The Tree of Good and Evil: Or, Violence by the Law and against the Law

By Charles K. Bellinger

There is a common way of thinking that distinguishes between the regular law-abiding citizens and the "criminals." The many high-profile killings committed by police officers in recent years, with the George Floyd case being the most famous, have served to render this simplistic way of thinking highly problematic. It is more realistic, in terms of cultural understanding, to see violence as a dialectic; it can come from the direction of "law and order" or from the direction of the violation of law. Employing the thought of Rene Girard, Soren Kierkegaard, and others, this book provides a framework for understanding this dialectic. Drawing on examples from slavery, lynching, the killing of unarmed Black persons by police, and the death penalty, the theme of violence coming from the direction of "law and order" is vividly illustrated, with Girard's thought being employed to formulate a deeply rooted theoretical understanding. There is also extensive attention paid to many examples of mass shootings and terrorist attacks--violence that is intentionally immoral and illegal. A psychological taxonomy is employed that comprehends such violence under the headings of the psychopathic, the psychotic, the traumatized, and the ideological actor.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Dec 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781666759051

Charles K. Bellinger

Charles K. Bellinger is professor of theology and ethics at Brite Divinity School at Texas Christian University. He is the author of The Genealogy of Violence (2001), The Trinitarian Self (2008), and Othering: The Original Sin of Humanity (2020).

Book preview

Introduction

And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil . . . And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die . . . Now the serpent was more subtil than any beast of the field which the Lord God had made. And he said unto the woman, Yea, hath God said, Ye shall not eat of every tree of the garden? And the woman said unto the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees of the garden: But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of the garden, God hath said, Ye shall not eat of it, neither shall ye touch it, lest ye die. And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof, and did eat, and gave also unto her husband with her; and he did eat.

(Gen

2

:

9

,

16–17

,

3

:

1–6

)

Violence takes many forms in human culture: war, ethnic cleansing, mass shootings, unjustified killings by the police, unjustified killings of the police, domestic violence and child abuse, gang warfare, and so on and so forth. When we seek to understand this phenomenon within human culture, taking this great variety into account, there is an immediate fork in the road that faces us. Will we see the different forms of violence as being sufficiently distinct from each other that they need to be understood using a variety of theoretical approaches, or will we see some common root out of which they all grow? Using a botanical metaphor, are the forms of violence like the branches of a tree, or are they different plants entirely: some are deciduous trees, some conifers, some small bushes, some grasses, some mushrooms or lichen, etc.? We can change the simile to pose the problem in a different form. Are the forms of violence like ten different houses with completely different architectural styles, or are they like an apartment building that has ten apartments but a shared infrastructure of plumbing, heating, cooling, and so forth? While I recognize the value of theories that focus on a particular form of violence, such as child abuse leading to violence committed by adults later in life, or a theory that homes in on the dynamics of a lynch mob, my instinct has always been to try to make progress down that fork of the road that looks for the deep taproot that is shared by the various forms of violence. I favor the metaphor of the tree, which has a root system, a trunk, and many branches. Could we be seeking to understand what the book of Genesis poetically describes as the tree of the knowledge of good and evil?

We know that there are many forms of evil in human behavior (war, mass shootings, etc., etc.); we also know of many acts of love, kindness, goodness. The human condition is complicated at this basic level, however, by the observation that it is often the case that people who commit acts of violence think that they are doing something good. The Crusaders think that they are liberating the Holy Land from the infidels, or the terrorists think that they are attacking the Great Satan, the United States. Hitler saw himself as cleansing Europe of parasites. Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, was wearing a T-shirt that said: The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants—a quotation from Thomas Jefferson. The first paragraph of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics makes the keen observation that all action intends a good. This means that we can interpret not only the examples just mentioned, and hundreds of other similar ones, but also what might appear to be a counter-example that falsifies Aristotle’s all. Even a serial killer who consciously knows that he is acting in an evil way is fulfilling some psychological need, such as a thirst for power or a desire to be free from all moral constraints. The meeting of this need is the good that his action intends. Once the actual meaning of Aristotle’s assertion is grasped, no counter-examples can be found.

In our era, the problem we are wrestling with here is concentrated in debates about the use of force by the police. As a general principle, the role of the police is to be prepared to rush to a scene where someone has already committed or is threatening to commit acts of violence. The police are the thin blue line that seeks to preserve civilized society from the continual threat of chaotic mayhem that human beings have shown themselves to be so capable of. But there have been many cases when the police have killed without proper justification for their actions. The police are supposed to be on the good side of the line dividing good and evil, but what if they jump or slip over to the other side?

