010 Maps of Meaning: 10 Figuring Evil (TVO)

As I've mentioned to you before, each of the three aspects of experience—so the things you know, the things you don’t know, and the fact of yourself—have a very ambivalent underlying structure, both positive and negative. So that the things you don’t know are interesting and compelling, in the sources of new information, but also the source of the things that undermine you, both physically and mentally.

And the things you know, of course, your culture disciplines you and shapes you into a full person. But also, at exactly the same time, molds you and crushes you in a particular direction rather than any of the directions you might have gone in. And then finally, with regards to the individual, we spent a substantial amount of time discussing the individual’s capability and capacity to make order out of chaos and sometimes to make chaos out of order in the service of a higher order.

And that’s all to the good, but just like culture and nature have their negative aspects, so do the individual. And I think, personally, this is where Christian mythology, in particular, comes into its own. I think of all the major religions, Christianity has the most thoroughly developed what you might describe as a formal model of evil. And that model isn't part of the canonical writings of Christianity, say encapsulated in the Bible, but part of a cloud of sort of natural mythology and storytelling that surrounds the canonical writings.

So, you could say that although Christianity and Buddhism have spent a substantial amount of time developing a representation of the hero, Christianity, in particular, has also spent a substantial amount of time developing a formal portrait of the figure that stands in opposition to the hero. And I think the most appropriate term for that figure, who takes multiple forms in mythology, is the adversary. Because the adversarial spirit is a spirit that stands in opposition to everything. Stands in opposition to nature, stands in opposition to culture, and most specifically stands in opposition to that aspect of the human being that’s both exploratory and creative.

Now, the last time we talked, I had a chance to describe to you how the figures of the adversarial brothers emerged naturally at the end of Genesis as a coda to the story. Right? Adam and Eve develop self-consciousness; they develop knowledge of their own mortality and death. And as the primordial parents of humanity, their first children take the form of the hostile brothers. Which is to say that if you're the child of nature, the child of culture—this sort of ultimate parents—then as an individual, you take two forms: a positive form and a negative form.

And the negative form is characterized in many ways by the kind of absolute hatred of the good, hatred of the positive form. And I think that you can’t understand the full human propensity for evil without considering more than the territoriality—more than the innate territoriality of human beings. So if you look at animals, well, animals are territorial, and they fight to preserve their territory, and it’s a rational struggle. They're fighting for resources and for a place that they can operate and live in and reproduce in efficiently.

But human beings are substantively different from that in that their agonistic conflict, their aggression, often seems to be motivated by something more akin to the pure desire for destruction rather than for any rational end whatsoever. And so from that perspective, I would say, as an example, the fact that Hitler ended up committing suicide in a bunker beneath Germany’s capital at the end of the Second World War, when Berlin was in flames, when all of Germany was in flames, and when his country was completely defeated after tens of millions of people had died in the conflict, including, of course, the 7 million or so people that were killed in the Holocaust.

The normal mode of interpretation of that would be, what a terrible defeat for Hitler. But an equally valid, and I think an equally valid prima facie argument—and one I think that’s actually more valid—is that it wasn’t a defeat for Hitler at all; it was precisely what he was aiming at right from the beginning because his mode of being was intensely adversarial. And I would also say that it’s certainly possible that the full nature of these motivations weren't even necessarily clear to him as they unfolded across time during the Second World War, no more than the full motivations of any human being are necessarily accessible to them as they act out whatever it is that they act out.

So Carl Jung says, for example, that we act out great mythological stories. That doesn’t necessarily mean you know the story; it just means you act it out. So, for example, you see people whose lives are repetitive bouts of tragedy, and what they're acting out is a tragic story. And they know it insofar as they're actually acting it out, but they don’t necessarily have an explicit model of the relationship between their patterns of behavior and the constantly tragic outcome they produce.

