Whence Cometh Evil? Part 2
At the inception of my senior year of college, in the fall of 2003, I had one last empty class slot that I needed to fulfill in order to get my degree. I had attempted to enroll in a course directed at ROTC Army students called "Small Unit Tactics", which taught how to lead a small platoon of soldiers into combat situations. When I showed up to the class on the first day, the panel of military men who were instructing the various army classes took one look at me and said, "What the hell, you're a business major? This class is only for ROTC students. There's no way we can teach you all the stuff you need as prerequisites. Get lost." Even though the course hadn't listed any prerequistes required, I didn't press the matter and just went away disappointed.
In the course catalog, I found a humanities class called something like "The Study of Disasters in History". I just now went to my university's online course roster to find it again, but it seems to have been removed in the interim. I suspect it was a course created by its professor at the time, a one-off concept that she herself found interesting enough to develop a curriculum around, but which was dissolved when she departed her position or became bored with teaching it.
In any case, I thought this would be an interesting course that would balance the rest of enrollments that semester, which was a tedious blend of taxation, business law, and other such ilk. We studied natural disasters, like the hurricane that hit Galveston, Texas, at the turn of the 20th century, to man-made ones, like the meltdown of the nuclear core in Chernobyl. Compared to the previous humanities classes I had taken, in which we dryly studied social philosophy of the Enlightenment or contemporary literature, the focus of the course offered a relatively easy, albeit quite morbid, way to stay engaged in the study of historical events that had culminated in the death of thousands of people.
For the final project, we were allowed to pick one disaster from history of our own choosing, but which we hadn't studied in the class already, and do our own art project around it. It could be a piece of writing, a painting, a collection of songs, and so on. That previous summer, I had seen a documentary about the earliest days of the European settlers in Jamestown in the early seventeenth century. The first winter, conditions had been brutal. Many of them had perished from illness or lack of food, to say nothing of the deaths resulting from the hostile attacks of the aboriginals already inhabiting the continent. There is evidence that, in order to survive, many of them resorted to digging up the recently diseased from their graves and eating their corpses.
I conceived of a simple story that I could write that would illustrate the horrors of living during such a time. I remember spending a lot of time in the university library and on the Internet looking for any sources I could find about what the early settlement at Jamestown was actually like, but surprisingly, I could find almost nothing written about any of it. I had to preface my own story with a caveat that I had tried to find sources to reference that would make the fiction I was writing as historically accurate as possible, but that due to this difficulty, I had been forced to take some artistic liberties.
Each of us in the class had to go up and present our idea in front of the class. Hearing the disasters chosen by my fellow students, and how they were expressing them artistically, was in some ways much more interesting than the class itself. Because I had chosen to be one of the first students to present my idea, in the early final weeks of the class, I didn't have to read my full story in front of the class, but merely describe what the event, the plot, and the themes would be. I chose to do this quite intentionally, since, as will become clear, I was pretty sure my fellow students would have trouble stomaching the mere idea of my story.
I'm a bit more tame these days, but in my college days, my preference was to employ shock tactics wherever possible. Whenever I was allowed to do so in my schoolwork, I happily seized the opportunity. You could view this as a means of crying for attention, which in part it was probably was, but it was also that I realized I needed to present my idea to a large classroom fully of glassy-eyed college students who were just politely listening to their fellow peers. I wanted to present something that would cut through their boredom like a knife and seize their attention.
The story, in brief, involved a colonist in early Jamestown who had come to the New World with his wife, but she had perished early on in childbirth. Because of the harshness of the winter, and knowledge that his fellow colonists were resorting to cannabilism, he does not tell anyone his wife has died, but hides her body, intending to use it to feed himself and his child. In his anguish over his loss of love, he ends up going mad and using her corpse to gratify himself intimately. In his distracted fixation on doing this, he ends up forsaking his own child to the point that it perishes shortly thereafter. This was inspired, in part, by the lyrics of an old Rammstein song called "Heirate Mich" (trans. "Marry Me") which is about a man who digs up his dead wife in a cemetery to "have relations" with her body. In the story I wrote itself, I spared the audience any specific details and just alluded to the action. To be clear, I'm just as horrified by the idea of necrophilia as the next person.
Needless to say, when I dropped the clear hint to the classroom that this is what my own story would be about, all murmurs ceased and my fellow students stared at me, saucer-eyed, with a kind of horrified fascination. Overall, I was surprised by how well the idea was received. I went on to explain the rationale for my idea: that while natural and man-made disasters were all well and good, the disasters that I find to be the most fascinating to explore are those ideas that take place in the human mind. I referenced the idea of the Holocaust, and made the broad insinuation that all of the students in the classroom I was addressing were perfectly capable, as human beings, of inflicting the atrocities the Nazis had inflicted on the Jews on their fellow human beings if the right circumstances arose politically in our own time. I pretended to catch myself in error, in order to emphasize the point of universality, by saying, "Any of you...actually, what am I saying? I must include myself. Any of us has it in our nature to do such evils. For any of us to believe we cannot is the first step leading to possibility of these evils."
