|
EVIL RECONSIDERED by Russ Chenoweth [The basis for a talk given at the Chapel in the Pines, Eastham, MA, in August 2004} Ronald Reagan talked about the Evil Empire, but I always thought that was partly tongue in cheek. Recent comments on “evil doers” and the “axis of evil” seem more serious. I was thinking this last January when my friend Art told me about a book. He’d heard Bill Moyers interview the German philosopher Susan Neiman about her new book, Evil in modern thought, an alternative history of philosophy. I bought a copy, and this talk is based on it. In her introduction to the paperback edition, published in the spring of 2004, Neiman says that some thoughtful people no longer talk of evil, because the term is being used for political ends. She says: “As I write, the Bush Administration is busy making use of events that were undeniably evil to further partisan ends that are judged by much of the world to be a greater threat to a peaceful and just order than any we have seen in decades.” And worse, she says, the focus on terrorism obscures more insidious forms of evil, such as genocide, economic exploitation, and environmental pollution. NO ESSENCE OF EVIL September 11th was a frightening example of old-fashioned malice aforethought on a grand scale. But Neiman says we mustn’t let it overshadow more subtle forms of evil. We can’t rank 9/11, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, and the destruction of the rain forests on an absolute scale or include them in the class of all evil events, because there is no such scale or class. There’s no such thing evil itself. There’s no intrinsic property of evil, no common reality of which particular evils are instances. There’s no essence of evil Essence versus existence is an old argument. The Platonists said a ball was an ephemeral approximation of the essential reality, the eternal idea of a perfect sphere. The Aristotelians, and modern scientists, say a perfect sphere is an abstraction, a generalization we make after seeing a lot of imperfect balls. -- In the Aristotelian view, we may do evil, but there are no evil-doers per se, no intrinsically evil persons, no empires that are evil by their nature. Neiman doesn’t define evil. She says for her to call an action ‘evil’ is to say that it doesn’t fit into the rest of her experience. It shakes her confidence in the world. IS THERE ORDER BEHIND APPEARANCES? Neiman’s book traces changes that have occurred in our understanding of the self and its place in the world from the early eighteenth to the late twentieth century. In place of the familiar distinction between Platonist rationalists and Aristotelian empiricists, she argues that philosophy is better understood as a struggle between: A) Those who believe there must be a better and truer reality behind the ugly one we know. And, B) Those who take reality at face-value and say that belief in a hidden order is wishful thinking The order-seekers include: the Christian West before the 18th century, Pope, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Hannah Arendt, and Neiman herself. The face-value folks include: Pierre Bayle, Voltaire, Hume, and many of our contemporaries. Neitzsche and Freud are unique, and the views of Albert Camus and John Rawls, are fragmentary. WHAT IS THE PROBLEM OF EVIL? It has two meanings. One is the problem of justifying the existence of both God and evil: How could a good God create a world full of innocent suffering? Some thinkers, from Job to Kant, have argued that both God and evil are beyond the limits of human knowledge. Others have proposed explanations. These are called theodicies, from the Greek theos “god” and dike “justice.” The other meaning of the Problem of Evil is more general. How can we live in the world as it exists? How do we make some sense out of a world in which there is so much pain and suffering? How do we account for Auschwitz? In both cases, the Problem is the intelligibility of the world. There’s a deep human need to face evil without giving in to despair. THERE ARE MANY ANSWERS Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, believe God’s Creation was initially good. Evil came into the world when Adam and Eve sinned, and we need God’s help to overcome it. IRENAEUS (2d Century C.E.) Irenaeus, a 2d century theologian, said human redemption comes through the humanity of Jesus. We fell, but with God’s help we’ll pull ourselves together and make things right. The pre-fall Adam and Eve were child-like, and the fall of man was an inevitable incident in man’s development. God created man as imperfect but perfectible and entered into human life as Christ, to bring about our salvation. For Irenaeus, evil is just part of the process of making good souls.
