Both questions also assume that we live in a tit-for-tat Newtonian universe, where every action has an equal and opposite reaction. If you do some thing good, something good should come back to you; if you do something bad, some thing bad will return to you.
If those assumptions are true, the righteous should prosper and the wicked should suffer and be in poverty.
But the psalmist noticed that an awful lot of wicked people had shalom, while he did not. What if, first of all, God has given a high degree of freedom to human beings to shape their own societies and politics and economic systems, including systems where bad people can rig the systems? And second, what if God has not constructed a universe where there is payback for every evil or good deed?
The Hindu idea of karma says that there will be payback in this life or the next for every evil or good deed. Most versions of Islam emphasize that while God is merciful, God metes out punishments and rewards in a predictable fashion. It seems to me that this is considerably less true in the Hebrew scriptures we call the Old Testament, where there is more emphasis on a fluid covenant relationship than on tit-for-tat consequences, and the life of Job stands as a radical critique of a simple-minded view of divine justice.
That idea seems even less true in the New Testament, where the whole story of Jesus, the righteous one who suffered for us, stands in contradiction to the idea that a good life pays off. Christianity, like some strains of Judaism, is willing to live with the idea that life is not fair and righteousness has to be understood as its own reward.
God is good! And the people reply, All the time! God certainly is good, but that does not mean that in the near term—or the middle term—God punishes evil. California is not in a drought because of some sin they committed, and we do not have plenty of rain on Block Island because we are so righteous. The psalmist implies that he always believed God is good, but he almost lost that faith—his feet almost came out from under him—because he saw the lack of fairness in this world.
It bothered him that bad people were blessed with health and wealth, because he thought a just God would make them pay for their sins. His envy was mixed with indignation at the injustice of it. He spends eight verses describing the arrogant wicked. My body is something less than sleek, he implies. You have to wonder if this is really accurate. Has he ever actually watched the Kardashians? Everybody has trouble. He goes on: what they wear, what they really wear, is not the latest fashions; they wear pride and violence, and show them off the way other people show off clothes.
Even if they know the camera is rolling, they will say the most self-aggrandizing things! They get everything they want. They eat so much chocolate that their eyes are about to pop out. Their hearts overflow with ridiculous wishes, and the genie keeps granting them more and more. They scoff at us regular folks and say nasty things about us. Did you see the video this week of the ESPN reporter whose car was towed, so she decided to yell at the lady collecting the fine?
What are you, a college dropout? But these people even boast against God. They are convinced that they have made it on their own. And people believe them! The common folk are so gullible they will believe that the turtle got on the fencepost all by himself.
They find no fault in the proudly selfish. These wicked people who are at ease and getting richer all the time do not think that God knows that they have done anything wrong—even if they have robbed their workers and defrauded customers. How can it be right that their lives are so easy and mine so hard? Why do I even bother to be good? Why not go over to the dark side, if it pays off that way? I could not find an explanation. Until —and this is the turning point of the psalm in verse 17—until I went into the sanctuary of God.
When I was watching the news, it drove me crazy, but when I went to church my perspective changed. Did he just look around at the beautiful temple and remember the beauty of God? Did the words of the psalms being sung remind him of the greatness of God? Martian satellites? Who knows? Another example of much the same thing is Amazon. Do you remember when it just used to be an online bookstore?
Now, the people who work at Amazon and Google are, by and large, pretty decent people. But the folks at the top? Remember when Google threw a small fortune — wait, a big one — at a sexual predator? Google employees protested. Amazon employees write secret whistleblower letters and articles.
The point remains. The people who helm our institutions are less good people than the people they command. And the result, quite naturally, is that the average person is made to feel terrible, worthless, and demoralized for trying to do good things. In our systems and institutions, doing good things is something you are punished for. Hence, we see endless weirdly awestruck headlines about people who actually do good things. But should she have to? You see, when good people are made to feel terrible, worthless, and demoralized for trying to do good things, the result is that…there will be less good things done in a society.
Our systems and institutions actively make it hard for decent people to do beautiful, wise, humane, noble, kind, compassionate, generous things. They punish and disinvest and stifle such things. Instead of freeing people to do more and better of them. Take my partner.
Take my friends Jeff and Sarah. Take yourself, or any number of people you know. Our institutions will in fact formally punish — this will go on your permanent record!! But they reward people doing terrible ones. Hence, here we are. Conformists to this strange iron law of perversity, mostly.
Good luck with that. The entire ladder of hierarchy, from Zuck and Bezos etc on down, will take turns beating and lashing you. That much is true, of course, in government, too. How did the modern GOP emerge? Because while the average Republican might have been a decent person, with mildly different opinions — the guys who rose to the top are monsters and predators to a degree so bizarre the world is dumbstruck.
The GOP is made of indecent and obscene men, who range from merely cowardly and pathetic, to genuinely deranged and evil. But that describes most of our leadership, too, not just in politics, but in business, in thinking, in publishing, and more. How are we to fix all that? I use those three terms of how good people are made to feel for trying to do good thing — demoralized, terrible, and worthless — in precise ways. Demoralized: as if their moral compasses are liabilities, to be disposed of.
Worthless: as if they themselves have no intrinsic value, and therefore, the idea of being a good person itself has never existed. We have to reverse just those three things…. If we want to free people to do good things again.
We have to build institutions that actively encourage, nourish, and nurture people towards the human good. That celebrate their nobility, courage, compassion, generosity, defiance, truth. Which remember them for it. Instead of making people feel demoralized, terrible, and worthless for doing good things, institutions must a give them an intrinsic sense of worth so they are free to do good things b reward them for doing good things, c empower them to do good things.
Empower them: give them more resources, time, freedom. Do they, as human beings, deserve a decent existence as their days play out? Countries such as Norway, with its prisons focusing on humanity , say yes and also happen to have some of the lowest re-offending rates in Europe. Whether we can change people — and therefore limit further unnecessary human suffering in society — by power is an ongoing debate. For others, a sense of justice — and therefore a reduction in suffering — comes from an offender being in prison and losing their freedom.
In removing free will or conscious choice, can we really say that those who commit such grave acts of cruelty are victims of their own faulty wiring? A study suggested that amygdala dysfunction in children as young as three could cause impaired responses to fear that precede criminality in adulthood.
However, implementing such testing in any kind of widespread way would be an ethical minefield. Put a psychopath under a scanner and they may be able to summon an empathetic response to order. When we feel pain we want to make sense of it. We hunt for a cause. The brain wants to find reasons because cognitive dissonance is so uncomfortable. There is no such thing as a human being who has never suffered. The rupturing of these illusions is, perhaps, what we find so unsettling.
This article is more than 3 years old. Eleanor Morgan. Our writers answer some of the commonest queries. Have I got depression? Read more.
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