No one seemed offended by this presentation, and at the end of it, I received a genuine round of applause from the entire group, which was audibly distinct from the polite clapping that most of the presentations received at their end. Two of the students who followed me in the session, in presenting their own projects, made reference to my own presentation, pointing at me and saying, "It's like he said, we're all capable of doing evil and that's probably why my own disaster happened the way it did."
The title of this post ends with "Part 2". Part 1 was written as a short, one-sentence entry about four years ago. I don't make reference to it in that post, but the question itself comes from a set of lines written by the ancient philosopher Epicurus, one of the earliest Greeks who advocated a materialist worldview and took exception to theism:
"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?"
This is perhaps the most common argument put forth to deny the existence of a benevolent God, which is just as easily refuted. This passage from Schopenhauer articulates it quite well:
"Imagine this race transported to a Utopia where everything grows of its own accord and turkeys fly around ready-roasted, where lovers find one another without any delay and keep one another without any difficulty: in such a place some men would die of boredom or hang themselves, some would fight and kill one another, and thus they would create for themselves more suffering than nature inflicts on them as it is."
If idle hands are the devil's playground, then we must reside in a world that resembles a devil's playground so as keep our hands constantly rowing in the opposite direction.
Much has been written about the problem of evil in Christian theology. Is evil the mere absence of good? Is it its own force in the world that is separate from good, operating independently? Modern neuroscience has demonstrated that if you monitor the brain of a person who is instructed to do something at a time of their own choosing, that activity will be detected in the brain in a non-negligible interval of time before the person "consciously" chooses to act. This complicates the Augustinian notion of free will and thus most of our ideas about the origins of evil that comes from Christian theology must be scrapped in trying to answer the question.
At present, I'm working my way through Volume 11 of Carl Jung's Collected Works, titled Psychology and Religion: West and East, which is a psychological analysis of how world religions and their scriptures imperfectly embodied what we now regard as psychological truths. This volume does not come cheaply (although after much Google-fu, I did manage to locate a PDF copy of the text here), which is unfortunate since this might be Jung's most important work in spelling out the implications for a society full of individuals who are, in greater and greater numbers, in the process of removing organized religion from their own lives. The psychology of a society must reflect the psychology of its individual constituents, and so the ramifications of throwing off religious belief and practice for the individual have the same ramifications for society en masse. I've found little written about the cognitive biases that exist in the psychology of a group, compared to the droves of writings available about the cognitive biases of the individual, and yet it would be folly to assume that such biases do not exist, or that they do not have problematic implications for society.
Many years ago I read a book by noted skeptic Michael Shermer, who expounds on the problems that follow from externalizing the existence of evil in the world. The religious, he argues, attribute the existence of evil in the world to an entity collectively referred to as "the devil", and in doing so, they deny their own capacity for evil and delude themselves into thinking that they are must not be any part of the problem. While Shermer is not a conservative, this point of view is encapsulated in the so-called "Cult of Personal Responsibility", which states that you shouldn't be blaming society or people around you for your own misfortunes. If evil befalls you, it can only be because of something you did, or something you did not do, and so it would be an error to blame anyone other than yourself.
There's much to be said for the virtue of accepting that you are the captain of your fate and the master of your soul, and that if you do something "evil", it is passing the buck to blame the devil for having made you do it. But this point of view is incomplete for two reasons. First, I'm surprised that anyone would intuitively accept this premise as a final descriptor of reality in a world where much of what happens to us is due to the whims of fate. Has any one of us not been screwed over by circumstances that lie outside of our control? If we're devastated by a meteorological event like a tornado, is this something we've brought on ourselves? Nor do we always end up with political leaders which we ourselves have personally chosen to elect. And so on.
Second, and must more important to our discussion here, the findings from neuroscience as mentioned above call into question just how much we are consciously responsible for our own actions. Much of our modern understanding of psychology is based on Freud and Jung's popularizing of the notion of the unconscious, that is, a part of our mind that operates autonomously outside of our own awareness and below our own level of conscious control, and which influences our thoughts and actions in subtle and indirect ways. Christian theology has chosen to make us entirely responsible for our actions, but the ancient Greeks believed that all our actions, good and evil, were driven by autonomous agents in our world that they called "gods". In this way ancient Greek theology was a much closer approximation to our own modern understanding of the brain than the Christian varieties have been.
In order to further our topic, I'll quote this bit from Jung's writings on psychology and religion:
"The world is as it ever has been, but our consciousness undergoes peculiar changes. First, in remote times (which can still be observed among primitives living today), the main body of psychic life was apparently in human and in nonhuman objects: it was projected, as we should say now. Consciousness can hardly exist in a state of complete projection. At most it would be a heap of emotions. Through the withdrawal of projections, conscious knowledge slowly developed. Science, curiously enough, began with the discovery of astronomical laws, and hence with the withdrawal, so to speak, of the most distant projections. This was the first stage in the despiritualization of the world. One step followed another: already in antiquity the gods were withdrawn from mountains and rivers, from trees and animals. Modern science has subtilized its projections to an almost unrecognizable degree, but our ordinary life still swarms with them. You can find them spread out in the newspapers, in books, rumors, and ordinary social gossip. All gaps in our actual knowledge are still filled out with projections. We are still so sure we know what other people think or what their true character is. We are convinced that certain people have all the bad qualities we do not know in ourselves or that they live all those vices which could, of course, never be our own."