AUGUSTINE (4th Century) Saint Augustine developed his theology through disputes with heretics, most significantly with Pelagius, an austere British monk who preached that our salvation depends on leading a pure life. For Augustine, this conflicted with St. Paul’s picture of mankind as totally corrupt. Adam and Eve’s sin in turning away from God was passed down to all humanity. No human could do anything to earn salvation. Natural evil was God’s punishment for sin. In arguing with the Pelagians, Augustine’s position grew extreme. Everything depended on the grace of an all-powerful god, and God showed the completeness of his power by choosing arbitrarily which human beings he would save from the damnation that all of us deserved. Since a perfect God couldn’t change his mind, all those saved were predestined to salvation, regardless of how they lived their lives, and all others to damnation. EVIL IS SIN OR PUNISHMENT FOR SIN Few Christian thinkers questioned the doctrine that evil was either sin (i.e. moral evil) or the punishment for sin by natural evils, such as accidents, disease, and droughts. The distinction between natural disasters and moral evil didn’t develop until the eighteenth century. ARISTOTLE (12th century) There was food for thought during the Middle Ages. The works of Aristotle, the Greek philosopher of the 4th century B.C.E., entered Europe by way of 12th century Muslim Spain. His writings were tamed and adapted to Christian purposes, but they had to have been startling at the time, and they stayed around on the shelves like bombs with a long fuse. This is a passage from Richard Rubenstein’s book Aristotle’s Children: “Aristotle does not seem to be aware that the world of the senses is a place of suffering and unreality, or that there is a better, more real world to come. His universe is one, and he seems to feel entirely at home in it. His writings have nothing to say about God the Creator or the Redeemer, and pay little attention to our sinfulness or its consequences in the afterlife. In Aristotle’s view, nature governs itself without divine interference, and human reason, far from being crippled, is perfectly adequate to secure man’s knowledge, good behavior, and happiness.” He says little about evil. REFORMATION (16th Century) Many reasons have been given for the Reformation: the corruption of the Old Church, the greed of kings for Church wealth, and the individualist spirit of humanism, but the heart of the matter was a new statement of Augustine’s theology, which denied the Church its former role. Salvation by faith had been Church doctrine since Augustine’s time and before, but it was always counterbalanced by a theology, like that of Irenaeus, of God’s mercy, the Church’s power, and the doctrine of purgatory. LUTHER (1483-1546) AND CALVIN (1509-1564) Martin Luther and John Calvin sternly re-emphasized Augustine’s doctrine of salvation by faith alone. The Church is no help, and we can do nothing to save ourselves. All is Providence, the hand of God. ENLIGHTENMENT (18th Century) The Enlightenment was the philosophical movement of the 18th century characterized by rejection of past authority and the courage to think for ourselves and assume some responsibility for the world. BAYLE (1647-1706) The process of rejecting the notion of Providence began seriously with the publication in 1697 of Pierre Bayle’s Historical and Critical Dictionary, which was called the most-read book of the eighteenth century and the arsenal of the Enlightenment. The premise that natural evil is punishment for sin was accepted without question in the 17th century. But, Bayle asked, if God invented natural evil as punishment for moral evil, why did He invent moral evil? Augustine’s answer, as we’ve seen, was that He didn’t. Evil is simply the act of turning away from the good, and God had to permit this as a condition of his greatest gift, free will and the respect that goes with it, the chance to become worthy on our own. To have real freedom, we must have the freedom to sin. And we did! But, Beyle asked, what kind of gift is this? It makes the Trojan horse seem benign. “There’s no good mother,” he said, “who, having given her daughters permission to go to a dance, would not take back that permission if she were certain that they would succumb to temptation and lose their virtue.” It would be better to have no God than to have one like this. POPE (1688-1744) The argument took a while to sink in. Alexander Pope held the standard eighteenth century Deist view of the goodness of God and the Creation and denied that we can understand the order of the universe. All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee;
