Tragedy vs Evil

When I started working on this problem—or, I guess, when it started working on me—was probably really in the mid-80s, and I found myself suffering from two things. One was a very lengthy sequence of nightmares about nuclear destruction, and they’re very affecting dreams. Associated with that was a sense of amazement that a dream that was that awful could reflect a reality that could be that awful; and an additional amazement about the fact that, despite the production of thousands and tens of thousands of weapons of unimaginable destruction, and that qualitative, qualitative change in human capacity that represented, that people could go about their day-to-day lives without acting as if anything fundamental whatsoever had changed.

Now, I've never really been able to figure out why that disturbed me so much when it seemed to not disturb to any profound degree most of the people I knew. It doesn't really matter. The upshot of it was that I spent... I probably spent my whole life trying to understand what evil was and, more importantly, what might be done about it. It’s a strange pursuit in some ways for an academic to undertake because academics tend to talk about academic things. And one thing you can say about evil is that, whatever it is, it's not bloody well academic. It’s not an intellectual issue. It's an existential issue, and it’s not a theoretical issue. It’s an issue that deals with that absolute nature of reality.

And I guess sometimes I think that people who go into academia go into academia to shield themselves from having to ask questions about the absolute nature of reality. So anyways, I think before you can talk about something—before you can dare to talk about something like evil—you should do some thinking about what it is that you're talking about. Definitionally speaking.

I learned this, I believe, from a historian named Jeffrey Burton Russell, who wrote a very detailed history of the idea of the Devil in the 1980s when, such histories were strange, to say the least. He was very interested in the history of the embodiment of ideas of evil. And one of the things his work did for me was to help me clarify the distinction between two terrible things: the distinction that has to be made, and that’s the distinction between tragedy and evil. And I don't think you can talk about evil at all until you distinguish it from tragedy.

So I’m going to try to distinguish evil from tragedy by making some reference to the essential existential condition of human beings. I would say that the nature of the human being is such that it consists of a confrontation with the bounded finite and the unbounded infinite, and that those are the bare facts of the matter. And the facts are that the world of experience, as it presents itself to us, is literally—and not metaphorically—complex beyond our capacity to understand.

And that means that people deal in a real sense on an ongoing basis with the infinite. I believe that that fact is the reason why religious experience is essentially... and belief is essentially endemic to mankind; it’s a human universal. And it's not because people believe; it’s because human existence as such consists of a confrontation between the finite and the infinite, and religious systems merely take that into account.

Now, our finitude in the face of the infinite has some inevitable consequences, and I would say those consequences are essentially the existential conditions of life. The first of those consequences is that the finite is always overwhelmed by the infinite; it has to be because it can't encapsulate it. And so what that means is that suffering is central to the nature of human existence, and suffering exists as a consequence of our limitations.

I mean, every single person who's alive is going to die, and every single person who's alive is going to deal with serious physical illness and mental distress. If they don't suffer, if they aren't suffering it directly, immediately, right now on their own, it’s almost inevitably the case that every single person who walks the Earth is confronting the bare bones of reality at that level in the guise of an afflicted family member. And so the fact of our finitude is again, no academic issue. It's essential to the nature of our being, and we're forced to deal with it on an ongoing basis.

So I would say insufficiency is built into human experience, and there are existential consequences to that. Now, I read something a long time ago, and I don't remember who wrote it, but it was written about Jewish commentary on the Torah: God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent. What does he lack? And the answer is limitation. And that’s a riddle and an answer of unparalleled brilliance as far as I'm concerned, because I think it speaks deeply to something about the central nature of existence itself, and that is that without limitation, there’s no being.

Now, that's a hard thing to understand, but I think you can understand it in a number of different ways. The first thing you might want to understand is that... I play this game with my students sometimes in my class. I'll come up to a student, I pick a poor victim at random and come up to them and say: "Okay, we're going to play a game." And they say: "Okay." And I say: "Well, you move first." Well, they don’t know what to do, and the reason for that is because the limiting parameters of the game have not been defined.