You can remove religious practices and rituals from your life, but to the extent that the mind has a religious function that must believe in the idea of God, an idea of something that transcends human thought and language, then we will find God somewhere outside of religion. It may be that we come to think of ourselves as God, as the existentialists emphasize is the first step towards a meaningful life without religion. It may be that we look to a leader or famous public figure to privilege over ourselves. The first Commandment hedges against this: "Thou shalt not have any other gods before me." While this was surely written in a polytheistic context, cautioning the Hebrews against worshipping the deities worshipped by their neighboring tribes, today we interpret it to mean that we should not make gods of earthly things, since this is more in line with our current world. This is a tendancy we succumb to without even being conscious of our doing it. Carl Jung lived with a latin quote from Erasmus etched above the front door where he resided, which was meant as a commentary about the spiritual in our everyday lives: Vocatus atque non vocatus, Deus aderit.. "Summoned or not, God is present."
What can be said of the modern polarization of our partisan political parties? The strife between the two sides, and that there are two sides, predate the existence of our union. Should there be Revolution or should we remain loyal to the British crown? Should we establish a monarchy or a Jeffersonian republican democracy? Should we abolish slavery or keep it due to economic necessity? The collective political mindset has always reflected a bimodality of opinion. Yet, the political conflicts that characterize our current age seem driven by a bitter vitriol that might not have an entirely historical precedent, and the reason for this, if true, remains unclear to me. Voltaire famously wrote: Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer. So it seems to be with the devil as well. Where we have rejected God and therefore the idea of the devil, the devil must be projected onto something or someone else. We seem to readily put this onto those who disagree with our political points of view. It is our political foes who are credited with being the source of all evil in our society.
What implications can all of this possibly have for a society? As the historians Will and Ariel Durant point out in their tiny tome The Lessons of History, we learn from civilizations past that as religion in a country decreases, communism increases. If there is not a spiritual God to be worshipped, then the people will make a god of the State. This is concerning, as all of our modern experiments in pure socialism or communism have ended with droves of unmarked mass graves. If we can overgeneralize a bit, the conservative side of the spectrum tends to be more religious and to favor less government, in a libertarian fashion. The opposite and liberal side tend to believe that religion is an unncessary evil and that we should seek our salvation from the government, in the form of gluttonous Statist social programs. The extreme of either side is incorrect in its purist form, in that it would result in a suboptimal outcome for society as a whole, and yet each is correct inasmuch as it acts as a check and balance on its opposition.
Back in mid-April, in the midst of doing one of my podcast episodes, I reflected on the question of how long it would take before all of the pent-up psychic energy would boil over into something truly dangerous. Shortly thereafter, protests about the shelter-in-place orders erupted around the country. Just over a month later, the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis sparked worldwide protests around globe over cries of structural racial inequality. In the month since this happened, I've seen footage on the news of police officers using excessive physical force against peaceful protesters. I've seen looters and rioters destroying property while the police stand idly by, doing nothing. While the protests have been organized under the guise of racial equality--something that I firmly stand in favor of fighting for--the current burst of protests are not altogether homogenous. Some of them seem to be clamoring for racial equality. Some are calling for defunding of the police. Some are calling for the abolition of the police. A group in Seattle has seized control of several city blocks in a move that is calling for nothing short of anarchy. It seems that there is an overall breakdown in law and order, even amongst those who have been tasked by our governments to preserve law and order. It is difficult, given our current communications systems, to determine what is actually true and what is really going on our there. What I know for sure is that since these protests have often turned violent, and that the entire movement seems to lack cohesion, in that they don't have a singular leader, or a singular focus, should be of concern to every citizen in this country.
Before commenting on the race issue, I should acknowledge that there are people who would tell me I'm not licensed to really comment on the current situation because I'm a white guy. To these people, I would say that, if you claim you have the right to stop me from talking because of the color of my skin, I'd assert you have the opposite and equal right to disregard what I'm saying, and to close this browser tab and stop listening to my perspective. What I would concede, without question, is that I have absolutely no grounds to claim that I understand the plight of minorities in this country. I cannot know. Nor do I deny systemic racism exists, as many do. I also do not deny that something must be done about these matters. What I question here is the path forward and the solutions we are employing to move that way.
Black conservative Larry Elder numbers among those who would deny, based on statistics and data he has, that systemic racism exists. I reject his assertion on grounds that have nothing to do with statistics or data, but mere intuition. The civil rights movement which culminates in Brown v Board of Education of Topeka, overturning the legal doctrine of "separate but equal", happened in 1954. One reaction to this decision was the formation of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission by the governor of that state, which was a state-funded coalition of former CIA and FBI intelligence officials hired to spy on civil rights activists, to compile dossiers on them, and to thwart their efforts to integrate the institutions of their state. The well-known 1963 murder of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi by the Ku Klux Klan was facilitated by intelligence provided to the Klan by the Sovereignty Commission. In a country with this sort of thing on its track record, merely 60 years ago, it is nothing short of delusional to insist that we have managed to fully heal all of these wounds and made racism in all of our systems a thing of the past.
