“At times I doubt, Excellency. But years ago I reached this conclusion. There is no alternative. It is necessary to believe. It is not possible to be an atheist. Not in a world like ours. Not if one has a vocation for public service and engages in politics.”
I have long been fascinated by Mario Vargas Llosa novels, and at long last I have read one I can recommend as a starting place. The Feast of the Goat. A brilliant novel. (But, I hasten to add, not for the squeamish. Llosa is all too masterful at convincing the Reader that some of the characters in the novel are truly evil.) (See here for a discussion of his other novels.)
It is the tale of Trujillo, the longtime strongman dictator of the Dominican Republic. The novel has shifting perspectives, Trujillo himself, the set of people who assassinate Trujillo (don’t worry, that is not a spoiler), the daughter of one of Trujillo’s cronies returning to the country decades after leaving it, and the people who managed the government in the aftermath of Trujillo’s death. Expertly done.
The quotation at the outset is a government official responding to Trujillo’s question. Why is it not possible to be an atheist in a world like theirs?
Trujillo was, like many another Latin American dictator, a hard, vicious ruler, maintaining order in the country with the fear arising from an extensive police network and well-used torture chambers. In the chapters examining Trujillo’s interior world, we find a man who seriously believes that what is good for him is good for the country, that his own enemies are enemies of the state, and that his own pleasures are benefits to the state. We get glimpses of a past when he had not confused matters to this extent, hints that maybe once upon a time, Trujillo really did care more about the actual country than himself, but those days are long gone.
Everyone else in the novel lives in the shadow of Trujillo, for good or ill. Therein lies the moral quandary.
If you are in a state dominated by a vicious ruler, how do you craft a good life? Obviously being complicit at the highest level of an evil regime is evil. But, what about being a soldier in the army? What about working in one of the dictator’s personal businesses? If your only choices are work in some way to support the dictator or watch your family be murdered, what do you do? Obviously not the sort of thing you ever want to have to figure out. So, set that question aside.
Returning to the question at the outset, the official who makes the remark above is onto something which generalizes. The reason he has to have a religion is that it is the only thing that can possibly check the descent into evil while working in Trujillo’s government. “Without the Catholic faith, the country would fall into chaos and barbarism.”
How? Without the Catholic faith, then everyone would end up like Trujillo, there would be no check to the evil impulses within. Catholicism is “the social restraint of the human animal’s irrational passions and appetites.”
Whenever the question of human nature arises in conversations with my students, I am always struck by their genuine belief in the fundamental goodness of humans. Sure, bad people exist, but in their view of the world, everyone is basically good. Indeed, if explicitly asked to name someone who is evil, there is invariably just one name mentioned. (Zero points for guessing which name.)
All of this makes me wonder: how do people who believe in the inherent goodness of humans explain Trujillo or the head of Trujillo’s secret police or the soldiers who derive great pleasure from torturing others? Good people gone bad? But why did they go so bad? Why was their no check on their descent into evil?
Another way of wondering the same thing: given these two options, which would be harder to explain?
1) People are basically good, but sometimes people do very evil things.
2) People are basically evil, but sometimes people do very good things.
The second seems easy to explain: a benevolent God extends his grace to allow evil people to refrain from evil. The first? It isn’t obvious to me how that would make sense.
Leave a Reply