He also wrote, “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan. The proper study of mankind is Man.” This was a shift in focus from God’s nature to our own. Pope began to push the problem of evil out of the realm of metaphysics and theology into the world of ethics and psychology. He says we should understand ourselves, our passions, and our possibilities, for only these have bearing on any problem of evil that we may hope to affect. THE LISBON EARTHQUAKE (1755) The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 was a turning point in the rejection of the doctrine of Providence. Lisbon was a wealthy and commercially important port city with a large foreign population. There were stores of gold and silver, art works by Titian and Rubens, and thousands of books and manuscripts. The earthquake struck the city on the morning of November 1st and lasted 10 minutes. It was followed by terrible fires, and while the fires raged, a series of tidal waves smashed the port. Sixty thousand people died, and the combination of destruction by earth, fire, and water caused many observers to assume a design. The Portuguese Prime Minister, the marquis of Pombal, set about burying the dead and feeding the living. The Jesuit leader, Father Malagrida, said the survivors should repent and fast and scourge themselves with whips, and that everyone should spend six days in prayer at a Jesuit retreat, because the final hours were near at hand. He saw the earthquake as a double gift from heaven. It punished particular transgressions and, as proof of God’s mercy, allowed the survivors a chance to repent before the apocalypse. The Protestant Jansenists explained the earthquake by the fact that Lisbon was a Jesuit hotbed. The Jesuits responded that the earthquake was God’s reaction to an Inquisition that had grown too lax. But all across Europe, more people said, give us a break. This carries “the medium is the message” too far. In his short novel, Candide, Voltaire wrote: “After the earthquake had destroyed three-fourths of Lisbon, the sages of that country could think of no means more effectual to prevent utter ruin than to give the people a beautiful auto-da-fe; for it had been decided that the burning of a few people alive by a slow fire, and with great ceremony, is an infallible secret to hinder the earth from quaking.” Immanuel Kant wrote an article on the embryonic geologic fault theory and suggested an experiment with sulfur to make a miniature earthquake. Malagrida was finally arrested on trumped up charges and burned at the stake. The sharp distinction between natural and moral evils that now seems self-evident began with Lisbon. VOLTAIRE (1694-1778) For most of the 18th century, belief in Providence was essential to any form of religion. Systematic connection between what we do and what happens to us was as important for Deism as for any other form of Christianity. But Voltaire thought a clear-eyed description of reality should precede any speculation about it, and he just didn’t see Providence working. Candide contains scathing critiques of the church, the aristocracy, imperialism, and war. The work is a radical demand that we stop viewing the present state of reality as determined by Providence; and try making it better by ourselves. He spent his own life doing this. Martin’s conclusion in Candide, “Let us work without reasoning, it is the only way to make life endurable,” seems to be Voltaire’s. Cultivating your garden is a way of averting: boredom, vice, and need, although it won’t yield more positive fruit. A bit of human decency and hard work to dull the painful memory of better hopes, are the best we can expect from the world. HUME (1711-1776) The 18th century still praised God’s workmanship. The argument from design was the heart of natural religion. Until Hume, it seemed a self-evident statement of fact, but Hume suggested that we look at the world more closely. The roof leaks, the stairs slope. The windows jam, and the activities of the occupants are worse. Hume deconstructed every brick and beam with which the argument from design is composed, well before Darwin came along and finished the job. ROUSSEAU (1712-1778) Jean Jacques Rousseau built on Augustine’s account of evil. For Augustine, the connection between moral and natural evil was clear: infinite punishment for infinite guilt. God’s benevolence wasn’t called into question by the presence of evil, because we are its authors. Rousseau said man’s fall, and any possible redemption from it, are both explicable in natural terms. His account vindicated God without damning humankind. Evil is our own doing, but we’re not inherently perverse. Evil arose as a collective process, not as act of individual will. We became wicked without willing it, through a long, slow development during which human beings alienated themselves from their own true nature. Private property, incidentally, was our first mistake! “Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of nature; everything degenerates in the hands of men.” “Man is naturally good, and only by institutions is he made bad.” “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” Lost innocence can’t be found again, but if a child could be raised as nature intended, he would be invulnerable