Wednesday, April 15, 2009

16: Good and Evil

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So I find this law at work: When I want to do good, evil is right there with me. For in my inner being I delight in God's law; but I see another law at work in the members of my body, waging war against the law of my mind and making me a prisoner of the law of sin at work within my members. What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God—through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I myself in my mind am a slave to God's law, but in the sinful nature a slave to the law of sin.
................Romans 5:12-21 (NIV)

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The long and short of it....
Evil can only destroy good, overcome it, diminish and eliminate it for evil's own purposes, but good can not only overcome evil, good can transform evil, can make it something better.


Virtues and Vices
Why is it that we can be so unconcerned about the suffering and destruction of other people? Why is it that empathy is such a rare commodity? The argument can be made on the matter of scale and distance. What good does it do to get worked up about 250 thousand people dying from a tsunami on the other side of the world. Why should I get all torqued out of shape for 2,000,000 Chinese slaves dying to build what is now a tourist attraction. What should I care about many, many millions of people terminated before ever seeing the light of day? People die everyday. I'm going to die, will anyone care in China? Oh sure, I can send some money somewhere and feel better, I suppose, but what can one person really do, anyway? I've got my own problems.

Is this bad?

How about greed? Some people scoff at the idea of even sending financial aid to help these other strangers. There is better use of my time and money. What good would it do anyway? Such a small drop in an ocean of misery. What will the ocean know if that drop never makes it? Nothing. Let the government handle that—isn't that why we pay taxes?

10% of my income to a church? Are you insane?!

When you look at commonalities across all humanity, you can see some pretty striking similarities across the human spectrum in the form of our shortcomings in dealing with each other, and the rest of the world around us. Callousness, greed, lust, gluttony, laziness, rage, pride, envy, cruelty, incredulity, judgment... In all cultures, in all epochs, in all corners of the world you find these characteristics in humanity. But before we get too pessimistic about all this, you can find the polar opposites of all of these as well: empathy, charity, intimacy, restraint, motivation, joy, humility, contentment, kindness, curiosity, compassion. We are dichotomous.

Back in the 4th century a monk named Evagrius Ponticus defined the seven deadly sins, also known as “the capital vices.” He left a few out (sadly) that, if perhaps they had been included earlier we may have had a less violent and destructive past. Of course, this assumes that anyone across history paid any attention to or cared very much about the seven deadly sins. The interesting thing is that there are polar opposites for each of the seven, which represent virtue. The table below represents this dichotomy, and includes an additional 7 that better round out the field.
The vices are symbiotic and enhance each other in various combinations. Lust and gluttony work very nicely together, as do pride and envy. Also, our condition in the world can exaggerate or deflate them, according to our lot in life. For instance, a rich man is more likely to be greedy than a poor man, and his greed can feed gluttony, lust, envy, pride, judgment, callousness and even sloth (though his children will more likely struggle with that). It is not without cause that Jesus said it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. But you can't blame the gold for the lust of it. A poor man, on the other hand, may struggle more with envy, pride, wrath, cruelty, callousness and incredulity. The bitter struggle of existence may well feed these negative characteristics in him, the labor of working out a hard living with little more to show for it than a hard disposition. But there are exceptions, and we also see the opposite in both cases. There are rich people who are charitable, intimate, content, humble, compassionate, and empathetic. There are poor people who are generous, hopeful, joyful and content. 

Think of the whole thing as a riddle of logic—how many combinations of vice and virtue can exist in a single person? Assume a person can be either greedy (1) or charitable (2) AND either lustful (1) or intimate (2). There would be 4 combinations (2 X 2), looking like this:

    Evil: choosing gratification of self at the expense of, or resulting in the harm of, self and/or other(s) Good: choosing gratification of other(s) usually at the expense of, sometimes resulting in the harm of, self.
There are several distinctions we need to make.
    1. Good and evil both begin with choice. Adam and Eve chose to disobey God before they ate the fruit, and therefore had the potential of good and evil within them prior to the knowledge of it.
    2. Choosing between good and evil is one of the fundamental characteristics of God in whose image we are made. God is aware of evil, He can even do evil, but He chooses not to.
    3. Good and evil are objective—they exist because we co-exist with other people, and our decisions and ensuing actions have effects on others. Because we can rationalize the relative “goodness” or “badness” of our choices does not lessen the expense or harm of evil action done to other. We have a talent for self-deception (it can't be that bad) and blame (he made me do it) that make evil more easy to digest.
    4. Humans are oriented towards gratifying self, and are therefore more oriented towards evil than good. Children are like water, they take the path of least resistance to resolve with the most gratification. We all start out as children, and one of the main jobs of a parent is to teach children to delay gratification, to work for gratification. It is the parents who never learned this themselves who are unable to teach it to their children.
    5. The relative goodness and evilness of a person is residual, based on decisions made and actions taken. In other words, you are what you choose to do.
    6. A person forced to do evil against their will, on the other hand, is not doing evil, but is rather an instrument of evil in the hands of another. This is particularly awful in that it does great harm to the victim, and greatly increases the chances of the victim making choices for evil later on and over time. For instance, making a young girl become a prostitute will greatly increase the odds that she will make many choices for evil later on in life, and may even cripple her from the ability to choose good. Check out Luke 17:1-2 to see how God feels about this particular brand of evil.
    7. The residual goodness and evilness of a person is cumulative. Goodness and evilness have a snowball effect, they gather like material as they roll forward. This actually makes it easier for us to live in denial, ignoring the choices we made to get ourselves into evil and blaming the cumulative effect.
    8. Culture, on the other hand, is a cumulative creation of people over time, and can embody and perpetuate corporate evil or good. The frightening thing about incorporated cultural evil is that it is like being born in a sewer—you come into a world overwhelmed by the stench of filth, but you believe this stench is normal, even beautiful. You are raised taught by your parents that evil is good and that good is evil, that cannibalism is the good and righteous act of a noble warrior, that killing Jews is the natural order of things, that African Americans are a lower order of humans. This stench influences decisions, wiping out the potential influences of virtue and focusing only on the harmful impacts of vice. Perhaps this is why some of the cultures in the Old Testament had to be obliterated, wiped off the face of the Earth, as their cultural evil was so toxic, so damaging that it had to be completely erased from humanity. For instance, those cultures that sacrificed their children to Moloch, or Ba'al, who the Jews found when they came to the Promised Land in Exodus. Archaeologists have excavated sites full of children's skulls where their parents killed them for such gods. Lovely.
    9. Destruction by nature is neither good nor evil as no consciousness is involved. Natural disasters are simply things that happen. Good and evil come immediately afterwards related to human response.
So, is all vice evil and all virtue good? Is lust evil? That's thinking of it the wrong way. Like greed or charity, lust or intimacy, judgment or compassion, evil and good do not exist outside of conscious human choice. Only by choosing to gratify lust at the expense of self, other or others, or if in the pursuit of gratifying lust one harms oneself or other(s), can lust be considered evil. Are lions evil for mating with every female in their pride?

