Survival of the Fittest

In an article in today’s New York Times, author Philip Kitcher of Columbia University has referred to President Obama’s characterization of Rep. Paul Ryan’s proposed budget as Social Darwinism http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/08/the-taint-of-social-darwinism/?ref=opinion which can be defined as follows:

Spencer, who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest,” thought about natural selection on a grand scale. Conceiving selection in pre-Darwinian terms — as a ruthless process, “red in tooth and claw” — he viewed human culture and human societies as progressing through fierce competition..Those people and those human achievements that are fittest — most beautiful, noble, wise, creative, virtuous, and so forth — will succeed in…competition, so that, over time, humanity and its accomplishments will continually improve….

The heart of social Darwinism is a pair of theses: first, people have intrinsic abilities and talents (and, correspondingly, intrinsic weaknesses), which will be expressed in their actions and achievements, independently of the social, economic and cultural environments in which they develop; second, intensifying competition enables the most talented to develop their potential to the full, and thereby to provide resources for a society that make life better for all.

So far so good, for few people will deny the argument that we are all born with intrinsic abilities and talents.  What is problematic for Kitcher is the assumption that these qualities ‘will be expressed….independently of the social, economic, and cultural environments in which they develop’.  In simplistic political terms, Republicans believe this premise feel that government should get out of the way of the individual so that these abilities can mature without inhibition.  Democrats, who reject the premise, feel that in order for individuals to realize their potential, they must be nurtured by the State – provided the right social, economic, and cultural environment in which they will thrive.  In other words, a motivational public nanny.

This, of course, is an exaggerated statement of the issue. The focus on individualism by Republicans, says Kitcher, is hard-hearted, brutal, and devoid of any Christian values of community and brotherhood and a reversion to the fang-and-claw society which prevailed in the 19th Century, and only through government support can individuals and the collective society to which they belong progress.  He begins reasonably, suggesting that a favorable environment can help those who have talent but who need only the encouragement and support to express it.  I have argued in this blog on numerous occasions that the current educational system needs to be radically reformed to encourage the gifted and talented – those potential Steve Jobs and Bill Gates whose own ambition and drive may have been suppressed by a Neolithic public school system:

Success has been facilitated by all kinds of social structures, by educational opportunities and legal restrictions, that were in place prior to and independently of their personal efforts or achievements. For those born into environments in which silver spoons rarely appear — Barack Obama, for instance — the contributions of the social environment are even more apparent. Without enormous support, access to inspiring teachers and skillful doctors, the backing of self-sacrificing relatives and a broader community, and without a fair bit of luck, the vast majority of people, not only in the United States but throughout the world, would never achieve the things of which they are, in principle, capable.

Kitcher then goes off the rails entirely:

Even if rigorous competition enables the talented — or, better, the lucky — to realize their goals, it is completely unwarranted to suppose that their accomplishments will translate into any increased benefit for the overwhelming majority of those who are less fortunate… We might reasonably expect that a world run on social Darwinist lines would generate a cadre of plutocrats, each resolutely concerned to establish a dynasty and to secure his favored branch of industry against future competition. In practical terms it would almost certainly yield a world in which the gap between rich and poor was even larger than it is now.

This is a complete distortion of the issue. Why does it follow that a collection of talented individuals who either emerge on their own or with the kind of enlightened public support suggested above will necessarily band together and collectively rule the disadvantaged in a plutocratic, insensitive way? 

First, as I have mentioned above, few would doubt inherent, intrinsic attributes or qualities in every individual; and that some individuals have particularly useful or productive talents – high intelligence, motivation, drive, natural risk-taking ability, etc.  Second, few would also doubt that government programs are more often than not detrimental to the maturation and emergence of these talents.  The public schools are not only mired in dismal performance, they spend almost all of their money on those least likely to succeed.  While programs to help these students may be beneficial to raise them to average levels of attainment, public money should be spent equally on those most likely to succeed.

