The Mystery of Evil: Conclusion
(One day after reading news about the separation and trafficking of children, refugees fleeing violence in concentration camps at the border, mass beheadings by terrorists, the lynching museum in Alabama, sexual abuse of women and children by persons in public trust, destruction of the conditions of life to increase private profits, I was overwhelmed by the evil being done by humans to humans. How can this be, I asked? And how am I complicit? I began to think that evil is in our bones and cannot be overcome. When I want to think I write. I wrote an essay on evil for which this is the conclusion.)
In my essay, I commented on evil in this world linked with needless violence and cruelty that molded people into things for use and disposal. I considered religions and the myths they use to understand why and how demons overcome our better angels. Then I considered how the philosophers aided by science attempt to explain evil in our nature. Although the myths and the arts describe the what of evil in all its tangible horror and although philosophy and science provide insights into the why and how, evil remains a mysterium tremendens.
Evil is stamped into our nature. It emerges from our human existence as a conscious organism adapting to our changing environment and adapting the environment to ourselves (thus, changing it). It is at the juncture of our need to protect ourselves by dominating the forces outside us and of our capacity for cooperation and tolerance by uniting the powers among us. Being human is a tension between spirit and world, past and future, real and ideal, person and community, and, yes, good and evil.
Our species grew in small groups of families with habits and rules handed down by ancestors to protect themselves from outside dangers. Tribes developed their own language and myths to support those rules. Humanity awakening in reflective consciousness learned the power of collaboration not only within the tribe but between tribes. Cities and civilizations grew with shared cultures, myths, and even wealth yet also with the shared tribal instinct of protection from and domination of outside forces. Reflective consciousness is the source of speech and all the symbolic activities by which we salute and engage in each other. It is also the source by which we build the walls and enforce the habits of fear of gods and hatred of strangers.
Our ongoing dialogue with others in our world through symbolic forms embodies the tension of our existence. Entering into dialogue opens us to other ways of observing and making the world. For the moment we put on others’ perspectives and roles. We share consciousness and presence. By symbolic forms, the memes of culture like words, propositions, models, laws, figures on which we focus, we appreciate and share the peripheral but fundamental background, intention, style that constitutes our person, character, or soul.
But danger! We easily shift attention from the less visible context and background of enjoined speech to the visible figures of speech as though they speak for themselves as absolute truths. The same forms we use to unite with others become tools of division: bludgeons for power over others. We deem others as adversaries and losers rather than co-actors who win together. The symbol expressed dominates the unexpressed spirit of the conversation in a winner take all or zero-sum situation.
Evolving corporeal reflective consciousness is the garden of the knowledge of good and evil. In our tensional existence we both advance and retreat. Progress is possible and discernable in history but so is regress. We have stumbled upon the tools of both creation and destruction. We can blame the gods or the stars for making us this way. Or we can accept who we are and take responsibility for choosing progress towards a more expansive and enlightened consciousness, a higher power that includes all humans, living beings, and the earth itself as potential partners to advance our species. If we take this alternative, winning a debate or an election never stops the conversation. It is just a momentary pause to reframe it so everybody wins.
The atrocities and cruelties of evil stem from us when we confine ourselves in a closed society which remains in a protective dominating mode of blind obedience that cannot or refuses to transcend its fixed rules and infallible values, its fear of strangers, motivated by hate of enemies and caught in a cycle of vengeance. We tout the supremacy of our race. We remake our religions into cults. We turn our economy into an ideology. We make our words, our laws, and our politics into idols. We wage religious wars because we believe in our righteousness. We wage political economic wars because we believe we are chosen by destiny. We cringe at the cruelties of terrorists or the crudities of political opponents and react in kind because, no longer joined in consciousness as cooperators, we do not understand the context and background of their actions.
The only way we will understand is to speak with them and hear their stories of suffering and hopes. Only then do we have the possibility from moving from reaction to action, power over to power with.
Recognizing myth as symbolic or as an extended metaphor that embodies the context, background, and intentionality of our human activities in the world, we might want to consider a new myth for our post-Enlightenment scientific and politically revolutionary world. This new myth does not destroy the ancient and contemporary stories that still function to give human individuals and societies identity and meaning. The emerging new myth combines and transcends all our stories by retelling them so they point to the invisible context and background of us all as conscious, transcending, and hopeful corporeal souls. This new myth needs to be a story by us all, a story of possibilities and aspirations for the ascent of us all.
The paleontologist poet priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was criticized by his Church and prevented from publishing his thoughts on the phenomenon of humanity in evolution because of his unorthodox treatment of creation and of evil. He envisioned the human acquired ability for reflective consciousness in knowing the universe as an infinite progressive realization of truth. Humanity, he poetized, is the universe becoming conscious of itself. In the Anthropocene Age there is transcendence from geosphere to biosphere to noosphere, from matter to life to mind.
He confronted evil firsthand as a stretcher bearer in World War I and in the Nazi occupation of France in World War II. Yet he chose to believe that, despite the evidence of evil, there was a meaning to matter, life, and mind in the evolution of humanity which is yet unfinished. He envisioned the human struggle to Infinity that he called Omega Point whose presence the universe experiences in our human desire and ascension towards Infinity, should we dare to reach for it.
What Teilhard de Chardin did for me is to fashion the beginning of a new grand story as a context to our modern and transmodern era. I see that story in the background of the scientist philosopher David Deutsch who picked up Chardin’s language of Omega Point. I discern it in new sci-fi films and fantasy novels. I perceive it in the theologies and struggles for liberation, especially by the youth who point to a vibrant future for humanity and the world. I discover the myth driving the accounts by new historians of human associations confronting and conquering crises including their accounts of imperfect political heroes focusing on the highest human potential for equality, freedom, and public happiness. For Chardin, expanding universal consciousness, personally and communally, is the Spirit of Life and Love.
Most of all I find the myth in Martin Luther King’s aspiration for the Beloved Community. The Beloved Community, when and wherever we find and create it, is an antidote to the political depression we are feeling while confronting the evil in this world. It requires not just personal choice, but political decision-making, the promises of the age of intellectual enlightenment and political revolution towards a democratic republic.
We can trace the evil in the world to a flaw in our nature, a contradiction in our existence, a cognitive defect in our mind, an original sin in our soul. Whether this is a fatal flaw or a felix culpa (happy sin) depends on human collective decisioning that invents and directs our history. Our history will be the ideal we choose to make real in our thinking and action.
An enjoyable rendition of the myth of good and evil written by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman was recently made into a TV series by Neil Gaiman called Good Omens. It is a retelling of the ancient Judeo-Christian myth that for a long time undergirded Western society. It is the story of the angel Aziraphale sent by the Archangel Michael and the demon Crowly sent by Fallen Archangel Lucifer who become friends and prevent the Antichrist Adam from permitting the Four Horsemen to destroy the world. This of course pissed off Righteous Michael and Revengeful Lucifer who vainly recalled their ambassadors for sparing the world and living happily ever after.
One moral of the story is to avoid both righteousness and vengeance. Another is to keep a sense of humor by never taking any word, law, dogma, or myth too seriously. Still another is to make friends from enemies despite the authorities. And maybe one more is to keep the tension going because that’s what human existence is: a mystery of good and evil in the world.