I agree with Larry Elder on two fronts: one, that each of us, black or white, whatever our circumstances, bears the responsibility for playing the hand that we have been dealt as best we can, despite how our hand might compare to that of our neighbors. For some, this will mean fighting systemic racism, as did Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall. For most of us, this means, among other things, making efforts not to act in a prejudicial fashion to those who are different than us. For all of us, it means that we shouldn't adopt a victim mentality about our lives and look to someone or something else, least of all the State, to resolve all of our problems for us. If we make a God out of the State it would consume us, and if we make a devil out of the State we would have to destroy it, which would leave us free to consume ourselves.
Second, and I think the numbers bear this out: if you adopt the slogan of "black lives matter" (which I agree they do), then the biggest threat to black lives, in relative terms, is not a problem of systemic racism that is omnipresent in our police and law enforcement systems. Yes, this problem exists, and it should be corrected, but the biggest problem facing black people in this country is economic in nature. That there are undercurrents of Marxist or socialist revolution that seem to be present in many of the protests currently underway seems to bear out this point, and that the spirit of some of the protesters is directing them to take an axe to the real source of the problem. One of the risks that concerns me is that we might throw out the baby with the bathwater. The United States is not perfect, but nor can it be made into a Utopia of any sort. In doing so, we would destroy ourselves. And, if we believe Schopenhauer as quoted above, if we managed to succeeed in establishing Utopia, those of us that manage to survive the revolution that got us there would destroy ourselves in its wake anyway.
So where does this leave me? I'm not currently in any position to make radical political changes. The mental health of a society depends directly upon the mental health of its individual citizens, and so I am focused on understanding my own demons. What of this?
A few days ago a friend of mine insisted we watch the old horror film The Babadook. This would have been lost on me, but the monster in that movie is an allegory for mental illness, or to our shadow, which are the parts of ourselves that we deny and repress. Most of our urges to do evil, so disturbing to us to acknowledge, are repressed down into the depths of unconscious. In doing so, we give them power over us. The monster is outlined in the film in the pages of a creepy children's book. The words on one of its pages reinforces this very point:
I'll wager with you,
I'll make you a bet.
The more you deny me
The stronger I get.
We cannot exorcise our demons, but only strike up an uneasy truce with them. This is what I have been attempting to do in my time sheltering in place, while unemployed and largely unoccupied.
Here's a concrete example: there are many people out there who believe that advertisements, like commercials, billboards, and so forth, have no influence on their own behavior, precisely because they are aware of the intended effect of these messages on their minds. A study was done by psychologists to investigate this claim. I don't remember where I read it--it may have been in the works of Dan Ariely, though I can't be sure--but the study found that people who believe they are impervious to the effects of advertising messages are actually more susceptible to them.
The more you deny me, the stronger I get.
I've always believed that, because I'm aware of superstition and its irrational mechanisms, that I'm not capable of being taken in by the superstitious. Of course I don't believe in aliens. Of course I don't believe in bigfoot. Of course I don't believe in most conspiracy theories. And so on. I'm a rational person. I recognized earlier this past week that this isn't true. It's not whether or not you are superstitious or irrational, but which superstitions or irrationalities possess you.
In the fall of 2003, the year of college that started this post, I met the person would become my girlfriend of 12 years. We were living together, in a cooperative house on campus, which we shared with 21 other people. When we split up in 2015, shortly thereafter, I went home to pursue, romantically, another girl who lived in that house, who had all those years ago expressed interest in me, but who I had pushed aside because I was already taken by someone else. I was trying to salvage some piece of what had escaped me by playing "could-have-been", by seeking after a missed connection. This other girl was receptive to my advances, but ultimately rejected me because she sensed--correctly--that I wasn't so much pursuing her as I was pursuing some ideal that I was projecting onto her. It was this rejection, it was reading these words from her in a text message, that finally shattered the illusion. I realized the full extent of what had been lost, and I broke down emotionally at that point, dealing with the end of the 12-year relationship whose end I had up until that point numbed myself to with flights of fantasy.
I've written a bit about that experience on here, insisting that this other girl represented a Gatsbyian "green light", one of modern literature's starkest examples of mankind's tendancy to obsess over, and seek to reclaim, the past. I've always insisted, just a tad too stridently, on the words that Don Draper utters to his long-lost brother in the first season of "Madmen": "My life moves in one direction: forward." It isn't until seven seasons of television later, in the show's final scene, that Don finally breaks with this stoic façade, recognizing that his adament words aren't the full truth.
I'm not exactly sure what this means for me at this point. I recognize that I have made a God, of sorts, out of my past, and that while I'd love to believe nostalgia doesn't control me, it's patently clear to me now that it does. I don't so much seize upon the present so much as a I sacrifice it to the altar of the past, and attempt to resurrect the elements of days gone by. I avoid dwelling on the past, eschewing old music, old photographs, as a kind of apotropaism against the passage of time and against a sense of my own mortality. This means, if nothing else, that the current need to plot out a future for myself must be approached very, very carefully, lest this demon wrench control from me.