Third, history and experience have shown that despite the draconian image presented by Kitcher and other advocates of social programming, competition in the broadest sense of the term does sharpen the skills necessary for individual progress and advancement.  Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, and Bill Clinton all have written about the adversity of their youth, and the absolute determination to rise above it.  Generations of new Americans – immigrants from Europe and now from Latin America have had exactly the same deliberate, focused, and determined spirit of self-betterment.

Fourth, capitalism, unless reined in, can most definitely be exploitive, manipulative, and detrimental to large numbers of ‘captive’ workers.  The era of the Robber Barons to which Kitcher refers did exist, and the government regulations which were put in place after the Depression were most welcome.  It is true that the most talented and ambitious without regulation can and will make bad moral decisions.  We have only to look at today’s Wall Street and the recent expose by a former Goldman Sachs employee who showed why good people do bad things – the environment in which they work and live can be corrupting and corrosive.

Therefore, casting the debate in such dramatic philosophical terms – the red blood, fang-and-claw Social Darwinist Republicans vs. the compassionate, Christian, caring Democrats is not only misleading, it is wrongheaded and can only lead to further divisions in already divided country.  The issue is not either-or.  It is how to find, nurture, encourage, and promote individual enterprise for the good of the country without totally ignoring those members of society – any society – who are without talent, hope, or ability.

What any sensible budget-making process should do is to focus on establishing this balance which is currently far from equilibrium.  It is not a question of slash-and-burn, clearing vast swaths of government programming on the basis of gross principle.  It is more cutting those programs which either have been designed incorrectly – that is, no matter how efficient they are they will have little impact – or are simply too inefficient to succeed.  Moreover, some of the savings (remember, the budget cutting has the principal goal of deficit and debt reduction) should be reinvested in those limited programs which have been proven to increase individual and collective productivity.

Similarly, there always has been a delicate balance between too many government regulations and too few; and the current Republican House feels that no regulation is a good regulation, and here I might agree with Kitcher that Congress wants to turn the clock back to the early days of the 20th century.  Again, the issue is not either-or, but a delicate balance between the two.

In all this often acrimonious debate, it is easy to forget the very individualistic origins of this country.  I wrote a post yesterday on the history of the Old Southwest, and how its development was not because of government, but because of the single-minded pursuit of individual betterment (wealth, status, privilege) of those individuals who hacked their way through canebrake and swamps to get to the fertile land of the Black Prairies; and it was the private investment companies who bought and sold land, rights of way, and rights to ports and transportation who build America.  Government was a facilitator.

What is most often forgotten is that American individualism has a religious basis.  The individual was so valued by the Founding Fathers because of his God-given soul the expression of which can only be unique and personal.  In Calvinist doctrine, creation of wealth and success were signs of salvation and to be sought. 

These arguments are still true, and the past few decades have been characterized by a deliberate attempt to downplay the individual in favor of the community.  Community, after all, is nothing more than an aggregation of individuals grouped together to add to personal value.  It is not a whole larger than the sum of its parts.  It is not a particularly holy or sanctified creation.  It is a practical human constitution to preserve and promote individual rights and well-being. 

In conclusion, I am very much a Social Darwinist when it comes to refocusing attention on the individual and acknowledging that human nature – one of an incessant drive for self-protection, self-aggrandizement, self-betterment, and individual superiority – has its very positive side as well as the negative.  Too much government in the name of reining in the negative at the expense of the positive is not good.  It ignores the ferocious power of the individual.

I am, however, not a Social Darwinist when it comes to favoring an enabling environment.  We have moved out of the kill-or-be-killed era of Wild West Capitalism; and the more the world becomes inter-related and integrated, the more accommodation and negotiated settlements are required.  Let us just not overemphasize the role of the State and undervalue the role of the individual.

Florida And The Old Southwest

For the past three months I have been travelling in what was called The Old Southwest – Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee and Florida – and began to learn about the history of that region between the arrival of Hernando de Soto in 1540, the late 1700s and the Civil War.  It is a fascinating story of the expansion of America and how it was made possible through deft international politics; military supremacy and favorable Indian alliances and treaties; environmental factors; and rugged individualism, entrepreneurial spirit, and the desire for wealth and position.  It is a story of partnerships as well as conflict – alliances between nations, between the US and the Indians, among Indian tribes; and between private sector interests and government.