Consider intimacy. 

In a happy marriage you need lots of intimacy, but you also need a touch of lust, controlled and shared between the lovers, an ember of passion cherished and preserved only between the husband and wife. It's one of the things that keep a marriage on track, believe it or not. The reason for this is that no matter how pious one tries to be, there is always that tether to the fallen self that needs to be dealt with. I believe that, at the core of every failed marriage is the lack of mutual intimacy, and at the core of that core is the lack of physical intimacy, a lack of mutual, directed lust for each other. You can tell a lot about the health of a couple from behind closed bedroom doors. No matter how holy we try to be, there is still the human nature screaming inside to be fed, clambering for attention. But you can only contain and control lust with intimacy, you cannot eliminate it, for at the heart of every virtue is a tiny kernel of vice.
Vice, on the other hand, is devoid of virtue. But whereas there is always a tiny kernel of vice at the heart of virtue, there is never a tiny kernel of virtue at the heart of vice. Consider Lust. A marriage consumed by lust looses all intimacy, as the pursuit of lust must necessarily eliminate intimacy. Whereas lust within the context of intimacy can become passion and is therefore augmented above mere vice and even helps to augment intimacy, intimacy is diminished within the context of lust, and it becomes a block for the full gratification of lust. You cannot contain or control intimacy with lust—lust will eradicate intimacy in favor of its own gratification.
    1. Greed AND Lustful
    2. Greed AND Intimate
    3. Charitable AND Lustful
    4. Charitable AND Intimate
So what would this look like if we accounted for all 13 of the vices or virtues above? There are 6,227,020,800 possible combinations, and that's only if they are combined by either vice or by virtue. But wait, there's more! Let's assume that not every characteristic develops in every person. That a human can be not only EITHER greedy OR charitable, but she can also be NEITHER greedy NOR charitable. This assumes that for a given person's disposition they have the potential of developing either one or the other, or neither. In other words, the potential for greed is there, but is only a tiny bit. What if there is a complete range of intensity for the V&V pair, say having an influence on a scale from 1 to 100. Ok, now assume that this scale evolves over time, as we either mature or degrade into debauchery, and the scale flexes up and down over time and circumstance? Now the number of possible combinations reaches infinity. So if we have a scale with infinite range, what's the point of having such a scale? What is the point of pointing out vices and virtues if you can't label people with them? The scale is not predictive, but rather illustrative. It's not so simple a thing to say, “Jack, oh yes, he is full of lust”, or “Teddy is a glutton.” (Jack and Teddy are our cats, by the way.) Identifying vices and virtues are useful in understanding another aspect of the struggle to be human, and to understand how that struggle manifests in life and evolves over time. But when we use these constructs to label people, and label them permanently, then we condemn them to an eternity of vice in our own minds and fall victim ourselves to the vice of judgment.

The seeds of these characteristics are in every living person, waiting to be fertilized by the dung life throws at us. A rich man may have more cause to struggle with greed, gluttony, lust and pride. A poor man may struggle with envy, wrath, sloth and incredulity. But just as easily, a rich man may struggle with envy, wrath, sloth and incredulity and a poor man may struggle with greed, gluttony, lust and pride. The point is, to think that these are extensions of any given class, culture or world view is nonsense. These are universal human dichotomies—go anywhere in the world and you will find pride; look in any village on Earth and you will find lust. One time a friend told me that greed was not an issue in his culture as people were more accepting in their lot in life. Sure, you can diminish the blossoming of greed by removing any hope of wealth, but turn over a few stones in the upper classes of that culture and you will find a nice think layer of greed. Look in the lower caste and you will find greed manifesting on other kinds of valuables than wealth. In other words, greed is not a uniquely upper-class vice. Pride is not a uniquely European, or Indian or Asian vice. There is no one culture or geography that excels is lust or envy or cruelty or sloth. In the same way, there is no group of people more virtuous than any other, no “race” that is more joyous, more motivated, more humble or more charitable. Vices and virtues operate on the individual level and are universal, and are therefore only manifested on the cultural level collectively relative to the communal experience of that culture.

Good and Evil

All humans have the potential for good and evil. All humans exist by exercising the choice of pursuing one or the other. There have been a bazillion philosophical, theological and a plethora of other types of books written about the nature and scope of good and evil. I have no intention of wading into that philosophical mosh pit. So for the purposes this discussion, let's just state definitions for our terms and move on.