Bob Muzelle was an idealist, although he preferred to describe himself as an optimist; but in either case he was a man who looked for good in the world. He knew it was there despite the horrors of the past century. It was hard to ignore Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot and the tens of millions of people they murdered, had killed, or let die - an unholy historical cluster never found before.
How could this have happened? Bob wondered. Each of them more evil than the other. Hitler of the gas chambers and ovens, responsible for 6 million deaths. Stalin who condemned millions to death in Siberian gulags, political sweeps and pogroms, and murderous assaults on dissension. Mao whose collectivization and The Long March consigned millions to starvation and death.
Pol Pot who proclaimed the Year Zero, the moment at which the past was to be forgotten and had never existed. Only the glorious Communist future was real, and in his determination to exterminate every vestige of the capitalist past and to establish a purely agrarian society, he murdered millions in the killing fields.
All in less than a hundred years and most in fifty, a concentration of the most heinous, frightening expression of the capacity of evil that had ever existed. Other moments in history were as violent. Genghis Khan and his Mongol-Turkic army burst out of the steppes and conquered lands from Europe to the Far East and took no prisoners. Caligula was a cruel, demented, horrific killer, a cruel and erratic ruler who murdered hundreds including of family members and political rivals. Shahs, shoguns, emperors, and kings were all responsible for slaughter on a large scale.
Yet all of these incidents were isolated, confined to the political ambitions of a single ruler. Bloody, yes, but nothing compared to the evil cluster of the Twentieth Century when four men, independent of each other but with the same murderous intentions changed the world's very conception of good and evil.
Joseph Conrad perhaps better than any other author, wrote about this resident evil in Heart of Darkness. The main character, Kurtz, an ambitious, amoral man who admires, then reveres, than adopts the pagan, savage attitudes of the cannibal tribes of the African forest, but as a man of two worlds - profoundly European and only pretentiously African - cannot survive. On his deathbed, his final words are 'The Horror...The horror', a recognition that not only has he fallen prey to the darkest, most violent, most hideous parts of the human soul, but that all men are capable of the same evil, the same brutality, and the same savagery.
In Lord Jim, Conrad presents the same moral conundrum. In the book a good man, Captain Brierly, commits suicide because he sees what men are capable of. When the captain of the Patna, a steamship carrying eight hundred pilgrims, sees that the ship is about to go down, he abandons it, leaving the passengers to die.
Brierly is an observer at the trial of the Captain and his crew, and finds the abandonment of the ship not only against naval protocol but against age-old codes of honor and justice - unconscionable acts of moral dereliction. When the Captain flees the court and disappears, Brierly is even more troubled. The Captain in his cavalier disregard for every civilized, honorable rule of behavior has committed an even more heinous act.
Brierly looks at the Captain of the Patna not as a single reprehensible individual, but as an example of the capacity for evil in every man, including himself. Brierly cannot stand the thought. His life of excellence, propriety, good judgment, and moral behavior only veiled the horrors within him, horrors that could appear at any time.
The issue of evil and whether or not it actually exists has been debated for millennia, largely because of religion. The Christian doctrine of creation makes the question of evil particularly pressing. If the world was designed and brought into being by a perfectly good, just and all-powerful creator, why does it contain evil at all? If God did not create evil, where did it come from? And why would God make human beings capable of extreme cruelty?
The popular Christian response has been that He created evil to test us, for the attainment of the Kingdom of Heaven, like anything else, should be hard work. If not, its value would be diminished. Only the good (and/or the redeemed) will see God.
Christian philosophers have taken a more sophisticated view of the argument. The emergence of St. Augustine’s thinking – and one which has dominated the Christian Church ever since – is that there is no such substantive, distinct thing called ‘evil’. It is just the absence of good.
As a young man, Augustine followed the teachings of a Christian sect known as the Manicheans. At the heart of Manichean theology was the idea of a cosmic battle between the forces of good and evil. This, of course, proposes one possible solution to the problem of evil: all goodness, purity and light comes from God, and the darkness of evil has a different source.
However, Augustine came to regard this cosmic dualism as heretical, since it undermined God's sovereignty. Of course, he wanted to hold on to the absolute goodness of God. But if God is the source of all things, where did evil come from? Augustine's radical answer to this question is that evil does not actually come from anywhere. Rejecting the idea that evil is a positive force, he argues that it is merely a "name for nothing other than the absence of good".
However, Augustine was aware that everyone ‘knew’ that there was evil in the world. Whatever they called it, however they conceived of it, people observed the most horrific examples of anti-human behavior – Godless behavior, many thought; and since God was good, then there had to be a devil, somehow set up in his own kingdom as a kind of semi-autonomous state performing the necessary task of challenging ordinary mortals.
Augustine’s account of evil is, of course, metaphysical rather than empirical. He is not saying that our experience of evil is unreal. On the contrary, since a divinely-inspired world is naturally oriented toward the good, any lack of goodness will be felt as painful, wrong and urgently in need of repair.
In Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment Raskolnikov is initially abhorred by his thoughts of murder, but over the course of time he is able to completely justify his actions. The landlady is no more than an insignificant fly who is of no good to anyone, who is herself a moral reprobate, and her murder will only be an execution.
Shakespeare took evil to new heights when he created Iago, Edmund, Goneril, Regan, Tamora, Dionyza, Richard III, and Macbeth; but he was not acknowledging evil as a special crime against humanity and God. He simply saw the dramatic potential in characters who took depravity to such extremes.
Bob, however, was a progressive - a political idealist who was convinced that despite the horrors of the past, societies and those who lived in them, could be reformed. A peaceful, verdant, compassionate, and harmonious world can exist if only we put our minds to it. Attainment of Utopia is only a function of commitment and investment.
For all this positive sentiment and heady idealism, progressives have actually encouraged an amoral pursuit of individual power, created deep social divisions based on artificial moral constructs. They have, in the purported goal of inclusivity, have created pockets of resentment and hatred.
Idealism is always a subjective, failed philosophy for it requires human definition. The better world envisaged by progressives is nothing less than a fantastically twisted deformation of traditional concepts of good Christian values, and American political fundamentalism.
Social reform by its very nature is subjective, but when it is conceived within a larger philosophical framework of a progressive Utopia, it turns aggressive, nasty, bitter, and in the end becomes inconsequential.
Bob's problem was threefold. First he believed that there was such a thing as good and evil. Second he believed that he knew how to define both, categorize them, observe and analyze them objectively.. Third he believed that evil could be removed from the human experience. All fanciful, anti-historical, subjective, and hopelessly idealistic assumptions.
Machiavelli was the most astute observer of human activity and he combined a profound philosophical nihilism with a canny observation of political behavior. World conflicts will always occur because of a hardwired self-interested human nature, and events will occur which many consider 'evil'. However there is no such thing, just exaggerated expressions of this innate self interest, confected into absurd forms by individuality; and the response must not be to counter evil but simply to counter a threat to one's own self interest.
Idealism, moralism, discussions of good and evil cause wars and complicate the response. Human society has always been characterized by self-interest, and this Machiavellianism plus Darwinian competition produce the countervailing forces which are humanity's best hope for reasonable peace and security
Bob kept flailing away at the evil Donald Trump, the antediluvian backwardness of conservatives, and the blind racism of Americans, and so buggered him into an early grave; but such is the fate of idealist progressives who can't leave well enough alone.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.