The social, political, and economic environment into which the white settlers of the Old Southwest found was complex and ever-changing. What was known as West Florida – most of the Florida Panhandle and parts of Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi – shifted hands many times, often back and forth between French, Spanish, British, and finally American interests.  New Orleans was first settled by France which later ceded it to Spain after the French and Indian War.  Then, largely because of European wars, conflicts, and treaties, Spain ruled for only 25 years, then returned it to France.  Finally France sold New Orleans and the vast area of the Louisiana Purchase to the United States.

To add to the mix, after a violent revolution through which Haiti won its independence from France in 1804, most French colonists and ex-combatants – including mixed-race Haitians and freed slaves – fled to New Orleans.  The society of the city was like none other in the South.  It had little to do with the aristocratic planter society of Mississippi which was basically divided in two – rich white planters and slaves, with fewer yeoman farmers and freed slaves.  New Orleans society had many stratifications including mixed race quadroons and octoroons who were accepted as lovers, concubines, and geishas to the wealthy white population, but who established their own subculture.

The entire Caribbean was the domain of the Pirates and Privateers during the 1700 – 1800's. The height of the Caribbean Pirates reign was 1700 – 1725 when terror ruled the trade routes. More than half of the three thousand recorded instances of piracy between 1814 and 1824 were on U.S. shipping vessels.

The Americans, therefore, inherited a city more foreign than any they had encountered; and the consolidation of political, military, and economic rule meant successfully negotiating the complex social, linguistic, cultural, and legal environment.  New Orleans was the cornerstone of development in the Old Southwest.  It was the most important port on the Gulf and the gateway to the interior.  The new American administration had to reform governance to assure that French laws were made harmonious with the very different Anglo-Saxon ones.  Property titling, whether land or commercial property, such as railroads and ports, had to be properly adjusted and completed.  Social harmony had to be achieved so that the traditions of the plantation South and the more independent free labor philosophies of the North were accommodated to an largely foreign intelligentsia; and so that the racial perceptions of Northern and Southern America did not clash too harshly with the more nuanced picture in New Orleans.  Faulkner’s canny understanding of class, race, and status gave his character, Thomas Sutpen, a recognizable downfall.  Sutpen was unable to appreciate the dangers behind the subtle shadings of New Orleans society.  

The Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Cherokee Indians had been trading with the colonial powers since the late 1600s, and European traders made their way into the interior by waterway or by land to establish trading posts.  Theirs was a peaceful co-existence until the European powers’ ambitions in Europe spread to their colonies in the Americas.  Then the Indians were seen more as potential enemies or military allies, or at best neutralized nations which would not take sides.

It is important to see the development of the Old Southwest from a geographical perspective.  First, the Black Belt or Black Prairies of Eastern Mississippi and Alabama was some of the richest land in America at the time, rivaled only by the Mississippi Delta farther west, the fertility of which came from its alluvial soil as the Mississippi River regularly flooded like the Nile, laying down nutrient-rich silt every year.  The original settlers in the late 1700s came to the Old Southwest largely because of this natural resource, but also because of the vast timberland and the many navigable rivers which facilitated the transport of natural resources from the interior to the coast and finished products upriver to both Indians and white settlers.

A quick look at a map of the Gulf Coast of the Florida Panhandle to New Orleans will give an idea of the number of important waterways that offered not only commercial but military opportunities.  The Mississippi and the Alabama Rivers were the most important, especially because they flowed into natural harbors (New Orleans and Mobile), but the Apalachicola, the Tombigbee, the Perdido, the Mobile, the Pearl, and the Atchafalaya were also important waterways.  These rivers featured in the early development of the region and in its wars.

I spent the Spring (2012) in Columbus, MS which is on the old Tombigbee River which was a principle route for trade and for military action in the Creek Wars and in the War of 1812.  I followed the history of the Tenn-Tom Waterway, a massive public works operation which linked the Tombigbee and the Tennessee Rivers, thus creating a river system which linked not only south to the Gulf of Mexico, but north and east into the Ohio Valley and beyond. 