The killing of George Floyd in the summer of 2020 led to massive protests and extensive rioting. Why? Part of the explanation is surely that it was a spark that lit a tinderbox situation that had been created by the many other cases of unjustified killings by the police in recent years; but there is a deeper level explanation that is pointed to in the writings of René Girard, whose thought built upon the anthropological reflections of many other authors who preceded him. Girard said that there has been a subtle and profound influence of the Bible on Western civilization for the last three thousand years, leading us to become sensitized to the idea that truth is on the side of the victim, not on the side of the victimizer. A plausible line of historical interpretation posits that violence against Black persons in the United States began with their forced enslavement, continued with their brutal treatment under slavery, morphed into the era of lynching and Jim Crow oppression, which morphed again into the era of mass incarceration and police brutality. There is a contradiction between the essential moral teachings of the Judeo-Christian tradition, such as the Golden Rule and the command to love one’s neighbor as oneself, and this historical trajectory just outlined. If the famous words of the American Declaration of Independence, We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, can be viewed as a kind of summary of the moral sensibilities that flow from the Bible’s influence, then acts of unjustified killing by police officers are not just regrettable incidents; they are at a very deep level a refusal to live in attunement with those moral sensibilities. This is why acts of malfeasance by the police lead to explosions of anger. What is the point of having thousands of crosses atop churches all over the United States if agents of the government, acting on behalf of the good, law-abiding citizens, echo the actions of the Roman soldiers that we read about in the New Testament? What if victims are still being victimized within a civilization that is supposed to have learned the lessons of history? We seem to be drinking water from the same deep well of hypocrisy that was lambasted by Frederick Douglass in the nineteenth century. What good is it to have a knowledge of good and evil if the good keep committing acts that are evil?

The task of understanding the phenomenon of violence in human culture is very complex; we need to not only comprehend the acts of those persons who can easily be labelled as criminals but also the acts of the police when they engage in unjustified killings; we also need to understand how whole societies can be expressions of unjustified violence, as in the cases of slavery or the Holocaust. When a member of a criminal gang or a terrorist commits a murder, he knows that if he is apprehended he will be put on trial and most likely convicted. Even though there will be a good that his action intends, in Aristotle’s sense, he knows that the justice system will judge his actions to be evil. But it is also the case that the justice system itself can be a form of violence, a form of injustice. An innocent man may be convicted of murder and executed, for example, based primarily on his skin color. Or, a police officer who has committed an unjustified killing may be acquitted at trial, in which case the jury is perpetrating an injustice. Any theory of violence that seeks to be competent, in other words, needs to account for both violence against the law and violence by the law. And within the category of violence against the law, there needs to be distinctions made between different types of actors, whose motives may be described under headings such as psychosis, psychopathy, or ideological malformation. This book seeks to comprehend this complexity while also striving to present an overall theory that understands the roots and trunk of the tree that is violence—the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

vvv

Various thinkers will be brought in as this book unfolds; one of the most important is René Girard (French-American academic, 1923–2015). A standard way of introducing the mimetic theory of Girard goes like this. (1) The basic principle of human psychology is mimetic desire; we look around at others, see what they are desiring, and mimic their desires. (2) We then become rivals of those others for the possession of those objects; rivalry threatens social chaos and breakdown. (3) The social group avoids this breakdown by choosing a scapegoat and killing him or her (or them if it is a small group). In this way the group cathartically releases the pent-up rivalries on a hapless victim, and thus restores peace. (4) The Bible unveils the process outlined in points 1 to 3, teaching us that truth is on the side of the victim, the scapegoat, not on the side of the scapegoaters. (5) This unveiling has acted as a slow but steady yeast, working its way into Western culture for three millennia; it inescapably influences our thinking today.

Of course, this bare outline of Girard’s theory omits many points of nuance and refinement, but it serves to lay the groundwork for an introduction to Girard that uses a completely different starting point. Think, for instance, of the basic plot of so many television shows and movies, which goes like this:

1.A bad guy does something evil, like committing a murder.

2.The good guy figures out who the bad guy is and hunts him down over the course of the episode or movie.

3.The good guy arrests or (preferably) kills the bad guy, thus restoring the cosmic moral balance disrupted by the bad guy’s original act.

This basic plot is pervasive throughout popular entertainment, watched by untold millions of people. What psychological need does it fill? As soon as we ask this question, we enter into unfamiliar and perhaps unsettling territory. What if most regular, law-abiding citizens have a need to see themselves as regular, law-abiding citizens? What if we need to affirm our own righteousness, which contrasts sharply with the evil character of those people over there (imagine a pointing finger) who are the criminals? What if the action we see on the screen has the purpose of reinforcing our self-righteousness project as we identify with the good guy? If the episode or movie has this purpose, are we going to be open, psychologically and intellectually, to a theory about how human culture works that begins with the idea that the unrecognized presence of a scapegoat mechanism shapes the thinking of most regular, law-abiding people? Clearly, the answer to this question is no. We know that the bad guys are evil and we are good; assuming we can grasp what it asserts, we must reject a theory that flips the script and reveals that the mass of people, the crowd of law-abiders, actually perpetrates violence in human culture. Girard’s theory makes this claim: The mythology of good vs. evil we assume to be correct is actually a falsification, a méconnaissance (misconstrual or misunderstanding), a romantic lie, that needs to be unveiled by a truth that comes from outside of ourselves, from somewhere else than our self-righteousness project.

