Our present rulers don't want the Geneva Conventions ban on torture to hold them back. Other Americans are struggling to return our country to a willingness to be ruled by law, and to sheer human decency.

Our present government has no interest in restraining greed to avoid potentially catastrophic climate change and other degradations of the biosphere. Others in this country are devoting our energies to moving America toward a way of life in harmony with earth's living systems.

The forces now dominating America are moving relentlessly to shift power from the weak and vulnerable to those already mighty, and to transfer wealth from those who have less to those already rich beyond any rational need for more. Many of us are striving to create a country where principles of justice hold sway.

Such struggles have characterized the whole sweep of civilized history. On the one side are forces that care for life and work to create and maintain life-serving structures. On the other side are forces that tear such structures apart.

To understand the interplay among such forces, the religious tradition of our civilization has employed the idea of  "the struggle between good and evil."

But that's a concept rejected by many of my sophisticated -- and, for the most part, liberal-minded -- friends.

For one thing, some do not regard the moral dimension as being truly fundamental to the nature of reality. They've been persuaded by that philosophic current that sees an unbridgeable gap between is and ought; they believe that moral judgments are just subjective preferences.

But it is particularly the concept of evil that they reject. Too primitive a notion, they say, manifesting black-and-white thinking. Too dangerous a notion, fostering demonization and self-righteous self-delusion.

By becoming more tolerant and more aware of psychological complexities, they see themselves as having advanced beyond the terms of our ancient spiritual traditions.

But I've come lately to believe that the concept of evil captures a vital human reality. So vital that its disappearance from the cognitive maps of many modern sophisticated people is a dangerous development -- dangerous because when people do not recognize the nature of the forces they are up against, they will be less able to deal with them effectively.

How the concept of "evil" became more real for me

Much of my adult life has been spent studying the play of destructive forces in the human system. (The word "evil" even occurs in the subtitle of one of my books.) But it was not until recently that my experience of these destructive forces plumbed me so deeply that the notion of "evil" became a palpable reality.

Part of what opened that door, I believe, was my having had, in the spring of 2004, a spiritual breakthrough regarding the very opposite of evil. This experience gave me a vision of a Wholeness and a deeper sense of reverence for the good, the true, and the beautiful. This experience seems, in retrospect, to have sensitized me to those forces that work to destroy such wonderful forms of good order.

Another part of what opened the door, it seems, was that for the first time it was from inside their domain that I was examining such evil forces. In other words, it is one thing to study the pathologies of Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia from the safe remove in space and time of my own comparatively humane America. But it is quite another thing to experience dark forces coming to rule the world around me.

Political underpinnings of a spiritual realization

Although my thrust here goes beyond the level of politics, the best way to bring that realization to life here is to report on those perceptions of our contemporary political drama that brought the concept of evil to life for me.

Something important is now visible in our politics, but the heart of it is not at the political level -- not, that is, at that level where liberals and conservatives divide. What's alarming about the political forces that have taken over is not the conservative nature of their stated political positions, nor the traditional nature of their stated moral values. America would do fine, I believe, with leaders who were in reality the moral and political conservatives these people claim to be.

The problem with the forces now ruling America is, rather, at that deeper, moral and spiritual level -- the level from which spring values like fairness and honesty and compassion that are shared by decent Americans of all political stripes.

It is at this level, as I see it, that these ruling forces have been unusually adept at obscuring their true nature: under the sheep's clothing of a false righteousness, these forces are giving free rein to the wolf of their unbridled lust for self-aggrandizement.

Indeed, it was my witnessing the success of that deception in seducing many basically good people that led me to confront the nature of evil more deeply than I ever have before.

The face of evil hidden in plain view

The dark truth of America's current peril is not hidden away, awaiting revelations from secret tapes. It's right there in front of our faces, playing out chapter-by-chapter on the news on prime time TV.