Roads were rudimentary in the early 19th century and railroads were non-existent, so the principal transportation was by river.  When the steamboat appeared in 1814 river traffic increased significantly, and by 1834 the number of steamboats arriving in the Port of New Orleans had increased nearly 1000 times over. 

The Natchez Trace and other traces were critical for linking the rivers to land transportation before the steamboat.  Traders floated their wares downriver to New Orleans and then made their way back to Tennessee and beyond on the then-primitive Natchez Trace.

What makes the region of the Old Southwest particularly interesting are the more localized interests – that is, how economic and social development occurred in towns, villages, and cities; and how various public and private interests combined.

I have written about Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! Thomas Sutpen, the fictional alter ego of the early Americans who settled the Old Southwest, and who came from the hard-life upland backcountry farming in the mountains of Western Virginia; or from increasingly depleted plantations of the Tidewater and North and South Carolina.  The journey from the East to the fertile, promising lands of Mississippi was one of incredible hardship, especially because the trip was made with family and slaves through tangled canebrakes, swamps, subtropical forests, snake-infested savannahs, and uncharted rivers.  Most of those who made the move had money – these were not the dirt-farming Okies of the Great Depression who made their way west to California because they had nothing; but Southern entrepreneurs who saw a declining return on investment in one area but the opportunity to make millions in another.

These entrepreneurs could never have survived on the frontier if it hadn’t been for the support of the US military.  As settlers moved into their new Southwest territory, they increasingly encroached on Indian lands.  The Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Cherokees saw the opportunities of trading with the new arrivals, but also realized the threat of their aggressive stance.  Tecumseh understood this threat perhaps better than any other Indian leader and attempted to form a political and military alliance with these tribes to keep the invaders from further penetration into Indian lands.  He was unable to do so, for the Chickasaws and Choctaws saw more advantage in peace and commercial accommodation with the whites than fighting them; and the Creeks were fighting too many internecine struggles to unify with Tecumseh against the Americans. 

Ultimately, the Creeks went it alone and lost to Andrew Jackson and his army of Tennessee militia, Indian warriors, and freed slaves.  Later when Jackson returned to fight the British in the War of 1812, the Chickasaws and Choctaws allied with him, hoping for increased political and economic gain.  They were disappointed in this hope, however, for the policy of the US Government was Indian removal west of the Mississippi and their military leader, Andrew Jackson, was one of the most ardent supporters of this policy. In fact the Choctaws were the first tribe to be forcibly resettled under the Indian Removal Act.

In any case, the area of East Mississippi and West Alabama was pacified, and the white newcomers could continue their settlement.  The community around Columbus, Mississippi was a very heterogeneous one.  The Chickasaws and Choctaws had traded for decades with the Europeans with whom they had made contact a century before and had become Westernized.  Intermarriage was common, and the dwellings, dress, and daily life of the Indians was little different from those of the white settlers.  Columbus was home to upper-middle class Indians whose life was relatively well-off compared to their kinsmen in the interior.

During the colonial period the spread of trade brought a large number of tribes in contact with the French and the English, and each nation strove to make allies among the natives. Their rivalry led to the French and Indian war, and its effects were felt as late as the first half of the 19th century. When the Revolution began the attitude of the Indians became a matter of importance, and plans were speedily devised to secure their friendship for the colonists and to thwart English influence. One of the means employed was the appointment of agents to reside among the tribes living near the settlements. These men were charged to watch the movements of the Indians and through the maintenance of trade to secure their good will toward the colonists (Wikipedia)

Many of us Americans take government for granted, and are perhaps not aware of the secondary role the federal government played before the Civil War.  ‘States Rights’ was not just the war cry of the South before Fort Sumter, nor only the rallying cry of the segregationist South, but Lincoln’s dilemma.  He knew that the Constitution did not allow for the sweeping powers that it has acquired today, and that the rights of the individual states were inviolable.  As states entered the Union, their sovereignty was guaranteed and the federal government was an enabler.  It negotiated treaties with foreign powers and with Indian tribes, surveyed land as it did of every square mile of the land of the Louisiana Purchase making ownership, titling, and capital secure, and assisted in facilitating commerce (Indian agents were really Economic Attaches). 