Well, that doesn’t even necessarily mean that what they're doing isn't voluntary. Because things can be voluntary even if you don’t understand them fully. There's an aspect to the human psyche that’s a “nest of vipers,” so to speak, because you can’t necessarily trust what you see. And that means not only when you're looking at someone else, say, but even when you're looking in the mirror. You can’t be sure that what you say you're doing is exactly what you're doing. Your motivations aren't transparent, and they may not even be clear.

So I suppose the idea that lurks behind this formalization is that freedom of choice is such a good that one of its subsidiary necessities, which is that there has to be a polar distinction between good and evil, is worth having. Freedom is so important that it justifies the distinction between good and evil. And I think that’s a reasonable way to presume. It’s reasonable to presume that that’s the manner in which experience is actually structured, and there are complex reasons for that.

One would be that under the most optimal circumstances—which is something we’ll talk about as this proceeds to a close—that means, in a sense, you can have your cake and eat it too. Which means the potential existence of good and evil allows for freedom of choice. And then if the choice is always towards the good, then you have the benefits of freedom of choice plus the benefits of the good. The only price you have to pay is the constant possibility of evil.

It’s very much like the structure of Christianity. So you have the highest God whose highest son is Christ, but you have the figure of Satan lurking in the background, who’s also got a filial relationship with the highest God. And it makes for a confusing kind of theology because, in many situations, of course, Christ is identified specifically with God the Father, but Satan always lurks in the background, and his existential status is indeterminate. Because since God is everything, then it’s very difficult to make the case that the evil spirit isn't a derivative of God. It’s not an easy thing to get straightened out rationally.

And I think Milton, in Paradise Lost, has a very good attempt—good attempt—to explain exactly what this might mean, how there could be an overarching transcendent power and there could be two subordinate elements to that, one evil and one good, without destroying the idea that God, as such, is good and without eradicating the reality of evil. A very, very complex argument to make. Now, the notion of evil is also a very complex idea. So if you look at arguments that support atheism—and I've mentioned some of these, like Ivan’s argument in The Brothers Karamazov—where Ivan says, well, the world as such, experience as such, must be evil because it’s predicated on the blood of innocence, the suffering of children, the fact that there's vast injustices in the world is indicative that there's no such thing as a good God.

Or to speak in personified terms, is evidence that the structure of experience as such is untenable morally; it shouldn’t be. Because it’s predicated on suffering. Jeffrey Burton Russell, who’s written a whole series of books on the nature of evil, makes a very clear distinction between different categories of terrible events that I think help bring this into clarity. So imagine this: imagine first that it’s useful to make a distinction between tragedy and evil.

Okay, now tragedy is when the bad befalls the good. An earthquake is tragic, or disease is tragic. Now it’s easy to regard a disease or an earthquake as evil as well, but the problem with that is there doesn’t seem to be any motivation to it. And so it’s more likely, it’s more reasonable to think something like, well, people are vulnerable and have to be vulnerable in order to give existence a viewpoint. One of the consequences of their vulnerability is that they're susceptible to tragedy.

Okay, if their vulnerability is a precondition for being, then the fact that they're susceptible to tragedy isn't necessarily an evil; it’s just a consequence of their limitation. Then you say, well, what constitutes evil if you can’t put earthquakes and diseases and so forth into that category? Well, then it seems to be something more dependent on choice, which is the argument that Eliade is making. Say the world does all sorts of terrible things to people, but there are frequent—it's frequently the case that people act in such a way that make things worse rather than better. Right?

So if you look at the consequences of the rise to power of the Nazis, for example, it doesn’t seem reasonable to put the Nazi concentration camp in the same category from an ethical perspective as the earthquake. Because the earthquake is an emergent consequence of the rules that govern physical existence. Whereas the Nazi death camp is something that was planned. It didn't have to be; it seems to be an aspect of choice. And this seems to be the idea that’s lurking underneath both this mythology and Eliade’s comment on it.

It’s the mere fact that the world is terrible does not mean that it’s evil. But then, when you look at specifically human actions, there's this aspect of twisted choice that Frye also makes much of. He says if you look at the structure of human history and you try to explain why it has such a bloody and terrible course, it doesn’t seem sufficient just to attribute it, say, to the conditions of existence or to ignorance. It seems more like there's a force behind it, so to speak, manifest say in every individual.