And, as a consequence of that, they’re stunned by their infinite freedom into complete immobility. And what that means in a sense is that in the absence of serious constraint, there can be no choice, no freedom, no existence. And I believe this to be fundamentally true, just as the fact that human being is vulnerable is fundamentally true.

Here's another example that I think is more personal to me, and it emerged in my imagination as a consequence of my contemplation of my son’s vulnerability. So I have children. They’re teenagers now. I still like them. One of the things I was really struck by when my children were little was how perfect they were. Like, I believe that that was the benevolence of God in a sense—children are tremendously difficult; they’re a tremendous responsibility—but they’re so perfect, and they manifest that perfection in such a remarkable way that that's the payment for taking on the responsibility of bringing them into being and caring for them.

The thing about being a parent is that the vulnerability of people may manifest to you in a way that was never the case prior to that. And it’s haunting, and it’s beautiful, but it’s also exactly right in a way. I was thinking, well, look at my son. He’s a little kid. You know, you’ve got to chase after him all the time; he could get sick, people could hurt him, you know, people are going to be mean to him. He’s going to be disappointed in his life; he’s vulnerable, and it’s a constant tragic reality that he’s vulnerable.

And I thought, well, okay, let’s say we want to do something about that. So let’s say we make him so that no one can pick on him. So we could inflate him to about 20 feet high and equip him with a metallic skeleton and a cast-iron exoskeleton, and you could equip him with a computerized intelligence that far supersedes his own, and you could remove his vulnerabilities one by one, hypothetically. And, of course, more and more we’re in a position where we could do that in reality.

And one of the things I realized right away was that as you remove the vulnerabilities, you remove the thing you love. And then I started to understand more deeply that vulnerability was a precondition for human being, and that was a desirable precondition because the things about human existence that are wonderful and remarkable are so integrally tied up with vulnerability that they’re actually inextricable.

The Jewish commentary—what the Infinite lacks is the finite. There's a more abstract way of getting at the same thing. If you could do absolutely anything you wanted at any point and be anywhere you wanted, be anything you wanted, and if there was nothing that was out of your reach, there would be nothing to do because you’d be everything at once. And when you’re everything at once, which is at least in principle the position of God, there's no story and there's no being.

And there’s something about being that is a story. And without limitation, there’s no story. So then the question starts to become, with regards to consideration of human vulnerability: Is there a way to conduct your life in such a manner that the intrinsic vulnerability that characterizes your life is rendered not only acceptable but desirable? And to me that’s the central question of existence.

And I tell you, get that wrong, and you're on the wrong track, and if you're on the wrong track, man, you are in one terrible place. I would say, with regards to tragedy, humans are vulnerable, and that's tragic. But if tragedy is the price that we pay for existence, then so be it if existence is justifiable.

And so tragedy itself, which is merely a revelation of our vulnerability, can't be regarded as evil; it's just a... it’s a condition of existence. And so it's necessary to distinguish the tragic conditions of existence from evil before you can even address the problem. And I think what that means to some degree is you should not blame on the relationship between the finite and the infinite the terrible failings of humanity that can be laid directly at the feet of human beings.

So earthquakes aren’t evil and cancer isn’t evil and mental illness isn’t evil and predators aren’t evil. They just are part of the way things are. But there are certain categories of human action that are definitely outside the parameters of mere tragedy. And those are the things we really have to get a handle on.

Evil for me is differentiated from tragedy by its lack of necessity and its volunteerism. It’s a tenant, I think, of modern materialistic thought that there are social or material causes for actions, and it’s an extraordinarily useful theory. And I think... but I think one of the unfortunate consequences of that is that we've tended to write off much of human misbehavior and attribute it to, say, insufficiencies and material conditions, which is not an acceptable theory.

There are all sorts of human cultures that were characterized by virtually complete absence of material luxury—well-being—whose cultures were highly functional and highly moral. And to describe the propensity towards misbehavior as a consequence of economic inequality is entirely beside the point as far as I'm concerned.