Local government was not the prime mover behind local development within new states of the Union, it was private entrepreneurs.  Some were individuals, like the fictional Thomas Sutpen, who came with their retinue to hack out land given by the federal government after Indians were removed; but most, especially in urban areas were private holding companies.  Individual investment entrepreneurs raised the capital to fund a corporation which in turn sold land to individuals; or to fund a corporation which bought rights of way and built for-profit railroads or ports, or shipping interests.  Government followed by providing the essentials of governance – contract law, titling, settlement of disputes; and the familiar public services of police and fire.

In short, the United States government facilitated the expansion of the new country by aggressive expansion achieved by pacifying and/or removing the Indians, by winning decisive battles with European powers (most notably the British in the War of 1812 which finally secured the Old Southwest in American hands), and by securing New Orleans. State governments granted charters to private companies which were then responsible for the purchase of land, rights of way, port facilities, and railroads.  Municipal government provided the essentials of governance.

I have never been a formal student of history – that is, one who studies periods of the past from an academic or theoretical standpoint.  Whatever I have learned has come from being in a place, for getting the taste and feel of a region.  I learned about the Chickasaws and the Choctaws because they inhabited the region around Columbus where I was staying.  I read about their history at Plymouth Bluff, and important outpost in both the Creek Wars and the War of 1812.  I handled shards of their pottery and porcelain that they had purchased from colonial traders.  I visited many of the locks and dams along the Tenn-Tom Waterway from Mississippi to Alabama and got a feel for river transport and its importance.  I studied the local economic history of Apalachicola which had been based on oysters and shrimp but then evolved into an important port until mismanagement and poor projections ruined its prospects.  I travelled the Natchez Trace and was able to at least imagine the commercial and military traffic that went down this important land route.  In short, living in the Old Southwest was the impetus for learning its history. 

I came to Columbus and the South because I wanted to learn about another important period of American history – the Civil War, the antebellum period, and especially Reconstruction.  I soon found out that one cannot understand American history without understanding Southern history; and that the Civil War did not end in 1865 but 1965 with the passage of the Voting Rights Act and the following federal interventions to fully dismantle segregation.  Without being here – without being in the place where battles were fought, where Sherman marched and burned, where Grant’s battleships shelled Vicksburg.  It is important to see Confederate statues in every town square and Confederate cemeteries; and to hear recollections from older Southerners who at 90 have heard and remember stories from their grandparents about Reconstruction or the War itself.

I have turned to the period around the War of 1812 because it was more important to this region than the Civil War, and because it was a big hole – one common to most Americans – in my basic understanding of US history.  When I return to Columbus and the Panhandle and many places surrounding and in between, this fascinating journey into our past will continue.

Can Good and Evil Exist Together? Melville’s Billy Budd

The Gibson Inn in Apalachicola, Florida, is an old Victorian hotel on the Florida Panhandle’s Forgotten Coast, as the Tourism Department calls it – forgotten because although close to the more developed towns of Panama City, Mexico Beach, and others, it is undeveloped. Whatever the reason - distance from major cities, geographical isolation, lack of promotion - Apalachicola has remained undeveloped and unspoiled for years.   It is a small working port,out of which oyster and shrimp boats operate.  It has no condos, no miniature golf, three or four family restaurants, a number of oyster bars, and a small town feel. The hotel is simple, ungussied, and as pleasant as the town.  Miles of unspoiled beach are maintained in a State Park just over the causeway on St. George’s Island, and the oysters are some of the best I have ever had – sweet, slightly briny succulent, and big.  Oyster harvesting is done the artisanal way by tonging.  Using a contraption that looks like a post digger – two long poles attached to a scoop – the oystermen haul up oysters in small batches, sort them on their small flatboats, and bring them directly to the restaurants on Water Street.  I eat at least two dozen for lunch and two dozen for dinner. 

Apalachicola Bay is perfect for oyster farming – it is at the mouth of the Apalachicola River, and is shallow and protected.  Oysters were a staple food of the Apalachee and Apalachicola Indians, then by the European and later American settlers to the Florida coast.  The tonging, which is highly labor intensive and inefficient, continues because of tradition, but also for the protection of the oyster beds which would be destroyed by any more aggressive harvesting.

