Sydney J Harris's second lecture challenged the use of opposites such as good-evil, love-hate. Again, these are my comments and not his. We try to make sense of human experience, and either-or is a favorite mechanism. Many questionnaires work on the same principle, with yes-no answers. That a person might wish to answer both yes and no wrecks the system. I once did a careers test to tell me what career I ought to go for. Do you like to work indoors or outdoors? Choose one. I like both. Depending on my choice they would advise me to be either a banker or a lumberjack. The verdict of the questionnaire was that it could not advise me. I liked too many things. A scale of responses is more helpful, but on occasions whether I reply 1 or 5 may depend on circumstances.
So is a person good or evil? Do I love someone or hate someone? 'Love a little' or 'hate a little' seem perverse options within polarity. How can I answer until I know what good is, or what evil is? Do I even know what love is? It is these sort of questions that push me into qualitative research, which raises a similar question - do I know what quality is, and does my view agree with everyone elses?
Good and evil have been part of the human psyche for ever. Evil spirits are still blamed for misfortunes amongst educated folk. Children are killed because they are believed to be inhabited by an evil spirit - Victoria Climbie is the most famous example. Religions have promoted the idea, and pastors have connived with the murder of children so labelled. A girl I once taught, with some emotional fragility, was exorcised by a Christian priest, with disastrous consequences. This was to objectify evil into a separate entity and to deal with it by driving it away. Evil, and exorcism are the stuff of popular films, which portray a dualistic world in which evil forces reign. Children's stories sometimes depict battles between these evil forces and the child characters. Garth Nix's The Ragwitch, and his 'across the wall' books; Anthony Horowitz's Raven's Gate; Michelle Paver's Chronicles of Ancient Darkness. The truth is that there are no evil forces. Philip Pullman shows struggles with archangels, ghasts, harpies and other monsters, and depicting fortune telling as real, but set out of this world, within the imagination, with a story which sets the mind free of these fictions by establishing a commonwealth or cooperative of individual endeavour, rather than a kingdom led by an authority - that is self help rather than dependence. This at least is an honest journey.
Evil characters in fiction and especially in computer games, can be killed. War stories exult in enemy dead. In a computer game, the child zaps aliens, or enemies, or even Indians. This is educating them to kill. The Nazis became very good at it. Few Germans in 1945 felt guilty and the victorious allies had to treat their misperceptions as a disease. People, in real life, are mixtures of good and bad. All are capable of change, given circumstances that enable them to. Equally good people are capable of becoming monsters if circumstances drive them in this direction. Madmen rule only because others permit them to. We need to cultivate those others to resist injustice and to build a fairer society.
So, there is no devil and equally no God. There are only choices, crossroads to different journeys with different consequences.
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Thanks for the emailabout the last sentence, Sean. This is a hard one to unpick. In a blog like this I prefer not to sit on an academic fence, which is I think the agnostic position. I refer of course to objective evil forces, a personal devil, the evil forces of dualism. The key word is 'forces'. There are evil, people have evil intentions which is different, people do harmful acts to other people, but I see that as a choice and not a force acting upon them. People make choices for many reasons, mostly selfish/self-centred. My Bahai friends say 'We don't believe in the God you don't believe in either', and they may have a point.
On Jesus, there is not a great deal, I think, about the historical Jesus. I am content to believe that he existed, and that his teaching broke the mould inasmuch as it can still be glimpsed. I have no reason not to have great respect for the Jesus of history and wish we knew more about him. The Jesus of faith has taken over, the myth rather than biography. We will probably have to disagree on the details of that. But Jesus for me is still on a pinnacle, albeit a human one, a son of man. Certainly not a conman - but a powerful political and religious dissident. Messiah by the way is 'the anointed one', a king, and to my mind Jesus explicitly rejected that title in the Gospels, preferring the title 'son of man'. The Gospel writers disagreed.
Evil forces existing as the antagonists of good forces goes back to Zoroastrianism (the Magi of Matthew) and influenced Jewish and early Christian doctrine, which we call dualism. This is good-evil dualism, an evil empire and a good empire. God versus the devil comes from this (the Old Testament God/Satan is different). It was a fashion, I see no rational reason to view it as anything but myth. So without these polarised empires, there remain human choices, and choices have rationales. To have pity and charity is one choice, to be murderous is another. Societies have varied between being humanitarian and totalitarian. Obama or Stalin. I think we need humanitarian principles to help humankind move forward. T - the belief that human life is precious, even when people disagree over religion or politics.
I have to end, but this reply could go on and on. One last thing. This is me trying to make sense of things as I see them. You are entitled to your own journey and I never attempt to debunk other people's choices. Stephen B
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