Whether summoned or not, God is present. So is the devil.
In the course catalog, I found a humanities class called something like "The Study of Disasters in History". I just now went to my university's online course roster to find it again, but it seems to have been removed in the interim. I suspect it was a course created by its professor at the time, a one-off concept that she herself found interesting enough to develop a curriculum around, but which was dissolved when she departed her position or became bored with teaching it.
In any case, I thought this would be an interesting course that would balance the rest of enrollments that semester, which was a tedious blend of taxation, business law, and other such ilk. We studied natural disasters, like the hurricane that hit Galveston, Texas, at the turn of the 20th century, to man-made ones, like the meltdown of the nuclear core in Chernobyl. Compared to the previous humanities classes I had taken, in which we dryly studied social philosophy of the Enlightenment or contemporary literature, the focus of the course offered a relatively easy, albeit quite morbid, way to stay engaged in the study of historical events that had culminated in the death of thousands of people.
For the final project, we were allowed to pick one disaster from history of our own choosing, but which we hadn't studied in the class already, and do our own art project around it. It could be a piece of writing, a painting, a collection of songs, and so on. That previous summer, I had seen a documentary about the earliest days of the European settlers in Jamestown in the early seventeenth century. The first winter, conditions had been brutal. Many of them had perished from illness or lack of food, to say nothing of the deaths resulting from the hostile attacks of the aboriginals already inhabiting the continent. There is evidence that, in order to survive, many of them resorted to digging up the recently diseased from their graves and eating their corpses.
I conceived of a simple story that I could write that would illustrate the horrors of living during such a time. I remember spending a lot of time in the university library and on the Internet looking for any sources I could find about what the early settlement at Jamestown was actually like, but surprisingly, I could find almost nothing written about any of it. I had to preface my own story with a caveat that I had tried to find sources to reference that would make the fiction I was writing as historically accurate as possible, but that due to this difficulty, I had been forced to take some artistic liberties.
Each of us in the class had to go up and present our idea in front of the class. Hearing the disasters chosen by my fellow students, and how they were expressing them artistically, was in some ways much more interesting than the class itself. Because I had chosen to be one of the first students to present my idea, in the early final weeks of the class, I didn't have to read my full story in front of the class, but merely describe what the event, the plot, and the themes would be. I chose to do this quite intentionally, since, as will become clear, I was pretty sure my fellow students would have trouble stomaching the mere idea of my story.
I'm a bit more tame these days, but in my college days, my preference was to employ shock tactics wherever possible. Whenever I was allowed to do so in my schoolwork, I happily seized the opportunity. You could view this as a means of crying for attention, which in part it was probably was, but it was also that I realized I needed to present my idea to a large classroom fully of glassy-eyed college students who were just politely listening to their fellow peers. I wanted to present something that would cut through their boredom like a knife and seize their attention.
The story, in brief, involved a colonist in early Jamestown who had come to the New World with his wife, but she had perished early on in childbirth. Because of the harshness of the winter, and knowledge that his fellow colonists were resorting to cannabilism, he does not tell anyone his wife has died, but hides her body, intending to use it to feed himself and his child. In his anguish over his loss of love, he ends up going mad and using her corpse to gratify himself intimately. In his distracted fixation on doing this, he ends up forsaking his own child to the point that it perishes shortly thereafter. This was inspired, in part, by the lyrics of an old Rammstein song called "Heirate Mich" (trans. "Marry Me") which is about a man who digs up his dead wife in a cemetery to "have relations" with her body. In the story I wrote itself, I spared the audience any specific details and just alluded to the action. To be clear, I'm just as horrified by the idea of necrophilia as the next person.
Needless to say, when I dropped the clear hint to the classroom that this is what my own story would be about, all murmurs ceased and my fellow students stared at me, saucer-eyed, with a kind of horrified fascination. Overall, I was surprised by how well the idea was received. I went on to explain the rationale for my idea: that while natural and man-made disasters were all well and good, the disasters that I find to be the most fascinating to explore are those ideas that take place in the human mind. I referenced the idea of the Holocaust, and made the broad insinuation that all of the students in the classroom I was addressing were perfectly capable, as human beings, of inflicting the atrocities the Nazis had inflicted on the Jews on their fellow human beings if the right circumstances arose politically in our own time. I pretended to catch myself in error, in order to emphasize the point of universality, by saying, "Any of you...actually, what am I saying? I must include myself. Any of us has it in our nature to do such evils. For any of us to believe we cannot is the first step leading to possibility of these evils."
No one seemed offended by this presentation, and at the end of it, I received a genuine round of applause from the entire group, which was audibly distinct from the polite clapping that most of the presentations received at their end. Two of the students who followed me in the session, in presenting their own projects, made reference to my own presentation, pointing at me and saying, "It's like he said, we're all capable of doing evil and that's probably why my own disaster happened the way it did."
