“In the pursuit of wrongdoing, one steps away from God. Of course, there is a price.” Sister Aloysius Beauvier, Doubt

Having seen the movie, I recently read the novel, The Kite Runner. Partly a coming of age movie, what the German Romantics would have called a Bildungsroman, a novel about building character, it’s the story of an Afghan boy, Amir, his betrayal of his Hazara friend,  Hassan, and Amir’s guilt and suffering, and his eventual redemption as an adult, as he rescues his murdered friend’s son from Taliban occupied Afghanistan. To give a little context, Hazaras are descendents of the Mongols who have been oppressed by the Pashtun majority in Afghanistan, of which the narrator and his father are members. But the narrator’s father, Baba, a strong-willed and successful merchant, has grown up with Hassan’s father, Ali, and although they are servants, in many ways they are treated as family. (There’s a plot twist here, but I won’t give it away.) Amir betrays Hassan by not defending him from the neighborhood bullies, and then out of guilt over his cowardice, he schemes to get Hassan and his father to leave Baba’s house. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Baba and Amir eventually flee to America. (Amir is eighteen at the time in 1981.) Amir eventually marries and becomes a successful writer in America. Many years later (2001), after Amir’s father has died, Baba’s best friend and business associate, Rahim Khan, who is terminally ill, beckons Amir back to Afghanistan. It is “a way to be good again,” he tells Amir. Rahim knows Amir’s secret betrayal of Hassan. As Rahim is ill and unable, Amir must rescue Hassan’s son, Sohrab, from Taliban controlled Afghanistan. Hassan and his wife have been murdered by the Taliban and Sohrab is an orphan. In his parting letter to Amir, Rahim tells him why he has chosen him for this mission, because he knows of his torment and suffering: “A man who has no conscience, no goodness, does not suffer” (p. 301), he tells Amir. He knows that Amir is basically a decent guy because he is tormented by his crime. I recall a line from another movie that I highly recommend, The Big Kahuna with Kevin Spacey and Danny DeVito. In defending Spacey’s character, DeVito says to their young compatriot that you really don’t “gain character” until you’ve regretted some of the foolish things you’ve done, and can’t change. But for Amir, although he can’t change the past, there is redemption.

But my intent was not to write a movie or book review. When I told a friend who is an English teacher that I was reading The Kite Runner, he commented that several of his “liberal” friends loved the novel and/or movie, both of which got rave reviews from the mainstream “liberal” press. I find this rather odd, although the chief villain in The Kite Runner is a blond haired, blue eyed half German Taliban. You know what the Who said, “No one knows what it’s like to be the bad man . . . behind blue eyes.” Also, Amir is certainly a feeling kind of guy who grows up to be a “good liberal” despite his traditional Afghan upbringing. But other than that, the novel gives a brutal description of Taliban ravaged Afghanistan: What they’ve done to that country is horrendous. “The horror! The horror!” as Conrad wrote in The Heart of Darkness. Of course, there’s always Somalia and Iran and Yemen and countless other places torn by brutal tyranny. Anyway, although the author, Hosseini appears to be somewhat “liberal” (Baba loved Reagan; the narrator didn’t), I still thought it somewhat odd that “liberals” would love this book: After all, the Taliban were portrayed as evil incarnate. (To be fair, it is a rather gripping story about the human condition, but why did this novel become a cause célèbre?) And although the Taliban are against all those things that Western leftist liberals revere, such as tolerance, diversity, and so on, what happened to “can’t we all just get along.” I thought leftist liberals didn’t believe in evil, except perhaps evil America and the three evil “c’s”: Christianity, capitalism, and conservatism. It is rather strange that a movement that seems to tolerate almost any sort of bad behavior is so intolerant of the very civilization that has allowed leftism to exist and flourish. Interestingly enough, I don’t think most conservatives consider leftists to be evil per se, just misguided. They have lost the capacity to see things clearly. Dennis Prager has often commented on this inability of leftist liberals to entertain the notion of human evil. This is partly due to the Rousseauist belief that man is basically good by nature; it is society or other forces outside the individual that are corrupting. Prager wrote, in an article called “Have We Stopped Trying to Make Good People?” (December 15, 2009:

In the Western world since the Enlightenment, belief in the inherent goodness of human beings has taken over. This has resulted in an increasing neglect of character development because evil has come to be regarded not as emanating from human nature (which is essentially good) or from morally flawed individuals but from forces outside the individual — especially material ones. Thus, vast numbers of the best educated in the West have come to believe that “poverty causes crime.”