to the evils of civilization, and he could play a role in constructing a better world. Rousseau outlined such an upbringing in his novel Emile. Knowledge, not penance, is what’s needed. With knowledge, we can undo the damage and form new human beings can think for themselves. KANT (1724-1804) Immanuel Kant said we’re necessarily ignorant. God and the problem of evil transcend human reason. Earlier philosophy viewed the finitude of human knowledge as a problem. Kant viewed it as simply a fact. But Kant said the assumption that happiness and virtue should be related is at the bottom of every moral critique. He believes all moral action has one goal: to realize a world in which happiness and virtue are systematically connected. We must believe that our efforts to be good will be completed by a Being who controls the natural world. We have no evidence that such a Being exists, but only such a Being could provide the systematic links between happiness and virtue that reason demands. How else can we face a life that rarely reveals these connections? Actual knowledge of the link between happiness and virtue, however, is not only impossible but would be morally disastrous. Imagine a world in which you knew what God knows. Could you engage in moral action? Could you act out of pure goodwill? To act freely is to act without enough knowledge and power. Not knowing whether our good intentions will be rewarded is essential to our having them. Solving the problem of evil is not only impossible but immoral. What’s wrong with saying, at least, that God has ways and purposes we can’t know? For Kant, even this is too much knowledge. To say that God has purposes is precisely what’s in doubt. It’s an infantile form of Pascal’s wager, i.e., if you bet on God’s existence, you have everything to gain and nothing to lose. Goodness is genuine only if done for goodness’ sake. If one shopkeeper never cheats because cheating is wrong, and another never cheats because a reputation for honesty will bring him more customers, their behavior may be the same, but the first is moral and the second is not. Action is moral only if done purely out of regard for the moral law. Alas, Kant says, although virtue may lie in our hands, happiness does not. Our power over the consequences of our actions is really very small. All that lies in our hands are our good intentions. HEGEL (1770-1831) History served the nineteenth century the way nature served the 18th. It gave order and meaning. For Hegel, history is both cause and redemption of our suffering. He built on the idea implicit in the notion of Enlightenment that most pain is growing pain, and the result is worth it. History gradually reveals its meaning, and the world and everything within it is seen to be purposive. MARX (1818-1883) Karl Marx adapted Hegel’s ideas to his own belief that social change is inevitable and will bring about the socialist revolution. Both religion and philosophy conceal our real task, which is to take responsibility for the world rather than to explain it, to transform it rather than endure it. “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of spiritless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” Humankind cannot be free, Marx says, until it takes back the power it gave to God. NIETZSCHE (1844-1900) Friedrich Nietzsche said the problem of evil was created by those who were unequal to life. They imagined an ideal world in the light of which the real one was despised, a cosmic version of the fox and the grapes. The clearest example was Christianity, which Nietzsche called Platonism for the people. Nietzsche thought good or evil were relevant only for the superior few. What happens to the common people, the “bungled and botched,” doesn’t count. Nietzsche had this to say about Humanism: Without a Creator, meaning can no longer be part of the world. The cheerful humanist, while acknowledging that the old values had no foundation, attempts to maintain them. And by continuing to oppose an ideal of life to the reality of it, humanism condemns it. Nietzsche’s not our guy. FREUD (1856-1939) People say we may never understand our suffering, but that’s no reason to stop trying. Sigmund Freud offered a reason. He said our attempts to seek sense in misery are fueled by childhood fantasies and fears. We aren’t Hegel’s adventurous mariners on stormy seas. We’re just lost children seeking to regain the protection we never really had. We project imaginary forces onto nature and then try to bribe them. We invent guilt and self-punishment in preference to remaining in the dark. “The whole thing is so patently infantile,” he says, “so foreign to reality, that to anyone with a friendly attitude to humanity it’s painful to think that the great majority of mortals will never be able to rise above this view of life.” In contrast to religion, which holds one form of coping with suffering