The title of this post ends with "Part 2". Part 1 was written as a short, one-sentence entry about four years ago. I don't make reference to it in that post, but the question itself comes from a set of lines written by the ancient philosopher Epicurus, one of the earliest Greeks who advocated a materialist worldview and took exception to theism:
"Is God willing to prevent evil, but not able? Then he is not omnipotent.
Is he able, but not willing? Then he is malevolent.
Is he both able and willing? Then whence cometh evil?
Is he neither able nor willing? Then why call him God?"
This is perhaps the most common argument put forth to deny the existence of a benevolent God, which is just as easily refuted. This passage from Schopenhauer articulates it quite well:
"Imagine this race transported to a Utopia where everything grows of its own accord and turkeys fly around ready-roasted, where lovers find one another without any delay and keep one another without any difficulty: in such a place some men would die of boredom or hang themselves, some would fight and kill one another, and thus they would create for themselves more suffering than nature inflicts on them as it is."
If idle hands are the devil's playground, then we must reside in a world that resembles a devil's playground so as keep our hands constantly rowing in the opposite direction.
Much has been written about the problem of evil in Christian theology. Is evil the mere absence of good? Is it its own force in the world that is separate from good, operating independently? Modern neuroscience has demonstrated that if you monitor the brain of a person who is instructed to do something at a time of their own choosing, that activity will be detected in the brain in a non-negligible interval of time before the person "consciously" chooses to act. This complicates the Augustinian notion of free will and thus most of our ideas about the origins of evil that comes from Christian theology must be scrapped in trying to answer the question.
At present, I'm working my way through Volume 11 of Carl Jung's Collected Works, titled Psychology and Religion: West and East, which is a psychological analysis of how world religions and their scriptures imperfectly embodied what we now regard as psychological truths. This volume does not come cheaply (although after much Google-fu, I did manage to locate a PDF copy of the text here), which is unfortunate since this might be Jung's most important work in spelling out the implications for a society full of individuals who are, in greater and greater numbers, in the process of removing organized religion from their own lives. The psychology of a society must reflect the psychology of its individual constituents, and so the ramifications of throwing off religious belief and practice for the individual have the same ramifications for society en masse. I've found little written about the cognitive biases that exist in the psychology of a group, compared to the droves of writings available about the cognitive biases of the individual, and yet it would be folly to assume that such biases do not exist, or that they do not have problematic implications for society.
Many years ago I read a book by noted skeptic Michael Shermer, who expounds on the problems that follow from externalizing the existence of evil in the world. The religious, he argues, attribute the existence of evil in the world to an entity collectively referred to as "the devil", and in doing so, they deny their own capacity for evil and delude themselves into thinking that they are must not be any part of the problem. While Shermer is not a conservative, this point of view is encapsulated in the so-called "Cult of Personal Responsibility", which states that you shouldn't be blaming society or people around you for your own misfortunes. If evil befalls you, it can only be because of something you did, or something you did not do, and so it would be an error to blame anyone other than yourself.
There's much to be said for the virtue of accepting that you are the captain of your fate and the master of your soul, and that if you do something "evil", it is passing the buck to blame the devil for having made you do it. But this point of view is incomplete for two reasons. First, I'm surprised that anyone would intuitively accept this premise as a final descriptor of reality in a world where much of what happens to us is due to the whims of fate. Has any one of us not been screwed over by circumstances that lie outside of our control? If we're devastated by a meteorological event like a tornado, is this something we've brought on ourselves? Nor do we always end up with political leaders which we ourselves have personally chosen to elect. And so on.
Second, and must more important to our discussion here, the findings from neuroscience as mentioned above call into question just how much we are consciously responsible for our own actions. Much of our modern understanding of psychology is based on Freud and Jung's popularizing of the notion of the unconscious, that is, a part of our mind that operates autonomously outside of our own awareness and below our own level of conscious control, and which influences our thoughts and actions in subtle and indirect ways. Christian theology has chosen to make us entirely responsible for our actions, but the ancient Greeks believed that all our actions, good and evil, were driven by autonomous agents in our world that they called "gods". In this way ancient Greek theology was a much closer approximation to our own modern understanding of the brain than the Christian varieties have been.
In order to further our topic, I'll quote this bit from Jung's writings on psychology and religion:
"The world is as it ever has been, but our consciousness undergoes peculiar changes. First, in remote times (which can still be observed among primitives living today), the main body of psychic life was apparently in human and in nonhuman objects: it was projected, as we should say now. Consciousness can hardly exist in a state of complete projection. At most it would be a heap of emotions. Through the withdrawal of projections, conscious knowledge slowly developed. Science, curiously enough, began with the discovery of astronomical laws, and hence with the withdrawal, so to speak, of the most distant projections. This was the first stage in the despiritualization of the world. One step followed another: already in antiquity the gods were withdrawn from mountains and rivers, from trees and animals. Modern science has subtilized its projections to an almost unrecognizable degree, but our ordinary life still swarms with them. You can find them spread out in the newspapers, in books, rumors, and ordinary social gossip. All gaps in our actual knowledge are still filled out with projections. We are still so sure we know what other people think or what their true character is. We are convinced that certain people have all the bad qualities we do not know in ourselves or that they live all those vices which could, of course, never be our own."
