Andrew Delbanco
I agree most with Andrew Delbanco’s point of view on evil. He claims that “But at the same time to pretend that an event like that which took place on Sept. 11 can be explained with the ordinary language of politics or psychology seems to me quite inadequate to what happened. We really did experience evil on Sept. 11.” It can be understood that other groups or countries have strong opinions of our Western lifestyle. It’s hard to believe that a group could take hundreds of lives because of its strong opinions, however, and so we must blame something else, like evil.
Another point that Delbanco made was that prior to 9/11, America had lost its sense of evil, and that left us “in a position of considerable vulnerability both to forces outside ourselves and to ourselves”. Because we are a world power, we thought that nothing and no one could conquer us, so we “lost touch with the reality of evil”. Because of this, America hasn’t been able to realize that other nations aren’t necessarily as accepting of our culture as we are. Since we lost a sense of evil, we also lost the ability to criticize ourselves, or see the parts of our lifestyle that need improvement. If there’s anything our country should have learned since 9/11, it’s to be more realistic and realize that we’re not a perfect nation, and we need to ask ourselves questions about the consequences of our actions.
