News Summary

A good thing about Americans is that we don't dwell on the past. A bad thing is that we tend to ignore the past, so we're unconscious of how the past shapes us, and we miss lessons we can learn. Consider a couple of points from the 16th century that are relevant to America in the Time of Bush.

In the theology deriving from John Calvin and his more militant followers, including Separatist colonists in America, there are people who are saved and many more who are not saved. The Elect are saved by the irresistible Grace of God, and that is that, and the rest of us are damned. Now follow that thought to the idea that there are good people and bad people — period — and add the standard Christian idea that good works are the product of true faith: which leads to the idea that good people (with true faith) do good things and bad people do bad things. End of discussion.

Except that that vulgarizes Calvinist teaching, and pushed too far, it's just silly.

In logic puzzles, there are truth-tellers who always tell the truth and liars who always lie. In the real world, there are some pathological liars, and there are some people who consistently tell the truth; the rest of us muddle through, speaking truth as much as we can without getting into, or causing, too much trouble.

In the real world, most of us try to do what's right most of the time, as we see the right. But we slip. The old Calvinists called it "back-sliding." Even the Elect slide back into sin. In the bumper-sticker slogan, the saved "aren't better ... just forgiven" (by God, not necessarily by those they've injured).

The logic-puzzle/vulgar-Calvinist division of people into Evil-Doers and Good-Doers has political implications, and it isn't new.

When Calvin was still a boy, Sir Thomas More finished "Utopia," Book One, which analyzes the problems of Europe in general and England in particular. In Book One, smart English lawyer More has a dense English lawyer brag about the English campaign against thieves: "We're hanging them all over the place,' he said. 'I've seen as many as 20 on a single

gallows. And that's what I find so odd. Considering how few of them get away with it, why are we still plagued with so many robbers?" (Paul Turner translation, 1965).

If there are honest men on the one hand and thieves on the other, and that is that, when the honest folk hang most of thieves, that should solve the problem of theft. Evil acts are done by evil-doers; eliminate the evil-doers and no more evil acts.

Things don't work that way, and didn't work that way in 1516.

In the real world, there are what contemporary liberals would call "root causes" and Sir Thomas — later St. Thomas — would label the deadly sins of greed and pride as practiced by those who control society.

In 1516, Thomas More understood context and indirect causation: how societies set up situations in which people will behave badly. Not bad people, but people. In late medieval England, the greed and pride of the ruling elites forced common people into misery so deep that theft was a logical choice, sometimes the only alternative to starvation or humiliation.

There are some people who are just no good, but not many, and the no-good are a threat to individuals and groups, but not much to society. Far more dangerous are ordinary people put into pathological situations: e.g., where it's a rational economic choice for a 16th-century peasant thrown off his land to rob the rich and use the money for food, or for a ghetto kid nowadays with no better prospects to go into the crack cocaine business. Far more dangerous are usually decent people who've been humiliated and have relatives killed and have few ways to get revenge, except through violence.

When it comes to terrorists, there are people who just hate the U.S. and the West and liberal democracy and do want to destroy us; but they are relatively few: a danger to Americans, but not to America. They become an "existential threat" only when supported by a large number of normal people with grievances.

George Bush and friends need to modernize their argument to at least 1516. We need to get beyond evil-doers doing evil and start discussing the causes of America's problems.

Richard D. Erlich is a professor emeritus in English at Miami University in Oxford, who is currently living in Ventura County, Calif.