Evil is more pernicious than that, which is generated, for example, by social inequality. I think it’s actually, although this is a terrifying thought in some ways, it’s more appropriate to consider it a form of demonically warped aesthetic. And I’ll give you a couple of examples of what I mean by that. For example, because the manifestation of this warped aesthetic makes itself apparent under certain conditions.

So, for example, I think it made itself apparent in the imagination of the first politician who coined the acronym MAD, or Mutual Assured Destruction. That’s an aesthetic of evil; to make a joke of a situation that catastrophic indicates the kind of malevolence that lurks behind the fact that such a condition exists.

The motto on the gates of Auschwitz, I believe, in the Second World War: "Work will make you free." That’s another manifestation of the aesthetic of evil. It’s a terrible, terrible ironic joke, and it’s instructive to meditate on what sort of imagination would have the arrogance to tell such a terrible joke. The concentration camps are classic examples of evil.

And I think by analyzing at least certain kinds of events that occurred within them, it's easier to get a clear idea of what evil constitutes. And one of the stories that's always haunting me, I guess, is—I believe it's another story derived from Auschwitz. The prison guards in Auschwitz would take the prisoners who were already stripped of their dignity and, to whatever degree possible, their identity and their culture and their language and their status as valuable beings.

And yet that wasn't sufficient; they needed to be tortured in addition to that before they were killed. And the torture often consisted of a self-evidently counterproductive work—an activity that also frequently characterized activity in the Soviet Gulag Archipelago, where perhaps 60 million people met their death. A typical Auschwitz example was the requirement for prisoners to carry 100-pound sacks of wet salt from one side of the compound and then back again.

Now that’s evil as far as I'm concerned, and you have to think about it from an aesthetic perspective in a sense because it's a celebration of horror. And it's a conscious attempt to violate the conditions that make life itself tolerable, and it's aimed at dehumanization, destruction of the ideal. And at an even deeper level, revenge against the conditions of existence itself.

I've tried to understand the developmental pathway that leads to acts like that. My academic research, as well as my clinical experience, has revealed to me that what appears to lie at the bottom of motivation for the excesses of behavior that characterize evil are two tightly causally related factors: one, arrogance, and another, resentment. And both of those are tied up with vulnerability of human beings in the face of the infinite but tied up with something more profound as well.

The most thorough account of this that I've managed, I think, at least to partially comprehend, I believe is contained in the first couple of the stories in the Old Testament—in Genesis. The story of Adam and Eve and the fall of man. And the immediately following story of Cain and Abel. As far as we can tell, those are very, very old stories. They predate Judaism, at least in some of their structural elements.

It’s conceivable that some of those stories are as old as the human capacity to tell stories itself, assuming that they were grounded in an oral tradition that predated the written tradition. And we know that oral traditions can last, at least in some forms, unchanged for periods of up to 25,000 years, so the anthropological and archaeological evidence is fairly clear on that point. These are very, very, very old stories, and people remember them and created them for reasons we really don’t understand. And they’re strange and mysterious and unforgettable all at the same time.

The story of Adam and Eve, as far as I can tell, is the story of the coming of consciousness. The coming of self-consciousness to mankind. And I think that the human self-consciousness is what separates us from animals. In Genesis, there’s an insistence that when Adam ate the apple that Eve offered to him, the scales fell from his eyes and the first thing that he realized was that he was naked.

And what that seems to me to mean is that, I mean... I think it means first of all that women make men self-conscious. And I think there’s ample reason to presume—not, and there's good evolutionary reasons for suggesting why that might be the case. Because sexual selection among human beings has been a primary force of evolutionary development, and sexual selection in human beings is primarily conducted by women.

So, for example, as Roy has pointed out in his address to the APA a few years ago, and I hope I get this right, twice as many of your relatives were women as men. And that means that women are more frequently reproductive successful than men, and that they reject most men. And the rejection of a man for reproductive purposes by a woman is the most serious form of rejection that's possible from an evolutionary point of view because the judgment is that, well, you might be nice enough to talk to, but you're sure not fit to have your genes propagate into the next generation.

