In keeping silent about evil, in burying it so deep within us that no sign of it appears on the surface, we are implanting it, and it will rise up a thousand fold in the future. When we neither punish nor reproach evildoers, we are not simply protecting their trivial old age, we are thereby ripping the foundations of justice from beneath new generations.
―Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
As C.S. Lewis put it, “We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”
Marvin Olasky wisely adds, "Similarly, when the poor are left with neither incentive nor penalty, we are surprised to find them immobile. When many children grow up without knowing a father either on earth or in heaven, we are surprised to find them wilding in the social wilderness. Who pushes for change once the wilderness is spreading? If the goal is to provide material wealth through welfare or other entitlements like single-payer health care, neither government nor the recipient is likely to demand change. Universalizing depersonalizes are popular among the poor who do not want anyone to challenge them. Who will fight such an arrangement? Only those who live by a different ethic and are unwilling to see it die."
Today's variance becomes tomorrow's norm. What is "evil" takes on different meaning. Trying to breathe air may have been bad for fish and neutral for amphibians, but it is positively good for us.
How true, and how privileged we are to be in a time when we can still ACT against the creeping evil.
Solzhenitsyn is a good man to take warnings from.