In any case, as I was sitting in the lobby of the hotel reading a theatrical adaptation of Billy Budd, Melville’s short story, a guest walked by and said, “How’s Captain Vere?” Now, few people have read the short story, let alone the play, and if they remember anything of Melville, it is Moby Dick.  Not only did this guest know the play, but knew it well enough to remember a central character in it.  When the guest returned I asked him how he knew the play since it was little known.  He said he had always liked Melville and especially Billy Budd and its theme of good and evil.  “Melville chose the name Vere from the Roman veritas, or truth; and Billy Budd is a Christ figure who, climbing the mast to the gallows shouts the last line of the play, ‘God bless Captain Vere’, an echo of Christ’s ‘Forgive them, for they know not what they do’”.

When I got over the surprise of the coincidence of meeting one of the few people anywhere who would know this relatively little-known work, adapted in 1951, I began to think about what he said which on the surface made sense.  Billy Budd is an innocent who cannot conceive of evil.  His goodness, his charity, and his love – let alone his beauty – enchant the crew and transform them.  They become better men because of him. 

Claggart, the Master at Arms is the embodiment of evil, a man who is cruel for cruelty’s sake.  His brutality has nothing to do with discipline, rank, or promotion.  When the Dansker, a ship’s mate, is asked why Claggart should pick on the innocent Billy of all people, he replies that not to do so would threaten his view of the world which he sees as evil, base, and primitive; without good or redemption.  Claggart must torment, torture, and kill Billy for his vision to survive just as Billy must always see only goodness in the world.

In the end, good and evil cannot survive together.  Billy, who stutters badly, kills Claggart in a frustrated, spontaneous blow when confronted by Claggart’s evil lies; and Billy who according to English maritime law, is executed for it. 

On one level, my hotel guest was right.  Billy could certainly be considered a Christ figure because of his pure goodness and charity, for his evangelizing mission among the crew, for his temptation by the devil, and for his forgiveness; and the play could be about the importance of Christian love in a fallen world; but I read it differently. It is about the nature of evil.

I was fascinated by Claggart, not Billy.  Claggart, like Shakespeare’s anti-heroes Richard III, Aaron the Moor, Iago, Edmund, Macbeth, Goneril, Regan, and Tamora, pursues his own vision without hesitation and with a singularity of purpose.  However, while the Shakespearean characters all have something to gain and therefore a motive for their actions – accession to or extension of power, protection of position, status, wealth, or revenge – Claggart has none.  His cruel mastery over the crew of the ship and his attempted destruction of Billy have nothing to do with these understandable human motives.  He acts only out of pure malice.

Claggart is very unlike the Machiavellian characters of Shakespeare – characters who are ‘Beyond Good and Evil’, who exist in an amoral universe, and who like Nietzsche’s supermen are compelled only by the power and force of individual will.  He is not beyond good and evil, he is evil.  Whereas Christians believe that that good has existed in the world only twice – in the Garden of Eden and in Jesus Christ – Melville believes that good can and does exist, but so does evil, and the two will ultimately destroy each other.  Billy may have uttered Christ-like words of forgiveness, but so will others like him in this classic and eternal struggle.  There will be other Christ-like figures of pure good, and they will all inevitably destroy evil and be consumed by it.

This theme is not new for Melville.  Captain Ahab is a distorted version of Billy Budd, for while Billy has no conception of evil, Ahab feels that he, and he alone, does see and understand it, and has an obsessive compulsion to eliminate the embodiment of pure evil, Moby Dick:

Ahab, the Pequod’s obsessed captain, represents both an ancient and a quintessentially modern type of hero. Like the heroes of Greek or Shakespearean tragedy, Ahab suffers from a single fatal flaw, one he shares with such legendary characters as Oedipus and Faust. His tremendous overconfidence, or hubris, leads him to defy common sense and believe that, like a god, he can enact his will and remain immune to the forces of nature. He considers Moby Dick the embodiment of evil in the world, and he pursues the White Whale monomaniacally because he believes it his inescapable fate to destroy this evil (Sparknotes).