So it’s no wonder that women can make men self-conscious. And I think there’s some reason to presume that it’s the sexual selection forces that women placed upon man that drove rapid human cortical evolution and the development of self-consciousness. Now that's a leap, and there’s no way I can justify that in the course of this particular talk, but I think there is good reason to presume that it’s the case.

In Genesis, human beings become self-conscious, and the first thing that happens to them is that they realize they’re naked, and then the next thing that happens to them is they develop the moral sense to tell the difference between good and evil. And it’s a very strange thing because in some sense before a creature is self-conscious, there is no distinction between good and evil because, as I said before, a predator is not evil; it's just a predator. The fact of a predator, like a wolf, might be a tragedy for the rabbit, but you can’t be assuming that the wolf is evil merely because it wants to eat the rabbit.

But with the dawning of self-consciousness, there seems to be the emergence of a moral sense that's essentially unique to human beings and that has something to do with our capacity to reflect upon the mechanisms of our action and then, for some reason, to be able to modify those actions and to choose which ones to implement into the future. We don't understand that. And you can even deny if you'd like that the phenomena of free choice exists, but our culture is essentially predicated on the notion that it does exist, and in the absence of evidence that it doesn't, I'm going to take the easy way out and assume that it does.

Otherwise, things fall apart, and they fall apart badly. When Adam and Eve become self-conscious, the first thing they do is close themselves. And to me, that's a mythological description of the emergence of culture as an intercession between the fundamental vulnerability and nakedness of the human form and the depredations of nature.

If you realize that you're vulnerable and prone to death, the first thing you're going to do is to start rearranging the manner in which you construe yourself so that you can protect yourself from such an unfortunate outcome. That's, I think, partly why God curses Adam with the necessity of work once he finds out—once God finds out that people have become self-conscious. Like if you know that that winter is lurking in the future, for example, you’re going to work, and animals don't work; they’re just motivated to do whatever they do.

But humans work, and that means they subvert their day-to-day motivations, their immediate motivations for the purposes of future security. And there’s a real cost to that. I mean, part of the cost is separation from the pure and unadulterated flow of animal life, and I believe that people suffer from that absence of flow continually. And the advantage they gain from it is that they can plan for the future, but the disadvantage is that they’re calculative and cold and separated from their own instinctual resources.

Eve, of course, is cursed by what's going to be terrible pain in childbirth, and that's related to the development of the immense skull size that characterizes human infants and their incredibly lengthy period of dependence, which is also associated with their immense brain. After Adam and Eve become self-conscious, they hide. And this is actually a comical part of Genesis—it’s never really read as a comedy, but it is a comedy; even the fall itself is a comedy.

So they’re hiding away behind a bush, and God comes walking through the garden. And God, the infinite, is accustomed to walking with Adam, with no interruption of the flow of information between them. But Adam is in error, and God says: "You know, where have you gone?" and Adam says: "Oh, well I’m hiding." And God says—this is kind of stupid, really, and this is why it’s a comic moment.

Like, he’s hiding behind a bush—this is God, and he can see through bushes, and like Adam should know that. But it doesn't really matter. He’s hiding behind this bush anyways, and God—so Adam says: "I’m hiding," and God says: "Well, why are you hiding?" Well, it’s because Adam is ashamed, and Adam says: "Well, I’m naked."

And this is an example of the tremendous compression of human wisdom into a few lines that characterizes mythology. You could say: "Well, why would people hide from God once they realize they’re naked?" And I would say, well, that's pretty obvious. Like, once you know you’re vulnerable, do you really have enough courage to manifest any sort of semblance of a divine destiny? Well, the answer to that is pretty much, clearly no. And it’s no bloody wonder.

