Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the great Russian writer and teacher who went into exile to bring the reality and truth of communism to the complacent Western civilization through The Gulag Archipelago, has only been gone from this scene for a short fifteen years. Yet already our civilization has forgotten the great truth he discovered whilst suffering and soul-searching in the gulag:
“The line between good and evil cuts down the middle of every human heart.”
That eternal verity frightens us. We all want to think that we are Schindler, Harry Potter, or Frodo. None of us want to think that we might be Dolores Umbridge, Adolf Eichmann, or Saruman. Even more frightening is the understanding that we could be Dumbledore or Gandalf: a person sorely tested and tempted by great power, who has spent enough time flirting with the powers of darkness to know why we must always choose the powers of light, and of good.
Rising like a phoenix from the ashes of postmodernism’s destruction of the grand narratives of good and evil, a new grand narrative has taken our Western institutions by storm. According to the new narrative, the great dividing line between human beings is no longer good and evil, and the choices that each human being makes to serve either the good or the evil. The grand narrative of good and evil has been replaced by the grand narrative of power.
The dividing line between human beings is now the oppressed class and the oppressor class. If one is so unlucky as to find oneself in the oppressed class, there is no act of evil too great to be condemned as evil. If one is so unlucky as to find oneself in the oppressor class, there is no act of good too great to be regarded as good.
If one is oppressed, one can do no evil. If one is an oppressor, one can do no good.
In Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, Jo Rowling sums up these two grand narratives in Professor Quirrel’s own words describing the experience of being possessed by the spirit of Voldemort:
A foolish young man I was then, full of ridiculous ideas about good and evil. Lord Voldemort showed me how wrong I was. There is no good or evil, there is only power, and those too weak to seek it.
Over this year’s annual Thanksgiving dinner with my folks, the evergreen question came up: why has Jo Rowling, one of the greatest women writers of all time, who taught an entire generation to fall in love with reading, been condemned in the most vicious witch trials since Salem? I have heard all the arguments for and against her, and I have come to the conclusion that something deeper is at play here.
Like all great writers for children and young people of all ages, Jo Rowling distilled the eternal verities, the timeless truths, that the very fabric of our universe is woven from: that all of human existence is the epic battle between good and evil. That each of us, like Harry Potter, has that capacity for evil embedded in us, and that only our life choices will determine whether we are destroyed, like Voldemort and his minions, or live and flourish, like Harry and Hermoine and Ron.
This eternal verity flies directly in the face of the prevailing zeitgeist of the postmodern age, and thus the author who made that eternal verity accessible understandable, and enchanting for people of all ages must be erased from the libraries and bookshelves of the West. The Harry Potter series must, at all costs, be backspaced and burned and canceled, because it is a mirror held up to human nature, from the deceitful media to the sadistic rule enforcer to the reality-denying bureaucrat. The treacherous mirror must be broken lest we recognize ourselves.
I encountered for the first time another of the great eternal verities in an episode of Star Trek: The Original Series, a science fiction series that was originally conceived to express “love for all things” and an optimistic view of mankind’s future. The episode was entitled “Whom Gods Destroy” and was a modern sci-fi retelling of Ancient Greek tragedy. I was thrilled to discover that the title of the episode was taken from the narrative poem Prometheus, an Ancient Greek tale translated by our great Maine poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
Longfellow translated the famous line “those whom gods would wish to destroy, they first make mad.” However, upon closer research, I found that there were several other sources and translations of the proverb and that it seemed too ancient to link to one origin. The translation that struck me most profoundly was from Sophocles’ tragedy, Antigone:
For with wisdom did someone once reveal the maxim, now famous, That evil at one time or another seems good, To him whose mind a god leads to ruin.
The Old Testament prophet Isaiah puts the ancient concept in another way:
Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter! (Isaiah 5:20-21).
In the post-death of God society, in our Western society that has embraced the Enlightenment values of reason and rejected the polytheism of earlier eras, who or what has replaced God or the gods?
Nietzsche suggested that following the death of God, mankind would have to invent our own values. Those values have taken the form of ideologies, and it is those ideologies that have replaced God and the gods.
We need only look at the bloodbath resulting from the enforcement of communist ideologies under Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot to see the ancient pattern played out again and again: those whom gods (or the ideologies that have replaced the gods) would wish to destroy, they first make unable to discern between good and evil.
The drama that we have seen unfold upon our college campuses in the weeks since October 7, 2023, bears this observation out in horrifying ways. The oppressor/oppressed ideology has blinded the minds of our greatest intellectuals all the way down to our greenest freshmen so that they are no longer able to discern the evil committed that day.
The oppressor/oppressed narrative we have set up as our god has blinded us to the eternal verity that when we rejoice over the torture and slaughter of Jews, we are rejoicing over the torture and slaughter of our flesh and blood. We are blinded to good and evil, and our ideology that so blinded us will lead us to our own destruction.
If I might be permitted to paraphrase Solzhenitsyn in relation to current events: “The line between good and evil does not lie between Israeli and Palestinian, between Jew, Muslim, and Christian, between cis and trans, between man and woman, between political Right and political Left, between Black and White. The line between good and evil cuts down the middle of every human heart.”
Wrong Speak is a free-expression platform that allows varying viewpoints. All views expressed in this article are the author's own.
I think this is your best article that I've read so far, Ms. Amsden. Nothing to add.
Bravo. ZL
This is outstanding writing; succinct and poignant. Great job.