If all evil were prevented, much good would be absent from the universe. A lion would cease to live, if there were no slaying of animals; and there would be no patience of martyrs if there were no tyrannical persecution.

Name	St. Thomas Aquinas
Life	1224 - 1274
Country	Italy
Category	Idealism
Wikipedia	>>

It may be true that Thomism, the dogma of the Catholic Church, is one of - if not the - most widely spread philosophical systems of the world. But woe to St. Thomas, had he written these famous lines today. Animal rightists would have told him how morally abhorrent meat-eating lions are. To prove their own absolute love of life, they would have sent him dangerous razor-blade letters. In the media, all good liberals would be horrified by these words. Isn't it evident that Thomas loves tyrants, as these produce martyrs? He must be seriously condemned and vilified! Nobody would have noticed that he, indeed, calls his examples "evil". This is how "profiteers of suffering" behave. And there are many of them! Saint Thomas shows here a surprisingly modern, almost social- Darwinist realism. He sees tyrants as they are: equally natural as lions. He praises patience as a virtue of prime importance. Is he wrong? Socrates in 399 BC showed a wonderful patience with the stupid rulers of his day. Xenophon, somewhat later, wrote an insightful little book with conversations between the tyrant Hieron of Syracuse and his court poet or philosopher. Jesus asked his father to forgive his murderers, even while hanging on the cross. Thomas surely had visited the catacombs, of which Rome is filled, once the refuge for patient martyrs of the faith. Like lions, tyrants have always been around. Even if we now try to extinguish both species,

they have, so far, always been natural parts of life. Patience is what is needed in the face of this reality! "Instant satisfaction" is hardly an ideal. Even if it is in high demand. Thomas knew one more, now widely forgotten, truth. He knew the difference between analytical and normative statements, between what we know and what we like. If we will ever be able to keep down evil a bit, we must first analyze and understand it. To do so, we must be able to talk openly about evil, without being accused of loving it. To take one actual example: equality, especially equality of intelligence. We know that evolution is a process, often violent, of selection among unequally fit variations. In modern society, most truly well-paid jobs require a high level of intelligence. It is, however, considered sinful, almost evil, to warn that thousands of studies show that IQ-differences do exist and that they can be - and are - used for discrimination between individuals both in universities and in big companies. People who take up this issue are exposed to persecution by media inquisition. Some good scholars have even been forced to use police protection against this form of "politically correct" intolerance of analytically truthful statements because they are considered normatively hateful. And this in spite of the fact that if the "evil" of inequality in intelligence had been prevented, no civilized mankind would exist. Nor would more than half of present humanity. If human life is something good, much good would, indeed, be absent from the universe, had we all been equal in intelligence.