But actually aiming at the suffering instead of just allowing it to happen or instead of not stepping in to stop it, but actually aiming at it. Now, so let’s take a look at the stories. And let’s take a look at the leading figures. So we know, for example, that the figure of Satan in Christianity is associated with a number of strange forms. Right? The first association we know of is that he’s associated with the… with the dragon in the Garden of Eden. Right?

So there's a profound ambivalence in Christianity about the meaning of the opening act of Genesis. Because on the one hand, you have when Adam and Eve are still profoundly unconscious; they don’t suffer. But they're profoundly unconscious, right? They're not self-conscious; they're not aware of themselves. So in many ways they're still animals.

So there's a Gnostic line of speculation. The Gnostics were a Christian sect that believed that redemption could at least partly be attained by understanding rather than just faith. The Gnostics believed that the serpent that tempted Adam and Eve towards self-consciousness was a more developed aspect of God than the God that had created Adam and Eve to begin with. Because the unconsciousness that characterized Adam and Eve was too underdeveloped to be perfect, and so they had to be tempted forward into a more fully developed consciousness.

And so although classical Christianity associated the serpent in the tree with Lucifer, who’s the bringer of light, who’s Satan, the Gnostic thread of reasoning said, well, wait a minute, it’s not that simple. Because, yeah, self-consciousness makes you aware of death and vulnerability and knocks you out into the profane world, but there's an aspect of it that looks like enlightenment.

And you know this already in your own lives because often, when you believe something and you're unconsciously convinced of the adequacy of that model, and then you find that it’s not sufficient, right? And so you crumble in disappointment. You put your trust in someone, and you find out, say, they're not worthy of that trust, and that the evidence that enlightens you breaks that frame of reference and makes you collapse. You think that’s a terrible thing; you can’t help but feel that as a real betrayal and as an act even of evil.

But then, a year later, two years later, you might look back, and, God, you know, I really needed that. I really needed that lesson because, as a consequence of learning that, I'm much more mature and much more likely to establish stable relationships. And so it’s easy to see that from one perspective, something can be terrible, and then from another it might not be terrible at all.

And even in classic Christianity, you get this strange ambivalence about the events in Genesis that runs something like this: Well, yes, it was an act of the most evil spirit, the spirit of enlightenment, the spirit of rationality, the bringer of light, Lucifer, to knock Adam and Eve out of their transcendental unconsciousness and to start history. It was an evil act.

But, on the other hand, it was also the precondition for the later emergence of Christ, and as far as the Christians are concerned, that’s the greatest event in history. So without this initial opening act, this tragic opening act, there’d be no reason for the whole redemptive story, and therefore, considered from the perspective of the total story, the opening tragedy cannot purely be considered evil. Very, very complicated line of reasoning.

Now, the other thing you see here—and I think this relates back to our initial map—is, and this also helps you understand the way people think. Now, I said already that it’s really easy to confuse tragedy and evil, right? Okay, so what that means is that it’s real easy to confuse the negative aspect of the unknown with evil. And likewise, it’s very easy to confuse the negative aspect of culture with evil—your own culture, the tyrannical aspect of it, or the culture of other people.

So it’s very easy, for example, for us to demonize the foreigner, and that’s basically because there's a part of our mind that presumes that all things that strike us negatively—all things that produce negative emotion on our part, like fear—are the same thing. So there's a blurry category of evil that’s all terrible natural things, all terrible social things, and then whatever nastiness the individual can generate among themselves.

It’s much more useful to draw a clear distinction between these different categories because that clarity of thought can help you focus in most specifically on those things that the individual is responsible for in terms of turning the world to waste. So Milton says this figure of Satan, Lucifer the light-bringer, always associated with rationality. Milton presents him as a remarkable creature, right? He’s the highest angel in God’s heavenly hierarchy; he’s Christ’s brother in a similar mythological vein; he’s the most powerful angel that ever lived.

