The Nature, or lack of same, of Evil

[fabrisse]

This is going to be a long and convoluted post. I'm having a hard time getting all my mental ducks in a row, so if you find that I've been illogical or self-contradictory, please challenge me. This is a way of thinking out loud. However, siderea's question in my last entry about whether I believe anyone is evil has had me thinking.

Behind the LJ cut will be several Pratchett quotations (and potential spoilers for the books Maskerade and Men at Arms), discussions of child rearing by a middle-aged woman who doesn't have any, and a labored potato analogy.


I wish I could remember where I first read the idea that good and evil are monotheistic constructs. Unfortunately, I can't, so all I can say is that the idea is far from original to me.

Now that I have that out of the way, Evil troubles me. It should, of course. Evil is this black horrible cloud that taints everything touches. And that's what troubles me. I'm seeing evil used widely and freely as a way of abrogating responsibility.

Evil is extrinsic. There may be evil exemplars from Caligula to Vlad the Impaler to Hitler, but we look at them as if they are far removed from humanity.

This is where the potato analogy comes in. One of the first things I discovered when my family moved to Belgium in the late 1970s is that there's a reason that the Europeans don't really do baked potatoes. There's something in the soil that means that most types of potatoes will end up with part of the crop being blighted.

Sometimes we'd buy a kilo of potatoes and less that a quarter of it would be edible. There might be a small blemish on the outside, but often they were pretty, well-shaped potatoes that seemed fine until they were prepared for the table. Sometimes it would be just under the peel. Usually you could cut away a chunk and eat the rest.

Occasionally though, I'd peel the entire potato. It would look perfect until I cut it. The heart would be this foul smelling greyish-black dry mass. There was nothing usable. It was truly rotten to the core.

But, while potatoes may be prone to blight and the blight can transform the potato from edible to inedible, it's a separate thing. The blight isn't inherent in the potato.

I think that's how evil is portrayed. Some people catch this thing and it transforms them into something that has a foul-smelling greyish-black dry mass at it's core.

I can't believe in that any more. There are many reasons that I reject it. The most important reason is that evil doesn't permit balance.

Pagans and philosophers (and apparently one semi-coherent Fabrisse) lean toward the idea of balance. There's light and dark, day and night, positive and negative magnetic poles, left and right, good and bad, right and wrong.

Bad is good's natural opposite. Bad implies choice. Bad is human. Evil is too big for good to be opposite.

This brings me to the Pratchett quotes:
The trouble is, you see, that if you do know Right from Wrong you can't choose Wrong. You just can't do it and live. Maskerade

It was later said that he came under bad influences at this stage.[...] He just came under the influence of himself.

That's where people get it wrong. Individuals aren't naturally paid up members of the human race [...]. They need to be bounced around by the Brownian motion of society, which is a mechanism by which human beings constantly remind one another that they are...well...human beings. Men at Arms

For me, Good or, if you prefer, Right consists of standing up for civilisation and society. It means acknowledging that there are choices to be made. It means accepting responsibility when I make the wrong choice (whether through wilfulness or ignorance). It means that the idea of evil is a cop-out.

I have more to think about and, eventually, more to say. Most of it having to do with poverty and teaching children that civilisation is a worthy goal.

A week from today, I will step into a voting booth and pull the trigger, er, lever. At this moment the Presidential Race is neck and neck. Neither candidate is evil. All I ask is that, if you are a US citizen, you too walk into a voting booth next Tuesday. Think about good and bad, right and wrong. Ask yourself what decisions these men have made and whether you agree with them. Ask yourself what mistakes these men have made and decide whether they've taken responsibility for them. Make your choice. Pull the lever.

Comments

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

Perhaps part of your trouble is that "evil", as with most useful English words, has a multiplicity of meanings. Above, you seem to be equating it, variously, with "imbalance", "ignorance", "selfishness", "sociopathy", and some others that I'm having trouble articulating myself. None of these definitions is inherently *wrong*, but if you try to use them all at once, confusion seems more likely than enlightenment.

the idea of evil is a cop-out

Expand, please? I don't see how this thought follows from what comes before. [Personally, I think 'evil' is *many* ideas, as I've said. Some of them are quite useful; others pernicious...]

[fabrisse.livejournal.com]

If evil is extrinsic, then it's a cop-out.

Some of it is "The devil made me do it" thinking, but the point that I apparently didn't make is that people are either good or bad. The choice at any given moment is between good and bad.

Hitler was human. He made choices for bad (as opposed to bad choices). He chose the wrong rather than the right, if you will.

I'm not equating it with sociopathy. Sociopathy is a mental defect that may come from many different sources. It's not ignorance either.

I think we're making a mistake even using the word evil.

It allows people to think that we're not capable of doing it. We can see ourselves making a bad choice or even choosing to do wrong -- like the kids who go out and get drunk because they think it's fun. We tend not to see ourselves choosing evil.

Part of this, is my seeing the little choices that are made every day and their influence.

A friend gave me seasons 1 and 2 of Starsky and Hutch for my birthday. The thing that amazes me is how littered the streets are. Yes, there was a successful ad campaign, but the fact that litter is far less pervasive today is because we all make small individual choices every day to put our cans and pieces of paper in provided receptacles instead of just dropping them where we stand.

That's the small choice for good.

Any clearer?

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

If evil is extrinsic, then it's a cop-out.

That is clear. Moreover, I even agree!

but the point that I apparently didn't make is that people are either good or bad

I strongly suspect that you left out a highly-important "not" from that phrase.

...the word evil. It allows people to think that we're not capable of doing it.

Agreed. That was one of the "pernicious" uses that I was thinking of. Understanding one's own capacity for evil is, I think, a necessary tool in the ongoing quest to Be Good.

[siderea]

It seems, if I am reading this right, your objection is to the use of the word "evil" because the use of the word "evil" causes people to externalize the locus of morality/agency.

That seems to be saying, "I wouldn't use the term 'evil' to apply to someone even if it were true because it would be counter-productive to use the word."

Let me put this another way. You seem to be working from a position which takes one definition of evil as the given, and then ask "Does this make sense." An alternative approach is to say, "there is this vague idea 'evil' floating around out there; to what extent does it or does it not map to reality? To what extent is it useful?"

So, for instance, from your perspective, you can assert things like "evil is extrinsic" as a given. To my mind, that's a question: "If there is such a thing as evil, what is its nature? Is it intrinsic or extrinsic?"

You're sort of approaching the concept of evil, I think, from the perspective of "'evil' means what people mean it to mean." Descriptivist lingustic. That's certainly a useful way to discuss usage. But in this secular -- and some would say morally debased -- age, does it make sense to go to the masses to get a definition of a term of morality? That's like asking LJers what 'meme' means: on LJ, it's come to mean 'virtual parlor game', but arguing that on that basis memetics, the technical field, is nonsense is, itself, nonsense.

There's this other question, however, which seems more interesting to me: Is there, in this ancient concept of 'evil' some there, there. Does it refer to something?

None of this is disagreeing with your essay above, really; just kicking the ideas around and talking about perspectives. I don't have a lot of answers on this topic, but I have boatloads of questions.