Thoughts on Good and Evil, Part 1

Each of us has a vision of good and of evil. We have to encourage people to move towards what they think is good... Everyone has his own idea of good and evil and must choose to follow the good and fight evil as he conceives them. That would be enough to make the world a better place.
--Pope Francis

“Evil then, for the moment, is the force, residing either inside or outside of human beings, that seeks to kill life or liveliness. And goodness is its opposite. Goodness is that which promotes life and liveliness.”

--M. Scott Peck

It’s almost impossible to come up with a sensible definition on perhaps the most important aspect of human thought—what is good and evil? I’ve thought about this a lot because we are facing some astonishingly large moral dilemmas in today’s post-modern world. Yet, I think most people have a sense of what is good and evil. I feel what is good and what is evil but that is not enough.

Due to the immense changes we as a civilization have experienced over the past couple of centuries the old moral structures no longer make sense and are in state of seeming chaos not because these structures were “wrong” but because they no longer apply—this should be obvious. Our view of sex, race, social morality, courtesy and manners and a hundred other things from child rearing to food has changed drastically. For this reason I believe we have to get back to basics. One choice is to “go back” to some more primitive time when good and evil were carefully defined. If you have ever encountered people from traditional societies you will find that there is a rule for almost everything imaginable and there is little reason to make moral decisions.

Fundamentalism of all kinds are thus appealing to many people who are confused particularly if they have made destructive decisions in their lives and find themselves helpless. Christian fundamentalists are particularly adept at enrolling these people in their moral ideology but there is a huge cost both intellectual and moral to their position such that these sorts of Christians are often in a state of tension. How can the God of love and compassion as described by the ministry of Jesus Christ be made to connect with the angry, violent, cruel, contradictory God of the Old Testament? How can this Savior condemn any human being to eternal punishment despite the fact the person has lived, as best he or she knew how to live as a devout Hindu, giving to the poor, treating people with compassion and so on simply for not enrolling as a Christian? In a sense this notion is insane and illogical.

There are clear reasons why we, as a civilization, have moved away from the conservative religious traditions and the expansion of our awareness of other cultures and other religions is key here. How can we condemn our good friends who live next door who are Hindus or Muslim’s. Once we encounter other human beings from other countries it is very hard to condemn these people to horrible torture for all eternity. re these ideas have been clearly rejected even within the conservative community.

The old morality is gone and the conservative religious attempt to resurrect it is doomed to failure for the reasons I outline above and many others as well though I understand that the certainty that any fundamentalism offers an island of certainty in a sea of confusion. This confusion is very toxic and helps create tension, anxiety and even depression usually without our knowing this. When we are unsure how to act in the new and largely unprecedented situations we face this creates stress.

The Western philosophical tradition that ought to provide us with a central core of metaphysical concepts that would inform us in finding out how to live has proven over the past two centuries to be largely useless in establishing a set of philosophical ideas of private and public morality. If it works, however you want to define it, then it is good. But works for what? Inherent in our problem is the question of who we are and what is our purpose or if there is no purpose then why not do whatever we want whenever we want to. The rest of academic philosophy suffers from the unbridgeable division between philosophy. Any philosophy that requires a post-graduate degree to even understand what the discourse is about is no philosophy at all. Philosophy is still alive in the sense that many humans who sense they are something other than automatons and seek meaning and context to their lives will be, automatically, a philosopher.

It is no surprise then that so-called “Eastern Philosophies” began to capture the imagination of people interested in the meaning of life. These traditions deal directly with our central human dilemmas. Who am I? What is the meaning of my life here? What is my purpose? All these questions which religion in the West once answered, usually poorly (which explains the restless nature of Western life), and Western philosophy is incapable of answering in any coherent way, Eastern philosophy addresses pretty directly. Thus the explosion of interest in these traditions and the often clumsy attempts to fit them into a Western context which much maligned (usually unfairly) “New Age Movement” that attempts to create a synthesis of East and West and resurrect old and neglected Western traditions.

We are stuck with the problem of defining “good” and “evil” before we can go beyond being programmed automatons and to create the new world we must create because we are now in a position, technologically, to create and maintain any sort of human society we want. We don’t have to settle for putting our noses to the grindstone and to eat shit at our work-place but we can fulfill M. Scott Peck’s definition: “Goodness is that which promotes life and liveliness.” If we don’t feel we are being more lively then our way of life is simply not good but bordering on evil. When we have to be humiliated and over-controlled by our bosses, our parents, our spouses, our relatives, our social circle then we need to move in another direction. Joseph Campbell said that our job is to “follow our bliss” and indeed this is logical if you believe, as I do, that there is something called a “Natural Law” (a tradition rooted in the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas) that can be discovered through introspection and experimentation. We can combine this with the Eastern idea of alert consciousness. We discover good and evil through our careful attention to what actually happens and see how these things feel. O

Pope Francis, who may be the first real Christian Pope in many centuries, said as quoted above: “Everyone has his own idea of good and evil and must choose to follow the good and fight evil as he conceives them.” Even if we do not see clearly moral distinctions there is something within us that, when we are healthy, will guide us in the right direction even if others may not agree with us. Thus we can include Campbell’s dictum with confidence. Sometimes this might mean taking vows as a monk or nun, in some religious tradition, sometimes this means experimenting with drugs and unstable lifestyles or taking risks that scare most people.

My intention is to provide a mythological/intellectual framework that saves energy and time. Instead of agonizing about our choices when we see that the road we really want to take is one that leads to good and the one we may be on that we don’t like are, in fact, evil because they sap our energy, sap our strength and starve our spirits. All this sounds very therapeutic and easy—just do what feels good to us. But that is only the basic principle. When it comes to actually living this out we are faced with enormous problems. First, of course, is the basis for morality the Pope and Peck recommends is in conflict with the dominant culture whether the one we live in at home or out in society where rigid rules and the notion that man’s basic instincts are bad and must be corrected unless these instincts and whims happen to cause us to buy the goods and services that keep this society humming along.  

Nevertheless, I have a rule of thumb: good integrates us within ourselves and our surroundings; evil isolates us from ourselves and our surroundings. When we want to connect we are ready to love, when we are not willing to connect, truly, the result is always alienation, isolation, lying and, eventually, rage. When we pursue good we know we are going in the right direction because we can feel it. Of course, when we are deeply conflicted and confused we are unable to really discern much of anything. This is when we kind of shift into our automaton personalities and become creatures of habit and we begin to shut down our ability to perceive the world around us. We become, truly, pragmatists—we do what has to be done and avoid anything below or above the surface. This can work for awhile but eventually unwelcome thoughts and impulses can cause depression, anxiety, negative thinking, addictions, escapism of all kinds simply because we are unable to meet and face our internal conflict which are really just parts of ourselves trying to stop other parts form coming out. This is, in my view, the cause of most of the ills of our time and at the heart of it is the inability to move towards a moral framework that handles issues of good and evil realistically. But it isn’t just personal anguish that is haunting us it is that this individual anguish and moral confusion leads to very powerful social currents.

This brings us to the external consequences of moral confusion that is perhaps more clear than our individual inner conflicts.

We will look at that in part 2.