The Slavery of Death

by Richard Beck

Wright goes on to note how these forces are still recognizably at work in the world today, still exerting an influence on human moral affairs, despite our quibbles about the language: You might have thought the history of the twentieth century would provide plenty of examples of this [i.e., a dark force taking over people, movements and countries], but many still choose to resist the conclusion—despite the increasing use in public life of the language of “force” (economic “forces,” political “forces,” peer “pressure,” and so on).14 Still, is calling these forces “demonic” or “satanic” a bit too florid and unnecessary? Wright thinks not, and argues that the language of the demonic can do important moral work for us: Without the perspective that sees evil as a dark force that stands behind human reality, the issue of “good” and “bad” in our world is easy to decipher. It is fatally easy, and I mean fatally easy, to typecast “people like us” as basically good and “people like them” as basically evil. This is a danger we in our day should be aware of, after the disastrous attempts by some Western leaders to speak about an “axis of evil” and then go to war to obliterate it. We turn ourselves into angels and “the