The Middle of the Road to Hell
We are accustomed to thinking of great evil as instantly recognisable. From Nuremberg rallies to the squalor of the Gulag, great evil is something obvious and unmissable. Or so we think. Unfortunately, we have developed such a cartoonish idea of what evil, villains, and devils look like, that as a people we are entirely unprepared for the entrance of evil dressed in a very different cloak. As C.S. Lewis warned us decades ago in his Preface to the Screwtape Letters:
“The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid ‘dens of crime’ that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices.”
Yet it is not only that great evil itself can be seemingly mundane, but it is often facilitated and allowed to grow by the ordinary, the middle-of-the-road. This has been the case in many totalitarian states, where the inaction and unwillingness of millions to confront the evil taking root and growing before their eyes has allowed it to thrive and take over their society like bindweed, and this is what is happening in our society right now.
