This posting will seem like a departure from my usual Letters From the Old Hyde Place; and in a way, it is. It is more contemporary. But that was inevitably going to be the case. My history from the Old Hyde Place, the stories themselves, isn’t endless. But I like to think the grounding those days gave me is endless.
In any event, bare with me. Let’s see if I can get to my point.
Some days ago, Gael MacLean posted a piece on Substack entitled I Am That Eichmann. She describes how easy it is for us to believe we can separate ourselves from evil by assuming we have no control over it. In my view, it is a brilliant piece and everyone should read it. They should because in the essay, MacLean reminds us how narrow the path is between good and evil and how vigilant we must be as we determine our next steps.
She sent me off looking again at Hannah Arendt’s work on the “banality of evil”, about how conformity is the wet decay where evil grows when there is no confrontation. There is a striking line she pens that I now have sitting in front of me.
For evermore, I think.
She says, “You can’t prevent what you won’t admit is possible.”
Her point is this.
When we don’t recognize, address and make every attempt to stop evil when we are first confronted with it, we contribute to its maturation into something worse. When we fail to take a stand because we think the stand we might take is too feeble to fight the evil we know is growing there, we join the crowd that is doing exactly the same thing and leaving evil unchecked.
“We excel at looking away.” MacLean writes. “At explaining why this particular horror is complicated. At finding the perfect distance—close enough to feel informed, far enough to feel helpless.”
How clever evil is in its understanding of human nature.
This takes me to the now famous line attributed to John Bradford, a 16th-century protestant reformer imprisoned in the Tower of London in 1555, who upon the occasion of seeing one of his fellow inmates being led off to the gallows said, “There but for the grace of God, goes John Bradford.”
Over the last 500 years, this line with its small but important modification has become a quiet little prayer of thanksgiving that we recite to acknowledge how we have been spared from whatever fate we know we most likely deserve or are just lucky enough to escape.
There but for the grace of God, go I.
I suggest it is also a place where, when confronted with an evil we believe cannot be challenged, we try to take refuge in from any personal responsibility to challenge. A place to duck our obligation. MacLean wants us to know that in doing so, we are that Eichmann.
MacLean again, “We are Eichmann, optimizing systems of harm, telling ourselves we’re just doing our jobs, just living our lives, just trying to get by.”
And she is right.
We cannot ignore the obvious when we see blood on the stone.
Now what, you sparse few but loyal subscribers to Letters From the Old Hyde Place ask, does all this have to do with my general trend in these postings?
As I have noted earlier, I was born in 1945 as World War II was coming to an end. This was a war kicked up by an ego maniac, a narcissist, a charmer who understood human emotions better than most and was capable of poking them and inciting them to his ends. He was a shameless usurper of decency and a fiery provocateur who could rile the baseline of human behaviors.
He was that evil rising unchecked, unchallenged and unappreciated for its virulence. An indecency growing in the very midst of decency until he finally crossed a line so maniacal that the world could no longer stand by and declare “There but for the grace of God, go I.”
And my arrival on earth came as my four oldest brothers were returning home from both Europe and the Pacific to stop that evil. None of them had been drafted; they had all enlisted.
They did not duck.
And Claude and Lena Renfro held each other in their arms through four years as their four sons took up arms and risk against that day’s totalitarian evil.
They did not take refuge, except in one another.
These are the lessons I still take from the Old Hyde Place. Gael MacLean helped remind me what Claude and Lena and my brothers all quietly spoke of through their reaction to evil let loose in middle of the 20th century.
That while we have within us the capacity for getting along by going along, we also have the obligation as sapiens to recognize the banality of evil and take it on.
What will I do now with this reminder of what I surely already knew? We’ll see, won’t we?
For what it’s worth, John Bradford did not die on the gallows. He was burned at the stake in 1555 because he held to his principles.
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