You can remove religious practices and rituals from your life, but to the extent that the mind has a religious function that must believe in the idea of God, an idea of something that transcends human thought and language, then we will find God somewhere outside of religion. It may be that we come to think of ourselves as God, as the existentialists emphasize is the first step towards a meaningful life without religion. It may be that we look to a leader or famous public figure to privilege over ourselves. The first Commandment hedges against this: "Thou shalt not have any other gods before me." While this was surely written in a polytheistic context, cautioning the Hebrews against worshipping the deities worshipped by their neighboring tribes, today we interpret it to mean that we should not make gods of earthly things, since this is more in line with our current world. This is a tendancy we succumb to without even being conscious of our doing it. Carl Jung lived with a latin quote from Erasmus etched above the front door where he resided, which was meant as a commentary about the spiritual in our everyday lives: Vocatus atque non vocatus, Deus aderit.. "Summoned or not, God is present."
What can be said of the modern polarization of our partisan political parties? The strife between the two sides, and that there are two sides, predate the existence of our union. Should there be Revolution or should we remain loyal to the British crown? Should we establish a monarchy or a Jeffersonian republican democracy? Should we abolish slavery or keep it due to economic necessity? The collective political mindset has always reflected a bimodality of opinion. Yet, the political conflicts that characterize our current age seem driven by a bitter vitriol that might not have an entirely historical precedent, and the reason for this, if true, remains unclear to me. Voltaire famously wrote: Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer. So it seems to be with the devil as well. Where we have rejected God and therefore the idea of the devil, the devil must be projected onto something or someone else. We seem to readily put this onto those who disagree with our political points of view. It is our political foes who are credited with being the source of all evil in our society.
What implications can all of this possibly have for a society? As the historians Will and Ariel Durant point out in their tiny tome The Lessons of History, we learn from civilizations past that as religion in a country decreases, communism increases. If there is not a spiritual God to be worshipped, then the people will make a god of the State. This is concerning, as all of our modern experiments in pure socialism or communism have ended with droves of unmarked mass graves. If we can overgeneralize a bit, the conservative side of the spectrum tends to be more religious and to favor less government, in a libertarian fashion. The opposite and liberal side tend to believe that religion is an unncessary evil and that we should seek our salvation from the government, in the form of gluttonous Statist social programs. The extreme of either side is incorrect in its purist form, in that it would result in a suboptimal outcome for society as a whole, and yet each is correct inasmuch as it acts as a check and balance on its opposition.
Back in mid-April, in the midst of doing one of my podcast episodes, I reflected on the question of how long it would take before all of the pent-up psychic energy would boil over into something truly dangerous. Shortly thereafter, protests about the shelter-in-place orders erupted around the country. Just over a month later, the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis sparked worldwide protests around globe over cries of structural racial inequality. In the month since this happened, I've seen footage on the news of police officers using excessive physical force against peaceful protesters. I've seen looters and rioters destroying property while the police stand idly by, doing nothing. While the protests have been organized under the guise of racial equality--something that I firmly stand in favor of fighting for--the current burst of protests are not altogether homogenous. Some of them seem to be clamoring for racial equality. Some are calling for defunding of the police. Some are calling for the abolition of the police. A group in Seattle has seized control of several city blocks in a move that is calling for nothing short of anarchy. It seems that there is an overall breakdown in law and order, even amongst those who have been tasked by our governments to preserve law and order. It is difficult, given our current communications systems, to determine what is actually true and what is really going on our there. What I know for sure is that since these protests have often turned violent, and that the entire movement seems to lack cohesion, in that they don't have a singular leader, or a singular focus, should be of concern to every citizen in this country.
Before commenting on the race issue, I should acknowledge that there are people who would tell me I'm not licensed to really comment on the current situation because I'm a white guy. To these people, I would say that, if you claim you have the right to stop me from talking because of the color of my skin, I'd assert you have the opposite and equal right to disregard what I'm saying, and to close this browser tab and stop listening to my perspective. What I would concede, without question, is that I have absolutely no grounds to claim that I understand the plight of minorities in this country. I cannot know. Nor do I deny systemic racism exists, as many do. I also do not deny that something must be done about these matters. What I question here is the path forward and the solutions we are employing to move that way.
Black conservative Larry Elder numbers among those who would deny, based on statistics and data he has, that systemic racism exists. I reject his assertion on grounds that have nothing to do with statistics or data, but mere intuition. The civil rights movement which culminates in Brown v Board of Education of Topeka, overturning the legal doctrine of "separate but equal", happened in 1954. One reaction to this decision was the formation of the Mississippi State Sovereignty Commission by the governor of that state, which was a state-funded coalition of former CIA and FBI intelligence officials hired to spy on civil rights activists, to compile dossiers on them, and to thwart their efforts to integrate the institutions of their state. The well-known 1963 murder of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia, Mississippi by the Ku Klux Klan was facilitated by intelligence provided to the Klan by the Sovereignty Commission. In a country with this sort of thing on its track record, merely 60 years ago, it is nothing short of delusional to insist that we have managed to fully heal all of these wounds and made racism in all of our systems a thing of the past.
