I had something of a theological discussion in a whatsapp group with some friends yesterday about the nature (or existence) of God, Good, and Evil. Unmentioned in that conversation, but relevant to it, is the fate of the Sycamore Gap tree in Northumberland, England.
You may remember the fate of that tree – cut down last year in an act of apparent vandalism. If you are Irish, you are probably unaware that two men are currently on trial for having committed the act.
Daniel Graham, 39, and Adam Carruthers, 32, are on trial in Newcastle Crown Court as we speak, facing charges of causing criminal damage without lawful excuse to the tree, and having further caused £1,144stg in damage to Hadrian’s Wall, upon which the tree fell. They deny the charges.
The prosecution alleges – and has provided video evidence in court – that the two men cut down the tree, recorded themselves in the act, took a trophy home to mark the occasion, and then gloated to each other on social media about their achievement, allegedly taking particular pleasure in how upset many members of the public were. The prosecution further alleges that the two men travelled a long distance from their home in Cumbria for the specific purpose of cutting down the tree, which was a beloved landmark.
The prosecution’s case, in other words, is that these two men did something profoundly shocking and upsetting to most decent people…. And that they did it all for the cheap thrill of watching decent people be upset by what they had done.
What strikes me about this is the parallel with other crimes: The cutting down of a tree may not be on the same moral level as – for example – Axel Rudacubana entering a Southport dance class to murder young children, but it strikes me that the inherent instinct behind both crimes is the same. In both cases, causing hurt and pain to people the criminal doesn’t know is the point. It is an anti-social crime. An attack on society itself.
Societies across time and space have always wrestled with the question of what to do with such people, because the particular motive for their crimes is so hard to reconcile with the idea of society itself. A common criminal who robs an old lady’s purse might be motivated by greed or desperation, or a man who murders his wife or her lover might be motivated by jealousy. These are not attacks on society itself, profoundly shocking though such crimes may be. It is at least arguable that absent a particular set of personal circumstances – poverty, or deep relationship unhappiness – the crimes would not have been committed.
The cutting down of the tree, however, is of a different order: The message there is directed at society as a whole and it is very clear: The perpetrator does not like you and wishes for you to be hurt, to whatever degree, by their actions.
Such crimes, to my mind, must and should be treated differently to crimes of circumstance. That is because they are moral crimes. They are crimes that when committed reveal the person who commits them to have a deep aversion to the society in which they live, and the people amongst whom they abide. They are an attack on all of us as a collective, not one or two of us as individuals.
Which brings me back to the opening of this article, and the role of God and good and evil in societies.
The late Pope Benedict XVI’s most famous contribution to the lexicon of modern discourse was the idea of a “dictatorship of relativism” – that is to say that we in the west have largely abandoned the idea of absolute good and absolute evil, and instead embraced the idea that things are only relatively bad, or relatively good compared to other things. That we have a tendency to judge everything in comparison to something else: For example, that cutting down a beloved tree to upset others is relatively less bad than murdering a bunch of children to make a political point. And of course, there’s logic to this: The most heinous crimes deserve the most severe punishments. It would devalue the lives of the Southport Children to say that they are the equivalent of a tree.
Yet, at the same time, we shy away from absolutes of good and evil. There are too few of us willing to state plainly that something as simple as cutting down a beloved tree to take pleasure in the upset of others is an objectively evil act, and that the people who did it are objectively evil-doers.
We have talked a lot in the west in recent years about “aggravating factors” for criminal acts. For example, “hate crime” legislation posits that a crime committed against a minority person – so long as that crime is motivated by bigotry on grounds of race, sex, religion, or orientation – is worse than a similar crime committed against a person of a non-minority background and should be punished more harshly.
If this is the precedent that has been democratically agreed, then I think there is another category of hate that should be added: Hate for society itself and hatred of public morality. Those who have sought to inflict pain or suffering on society at large for anti-social reasons should receive an anti-social penalty on top of their sentence. An extra five years in prison wouldn’t be a bad start.
In general, though, we should move back towards the idea of absolute good and absolute evil. Because both exist. That’s the whole reason we have a system of public morals to begin with.