In our culture, disasters such as Katrina and 9/11 are often the occasion on which we confront the problem of evil publicly together, though of course as individuals we bump into it every day, and theologians have broken their heads over it 24/7 for thousands of years.
After the desperate scramble for survival, for shelter, water, food, after searching for the living and then searching for the dead, it is time to bury the dead and to grieve, and that is always a moment that, to borrow Samuel Johnson's phrase, concentrates the mind wonderfully. Christians and, to a lesser extent, Jews, have approached the problem of evil with monotheistic blinders and fallen into the trap of the four-fold paradigm: God is good (or merciful), God is all-knowing, God is all-powerful, and there is evil. How could God do this to us? (Woody Allen, a much under-rated theologian, came up with the best answer to these questions, I think: God is not evil, he’s just an underachiever.)
But Hinduism, the religion I know best, is not hobbled by monotheism, and therefore most Hindus do not assume that their god is merciful, or all-knowing, or all-powerful, though they are well aware of the existence of evil, which they formulate in a more basic and existential, rather than monotheistic, way. The question then becomes, not, How could God do this to us? but How can this happen to us? Why us?
Hindus have, moreover, tackled the problem in mythology as well as philosophy. Philosophy doesn't do the trick for most people; the myths pick up the pieces where philosophy throws up its hands. Hindu mythology can startle us into new and creative ways of rethinking our own inevitable entanglement in this insoluble problem.
When Hindus round up the usual suspects, there are several possible culprits, and Hinduism has embraced them all at one time or another, in one sect or another: god, the devil, fate, and it’s your own damn fault. Let’s consider them one by one.
As for god, many of the Hindu gods create evil out of their own inadequacy; indeed, there are myths in which the god, stricken with the pollution that results from adultery or murder, is rescued by his human worshippers, who willingly take the sin upon themselves forever after in order to free the god to return to the divine work that is essential for human thriving. On the other hand, there are also myths in which unredeemed sinners (murderers, blasphemers, what have you) accidentally commit an act of worship (overhearing a sacred text being recited, or lighting a lamp only in order to rob a temple, or blasphemously calling out the name of god when they trip and fall down), and are saved at their death by this one unconsciously pious act. And then there is the argument of plenitude: the gods at the time of creation realize that, in order for the universe to be perfect, it must have everything in it, and that must include the deaths of children, the suffering of the innocent, and all the rest.
Devils, or demons, or the various things that go bump in the night, create deal of trouble for us in minor ways, though they are generally not directly blamed for the creation of evil in the first place. Indirectly, however, they are responsible for the origin of some forms of evil when the gods, in order to fight them, corrupt them with heretical doctrines that then filter down to humans and make another sort of trouble.
In addition to these explanations, Hindus in the face of disaster often invoke fate, what Hindi-speakers call honi, persistent, inexplicable bad luck, against which even the gods are powerless.
And finally, there is the “it’s your own damn fault” argument, which Hindus call karma, the belief that apparently undeserved misfortune is actually well-merited punishment for sins committed in forgotten past lives. (This can also take the form of the theological guilt trip: “God must be punishing me for something bad that I did.”) The sociologist Max Weber, in his survey of various religious approaches to evil, thought that karma was not only a satisfactory answer but the best of all available answers.
The fact that Hindus have devised so many other answers proves Weber wrong, I think. But ultimately, of course, there is no satisfying answer. The best that we can hope for is the reassurance of knowing that others, too, have dived under the wave of disaster and brought back from the abyss the flotsam and jetsam of the wisdom of their suffering, and that some of these inadequate but imaginative responses may comfort us, too.
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