Anne Coulter and Sean Hannity

It's there in the way these forces have injected what I call a "culture of falsehood" into the American body politic. With their almost habitual disregard of truthfulness in their own utterances, their contempt for science and for objective analysis of all sorts, their insistence on forcing reality to conform to their beliefs rather than vice versa --America's current rulers are degrading that heritage of honest deliberation on which American democracy rests.

It's visible in how unrestrained by any notion of justice or the common good these forces have been in their insatiable pursuit of wealth and power for themselves and their cronies.

It's visible in the unscrupulous way they pursue political advantage -- for example in their consistent practice of character assassination against any who might meaningfully challenge them.

And it is visible, too, in their consistent fostering of division -- both among groups within America and between America and the world. By systematically focusing on those issues that divide Americans, and never on those values that we share, these ruling forces have made the American people more polarized than the pollsters have ever seen before. And, by their way of wielding American power on the world stage, they have made this country the object of more hatred and distrust from the peoples of the world  -- even among our traditional friends -- than ever before.

And it's there perhaps above all in their consistent dismantling of the traditional structures of good order -- in their consistent degradation of the structures of international order, of environmental regulation, of Constitutional restraint on political power -- all those structures that might otherwise restrain their freedom of action.

If, as I believe, goodness is to be understood in terms of wholeness -- the arrangement of the parts of a system in a harmonious, well-ordered and life-serving way -- then surely evil, as the opposite of goodness, will involve the kind of destruction of harmony and good order manifested by such developments as those I've just described.

But it's not only the destructiveness of these ascendant forces that led me to my new sense that evil was an important concept. There is also something in the dynamics of their rise to power, as I'll soon relate, that made the ancient notion of the battle of good and evil seem valid and important.

The liberal discomfort with the idea of evil

When I began to speak out about my sense that dark forces were consolidating their grip on our country, I did not feel a need to use the e-word. It seemed adequate to use less spiritually loaded terms like ruthless and amoral and dishonest and bullying.

But as I continued to explore the dark spaces that I'd seen, those words soon seemed insufficient. There was another element that these words did not capture, and soon I was speaking to liberal audiences about the "evil forces" at work.

Although the people in these audiences opposed many of the same trends and practices that alarmed me, many were not comfortable with my using that ancient and freighted term "evil" to describe them. I came to understand that underlying this discomfort was a worldview. And I�ve come to believe that this worldview -- widespread in liberal America -- is part of what has made it possible for such dark forces to gain power.

For this reason, I have been glad to confront the controversy raised by my using this deep and spiritual concept.

Objections to the concept of evil

One objection I've heard from liberals is that it can't be right to see our current ruling group as agents of evil forces because they really believe that what they're doing is right. But it is a complete non sequitur that if people believe in their rightness that they can't be the instruments of evil.

As if most of the world's evil weren't done by people who'd persuaded themselves they were doing right -- from the torturers of the Inquisitions, to the Nazi mass murderers, to the men who flew the planes into the World Trade Center.

As if the psychologists hadn't shown us that, if you understand people only in terms of the motives they acknowledge in themselves, you'll hardly understand them at all.

Indeed, if part of the essence of evil is a pattern of brokenness, one would expect precisely that kind of psychic brokenness -- that profound disconnect in the realm of self-knowledge -- in which people can persuade themselves that they are doing God's work when in fact they are serving their own darkest impulses.

A related objection, and perhaps the most frequent one, is that one should never label others evildoers because, historically, so much human destructiveness has accompanied such accusations.

Admittedly, through the millennia, great peril has surrounded people's wielding of the ideas of good and evil. But the same has been true for all ideas about which people feel passionately -- God, truth, love of country. Any beliefs that come from the core of people can lead to destructive or constructive consequences depending on how whole and clear, or how broken and twisted, are the souls or psyches of those who hold them.

So while there are reasons for great caution when operating from the deepest and most passionately felt beliefs, it hardly follows that we should reject these beliefs or ignore them when we act in the world. In particular, from the fact that the idea of evil has often been used in distorted and destructive ways, it does not follow that it's never important and right to label as evil the forces one sees at work.