I've been away from Mere Comments for most of the last month, not because I don't care about the fellowship we have enjoyed here, which I've found to be a fund of real sanity and good cheer, but because of my being blindsided by a particularly ferocious attack. It's not personal, and I'd rather not go into the details. But it's left me with almost nothing to say about current events, mainly because for the time being I don't have the wherewithal to care too much about a tax cut or a tax hike, or even what Mr. Obama plans to do to bring us nearer the time when human beings will be the objects of manufacture, like widgets or drain stoppers, for utilitarian purposes. I've been trying instead to make my thoughts on what has occurred to me to call "the Problem of Everything" as precise as possible. It is no pleasant task. The idea is that, while people who believe in God are confronted with the Problem of Evil, and have historically attempted to come to grips with that problem, people who do not believe in God are confronted with that same problem no less -- and with the problem of everything else, to boot.
What's included in Everything Else, I'll get to in later posts. Right now I'd like to start with the Problem of Evil. A revered professor of Shakespeare at Providence College, Rene Fortin, meditating on the force of Shakespeare's Macbeth, conceived of the idea of a "negative transcendence." His idea was that our encounter with pure evil is such as to shock us out of any easy psychologistic, sociological, or naturalistic explanation. We must confess that we are unable to fathom the mystery; and that inability suggests to us, by contrast, the existence of an even more mysterious and more comprehensive Good, the idea of which we use strange and paradoxical images to try to convey: as, for instance, the naked babe "striding the blast," which Macbeth fears will finally overwhelm all his evil machinations.
Professor Fortin was far too precise in his thinking to fall into any Manichean dualism. He readily assented to the definition of evil as privation; it's just that in our ordinary human experience we do not generally tread anywhere near the vertiginous depths of negation and perversion that the demonic presents to us. Any confrontation of those depths must compel us to choose between life and death, good and evil, being and nonbeing, light and darkness. Milton portrays for us that self-involuted hater of all things, Satan, who prowls about Eden, seeking the ruin of souls, "For only in destroying I find ease / To my relentless thoughts." Imagine what it might be like to look into the eyes of a being who could say that. Ivan Karamazov believes he has done so; he has collected newspaper clippings detailing the unimaginable torture of children. Of Turks, for instance, who in the presence of a screaming and pleading mother would let her little infant play with a loaded pistol, placing its baby fingers around the trigger, until it finally shot itself through the head. Here we have something utterly unknown in the animal world -- how innocent do cats appear by comparison! The addition of aesthetic flair, of dramatic tension, the enjoyment of the contrast between the harmless and unaware child, and the helpless and horrified mother -- all that places the murderous Turks in the role of an all-comprehending anti-god, consumed with an insatiable lust to destroy.
And precisely here does the atheistic playing of the Evil card appear shallow and evasive. The old materialist Lucretius recounts instances of evil, to be sure, and lashes out against them -- but to rhetorical purpose; I am not persuaded that he ever beheld the face of evil, so as to be able to say, with conviction, "This is evil," and to explain why. He recounts the legend of Iphigenia, tricked by her father Agamemnon into coming to the shore at Aulis, ostensibly to marry Achilles, but actually to be a human sacrifice demanded by the vicious goddess Artemis, "to shove his fleet off on a bon voyage." Concludes Lucretius, in a line of devastating finality: "Such wickedness religion can incite." But step back from the rhetoric for a moment and ask, "Why? What is wicked about this? Have you, Lucretius, genuinely beheld the face of evil, or are you merely -- though with evident sympathy for poor Iphigenia -- calling up a scene as a counter in an argument? Do you, meanwhile, have any explanation upon your own grounds for recoiling in horror from it, or are you assuming, without granting attribution, the moral strictures you have learned from the Roman religion you are now rejecting? Have you actually beheld the horror?"
