Evil--What Is Meant?

 

Rollo Romig, a New York journalist, wrote an article for The New Yorker on July 25, 2012, titled WHAT DO WE MEAN BY “EVIL”?

 

For brevity,  I will selectively quote what interest me from his article and then comment on what I select.

 

Romig: “What does it mean, in the twenty-first century, to call a person like James Holmes ‘evil.’ In centuries past, ‘evil’ was used to describe all manner of ills, from natural disasters to the impulse to do wrong. Today it’s used mostly to emphasize the gravity of a crime trading on the term’s aura of religious finality. The meaning of ‘evil’ has become increasingly unsettled even as it has narrowed, yet the word has proved to be an unshakable unit in our moral lexicon. Why does ‘evil’ persist?

 

My response: if evil is used mostly today to describe crime, that is okay but not the last word. If people deny that there are more should and should nots for us to live by, then we can do evil, and not be condemned for being evil, and that is quite satisfying for wrongdoers.

 

If the term is falling out of favor, in part that is because in this postmodern age, no one wants to believe humans are born in sin, that the devil exists, that group-living increases sinfulness, that collectivist predominant motives render people self-loathing, and hatred of self, others, God and the world leads people to misbehave, and that is the origin of societal evil.

 

Evil is used because people intuitively call it what it is, and they know we are born wicked, and the Devil actually exists and runs this world, and that is why evil persists, because it exists, and the Dark Couple have this world in the palm of their hands.

 

Romig: “In the book ‘Evil In Modern Thought,’ from 2002, Susan Neiman traces philosophy’s struggle with evil over several hundred years. The book is structured around two events that Neiman considers the ‘central poles’ of the modern era, both of which threw philosophers’ understanding of evil into confusion: Lisbon and Auschwitz. In 1755, at the dawn of the Enlightenment, an earthquake destroyed Lisbon, then one of the major cities in Europe. In the era before that disaster, evil, was thought to come in three varieties—natural, metaphysical, or moral—and inquiry into the concept of evil was dominated by theodicy, which is the attempt to reconcile and good and omnipotent deity with evil in the world. As Neiman shows, theodicy never really recovered from the tremors. Such vast, meaningless destruction made it much more difficult to think of natural and metaphysical calamities as acts of God. Few but religious fundamentalists would continue to use the morally inflected word ‘evil’ to describe natural disasters.”

 

My response: Dennis Prager offers a plausible answer to theodicy—how does all-knowing, all-loving, all-powerful God allow evil to exist in His world. Prager believes some things that happen to people are just good or bad luck, without any explanation, and have nothing to do with God’s intervention. Just as God allows evil to exist so that free will is meaningful, so God allows for luck, chance and the unexplainable natural evils and sufferings to occur, and they cannot be explained away. These are just mysteries we live with while not losing or faith in God’s kindness and square-dealing with us. This religious fatalism is not a copout or failure to deal with this skeptical or scientific criticism from the atheists and secularists. Rather it is an honest response. The moral mind cannot comprehend the laws governing the infinite and its Creator, so these things remain mysteries for now, and perhaps forever.

 

Metaphysical evil is spiritual evil, and moral evil is downstream from that practiced by humans in the world.

 

To refuse to any longer refer to natural disasters as evil is fine, and there is thus much less superstition in the world.

 

Romig: “The problem of evil became a secular one, and the philosophy of evil came to focus on the moral category: the evil that men do. In the post-theodicy years that followed Lisbon, Neiman writes, attempts to understand evil feel into three strains: Hegel tried to explain evils as necessary steps in the march of history; Nietzsche argued evil is a problem we brought on ourselves, by inventing moral categories that don’t reflect the ways  of the natural world; while a third view insisted that evil was a clear moral category of its own, defined by acts of intentional malevolence. But just like old theodicies, these three ways of thinking, Neiman argues, were devastated by the second main event of her study: Auschwitz, a word she uses for the collective horrors of the Second World War.”

 

My response: The problem of evil is spiritual, moral, sociological, and biological. Hegel had a point, and Nietzsche talked nonsense about morals. Moral evil is intentional, but the horrors of the Second World War should give anyone pause, that evil is more than just a whimsical, arbitrary social construct.

 

Romig: “ Since Auschwitz,  Evil Studies is a discipline in tatters, particularly the school of thought that argues that evil is born of malevolence. As Neiman writes, ‘Precisely the belief that evil actions require evil intentions allowed totalitarian regimes to convince people to override moral objections that might otherwise have functioned’—heinous acts are too easily rationalized by loyalty to supposed higher values, and personal feelings of guilt are too unreliable. The rise of brain science and genetics has thrown further doubt on what intention and will even mean. Few philosophers of any school wish to confront the problem of evil directly anymore; it’s a concept confused by old arguments that have been overtaken by events.”

 

My response: evil studies should not be a discipline in tatters. Good is good and recognizable as such and evil is evil and is detectable and labeled accurately as such. Evil actions do require evil intentions and because mass-movementized, collectivized people in the 20^th century under monstrously cruel totalitarian governments ordered the masses to participate or stand by and allow unspeakable crimes against humanity in no way excuses each member of a cruel society. WE are always responsible for our sins of omission and commission. people are selfish, cunning cowards that go along to get along, and do the monstrous evil or do not stand against it, so they do not become a victim if the machine devouring the innocent. The human conscience is a frail flower of short life span, and people reconcile themselves quickly and easily to what their superiors demand of them.

 

I am not anti-science, but Jordan Peterson is a psychologist and social scientists that believes we are born fallen, and that evil exist and is identifiable and blameworthy. He does not accept that evil is some nebulous concept. We need not be confused, and events of the 20^th century should prove to us that are realistic and rational that evil exists spiritually, in society and in the bestial heart of each human demon.

 

Romig: “Despite the confusion of philosophers, the word ‘evil’ is still in common use. Neiman herself is understandably reluctant to offer a single, narrow definition of her own for what ‘evil’ means today, but what she does suggest is a useful description of what effect evil has: calling something ‘evo;’, she writes, ‘is a way of marking the fact that it shatters our trust in the world.’ Evil is both harmful and inexplicable. Evil is both harmful and inexplicable, but not just that; what defines as evil act is that it is permanently disorienting for all those touched by it.”

 

My response: here we have skeptical, relativistic, secular philosophers, most of them leftist and atheist, talking about evil as some fictious, nonexistent fantasy abstraction from the dark ages of Christian origin. I like Peterson; he fines evil as human cunning about being personally vulnerable, so one then knows how to hurt and inflict senseless needless pain and suffering upon others. That is evil: it exists, and we are addicted to it, enjoying have it done to us, as well as thrilled to do it to our victims. We are twisted complex creatures: we do seek pleasure and want to avoid pain, but we often also act in ways that increase pain and suffering without cause or benefit upon others and ourselves making the world a much worse place, and that is what evil is, and it does shatter our trust in the world. If we love ourselves, God, and others, we can bring joy, love, happiness, and honorable pleasure to the world, and this makes up for much of evil that has happened to the world.