Yin and Yang, good and evil, pursuing one another eternally, each dependant on the other for its existence. Is this interpretation of reality valid?
The concept of Evil, like so many concepts that are defined by usage, is not well understood in its abstract sense. Appeals to etymology are of little benefit, since usage is what reveals the common understanding of a term. For this reason I attempt a semantic definition using linguistic comparisons that I hope the reader will confirm as valid.
Let us propose a relationship that spans a spectrum of well-being; good - bad - evil. Note the following examples:
Generosity - Greed - Theft
Comfort - Pain - Torture
Truth - Ignorance - Lies
Life - Death - Murder
Love - Indifference - Malevolence
Order - Dilapidation - Vandalism
And finally, in relationship to evil;
To Resist - To Acquiesce - To Promote
The armchair philosopher will doubtless object and cite special circumstances where Pain is not bad, where Death is preferable to Life and where, in the economic sense, Greed is good. I would counter by arguing that Death is only preferable to Life where Pain has made it so, Pain is only of benefit where it prevents greater Pain, and the concept that Greed is good exists purely to justify a system whose vice is the ‘unequal sharing of blessings’.
Among the many definitions of Good, one might be ‘that which is beneficial’. If this is the definition on which we fix, then an appropriate definition of Bad might be ‘that which is not beneficial’. In this paradigm Evil would be defined as ‘the obstruction/nullification of benefit’. The reader may well find different ways to describe this relationship, but it is likely that he will simply be substituting synonyms of his choice to the same end.
Thus we come to the initial assertion in the title of this piece, that while Good and Bad may be thought of as impersonal, Evil is the mark of Agency, the evidence of a Malevolent Mind. Some readers may object that the list of examples has been cherry-picked for the purpose of making this assertion. They may posit other examples such as ‘satiation - hunger - starvation’ where the Evil is also impersonal. We will deal with cases such as this in the conclusion. For the time being it is enough to accept that Evil is often the mark of agency/mind/intent, and that this is predominantly the usage of the concept.
Take the comparison ‘comfort - pain - torture’. We are willing to accept that an amount of comfort and pain in life is the common lot of all, and the balance between these is often the result of random forces. Torture however is always the result of a malevolent agency. In the interests of balance therefore is it not reasonable to ask ‘since torture is the destruction of comfort, what is its source?’ If mind is involved in the destruction of good by means of the promotion of bad, and this is regarded as a superlative of bad - Evil, then to what can we credit the creation of Good?
It is only in this epoch that there is resistance to the destination of this logic. It is only now that it is asserted that the thing which requires agency to dismantle, requires no agency to assemble. From a semantic point of view the sequence Good - Bad - Evil is incomplete. The full sequence must be Creator - Good - Bad - Evil, as no other proposed concept fits the requirement of symmetry in respect of core meaning and the possession of mind/agency.
We accept without argument the existence of Evil. Its embodiments are the paedophile, the racist, the serial killer, the rapist, the vandal, the war criminal etc. While various philosophers argue that Good, Bad and Evil are merely cyphers, and child murderers categorise their exploits as ‘experiments in existentialism’, these are the outliers, the vanishingly small minority. Since Cultural Relativism, otherwise known as Majority View ethics, is the foundation of the modern, liberal, democratic paradigm, these philosophers are out of step with a world that contains International War Crime Tribunals, police forces, prisons and parking fines. While the maxim of Aleister Crowley ‘do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law’, has a certain appeal to the ego, it is by definition Evil.
Identifying Evil is an exercise in self preservation. The charlatan, the confidence trickster, the hacker deploying ransomware are all Evil individuals, seeking to obstruct/nullify benefit in your life for the purpose of creating it in theirs. In a society that refrains from approbation this may seem excessively judgemental, so we are tempted to merely state that their actions are Evil, for the sake of our comfort. There is a problem in this liberal view. While we may not be able to identify them with absolute certainty, there are most certainly Evil individuals. To illustrate this from nature; a person may be accidentally thrown from a horse and die, and this is a case of ‘death by animal’, but a person may also be hunted by a rogue tiger and killed. Both died, but the cause of their death was qualitatively different, as is the death of a person randomly stabbed in a drunken brawn, compared with a child abducted and murdered; the difference between Bad and Evil is real and correspondingly larger precautions are justified to avoid becoming a victim of Evil.
Returning to the objection that ‘starvation’ in the sequence ‘Satiation - Hunger - Starvation’ does not require agency or mind, we must accept that refusal to act is an act in itself. On a planet that can supply the needs of all its inhabitants, the starvation of any is Evil. The fact that ecological collapse may soon render such starvation inevitable is no less Evil, since the system that produced the collapse pursued Greed, often by means of Theft, thus resulting in Starvation, and is therefore Evil in itself.
Having examined the end of the sequence, let us return to its start. Once again the position of the materialist philosopher who seeks to explain away the need for a first cause is a minority one, the majority view is that there is a source of Good, the Creator. The only logical course of action is to seek the Creator out, bearing in mind that such a search should be alert to the marks of the malevolent mind, since much that is branded as Good turns out to be Evil. Should we be concerned that Evil may overwhelm Good and the Creator too? Once again logic assures us that this cannot be the conclusion. Since the Creator is greater than the creation, it follows that the Good that has been created is less than the sum of the powers of the Creator. By extension therefore, no matter how cunning the Evil, it cannot exhaust the resources of the Creator since Evil is an obstructive act, not a creative one. Any innovation that Evil seems to create is merely a perversion of that which was already created.
The premise of Yin and Yang, quoted at the outset, is not valid. It is not necessary for bad to exist in order to have good, and Evil is certainly not required. To understand this it is only necessary to seek the Creator.
No comments:
Post a Comment