Follow-up

[fabrisse]

This post is my questions playing themselves out. The answers are surprising me a bit. And clarifying them to siderea and alexx_kay (and whoever else may choose to play later) is opening up whole new avenues.

All of this came from siderea saying that I don't believe that anyone is evil in my post on Nitze.

In response to my last post, Siderea said: 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."

I think I'm coming to the conclusion that evil doesn't exist. Please understand, I think that there are some moral absolutes. Violating them is wrong; upholding them is right.

My problem is that I see too many people using evil to describe what's happening in the world or to describe those making the decisions that allow/cause these things to happen. What I see are officials making wrong choices based on bad information.

Are the results evil? Possibly. Is evil just a preponderance of bad decisions? Maybe.

But something inside me keeps coming back to balance.

When I make a decision, I often go by what feels right or wrong. And let me be clear, I'm aligning myself with Granny Weatherwax on this: Once you know Right and Wrong so that it goes clean to the bone, you can't knowingly choose the Wrong.

St. Augustine came up with the idea of original sin -- something intrinsic to humans that comes from Adam and Eve biting the apple. I reject that with everything that's in me and have from the first time I heard of the concept in religion class at my Catholic school.

At the same time, I was a Presbyterian being brought up to believe in predestination. That there is nothing that I can do that God doesn't already know is also something that I reject with every fiber of my being. Humans have choice. Oddly enough, this doctrine is also one that was originally proposed by St. Augustine.

So these are my tenets: Humans have choice, and they aren't born with any kind of psychic soul-sludge that they inherit from their parents.

From this, comes the question: is there anything that is evil?

I have stood in places that chilled my blood. I have felt a presence of something that made me want to vomit in a spot where too much horror had occurred.

The pictures from Abu Ghraib are appalling. But I don't think that the American soldiers that we see in those photographs are evil. That would be too easy. They are people who have done wrong. What's more the wrong that they've done is likely to perpetuate itself.

Some of it comes from the old saw "Don't judge a person until you've walked a mile in her shoes." I've always been able to walk in other people's shoes.

People choose the military as a way out of a dead-end place. The military will give them choices after they've served their hitch. The choices include college or training and preferential treatment in the job market.

I understand peer pressure. There have been times in my life when I've wanted nothing more than to fit in. Some of the horror that I feel at those pictures is recognition.

Terrible as they are, I get how those pictures came to be. I can use my mind to walk in those shoes, and I hate what I see of myself.

However, someone who was under the same pressure to conform chose to blow the whistle on Abu Ghraib. And, unlike the Department of Defense, the military chose to investigate it and prosecute those involved. The person who said, "No, I won't do this," had a sense of right and wrong and could not choose the wrong.

What balances evil? Good balances bad. Right balances wrong. Does virtue balance evil?

All I know, is that when I went to a school that had hazing, I said "No, I won't participate." It wasn't strong hazing -- no one's life or limb was ever in danger -- but I just couldn't and wouldn't be part of it.

That sounds like I'm tooting my own horn of virtue. I'm not. I've done bad things, and that's not counting the sins I've racked up by Biblical standards.

Is regret, expiation or atonement, and a renewed resolve not to fall into the trap again enough to keep a person on the right path?

So many questions. I know, have always known, that the death penalty is wrong. Neither candidate in next week's Presidential election is specifically anti-death penalty. Bush is for it, and Kerry is willing to bow to the will of the individual states. Does this mean that I can't or shouldn't vote?

What I keep coming back to is that the way I hear the word "evil" used is as an external and inhuman thing. The people who are referred to as evil -- Stalin, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Hitler -- saw themselves as men apart, and we seem to return the favor by seeing them as outside our humanity.

We do the same with saints.

I think it's wrong in both instances.

Comments

[siderea]

I beg your pardon. I said nothing of the sort. I asked you if you ever think someone evil.

The more I read what you write, the more convinced I am you actually do use the concept of "evil", but don't like to call that spade, a spade. You keep bringing up this idea that the use of the term "evil" is undesirable on a practical plane because it externalizes.... evil. In other words you are granting the idea of evil in your protests against using the word for it.

I also find it weird that you keep bringing up "balance", but you want to have "good" without having "evil". "Bad" is OK, for some reason, but "evil" is right out.

I am also perplext by the application of the "walk a mile in their moccasins" precept. It's advice against judging without knowing context, not against judging at all. Put bluntly, according to it, after you've walked a mile in someone's moccasins, it's OK to judge them.

Frankly, seeing how I could have committed an atrocity had I been in someone else's shoes does not make me think that therefore that atrocity was not an atrocity, and does not make me think that person shouldn't be considered evil for committing it -- rather it makes me more keenly aware of my own capacity to do and be evil, against which it is my moral duty to resist.

Let me give you a very alternate view on the use of the term "evil". After WWII, quite a number of psychologists and anthropologists unabashedly applied themselves to the question of "evil", as exemplifed by the conduct of the German people as a whole to their Jewish members, and as exemplified by more specific atrocities. Stanley Milgram, of the famed "electroshock" experiments which he discusses in Obedience to Authority is one example. Alice Miller, author of For Your Own Good was another. Much was learned from that work, about evil and how it is that people commit evil acts.

But much of that work has essentially fallen from modern consciousness because "evil" is seen as an old-fashioned notion, not useful to enlightened modern people like us.

[BTW, the book The Master and Margharita is a black comedy about this topic; in it, the Devil and associates take on godless Moscow under Communist rule, a society of easy pickings because it no longer believes in "evil".]