to be valid for everyone, Freud preached tolerance. Intoxicating substances and mania are the most effective means of coping with suffering, but they’re destructive. Love is a way to happiness, but we’re never as defenseless against suffering as when we love. Cultural pursuits, although they’re accessible only to the few and don’t give much protection from suffering, are at least steady. CAMUS (1913-1960) Albert Camus’s novel, The Plague, was written in 1942 as an allegory of the Nazi Occupation and French Resistance. It’s also a study of evil. An epidemic of bubonic plague isolates the city of Oran in North Africa. It produces mass graves, the slow death of a child, and internment camps, but also the increasing indifference and isolation of its victims. It saps the emotional strength of the authorities. Fighting it is a matter of quiet heroism without hope of final victory. Perhaps it’s no more than, “bearing witness so that some memorial of the injustice and outrage done to them might endure” The main hero is Doctor Rieux, who is “fighting against Creation as he found it.” Camus’s power as a writer lay in his ability to evoke the force of the everyday world. Salvation, if we find it, will be in the human senses. Camus’s readers are left with a hopeful picture of man, stark against the bleakness of the cosmos. In a butchered passage from The Plague: Tarrou says, “I’d like to know how to become a saint.” “But you don’t believe in God,” Dr. Rieux says. “Maybe I can be a saint without God,” Tarrou says. “Maybe,” says Rieux, “but I feel more solidarity with the victims than with the saints. I don’t think I have the taste for heroism and sainthood. All I want to do is be a man.” “We want the same thing,” Tarrou says, “but I’m less ambitious.” ARENDT (1906-1975) Hannah Arendt, in her 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem, says that to say evil is comprehensible is to say only that our capacity for moral judgment is sound. We find ourselves in a place where we know our way about, and we have the means to understand the world and act in it She was convinced that evil could be overcome if we understand that it often begins with trivial and insidious steps. This is her famous claim of the “banality of evil.” Its sources aren’t supernatural or profound. They’re natural and within our grasp. Auschwitz, as analyzed in Eichmann in Jerusalem, demonstrated that the greatest evils, like the Final Solution, the gulags, the killing fields, and Global Warming, are compounded of many factors, including carelessness, inattention, and ignoring importance of other human beings. Adolf Eichmann sold his soul at a bargain rate. He wanted no more than to do a good enough job to be promoted to full colonel. Evil need not be demonic, or even intentional! That was the most shocking aspect of Arendt’s view. Our justice system relies a great deal on intention. Does the accused understand the difference between right and wrong? Did the officers of the company intend to defraud the stockholders, or were they merely negligent? Contrition is a major factor in criminal sentencing. Eichmann was part of a massively evil process, but he never thought he did anything wrong. RAWLS (1921-2002) John Rawls was a contemporary analytic philosopher who also wrote a major book on ethics. Rawls says you may have been born with a trust fund, while your neighbor was born with high native intelligence and the willingness to take risks. These are matters of luck. No one deserves what they were born with. The fact that good fortune is arbitrary should encourage us to do all we can do to lessen the force of accident on all of us. If the facts of nature can’t be changed, at least some of its consequences may be in our hands. Rawls suggests a thought-experiment: Design a society for yourself and your children as if you knew nothing about yourselves, your wealth, your health, your nationality, your talents, or your inclinations. In other words, consider the world from somewhere other than the accidental point at which you stand in it. Rawls describes the goal of his work as showing that such a realistic utopia is possible, a society in which the greatest evils of human history —unjust war and oppression, starvation and poverty, genocide and mass murder — would be eliminated through politically just instruments. Without hope that this can happen, he says, why live? Unlike Hegel, Rawls doesn’t think such a world is actual in the present or necessary for the future. But, he says: “I believe that the possibility of such a social order can itself reconcile us to the social world. We can reasonably hope that we or others will someday achieve it.” That’s some of what Susan Neiman has to say. I’ll add for myself that I think part of our bad behavior is in our genes and part of it’s learned and that in either case it can be overcome. And I never use the word “evil.” |