So at least in the opening stages of this act, Satan is presented as something absolutely remarkable. Now the problem is here his very remarkableness starts to work against him. And what happens is that as he grows in power and strength in this heavenly hierarchy, he starts to become convinced that that omniscient himself—whatever that transcendent figure is—is unnecessary.

So the idea is that whatever Satan represents decides, because of his own pride, his own belief in his own sufficiency, that the transcendent can be eradicated from consideration. And the way Milton presents that is as a revolution in heaven, fundamentally. So imagine that the story is something like this. Well, George Kelly, way back in like 1955, noted that what human beings like more than anything else really when they get right down to it is to be right.

Why? Well, it’s a pain to be wrong, right? Because if you're wrong, then whatever structure that you're using to conjure up the world has to dissolve. But then you have to do a lot of really aggravating work, exploratory work, and creative work to put it back together. And during the time before you put it back together, then you're flooded with negative motivational states, right? You don’t know which way is up, metaphorically speaking.

So we don’t like to be—you don’t like not to be right. And so what does that mean? Well, psychologists know that people have a very strong confirmatory bias, which basically means that if you bring a frame of reference to bear on the world, the probability is very high that you will look for confirming evidence and you discount disconfirming evidence. Now the other thing that is characteristic of great figures of evil, like Satan, is the tendency to lie. So Satan is the prince of lies.

Now what does that mean exactly? So, T.S. Eliot wrote this poem called The Cocktail Hour. He talks about this woman who goes into psychiatric treatment. The woman says to the psychiatrist, "I’m telling you, I really, really hope there's something wrong with me because I'm having a miserable time of it. And as far as I can tell, there's only two options here. Either I’m okay and I’m having a miserable time because the world is terrible, which case there’s nothing I can do about it, or there’s something wrong with me at some level of analysis that I don’t really comprehend. And although that’s a painful option, I’m really hoping it’s true because if there's something wrong with me, possibly I can fix it. And if there's something wrong with the structure of the world, well, what's there to do about that?"

Often what you see in psychotherapy is a battle between those two perspectives going on in the minds of the client. That the client is in a situation where they're repetitively facing tragedy. They have a specific viewpoint about the world, but the viewpoint might be, well, when it comes right down to it, you really can’t trust other people. And they have all sorts of reasons for believing that: they abused as children, or they had a bad developmental history, a number of relationships that hadn't gone well. They have all the facts at their disposal to justify that particular perspective.

But the truth of the matter is that as long as they hold onto that belief and won’t let it go—and no wonder they won’t—they're gonna continue to suffer. And part of what you always do to someone in therapy is saying, you know, yeah, you got a pretty coherent view of the world and all that, and I can understand why you'd like to cram the whole world into that coherent perspective, but the truth of the matter is that as long as you hold onto that and won’t sacrifice it, won’t go through this terrible period of dissolution, it’s always gonna produce the same tragic consequences.

So as long as you hold onto your belief rigidly, everything around you is gonna go from bad to worse. Northrop Frye says with regards to such states that a "demonic fall," as Milton presents it, involves defiance of and rivalry with God rather than simple disobedience. And hence the demonic society is a sustained and systematic parody of the divine one associated with devils or fallen angels because it seems far beyond normal human capacities in its powers.

We read of ascending and descending angels on Jacob’s and Plato’s ladders, and similarly, there seem to be demonic reinforcements in heathen life that account for the almost superhuman grandeur of the heathen empires, especially just before they fall. Two particularly notable passages in the Old Testament prophets linked to this theme are the denunciation of Babylon in Isaiah 14 and of Tyre in Ezekiel 28. Babylon is associated with Lucifer, the morning star, who said to himself, "I will be like the Most High."

Okay, so let’s translate that into modern language and forget about Babylon. Let’s take the Soviet Union, for example, instead. And let’s say something like this: "I will be like the most high." Well, first of all, it’s not difficult to read Stalin into that from a personal perspective, but then it’s more complicated than that because you can’t blame the Soviet Union on Stalin. When the wall fell down, we know that one-third of East Germans were KGB informers. You can’t blame that on Stalin; you have to blame that on the one-third of the East Germans who were KGB informers.