And so the hiding is... People hide when they're self-conscious and vulnerable. And what are they hiding from then? They're hiding from their deepest destiny, and it’s no wonder. God says: "Okay, yeah, well, you figured that out; and how did that happen?" And Adam says, and this is comical too, "It was the woman’s fault." Which I think is really funny, and which actually may have been the original sin—not the eating of the apple, right? The first time that the man blamed the woman for his self-conscious misery—I think that's the real fall and not the rise of self-consciousness itself.

Anyways, we know the rest of the story. God says: "Oh, well, the cat’s out of the bag now. You know you’re vulnerable, and from here on in, history starts. You’re out of paradise; you’re out of unconscious identification with the natural world. You’re going to work; you’re going to sweat a lot of the time, and it isn’t going to work. And women—they’re going to be beholden to their husbands, not because that’s divine fiat, but because the developmental dependency of a human infant is so extreme that women are cursed to rely on men for protection when they’re at their most vulnerable."

Fine. So that’s self-consciousness and an explanation for why people would hide away from their destiny. But then the next story, the Cain and Abel story, really elaborates that out and describes it. And so Cain and Abel, of course, are two sons of Adam and Eve, and they’re really the first people because, of course, Adam and Eve were made by God, so they’re really not people at all because people are born.

And Cain and Abel are the first two people. And they’re characterized, as far as I can tell, by two canonical patterns of reaction to the terrible vulnerability that's revealed as a consequence of the development of self-consciousness. Cain and Abel make sacrifices to God. Why? Human cultures make sacrifices. That's what they do. Sacrifice, sacrificial rituals, is a human universal; blood sacrifice is a human universal. Human sacrifice, at least in some anthropological epochs, was regarded as a human universal.

Why do people make sacrifices to God? To please them. It seems like a mystery to modern people. I ask my students: What sacrifices did you make to go to university? Well, they can answer that in 2/10 of a second. You know they can’t party as much as they might have; they can’t drink nearly as much beer as they might have liked. More seriously, a lot of them work; a lot of them have put their families in serious financial straits to send them to university. They’ve given up all sorts of things in order to pursue a course of action that they believe will best ensure their harmonious relationship with the nature of reality.

Everyone makes sacrifices. Okay, we can say that now because we're psychologically sophisticated and linguistically sophisticated. We know something about human psychology. But thousands and thousands of years ago, before people had this explicit psychological acumen, the best they could do is act out and tell stories about human psychology because they hadn’t developed any further than that. And Cain and Abel is one of those stories.

The sacrifices are burnt on an altar. Why? Well, a smoke rises. Well, so what? Well, God’s up in the sky, and if the smoke rises up there and he gets a whiff of it, he can tell what the quality of the sacrifice was. And you can laugh about that. And you can think about it as primitive. But it’s not primitive; it’s artistic and it’s beautiful in it. And it’s accurate.

And here’s why. It’s because before the invention of the electrical light, and maybe before the invention of fire, the closest a human being could ever get to direct confrontation with the absolute unknown was to look up at the night sky. Because the night sky, especially when it’s sprinkled with stars, confronts you directly with the fact of the infinite. And to make the presupposition that God resides in the infinite, and you’re having a direct experience of the infinite at that moment, is not a primitive notion; it’s a very intelligent and creative hypothesis.

And so, the notion that God occupies the sky—the day sky being equally as impressive as the night sky—is not a primitive hypothesis; it’s a reflection of the nature of a certain kind of human experience. You burn something, and you send the smoke up. God gets a crack at determining the quality of your offering, the quality of your sacrifice. Well, let’s be perfectly clear about this: if your sacrifices aren’t first-rate, the nature of your relationship with the infinite is going to suffer dreadfully. And that’s exactly what the story of Cain and Abel reveals.

Now, Abel—he’s a trusting character. He believes in the nature of experience, in the nature of existence. When he’s called on to make a sacrifice, he sacrifices the best that he has to offer, and that makes God happy. And as a consequence, everything that Abel touches turns to gold. Everyone likes him; they respect him. His crops multiply; he’s successful with women. Plus, he's a wonderful guy, so you could hardly imagine a more annoying creature if you possibly attempted to do it.

