Themeattics

Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.

John Stuart Mill, inaugural address delivered before the University of St. Andrews, 1867

I’m a cradle Catholic. For a lot of people, that implies I don’t know much about the Bible. The long-persisting stigma of the Latin church remains, and whether we think that’s a fair stigma or not, it is what it is. I could get start the litany on defending practices, but that’s not what this is about and I’m going to try and stay on task here because I think this is an important matter.

Obviously, a lot of what I’m ending up writing about here are base philosophical ideas. I don’t think that was going to be the case, but looking at my upcoming list I guess that’s the direction I’m going. So, with that list in mind, I thought I’d start here. At the beginning.

Genesis.

We all know the story. God creates the universe, creates life, creates his masterpiece, and his masterpiece is corrupted. It’s the basic rendition of humanity and, I feel, one of the fundamental building blocks of a person’s outlook on the natural order. I know that’s a big claim, but I think most ideologies can be boiled down to one or two fundamental principles, with “can man be perfected” being one.

But I’ll get to that some other week. This isn’t about the nature of Man, this is about the nature of men. This is about what a small omission can do to a story and what can be conveyed between a pair of commas.

If you happen to have a Bible with you, go ahead and pull it out. Open to Genesis 3:6 and give it a read. Here’s my translation:

When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.

Some of you will compare and find little difference. Some of you might not notice the difference, being that it’s only four words, but those four words are a dagger in the heart of someone like me, who’s spent a lifetime trying to be a “good person.” Some of you might realize the missing piece and see the problem.

“Who was with her.”

People use this story as a means to attack the church all the time, saying it breeds misogyny and casts women as the reason for the fall of man. I expect a lot of those same people haven’t read through the Bible or really care whether this is true or not, but those that have may well have read versions that omit this line. This omission does everyone a grave disservice. It is the lynchpin of it all, and as far as I know, it’s the earliest version of my quote at the lead of this post.

You see, it wasn’t just Eve being tempted by the serpent. Yes, it spoke to her directly, but Adam was right there. He witnessed. He listened. He did nothing.

We can ascribe all kinds of motives for this as none are given. Apathy, fear, appeasement, intrigue, desire. In the end, I’m not so sure they matter. What matters is that he was witnessing the first act of betrayal and, by his silence, accepted it. He, who was supposed to be a good man, did nothing.

This one’s just for us guys, right? Just the booooys. When you read those words and realize what they said, did they not set you off? Here’s the woman he’s given to love and protect talking to a snake who’s trying to convince her to turn her back on the one promise each of them needed to uphold. It’s putting her in danger, and he just lets it happen. That’s not the way this is supposed to work. That’s not who we’re supposed to be. But it was then and it has been since.

The first sin, pride.

And now, we live in a world full of it. Full of good men who do nothing because of pride. Pride that makes their tiny foothold in the world more valuable than the direction of society. Pride that keeps us from talking. Pride that invokes fear.

I think I’ll stop there, since I’m bleeding into a couple of other upcoming posts, but before I go I want to make this abundantly clear. I’m guilty of this, too. Probably more so. The niceness that was bred into me has kept me on the sidelines for most of my life. I’m not proud of that fact, but it is a fact. I get the worry and the need to just get along. It’s powerful, the pull of the world. But we can beat it.

We can be better.