Right? It’s this totalitarian presupposition—presumption—is distributed through the whole society. There's a leader and a hierarchy and all that, but they’re not the people to be identified with the fact of the totalitarian state. It’s distributed through the whole society, and it’s precisely this: it’s what I don’t know. I don’t need—I don’t need what I don't know. One of the things I really liked about this sort of Christian metaphysical take on the problem of evil is that it adopts strange first principles.

Like, if you're an empirical scientist, it’s very difficult to come to terms with the notion of free choice. Right? Because there are no deterministic models of free choice; we don’t know how that might occur. Although if it seems to be a reasonable phenomenological observation that if there’s anything true about existence, about the facts of existence as it’s subjectively construed, the fact that you seem to have the faculty of choice seems paramount or primary.

Now, one might say, well, that’s just a delusion, and we know that because our deterministic models have been so powerful. Or one might say, well, alternatively, we’re going to presume the subjective experience to be true and say, well, our deterministic models just aren't sophisticated enough. And there’s no real reason to choose between either of those on an a priori basis, right? They’re perhaps equally plausible.

And we also might note the deterministic perspective, of course, that if you go down far enough in your analysis of physical structures down to the quantum level, say, then deterministic models don’t hold at all. So determinism has its limits at the lower end, or higher resolution end, of physical inquiry. I have no idea what that might mean for free choice. It just means that our level of analysis—that deterministic models do not describe.

Christianity takes the stance that the subjective sense of freedom is accurate and then tries to build the world from that point. It presumes that’s in axiomatic principle. And so you have God, in Milton’s Paradise Lost, saying with regards both to Lucifer and to human beings who are fallen, he says, "Some will fall, he and his faithless progeny," speaking of human beings whose fault whose but his own ingrate. He had of me all he could’ve—I made him just and right, sufficient to have stood, though free to fall." I like that; I think that makes a fair bit of sense to me.

I started to understand this most particularly as a consequence of reading Carl Jung because Jung has this really interesting notion, and I think it’s tied to the idea in Genesis that as soon as Adam becomes self-conscious, he hides from God. So what if it was this? And you can take an evolutionary tack on this too. What if it was the case that if you never turned away from any phenomenological evidence, then you build a personality that would be strong enough to withstand tragedy?

What if that was the case? So the idea here being, let’s say you are the person who notes that his or her friends don’t exactly trust me. What do you do? Well, to hide away, you just walk away. And then, of course, you never learn anything. But let’s say, by contrast, you say, well, no, the first time you get any evidence that you're not 100% trusted, you say, look, I got this pang in my heart saying the communication between you and I is not exactly straight.

Now something’s going on here. Either you haven't got your frame of reference with regards to me right or there's something wrong with the way I'm looking at the world. Those are the options. So let’s have it out. You got this attitude, and it’s doing—it's hurting me. Tell me what you have to say, and I’ll tell you what I have to say, and we’ll exchange this pattern of information, and as a consequence, we’re both gonna walk away a little bit more well put together.

God says, yeah, people get disturbed and twisted and bent and warped, but that’s their own problem fundamentally because they have this capacity just to turn away. And as they turn away, they get weaker, and as they get weaker, the world gets worse around them because they can’t deal with it, and they keep making mistakes. And that’s a terrible consequence and all that. But if they just wouldn’t turn away to begin with, then there'd be no problem.

And there wouldn’t be any problem because the world would stop being tragic because the world’s tragic, right? I mean, there you are, little and vulnerable, and you know things can roll right over you. The world can demolish you. But the idea would be instead that you could handle it without becoming corrupted, and that would be sufficient. So the idea would be it’s a tough situation, all things considered, but it’s also an interesting, compelling, and beautiful one. And maybe that if you didn't turn away, the interesting and beautiful and compelling aspect would overwhelm the tragic aspect, and that would be fine.