The philosopher/critic Peter Kivy has said:

We may destroy others for the sake of our own interest, or the interest of some third person, or to satisfy our particular passions and affections. What we cannot do is destroy or harm others without one of these motives. There is no motive, even on Butler’s liberal view, of pure destructiveness

Melville has ‘invited us to read it as a world in which physical objects
and human beings behave in accordance with the physical and psychological laws of our own’12. And as such, Kivy concludes, in developing a character such as Claggart, Melville intended to, and did, present in Claggart a psychology that could be instantiated in the actual world. Because of the very possible existence of Claggarts, the problem of evil, for Kivy, is pressing.

Our noses are being rubbed in the unintelligible aspect of human wickedness that no theory of human motivation can explain, short of making itself true by stipulation, in the face of recalcitrant experience, through the postulation of imaginary motives (Luc Small)

In other words, Kivy subscribes to the Machiavellian/Shakespearean theory that good and evil do not exist, but are expressions of self interest; but acknowledges that Melville thinks otherwise.  Since Melville offers no explanation for Claggart’s actions, his is the embodiment of pure evil which, therefore, must exist.

I prefer Shakespeare’s (and Machiavelli's and Nietzsche’s) view of life – there is no such thing as good or evil, but an aggressive, self-protecting and self-aggrandizing human nature which propels individual action and is the reason why history consistently and continuously repeats itself.  Both ‘good’ and ‘bad’ people act according to the immutable laws of this nature. 

The epic battle between Ravana and Rama in the Mahabharata shares much with Moby Dick for in both there is a struggle between good and evil.  In Hinduism the sides are clear and well-matched suggesting that on one level good and evil do exist in the world and will always confront each other.  However:

On the higher level of Existence…there is no evil or good [in Hinduism], since these are dependent mainly on temporal circumstances. Hence a jnani, one who has realized his true nature, is beyond such dualistic notions (Wikipedia).

Shakespeare and Melville (Melville admits the influence of Shakespeare on his writing), therefore, agree that on a temporal level there is and will always be opposing forces of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ (Melville) or stronger and weaker forces (Shakespeare).  However, Shakespeare never concludes that there is never anything more to life than the perpetual struggle between these two mundane forces; but Melville does believe that Good and Evil exist on all planes.  The following criticism suggests that Billy Budd combines both – that is, the temporal and the existential:

In the second phase of composition Melville developed John Claggart as the moral and spiritual bête noire to Billy, attempting to explore nothing less
than the “mystery of iniquity”. The narrator concedes that Claggart’s “portrait I essay, but shall never hit”. As the opposing parallel to Billy, Claggart, like the handsome, innocent sailor, exhibits entirely unknown human origins, a suggestion that promotes the idea that both figures symbolically lie outside of time, or at least outside human and social history.

Since the eventual confrontation between them amounts to good versus evil, such out-of-time yet universal status may seem to us readers appropriate; indeed, the narrator also tries to explain the unexplainable Claggart by recourse to the Platonic—and later Christian—concept of “Natural Depravity: a depravity according to nature”. With such basis for character delineation, it is not surprising that both emerge
as far more type than character; and as types they can but eventually destroy each other—Claggart by Billy’s single “angelic” blow, Billy by naval law. (American History Through Literature)

Interestingly the Melville novella on which the play was based ends very differently, and suggests a slightly different interpretation.  While Billy still says, “God bless Captain Vere”:

The novella finishes with a song composed by one of the sailors from Billy's watch. Called "Billy in the Darbies" ("Billy in Irons"), it has Billy waiting for execution and imagining being a corpse dropped down into the sea. The final image of the book is the song's haunting final line. Billy, in chains and awaiting death, imagines himself at the bottom of the sea. He asks for his chains to be loosened, adding, "I am sleepy, and the oozy weeds about me twist." (Gradesaver)

These lines are definitely not Christ-like and suggest a pagan death.

In any case, I am a believer in fortuitous events, and the comment by my hotel guest made me even more curious about Melville and the themes of good and evil.