The repercussions or consequences of this way of thinking are not merely academic or theoretical. As Richard Weaver has said: “Ideas have consequences.” Prager says it well:

When society blames evil on forces outside the individual rather than on the individuals who perpetrate evil, society will work to change those forces rather than work to improve the character of individuals. That is a key to understanding why the left constantly attempts to radically change society — how else make a better world?

Yes, “hope and change,” folks, that’s what it’s all about from the leftist perspective. But the leftist is already perfect; it’s you he wants to change. Speaking of Prager, in his recent speech to Republican Members of the House of Representatives (“What I said to the Republican Members of Congress,” February 2, 2009),  he clearly maintains that liberalism is dead on the left and the term “liberal” should be replaced by “the Left”:

You are not fighting liberals. You are fighting the Left. Democrats were once liberals. But you are not fighting liberals any longer. You are fighting the Left. And as leftists, they do not like to confront reality, even if it means rewriting it.

What seems obvious to some of us on the right, that so-called “liberals” are no longer liberal, seems to be a great big secret. But many classical liberals on the old right such as Garet Garrett, John T. Flynn, H.L. Mencken, Frank Chodorov, and Albert J. Nock knew the gig was up a long time ago with the advent of the New Deal. Liberals or Progressives had become advocates of the Leviathan State. Their objective, like that of their European socialist brethren, was total power in the hands of the state, Constitution be damned. In the eyes of the Left, those who promoted the State as the final arbiter of all things were good, while those who opposed the modern Welfare State were bad. The Nanny State is there to take care of all our human needs. But as Prager observed, “’The bigger the government, the smaller the citizen.’ . . . The bigger the government, the less I do for myself, for my family and for my community.” During the 1960s the New Left pushed the Progressive movement even farther to the left with Marxist influences such as political correctness becoming dominant once they took over the organs of cultural transmission, such as academia, the schools, the media; in other words, the cultural Marxism of Antonio Gramsci, which advocated a leftist march through the institutions of the West. So is it any wonder that the American left finds such third world tyrants as Mao, Castro, Che, and Arafat so appealing, just as their progenitors found Stalin admirable. If evil is without, outside of me, then I never have to deal with the evil within. In fact, I can get away with murder in the name of destroying the evil without, and be a hero of the Left, like Mao, Castro, and Che.

One of my favorite lines about evil is from the movie, The Usual Suspects (1996), in which Kevin Spacey’s character, Verbal, said: “The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.” Although I could be mistaken, I don’t believe in that red fellow with horns and a tail, and would rather think that if evil is incarnate in a person, he’d appear more like the Stones character in Sympathy for the Devil: “Please allow me to introduce myself, I’m a man of wealth and taste.” Very slick and polished, in other words. But the question of whether evil exists in a person, like the question of whether God exists in a person, is a matter of faith, and down here in the world of human experience, regardless of what culture you’re brought up in, most people do have some sense of right and wrong, good and bad. Where to draw the line, isn’t always easy. To one person, Bush is Hitler and to another, Obama is the Anti-Christ. But what I think only the evil person or the stupid or naïve person can deny is that there is good and evil in the world, and that in fact, human nature contains the seeds of both. We must conquer the evil within before we can vanquish the evil without. Far too often, that is not the case, which is why some things never seem to change. But like the lead character in Kite Runner, I would far rather be the man who stands up to evil and protects the innocent from brutality, than be the man who looks the other way. The question is, in this globalized world we live in, when is it our place to act and when is it not. That is where wisdom is most needed and most sorely lacking.

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Tags: Dennis Prager, Good and Evil, Government, Islamofascists, liberalism, Marxism, Political Correctness, Taliban

This entry was posted by Mark Amagi on Friday, February 5th, 2010 at 6:14 PM and is filed under Afghanistan, Political Correctness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.