Whereas Cain has reacted to his self-consciousness by withdrawing from the infinite. And there’s a tremendous danger in that because it starts to mean that he relies purely on his own devious devices to sail his ship through the shores of life. He believes, as his arrogance develops, as a consequence of this withdrawal from the infinite—a contact that he can’t tolerate because he can’t tolerate his own vulnerability—that he is able to deceive the structure of reality itself to offer second-rate sacrifices to God himself, who can see absolutely everything because the infinite is absolutely everything—and to prevail nonetheless. Well, needless to say this does not work.

And it doesn’t work in an obvious way. If you talk to people, and they reveal to you their unnecessary suffering, it’s very straightforward to look behind what it is that they have to say. They’ll tell you the poor decisions they made in their lives and the opportunities that they didn’t take and the chances that they didn’t— they didn’t have enough courage to grasp and the sacrifices they fail to make. There’s nothing mysterious about it. And their own experiences teach them full well that they pathologized the relationship they have with the nature of reality.

Well, that’s a terrible thing. Well, and Cain is dreadfully unhappy. He’s unhappy because nothing he ever wants happens. And that's partly because he doesn’t really want it, because if he really wanted, he’d make the right sacrifices. And the salt is rubbed into his wounds by the existence of his brother, for whom everything seems simple—but of course really isn’t. Cain goes to complain to God.

And I had to read three or four different translations of these particular verses to figure out what this meant, and he says, “What in the world is going on here? I’m working myself to the bone; I’m sacrificing things left, right, and center. Everything I touch turns to dirt; everything turns against me. Like, what’s up with the nature of reality?” Cain’s essential vulnerability is revealed and exacerbated by his pathological attitude towards his own actions.

God says to him, essentially: “Sin is a predatory cat that crouches at your doorway and leaps on you at will. But if you only wanted to, you could master it.” And that is absolutely the last thing that Cain wants to hear because if things are going from bad to worse for you and you’re playing a causal role in it, there’s nothing more horrible that someone can do to you than reveal to you in a way that you can’t deny that you’re entirely complicit in your own demise. And that’s exactly what God does to Cain.

And so, what does Cain do? Well, the logical thing would be to listen because if the structure of reality itself tells you something, it’s best to listen since there’s no way out of it. But that’s not what Cain does. He’s so incensed by his essential vulnerability—compromised and exacerbated by his failure to make the appropriate sacrifices and to conduct himself appropriately—that he decides then and there, number one, to destroy his ideal, to reduce the tension that he feels when that ideal exists as a contrast point, and number two, to destroy the favorite son of God.

And so he goes out into the field and kills Abel. And God comes along and says: “Where’s my favorite son?” And Cain says: “I killed him.” And it’s so interesting to me that that story is placed... Really, it’s the third story in the Old Testament. It’s with the archaic stories, and it’s a story that reveals, as far as I can tell, that there are two essential patterns of reaction to the self-conscious vulnerable conditions of existence.

And one is a humble approach to infinity with determined attempts to make the appropriate sacrifices. The other is arrogance, resentment, the keeping of everything good for oneself, and the degeneration of the soul into something that’s homicidally murderous. Well, the story doesn’t stop there. It gets really compressed in this part. And that's perhaps because some of it’s being lost with the passages of time.

But the next thing that happens is that, well, God doesn’t punish Cain. And you think, that’s kind of strange. I mean, in the whole Old Testament, God, he’s punishing people left, right, and center. Why not Cain? And you think, well, he marks Cain, and he says to the people who are around that they should leave him alone because he’s been marked by God as to be left alone.

And the reason for that, I think— and this is something that’s reflected in our legal system—is that murder promotes revenge. And revenge destroys societies. And so God puts an end to the situation right there and then by telling people that despite the fact that Cain has committed a terrible crime, there will be no retribution. Cain goes off and gets married, and he has a number of generations of offspring.