I agree with Larry Elder on two fronts: one, that each of us, black or white, whatever our circumstances, bears the responsibility for playing the hand that we have been dealt as best we can, despite how our hand might compare to that of our neighbors. For some, this will mean fighting systemic racism, as did Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall. For most of us, this means, among other things, making efforts not to act in a prejudicial fashion to those who are different than us. For all of us, it means that we shouldn't adopt a victim mentality about our lives and look to someone or something else, least of all the State, to resolve all of our problems for us. If we make a God out of the State it would consume us, and if we make a devil out of the State we would have to destroy it, which would leave us free to consume ourselves.
Second, and I think the numbers bear this out: if you adopt the slogan of "black lives matter" (which I agree they do), then the biggest threat to black lives, in relative terms, is not a problem of systemic racism that is omnipresent in our police and law enforcement systems. Yes, this problem exists, and it should be corrected, but the biggest problem facing black people in this country is economic in nature. That there are undercurrents of Marxist or socialist revolution that seem to be present in many of the protests currently underway seems to bear out this point, and that the spirit of some of the protesters is directing them to take an axe to the real source of the problem. One of the risks that concerns me is that we might throw out the baby with the bathwater. The United States is not perfect, but nor can it be made into a Utopia of any sort. In doing so, we would destroy ourselves. And, if we believe Schopenhauer as quoted above, if we managed to succeeed in establishing Utopia, those of us that manage to survive the revolution that got us there would destroy ourselves in its wake anyway.
So where does this leave me? I'm not currently in any position to make radical political changes. The mental health of a society depends directly upon the mental health of its individual citizens, and so I am focused on understanding my own demons. What of this?
A few days ago a friend of mine insisted we watch the old horror film The Babadook. This would have been lost on me, but the monster in that movie is an allegory for mental illness, or to our shadow, which are the parts of ourselves that we deny and repress. Most of our urges to do evil, so disturbing to us to acknowledge, are repressed down into the depths of unconscious. In doing so, we give them power over us. The monster is outlined in the film in the pages of a creepy children's book. The words on one of its pages reinforces this very point:
I'll wager with you,
I'll make you a bet.
The more you deny me
The stronger I get.
We cannot exorcise our demons, but only strike up an uneasy truce with them. This is what I have been attempting to do in my time sheltering in place, while unemployed and largely unoccupied.
Here's a concrete example: there are many people out there who believe that advertisements, like commercials, billboards, and so forth, have no influence on their own behavior, precisely because they are aware of the intended effect of these messages on their minds. A study was done by psychologists to investigate this claim. I don't remember where I read it--it may have been in the works of Dan Ariely, though I can't be sure--but the study found that people who believe they are impervious to the effects of advertising messages are actually more susceptible to them.
The more you deny me, the stronger I get.
I've always believed that, because I'm aware of superstition and its irrational mechanisms, that I'm not capable of being taken in by the superstitious. Of course I don't believe in aliens. Of course I don't believe in bigfoot. Of course I don't believe in most conspiracy theories. And so on. I'm a rational person. I recognized earlier this past week that this isn't true. It's not whether or not you are superstitious or irrational, but which superstitions or irrationalities possess you.
In the fall of 2003, the year of college that started this post, I met the person would become my girlfriend of 12 years. We were living together, in a cooperative house on campus, which we shared with 21 other people. When we split up in 2015, shortly thereafter, I went home to pursue, romantically, another girl who lived in that house, who had all those years ago expressed interest in me, but who I had pushed aside because I was already taken by someone else. I was trying to salvage some piece of what had escaped me by playing "could-have-been", by seeking after a missed connection. This other girl was receptive to my advances, but ultimately rejected me because she sensed--correctly--that I wasn't so much pursuing her as I was pursuing some ideal that I was projecting onto her. It was this rejection, it was reading these words from her in a text message, that finally shattered the illusion. I realized the full extent of what had been lost, and I broke down emotionally at that point, dealing with the end of the 12-year relationship whose end I had up until that point numbed myself to with flights of fantasy.
I've written a bit about that experience on here, insisting that this other girl represented a Gatsbyian "green light", one of modern literature's starkest examples of mankind's tendancy to obsess over, and seek to reclaim, the past. I've always insisted, just a tad too stridently, on the words that Don Draper utters to his long-lost brother in the first season of "Madmen": "My life moves in one direction: forward." It isn't until seven seasons of television later, in the show's final scene, that Don finally breaks with this stoic façade, recognizing that his adament words aren't the full truth.
I'm not exactly sure what this means for me at this point. I recognize that I have made a God, of sorts, out of my past, and that while I'd love to believe nostalgia doesn't control me, it's patently clear to me now that it does. I don't so much seize upon the present so much as a I sacrifice it to the altar of the past, and attempt to resurrect the elements of days gone by. I avoid dwelling on the past, eschewing old music, old photographs, as a kind of apotropaism against the passage of time and against a sense of my own mortality. This means, if nothing else, that the current need to plot out a future for myself must be approached very, very carefully, lest this demon wrench control from me.
Whether summoned or not, God is present. So is the devil.