It’s not plausible that morally well-ordered communities will be composed of a population containing a high percentage of morally ill-ordered individuals. One problem is that a morally well-ordered community with even a substantial minority of morally ill-ordered individuals would be a flock of sheep with the wolves living in the flock. But it seems plausible to me that morally ill-ordered communities might form from a population of morally well-ordered individuals. (I simplify greatly as there are a large number of possibilities involving well-ordering and ill-ordering at various levels of human being.)
I’ll point to an earlier essay where I wrote of the foundations of good order, even if that good order doesn’t rise to the higher level that we moderns would recognize as truly moral. See Human Moral Order: Building Upon General Forms of Order.
The order of swarming sharks precedes the order of the wolf-pack which precedes that of paleolithic human tribes which precedes the political order found in larger tribes and raiding bands of the iron-age Indo-Europeans and other like peoples on horseback which precedes…
The earlier forms of order involve the construction of hierarchical relationships and peer relationships based upon various factors including physical power, charisma, cleverness, and even sheer narcissistic ego on the part of would-be leaders. See Be Obnoxious and Be Our Leader for a brief discussion of that latter factor.
Let me make a broad reference to the writings of Hannah Arendt who was Austrian and Jewish. Professor Arendt was a sometimes controversial (she had substance and courage) philosopher and historian of modern totalitarianism including that of the Nazis. Having interviewed Adolf Eichmann, the logistics genius behind the Holocaust and related horrors after the Israeli prosecutors did their preliminary interrogations, she claimed he was one of the nicest men she’d ever met.
In In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, Robert McNamara (with Brian VanDeMark) wrote in similar terms of himself and the other high-level officials who made the `authoritative’ evaluations of the situation in Vietnam and made the recommendations to the President as to future actions. Those well-dressed and well-credentialed men and women were nice people who were really worried about crossing items off their to-do lists so they could get into their nice cars and drive along nice highways to their nice homes where their… They hadn’t bothered to read reports in front of them which—McNamara verified this in the still-private papers of President Kennedy and President Johnson—gave undeniable evidence that those officials in Washington were forcing the US military to fight a truly criminal war.
The nice Germans of the 1930s and 1940s, the nice Americans since at least the days of the Indian and then African slave-trades and the Chinese opium trade, were living in acceptance of the evil which their countries were doing. In the case of the Americans of the Northeast and the Midwest, they enjoyed for decades the benefits of a tremendous era of booms—punctuated by collapses, but the upward trend was strong over the 1800s—and those booms were financed at least in a major part by that trafficking in human beings and by the trafficking of opium into China against the wishes of the imperial government; we even participated in minor ways in crushing any uprisings by the peoples of East Asia when they tried to push the criminal and exploitive sea-devils (Europeans as well as Americans) out of their countries. In a manner of speaking, we Americans were profiteering sidekicks of the British gangsters in our exploitive adventures in East Asia, especially China. It must also be noted that, whatever the efforts of Americans opposed to the African slave-trade, that trade went on so long as it was protected or at least tolerated by the British and then it ended when the British navy began to hang, upon capture, officers of slave-trading ships and to bring the rest of the crew to Great Britain for trial.
In many ways, Americans have been a country of good individuals, certainly when we responded generously to natural disasters or other problems but even when some of us where off in various regions stealing and killing and engaging in various profitable activities, such as drug-smuggling or human-trafficking. Something very similar was true of those Germans of the 1930s and 1940s. I’m sure most were nice, or at least silently and cowardly well-wishing, to their Jewish neighbors right up to the arrival of the Gestapo trucks.
So, yes, good human beings can come together to form communities which are criminal, even to an extent where they can be, at least sometimes, described as evil.
I’m dealing with various issues of this sort as I continue making some baby-steps towards understanding the reality of human being in its individual and communal forms. I plan on posting the book of this short journey on the Internet—God willing—before the end of 2016. It is important to deal with some issues beyond the scope of that baby-step book that I might prevent some fundamental errors.
My first efforts will cover some very basic definitions of individual and communal human being, touching very lightly upon complex entities in general. The emphasis will be upon providing ways of speaking rationally and with proper piety of `communal being’; I use scare quotes only because I think in terms of human communities and human individuals but also in terms of the universe and all the individual entities which are part of the universe but don’t fully define it or constrain it in the way of much modern thought to be only the sum of stars and gas clouds and so on. (See one of my earlier essays, A Universe is More than it Contains for a discussion of a claim made by a prominent physicist-cosmologist.)
The universe is not just a way of speaking about an assemblage of lesser physical entities and a human community is not just a way of speaking about an assemblage of individual human beings. More than that, the formation of human being—that is, the relationship of individual human beings to communal human beings—has to be understood in dynamic terms. Those dynamic terms are oh-so important but are at least a second-stage of knowing, of responding with mind and heart and hands to the way things are and not to the way we assume abstract entities to be based upon modern thinkers, many of high-quality and fruitful of insight but far too inclined to believe that human communities are nominal entities, just voluntary gatherings of the only true human beings—individuals. In this age, to speak of the universe in such terms, as only a name for an ad-hoc gathering of stars and so on, would invite ridicule from scientists who know well that the universe is a somewhat abstract entity with its own properties apart from the properties of what it contains.
In an analogical sense, the book I’m currently writing is about pre-Galilean kinematics as opposed to Galilean dynamics.
The universe is for real and so are human communities. And so I can see the possibility, however dimly for now, of speaking rationally of human communities which are evil though `made up’ of nearly all good human individuals. And that possibility arises by abstract ideas out of the fields of abstract mathematics which are used to understand assemblages of entities, possibly themselves complex, as being evidence of a single, complex `communal’ entity. I’m extending the ways of thinking developed by Bernhard Riemann and used with great effect by Albert Einstein to describe the universe as an entity on its own. Einstein was himself a philosophical sort of physicist but his theory of General relativity described possible quantitative models but my claim is that this form of mathematical (mostly geometric and topological) reasoning can be abstracted to deal with qualitative forms of being and with forms of being, including human being, which is a complexity of quantitative and qualitative parts and aspects.
I’m not writing about proofs nor about quantitative calculations. I can’t prove the Body of Christ exists, however tentatively in this mortal realm, but I think I can take first steps in providing ways of talking about it in rational terms, that is, terms rational in the context of solid modern knowledge about many parts and aspects of God’s Creation. And I certainly can’t calculate the number of members of the Body of Christ, nor the percentage of living human beings who will rise from the grave to share the life of Jesus Christ and His Father and Their Holy Spirit, but—again—I think I can take first steps in providing ways of talking about it in rational terms.