This is my chief objection to theories of human behaviour, which are mechanical in orientation; they bypass the problem of evil, and I suspect bypass it deliberately to avoid dealing with it. But you do not spend your professional life in the Law Courts, without recognizing that the problem exists; you meet it every day in Court, in the manipulation of the lists for personal advantage, in misrepresenting the evidence in cross-examination, in speeches that ignore the evidence that has been given, in summings-up that defy the guidelines of the Judicial Studies Board, the list is endless. Evil ignored does not go away.
I have been defeated by evil many times; but I do not think I have ever ignored it, not for long anyway. So I cannot take seriously expositions of human conduct that do ignore it. And I ask myself when I read one, whether I am expected to become so naïve as to ignore it myself, or whether the purpose is rather to create a climate of public opinion which denies there is any cohesion or brotherhood in society. To create a climate of opinion which suggests a community in which we are all just individuals, with no comradeship, no pity, no generosity to strangers, and above all no forgiveness towards enemies. Or is it more charitable to think it is like Marshall Foch, a rational military man obsessed with an irrational military idea?
I have been considering, in a superficial way, some of the problems inherent in modifying a religion. This has been a somewhat artificial enquiry, because to appreciate that Jesus will not have read Herodotus, nor learned what we should understand by a sense of history, is not even to begin to appreciate the problems he had to face. Even if one is widely read, it is almost impossible for us today to imagine what life was like for ordinary people in those days. Of course he did not want to be arrested for subversion, by challenging Roman rule; his vocation was to show us the Father, that is reveal the type of relationship he believed he had with God, and try to convince us that we could share in it too. To have been arrested for subversion would have ruined everything. So he exhorted his listeners to turn the other cheek, walk the second mile, render to Caesar what belonged to Caesar etc. To use these sayings as a blueprint for life in a democracy today, with freedom of speech, freedom of movement, modest economic independence, is not only absurd, it lacks all intelligence. When I see him, in my imagination, listening to his so-called followers preaching that we should turn the other cheek to terror, and allow all the social advantages we have won over hundreds of years to be extinguished, and what is more do it in his name, I see him tearing his hair in frustration and anger. How dare they invoke his name as an excuse for conduct which is not only crassly stupid, but despicably cowardly as well. He was never a coward; and it is very unlikely he would ever approve of cowardly behaviour.