirkwood Memorial Fund. You can see flyers for these events on our bulletin boards.
In the days and weeks ahead, I urge you to think of some simple act of kindness you can do. Some small step you can take to combat evil. Maybe writing a letter to the editor of your local newspaper. Maybe stopping on the side of the road to help a stranded motorist. Maybe being nice to your brother or sister when they don’t deserve it.
If you keep your eyes and ears open, many possibilities will present themselves to you.
The song says that “once to ever soul and nation, comes the moment to decide, in the strive of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side,” but I think we know that there are many such moments, many such choices. And it is these accumulations of choices that others will be able to say of us– that we lived a good life.
I invite you to rise and sing: Once to Every Soul and Nation, #119.