I know that many people have stared down into the depths of human evil and have lost their faith: Albert Camus seems to have been one such. I have great sympathy for these; their doubts come less from logical arguments than from shock, and they generally, in the teeth of the relentless logic of atheism, maintain the existence of an objective moral order, and sometimes act heroically in its service, as did Camus himself. My question is not about what the psychological effects of that encounter may be. It is simply, "What can adequately explain our perception of such evil if not the existence of what is objectively good -- and deserving of our awe?"
I'm aware that there are materialistic explanations of the provenance of our moral feelings. These seem to me to evade the question. Suppose we are so constituted, materially, as to find the actions of Macbeth or of the murderous Turk to be appalling. Fine; it is difficult (but far from impossible) for me to see how we could have survived as a race had we not found such things appalling. But that is neither here nor there! As soon as I am aware of my feeling about the matter -- "This appals me" -- I am suddenly in a position to judge that feeling, that is, whether it conforms to the truth, or whether it is a feeling I may as well dispense with. I am not obligated to continue to feel what I have felt. In other words, I am not asking about my feeling. I am asking about the thing itself: "Should this appal me?" And no analysis of how I came to my current position can be decisive. My parents taught me that such a thing was wrong. Well, my parents could have been mistaken. All my neighbors always acted as if such a thing was wrong. Well, my neighbors are only looking out for their own interests. The history of my race, etched into my genes let us say, prompts me to view it as wrong. Ah, well then, there is always this little thing called "education," and I can so shuffle my feelings on the matter as to arrange it under the ledger of admissible, even pleasurable.
Nor will it avail to turn to any utilitarian or pseudo-Kantian analysis of what might happen if everybody believed as I believe. First, the materialist knows what will happen, eventually. In the long run, as Lord Keynes said, we are all dead. This earth will be a cold hard cinder, or will be vaporized in the heat of our dying sun. All the universe will thin out into heat death. Whether it then begins again in another series of big bangs is of no consequence to us now -- as Lucretius himself argued, quite correctly. So it is not the case that my actions, if universalized, mean the difference between the survival or the death of my race. My race is going to die out no matter what, anyway. I grant that it might make a difference to the probable length of time it survives. But I do not see how that can be decisive, either. Suppose you say to me, "If you adopt life A, you will live an additional 29 years, but if you adopt life B, you will live an additional 32 years." Would that decide the issue? Even a selfish man would think to ask, "But what exactly will life B entail?" Lucretius too understood this; it's why he scoffs (with considerable callousness, I might add) at aging people who grow morose as death approaches; he wants them to quit their whining and clear out. But what applies to the individual applies to the race as a whole. If you ask me which I should prefer, that the human race live another 29,000 years or 32,000 years, I must answer that the question makes no sense to me. I want the human race to live well; and if we are not going to live well, then what difference would an extra three millennia of paltriness make to me, if God should decide to end our race the sooner?
Besides, I do not concede the fact: I do not see why, at this stage in our technological development, we cannot survive as a race despite dabbling in the depths of unspeakable evil. We certainly do seem to have passed the stage at which stupidity is no longer a bar to successful procreation; in fact, right now, stupidity and vice seem to enjoy a slight but noticeable premium in the reproductive economy. No, if we must call the Turk's murder of the child before its mother evil, we will have to do better than to spin out fanciful stories of why we came to believe that such a thing was bad, and how the price of tea in China in the year 3636 will fall unsustainably low unless we persist in believing in its badness. We must confront the evil of the act, right here, right now, in its perversity, or in its pure privative "being".
So the first response to the rhetorician who asks, "What about all the evil in the world?" is to turn on him with eyes of steel. "What evil can you possibly be talking about?" It is a version of what the charlatan Bible salesman says to Hulga-Joy in Good Country People, after he's left that scoffer up a hayloft without her wooden leg. "I been believing in nothing all my life!" You had better not touch that sword, scoffer, till you know how it cuts -- and whom. I'll have more to say about this later in the week.
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