Girard sometimes describes his mimetic theory as a secular approach in social science, which avoids religious presuppositions. At other points in his writings, however, he talks about the unveiling of the scapegoat mechanism as the work of the Holy Spirit through the influence of the Bible. His early books tended to fit the secular paradigm, while his later works increasingly spoke openly in theological terms. This passage shows the latter approach very clearly:

The Gospels are borne aloft by an intelligence that does not come from the disciples and that is clearly beyond everything that you, me, and all of us can conceive without them, a reason that is so superior to our own that after two thousand years we are discovering new aspects of it. Here we have a process that surpasses our understanding because we are unable to conceive of it ourselves; and yet we’re capable of taking it in, or we soon will be. The process is therefore perfectly rational, but it stems from a higher reason than ours. In my view, we have here a new illustration of a very great traditional idea, reason and faith upholding each other. Fides quarens intellectum and vice versa.

That’s a Thomist way of reasoning, I think, but it’s applied to a domain—anthropology—that in Saint Thomas’s era didn’t exist in the modern sense. And, once more, it’s a question of the Light that is at once what must be seen and what makes it possible to see, Deum de Deo, Lumen de Lumine.¹

Girard elsewhere expresses this idea that a genuine understanding of human psychology and culture requires a conversion experience; epistemology is not an armchair reflection but a wrenching realization that one has been complicit in violence and scapegoating without realizing it. The conversion of Saul of Tarsus is paradigmatic for Christian thought in particular, and thus for human self-understanding more generally, because that self-understanding is the fruit of the slow, steady influence of the Bible over three millennia. As Girard says, We see scapegoats everywhere, and we loudly denounce those guilty of attacking them. But we don’t feel that we are personally implicated in the scapegoat mechanism. The scapegoat phenomenon is universal as an objective experience, and exceptional as a subjective experience.²

Girard tends to present his theory of scapegoating as a classic scene of lynching, whether it is in the ancient world or in more recent times. He recognizes, however, that this classic scene is not the only form of violence. One suitor for a woman may kill his rival, for example. Or, two groups that have relatively even strength are at war with each other; they see only differences between themselves, but as they engage in atrocities on both sides they come to resemble each other more and more closely in their actions. Girard also commented on terrorism in the wake of the 9/11 attacks; he described Al-Qaeda and the United States as engaging in rivalry on a planetary scale.³

We need to see violence as a shape-shifting phenomenon that has historical and psychological aspects. Authors employ the historical perspective, for example, when they argue that slavery was a form of violence that morphed after the American Civil War into lynching; in our era it has morphed once again into the unjustified killing of Black persons by the police. Such incidents have made national news headlines and have led to massive civil unrest, as we saw in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in May 2020. The similarity in these three phenomena is that the violence is coming from the direction of law and order, in that its defenders viewed slavery as legal and constitutional; those who engaged in lynching saw it as an appropriate punishment for the alleged crimes of those who were hung or burned to death; police officers view their work as essential and appropriate, and they must sometimes employ lethal force to defend their own lives or the lives of innocent third parties. Capital punishment is another phenomenon that has morphed over time, in that it used to be a public spectacle, but the state now carries it out in a small room with a limited number of witnesses. In many countries it has been rejected as a legitimate practice, which is another step in its historical trajectory toward extinction.

The psychological perspective on violence as a shape-shifting phenomenon points to the state of mind of the person or persons who are violent. The slave owner who whips a slave to death does not have exactly the same psychological profile as the members of the lynch mob, though the two are of course related. The police officer who kills without appropriate justification also needs to be understood according to his or her own personal history and the cultural environment in which their action occurred. We also need to consider violence that is coming from the opposite direction, that which is against the law. I refer here to incidents such as the Oklahoma City bombing, Columbine High School, the Sandy Hook shooting, a terrorist attack, or the Las Vegas concert massacre. In a later chapter I will classify the psychological state of the violent actors as fitting into four main categories: the psychopath, the psychotic, the traumatized, and the ideological.

This book is multifaceted and interdisciplinary, in the sense that, as the text proceeds, I will explore ideas that are historical, social, psychological, legal, ethical, and theological. This is a complex weave; I ask my reader to be open to the twists and turns of the text as it unfolds. For example, I may describe a particular historical situation and then pivot to a commentary that draws on the ethical and theological insights of Søren Kierkegaard. Or I may show how the psychological/anthropological insights of René Girard illuminate the actions and words of a particular violent person. These are the two main theorists I utilize in my attempt