If you insult a member of the first generation of Cain’s offspring, he doesn’t kill you; he kills seven of you. And if you insult a member of the second generation of Cain’s offspring, he doesn’t kill seven of you; he kills seven times seven of you. And then on down the road of the offspring of Cain is Tubal Cain. And Tubal Cain is the artificer of weapons of war.

And this stunningly brilliant story says in its incredibly compressed fashion that the motivation that drives the commission of the worst human atrocities is an inevitable social consequence of the refusal of the self-conscious individual to make the sacrifices appropriate to establishing a harmonious life and their consequent degeneration into a kind of murderous and resentment-filled rage, propagating endlessly through its variations in society until everything comes to an end. And the next story is the flood. And it’s not surprising, because if things go from bad to worse long enough, everything falls.

And it's a terrifying story. I didn’t understand that story. I didn’t understand that story for years. It wasn’t really until I read Alexandr Solzhenitsyn that I developed, I think, the cognitive capacity then to even understand what the story meant. Because Solzhenitsyn said in his Nobel Prize accepting speech: “A single person who stops lying can bring down a tyranny,” which is a stunning thing to say.

But I would also say something that’s been amply demonstrated in the 20th century because we have historical examples of people who did precisely that. Gandhi did it; Václav Havel did it; Nelson Mandela did it. Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago was definitely one of the ax blows that brought down the Soviet Union. A stunning achievement for a person who started writing that book by memorizing it when he was a concentration camp victim, this far away from starvation.

It shows you, as clearly as anything possibly can, how powerful the human spirit can be if it's willing to take on the obligation of its relationship with the divine. And also how terrible things can become if the responsibility of that burden is not shouldered. Now, it’s no wonder, as far as I can tell, that people don’t think this way because thinking this way is catastrophic in a way.

Because the burden it places on the individual is so extreme that it’s almost unbearable, while in a... But that’s exactly why it is in Genesis, to begin with, that Adam hides—he becomes conscious of his own vulnerability. It’s like he thinks: Well, a creature such as I, I could never bear such a burden.

Well, there’s a lot more to people than meets the eye, and the only way I learned that was by looking at people’s and my own—people’s and my own capacity for evil. Because I started to realize that we regard ourselves as narrow little beings in a particular kind of box, and there’s real comfort in that, although there’s tremendous limitation.

You cannot see your way out of that box until you know. Well, what I teach my students—I teach them about Nazi Germany, and I try to make them understand that there’s an overwhelming probability if they were in Nazi Germany in the 1930s that they would have been perpetrators and Nazis. An overwhelming probability. And if they can't accept that—because it's a historical fact—they have absolutely no idea who they are.

Now, imagining yourself as a Nazi perpetrator is an unbearably terrifying thing to do. But I don’t believe that you can do... I don’t think that you have any insight whatsoever into your capacity for good until you have some well-developed insight into your capacity for evil.

Because people can tell you till they’re blue in their face about your capacity for good; it just sounds like... It sounds like wishful thinking. It sounds like the sort of thing that an advertiser might tell you on TV. It’s just too good to be true, and I don’t think people believe it.

But I think that if you tell people that, you know, in the cold dark corners of their mind, there are motivations that are so terrible that they would traumatize themselves if they were ever revealed, that everyone knows at some level of analysis that that's absolutely true. You think... There’s evidence throughout history that it’s possible for people to be enlightened. And you’d think since enlightenment is viewed as the medication for vulnerability and death, that everybody would be struggling as hard as they possibly could to be enlightened, if such a state exactly and precisely exists.

But if the barrier to enlightenment is the development of self-consciousness of the individual human's infinite capacity for evil, then you can be immediately convinced about why enlightenment is in such short supply. When I finished my first provisional examination of the sorts of motivations that drove people to set up concentration camps and to torture people terribly in those camps, I came to a terrible conclusion.

It was a conclusion that I think, in some ways, was the worst thing that had ever happened to me—maybe intellectually and morally. I thought I came to understand why it is that people depended on their group identity and their cultural identification because that helped protect themselves from their own vulnerability. You have to believe things because you just don’t know everything, so you have to believe things. They fill in the gaps; the beliefs fill in the gaps.