If the concept or word "evil" has been debased, is that a reason to reject it -- or to restore it?

evil or Evil

[cristovau.livejournal.com]

One of the major distinctions is that many people doing wrong things, hideous crimes, feel righteous in enacting them. The soldiers in Abu Ghraib feel that they are scorging terrorism. They think that they are doing good.

I suspect that people brought up in traditional Christian good-evil dichotomies expect that the forces of evil know and embrace bad deeds. In reality most people do evil because they have become confused, misguided and zealous.

In reevaluation co-counciling one of the hardest tenants to grasp was that all people are inherently good, simply under the influence of harmful social/cultural patterns. We are quick to judge and define an action as wrong and condemn the person for it. One of the problems is that being judgemental and compartmentalising people furthers confusion and misguidedness. Especially with a loaded term like "evil" it's a short path down the road to zealous righteousness.

If the concept or word "evil" has been debased, is that a reason to reject it -- or to restore it?

I would say reinvent it. Evil carries lots of loaded connotations and historically has been tied to Christian divine justice and used as an excuse to justify atrocity. The concept of evil is valuable and useful to study, but in specific terms like atrocity or antisocial behaviour or severe cultural prejudices.

It isn't so much that evil as a term has been debased, it is simply that your concept of evil, which is clinical and technical, doesn't match christian society's emotinally loaded preconception. If someone says that they believe someone else is evil, I immediately think they are playing god or Toquemada, not doing important psychological study.

[fabrisse.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry that I misinterpreted and misunderstood the question. We've touched on aspects of this in our face to face discussion, and I thought from context (I wasn't condemning the person I see as most responsible for the Cold War as evil) that you were implying something about my nature that you weren't. I'm deeply sorry.

Can a debased currency be restored or must it be reinvented from scratch?

My worry, and it stems from the usages in this election of the word evil, isn't that we've debased a worthwhile notion it's that we've valued it so highly that it's no longer human.

Part of me is trying to say that it's the little decisions every day that make us good or bad people.

Evil can be dismissed because too many people don't see it in the small decisions. The people who complain about T service, but cheat the T out of their fare or partial fare are a minor case in point. It's a small thing, but it underscores an innate dishonesty. And is the person who does it more, less, or equally bad as the T worker who won't do anything about it?

I think that we're valuing evil so highly that we have nothing to fight it. What's the point? It's too big and inexorable.

I keep coming back to the word pairs. What's evil's opposite?

And if everything boils down to cumulative decisions -- whether lots of people make one small decision like the litter analogy I used in my reply to Alexx or a person's lifetime choices making them mostly good or bad -- then what do the "lesser of two evils" decisions that we have to make mean?

My most important hot button issue is usually capital punishment (right now, it's the whole Iraq thing -- and I'm using the vague term because I mean more than the current war). Should I say that neither candidate supports or even pretends to understand my view of that issue so I refuse to vote for either? Or should I make a lesser of two evils decision?

I've gone for the latter in the past. Do I think Americans who vote for Bush are either stupid or evil (and I've heard that view put forth at a party in late August)? No. I think they're scared, and I understand that they fear even if I don't grasp the specifics of what they fear.

The right thing to do is to help them overcome that fear. Is fear the definition of evil?

What's the opposite of evil? I know that there are people who've lived so strongly by their beliefs that they've been named Saints by some church or popular acclamation. Most of them have feet of clay, but does that make their decisions and actions any less laudable?

These posts and questions have been cries in the dark for me. I DON'T KNOW. All I see is that I can make a lot of little choices every day.

At what point do I stop and say "this is evil"? I never have. But I have stood up and said "this is wrong". Right and wrong are comprehensible and human.

My moral absolute is that it's wrong to kill another human being. I'm a pacifist. I'm against capital punishment. Am I wrong to be pro-choice?

I believe in following the rules, but I flout authority when I think the authority is wrong.

Since you brought WWII into it, let me ask -- what about the Germans who saw what was happening to their country and left Germany? The ones who weren't likely to be part of "The Final Solution" but chose to leave before the War, what's their share in the blame? Or do they have one?

I knew one man who left Germany pre-Hitler. He fought in the US Army Air Force against Germany.

I guess I'm asking the oldest of all questions, "What then, must I do?" And in trying to come to terms without a belief in God, I'm struggling to find an answer that I can live by -- or die by if necessary.

[mecurtin.livejournal.com]

I don't use the word "evil" for persons or things, but I do use it for actions and attitudes. What makes a human being a moral agent is the capacity to do good things and evil things, and I believe *all* human beings have that capacity. To me, calling a person "evil" implies that you don't think they have the capacity for good -- which is not treating them as a full human being, which is part of my definition of "evil".

So I believe that calling certain people evil is itself an example of evil. As you say, What I keep coming back to is that the way I hear the word "evil" used is as an external and inhuman thing -- and that means that using "evil" in that way is itself evil, because treating a human being as outside our humanity is evil.

[fabrisse.livejournal.com]

Yes, I think that's a huge part of it. Actions and attitudes, but not people themselves.

It's part of the death penalty issue for me, for instance. If you're a true Christian -- and I can only use that example because it was how I was reared -- then surely you want the person who did the crime to live out the rest of his natural life. How else can he or she come to remorse and redemption?

Thank you for putting it so succinctly. I've just been blithering over several pages what you summed up in a couple of paragraphs.

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

I had a follow-up thought on this, but it was long enough (and separate enough) that I ended up posting it in my own LJ. Thought I ought to leave a pointer to it here, in case you wanted to check it out.