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You wish that you could say it’s what money does to them, and that can be part of it, but it’s not all. You wish it could be ascribed to people with wealth that is inherited, or wealth that has been recently come by, but people from both groups are among them. You wish that it isn’t about money and privilege and, yes, race, but it is. And you wish most of all that it wasn’t true, that there aren’t people who are cruel, people who are so self-centered that they have no feeling for others, people who have no feelings at all, people who are soulless and empty, people who expel with every breath air that stains and pollutes the earth’s atmosphere for the rest of us, but you know that there are such people, and we know some of their names.
You may know, and I do know, rich people who are not like them, who are like us, who listen to and support NPR, who have shown up in basements and churches for meetings to help the poor or heal the planet or work for peace. So, it’s not just about money. It’s about something else.
With certain of them, and I think you know who I’m talking about, it is always about power, about the will to amass power, about the will to use it for personal gain, about the drive to abuse power by employing it to damage others, about what we can only call the evil that power can bring with it. We ask ourselves, where does that come from? We look back in our own lives and find examples from what you might call ordinary life – bullies on the playground, in school, in jobs, in relationships we may have had. We asked ourselves as children, as young adults, and again when we got out in the world as adults, where it comes from, the drive to dominate and harm others. We examined our own experience to find if there was some of it in us, if we had misused power of whatever level when we achieved it, or when it was given to us, and if we were honest, we found ourselves guilty. There was someone who asked for our help, and we were too busy, too self-involved, too unthinking for whatever reason to lend a hand. There were those we were just mean to.
We feel shame, and we find that we changed, and sometimes we even made amends. In other words, we acted like human beings.
But what of those who are – there is no other word for it – inhuman? I remember with great clarity the day I discovered that all of this is nothing new, that it has been studied for centuries, indeed for millennia, that great tomes have been written in search of answers. I was a junior in high school taking honors classes and I took an elective in philosophy, and one day, the teacher walked into the room where only about a dozen of us sat at our desks, and he introduced the topic of “man’s inhumanity to man.” I was fascinated. He asked us if we could think of any examples. I was from an Army family, and I raised my hand and answered, “war.” The teacher said yes, but there were other, less obvious, examples, weren’t there?
We spent the next two months on that topic alone in that philosophy class, I guess because it was so bottomless.
Later in life, I came to learn that people make war on each other for many more reasons than imperial ambitions or revenge for perceived losses, or because of belief in religious doctrine. People are not inherently cruel or born in sin as some religions would have you think, but they are like faulty engines, flawed inside themselves in some way, and because they are human, the flaws cause them to act in ways that will hurt others.
But this stuff we are in the middle of, these daily revelations from – I will not use his name – those files, are something different and, if it is possible, worse than the big shooting wars countries make against each other, and the little wars we wage against each other in our ordinary lives. This is in so many ways beyond our comprehension, or at least that is how it feels until we remember the scandals of abuse of children by the Catholic church, the scandal of the Irish mother and baby homes, the scandal of the “schools” for native Americans and Canadians that produced such terrible abuses of children in the name of one authority or another.
And we remember the horrors visited upon children alongside their mothers and fathers in the Holocaust.
It is not necessary to ask ourselves which is worse, because it seems all of a piece. Or is it?
What makes it different this time is that these horrors seem recreational. There is no reason other than satisfaction of desires and urges that are untethered to anything other than pleasure. This is where money and wealth and power have made possible what we read about in those files but does not explain it. To gain wealth, or have wealth, has not made these men do what they have done to the more than 1,000 children who were their victims. As Susan Brownmiller taught us in her groundbreaking book, “Against Our Will,” rape is not about sex, it is about power.
But sexual abuse of anyone – male or female, adult or child – is not explained as a question of power any more than war is explained as a question of imperial ambition or revenge or dominance in trade or any of the other reasons given for the wars that humans have waged against each other since the beginning of recorded history. We know that war happened before anyone could record it on the walls of caves or on tablets of clay or etched into stone.
It feels like going in a circle, doesn’t it? An unsatisfying journey through something that cannot be explained or understood in any way other than the inhumanity of these people, most of them but not all, men. But if it is yet another instance of man’s inhumanity to man, do we find the connective tissue in the root “human?” Or do we find it in that other word, evil, that has been employed to explain the things we cannot understand about ourselves and our world?
I don’t have an answer, but I do know this: We are different from them, because we have the capacity to feel.
