Thursday morning musings on Evil
Although I use the word frequently for dramatic emphasis, I don't actually believe in evil. Whenever I say this, though, people misunderstand. They think I'm expressing a blindly optimistic, sunny view of the universe. But in reality, it is exactly the opposite.
Evil makes it all too easy to tell stories, highly polarized stories, in which there are heroes and villains, dark and light forces, and there is at least the potential for ultimate justice to be served, even if circumstances don't allow for it to happen.
Evil is a great comfort to us; with evil we can write off all that is too disturbing for us to make sense of; we can think of it as from an outside source, a possession, rather than simply a part of the messy spectrum that is nature, or human nature. Evil implies an otherness, a sort of vacuum, or a force or path which is isolated from the rest of life, or from the human spirit as it's meant to be.
The drama and severity and objectivity of the word renders it almost out of our hands.
In a back door way, it's as comforting as God and Heaven.
I can't buy into the consolation of evil. I can contemplate the most disturbing, wretched behaviors: one spouse abusing another over a lifetime, baby chicks being ground up while they're still alive in standard factory farm practice, humans stripping the earth bald, altering the climate, causing a mass extinction, and believing they're doing nothing wrong, Europeans genociding Indians, "witches" being burned at the stake, minks and foxes being anally electrocuted to death for their fur, children working long hours in factories, women being stoned to death for having sex before marriage, marshes and forestland being bulldozed to make way for yet more human mass, people turning their backs on their loved ones because it's easier than dealing with their own hearts and emotions...
In the abstract, all of these actions may sound evil or wrong to us. And yet, in their time period and context, each one has been or is being condoned. If I start looking at humankind's movement over and exploitation of the world, everything appears evil to me. And yet, that's too easy.
All of what we call evil is in the spectrum of human behavior, and generally involves stories people tell themselves, and that their cultures tell them, about their place in the world and the types of relationships they are supposed to be having, with the planet, lifeforms, society and each other. And, since dominance and hierarchy are winning the day in the "civilized" world, people often believe, even if subconsciously, that they have no other choice. They forget that there are other kinds of relationships they could be having, other stories they could be telling themselves.
Living by distorted narratives has greater potential to cause cruelty, destruction and alienation than does anything else. And you don't have to be mentally ill to have these, when society itself is living under a mass delusion, pathology disguised as "business as usual".
I wish I could write it all off as evil, but that would effectively shut down my attempt to understand why the world is in the state it's in and why people do what they do. Instead, I must roll up my sleeves and get my hands dirty as I search for the tangled roots of actions and mindsets which are unthinkable, which are as deep and dark and intertwined as life itself, and which ultimately are me, as nothing exists in a vacuum.
Evil makes it all too easy to tell stories, highly polarized stories, in which there are heroes and villains, dark and light forces, and there is at least the potential for ultimate justice to be served, even if circumstances don't allow for it to happen.
Evil is a great comfort to us; with evil we can write off all that is too disturbing for us to make sense of; we can think of it as from an outside source, a possession, rather than simply a part of the messy spectrum that is nature, or human nature. Evil implies an otherness, a sort of vacuum, or a force or path which is isolated from the rest of life, or from the human spirit as it's meant to be.
The drama and severity and objectivity of the word renders it almost out of our hands.
In a back door way, it's as comforting as God and Heaven.
I can't buy into the consolation of evil. I can contemplate the most disturbing, wretched behaviors: one spouse abusing another over a lifetime, baby chicks being ground up while they're still alive in standard factory farm practice, humans stripping the earth bald, altering the climate, causing a mass extinction, and believing they're doing nothing wrong, Europeans genociding Indians, "witches" being burned at the stake, minks and foxes being anally electrocuted to death for their fur, children working long hours in factories, women being stoned to death for having sex before marriage, marshes and forestland being bulldozed to make way for yet more human mass, people turning their backs on their loved ones because it's easier than dealing with their own hearts and emotions...
In the abstract, all of these actions may sound evil or wrong to us. And yet, in their time period and context, each one has been or is being condoned. If I start looking at humankind's movement over and exploitation of the world, everything appears evil to me. And yet, that's too easy.
All of what we call evil is in the spectrum of human behavior, and generally involves stories people tell themselves, and that their cultures tell them, about their place in the world and the types of relationships they are supposed to be having, with the planet, lifeforms, society and each other. And, since dominance and hierarchy are winning the day in the "civilized" world, people often believe, even if subconsciously, that they have no other choice. They forget that there are other kinds of relationships they could be having, other stories they could be telling themselves.
Living by distorted narratives has greater potential to cause cruelty, destruction and alienation than does anything else. And you don't have to be mentally ill to have these, when society itself is living under a mass delusion, pathology disguised as "business as usual".
I wish I could write it all off as evil, but that would effectively shut down my attempt to understand why the world is in the state it's in and why people do what they do. Instead, I must roll up my sleeves and get my hands dirty as I search for the tangled roots of actions and mindsets which are unthinkable, which are as deep and dark and intertwined as life itself, and which ultimately are me, as nothing exists in a vacuum.