If the beliefs are stripped from you, then your defenses against the infinite are stripped. And it’s no wonder that people will defend their beliefs. I thought, well, you do if you're too involved in defending your beliefs; you’re going to be willing to kill other people in their defense. And we’re so technologically powerful now that we can no longer be willing to kill other people in the defense of our own beliefs because the time for that has passed.

And I realized, well, if you don’t stand up for your beliefs, you leave yourself bereft. You’re open to the depredations of the infinite. That’s equally intolerable; it seems to leave no way out. There is a way out, you know, and I think it’s the way out that genuinely religious people have tried to offer humanity for thousands and thousands of years.

And the way out of the conundrum posed to you by your reliance on ideological beliefs and your vulnerability in the face of the unknown is the development of a truly integrated and powerful character. And that’s an individual development, and it means constant confrontation with things you don’t understand and constant attempts to ensure that your character is composed of truth and solidity rather than deceit.

And to make of yourself something that’s built on a rock and not predicated on sand. And the thing is, it’s one thing to tell people that because maybe they should take care of themselves, but I don't know if that's enough to tell people because they don’t take care of themselves that well.

But it’s a completely other thing to say: "Look, you know, every time you make a pathological moral decision, you move the world one step closer to complete annihilation." And I absolutely believe that. I think the historical evidence is crystal clear. And I also think that every time you make an appropriate moral decision, and you manifest moral courage in the face of your own vulnerability, then you move the world one step farther from the brink.

And every... that’s the case for every single person. You know, Solzhenitsyn said, drawing on his Eastern Orthodox Christian background: "Every single person is the center of the world." As center of the world—not ‘the’ center of the world. The world is a complicated place. It can have all sorts of centers; it's hard to believe that you might be one of them, but everything about human existence is hard to believe.

The fact that it’s here at all is hard to believe; the nature of it’s hard to believe. Everything that human beings do is so ridiculous and remarkable that it’s consistently and constantly unfolding miracle. The idea that each of you might be a center of the cosmos, in that infinite admixture of ridiculousness and absurdities, is hardly more than one more ridiculous thing to swallow.

Well, I'll summarize, I guess I said that tragedy is a precondition for being. Being is the interplay between the finite and the infinite. And in that interplay, there’s tragedy. And there’s no way out of that. Evil is something different. Evil is the conscious attempt to make the conditions of existence more pathological than they have to be.

And it’s motivated by conscious intent. The motivations arise because people pay a terrible price for their self-conscious awareness. And that awareness is their awareness of their vulnerability. And that is a terrible thing to be aware of. That vulnerability can be confronted forthrightly, accepted, and the appropriate decisions made. Alternatively, people can retreat into their own rationalistic arrogance and attempt to deceive themselves and everyone else about the nature of their own existence and about the nature of reality.

That pathway leads to nothing but destruction. I think that there’s good reason to assume that it’s too late in our developmental course as a species for that path to be acceptable anymore because we’re too powerful. And if too many people stay on that path, we’re going to do ourselves in.

So I would say as we've become more technologically powerful, an increasing moral burden is being placed on each of us. It matters, to the destiny of the cosmos, whether or not you get your moral act straight. And I don’t mean that in a trivial way. I believe that that’s as close to an empirical fact as anything that can be demonstrated.

And I also believe that’s as terrifying a thing to consider as anything you could possibly imagine. And maybe it’s too much to ask of people. But you know our great religious traditions do continually remind us that inside every human being there’s a spark of divinity. And that idea is a precondition for our entire system of law.

There’s always the possibility that it’s true. And if it’s true, it means that there is an infinite avenue of potential that lies open to every single person. And that the ability to transform the terrible conditions of reality into something not only acceptable but worthy of celebration actually lies within our grasp. An alternative to that—the alternative to that—is the continual generation of a kind of hell that’s so incomprehensibly awful that, by any reasonable person’s standards, it has to be regarded as something to avoid.

That’s all I have to say about that.