Understanding Evil

Evil is present everywhere at all times and in every one, including ourselves. This is the consensus of some of our best thinkers. Shakespeare wrote: "The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together: our virtues would be proud, if our faiths whipped them not; and our crimes would despair, if they were not cherished by our virtues." William James, an American philosopher and psychologist wrote: There is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it positively refuses to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life's significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth." Depth psychologist C G Jung wrote: "The sad truth is that man's real life consists of a complex of inexorable opposites--day and night, birth and death, happiness and misery, good and evil. We are not even sure that one will prevail against the other, that good will overcome evil, or joy defeat pain. Life is a battelground. It always has been, and always will be; and if it were not so, existence would come to an end." So it pays to understand it. That is why I continue my reading of Zweig & Abrams' Meeting the Shadow.

According to the authors, while the personal shadow is an entirely subjective development, the experience of the collective shadow is an objective reality. We call this "evil". While the personal shadow may improve by moral effort, collective evil may not be touched by rational efforts and may thus leave us feeling utterly and completely powerless. For some, relief can only be found in faith and belief in religious dogma such that to the extent that such institutionalized values support those of their own, they may feel inoculated against the effects of evil. Different societies and religious systems have dealt with evil differently.

Amongst the aborigines of Australia, evil is always associated with the darkness of the night. When the sun goes down, evil is thought to lurk menacingly in the shadows. Their lives are governed by superstitions. Their literal shadow is internalized symbolically through customs, taboos and rituals. In ancient Egypt, the aridness of the desert, the droughts and the plagues are attributed to the god Set, the dark brother of Osiris (the sun god). In ancient Persian mythology, life is thought to be a battle between two gods, Ahura-Mazda (the life force, the bringer of light and of truth) and Abriman, ( the force of collective evil, the lord of darkness and of deceit ) about which I wrote in my earlier blog about Zoroastrianism in Hong Kong. According to Hinduism, evil is an integral part of the karmic cycle of cause and effect. Hindus believe that it is by our individual thoughts, intention, and deeds that we merit happiness or anguish and that the world will go on in unending alternate cycles of good and evil. Therefore, according to the Indian scholar, Heinrich Zimmer, "the wise are attached to neither the evil nor the good. The wise are attached to nothing at all."  In the West, religious ideas about good and evil have tradtionally been strongly influenced by the Jewish, Christian and Islamic idea that man is supposed to enjoy a privileged dialogue with his creator and that this world is governed by God whose enemy is one of his former creations, Satan. In ancient Greek mythology, there is a pantheon of gods in Olympus whose personalities closely resemble those of man in that they too are fallible and are capable of both good and evil. According to their myth, evil came to us through the curiosity of Pandora (who, like Eve, was tempted by her insatiable curiosity to desire tasting the fruit of the tree of knowledge). According to this myth, in order to punish Prometheus for having disobeyed his sanction against giving man fire, Zeus asked the master-craftsman god Hephraistos to model from earth an innocent maiden called Pandora (meaning "rich in gifts"), in the image of the beautiful Aphrodite, the goddess of love and then through the messenger god Hermes offered her as a gift to Epitheus, Prometheus' brother. Zeus himself endowed her with an insatiable curiosity but then gave her a sealed earthenware jar with the warning never to open it. As he  expected, she could not resist the temptation. Once she opened it, all kinds of evils shut up in it came out including sickness, sorrow, death. Until then, such evils were unknown to man. She quickly shut it but just in time to keep Hope inside! It is human nature to want to receive gifts but  not to realize the hidden dangers those gifts may bring. We want to receive only what is good and beautiful and ignore the attendant evil: we are naive in failing to see the danger accompnaying what we regard as good and beautiful because we are blinded by our subjective desire and our hope.

Throughout human history, collective evil has taken the form of certain beliefs by whole sections of society in some kind or other of ideology, whilst they were seized by the archetypal forces of evil: people would identify themselves emotionally and fanatically with a symbol ( the cross, the national flag), a leader ( Napoleon, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, Saddam Hussein, Khomeni), a party ( the Nazis, the Fascists, the Communist Party), a religious sect ( The People's Temple of Jim Jones), a gang that give expression to their their anxieties, their fears, their anger, their hatred, their despair and their hopes, thus giving rise to  all  kinds of religious persecution ( the Spanish Inquisition), racial bigotry (aparteid, Ku Klux Klan), caste systems ( in ancient India and China), scapegoating, witch-hunting (the Salem witch hunt), genodical hatred (the holocaust, massacres in Czechoslovakia and other places). We project all that the society cannot accept, all its the evils on to a small easily identifiable group in society as if they were not part of our society, as if they were no longer human and we attack them, persecute them, even kill them eg. Czarist pogroms in Russia, Nazi persecution of the Jews, gypsies, and homosexuals during WWII, American McCarthyism in the 1950s, South African apartheid etc. Such mass hysteria may last shorter or longer periods of time. Any one who is not caught up in such a mass hysteria will themselves be treated by such a seething multitude as the "enemy" and attacked accordingly. The leaders can be considered merely the embodiment of the collective shadow, of the collective acting out of the evil within themselves! To deal with such evil, people usually resort to the psychological defence of denial. They may try desperately to avoid having to face the evil and so they would project them on to the others and /or  pretend that that evil did not exist, that evil cannot exist. One of the greatest evils they try to avoid having to face is death itself . But in seeking to avoid evil, Ernest Becker says in Escape From Evil  (75), "man is responsible for bringing more evil into the world than organisms could ever do merely by exercising their digestive tracts. It is man's ingenuity, rather than his animal nature, that has given his fellow creatures such a bitter earthly fate." But not everyone accepts that evil is a permanent part of the human condition. Thus St. Augustine thought that evil is simply "the absence of good" under the doctrine of privatio boni. But Jung thinks that "white and black, light and dark, good and bad, are equivalent opposites which always predicate one another".

The authors agree with Jung. They think that "evil" is inextricably bound to what we normally consider as "good". To Jung, we now stand in need of a metanoia, a reorientation. Touching evil risks succumbing to it, he says. We must learn not to succumb to anything, not even to good. He says: "The criterion of ethical action can no longer consist in the simple view that good has the force of a catergorical imperative, while so-called evil can resolutely be shunned. Recognition of the reality of evil necessarily relativizes the good, and evil likewise, converting both into halves of a paradoxical whole". We must realize that what is considered good or evil is a judgment and that often we may misjudge. We must learn to have more self-awareness before we can deal properly with evil. To the authors, "To reject the legacy of Pandora would require us to vacuum the evil swarm back into the jar. This seems both proverbially and realistically impossible."  Often by trying to do what is considered "good", we bring along or with us even more evils. e.g  the crusades against so-called "infidels" in the Middle Ages, the Vietnam war, the invasion of Iraq on the pretext of its having "weapons of mass destruction" which were never found, the Cultural Revolution in China to maintain "revolutionary purity", the Reign of Terror as the triumph of Reason. Jungian pscyhologist Edward C Whitmont says:" We have to acknowledge the archetypal objectivity of evil as a terrible aspect of sacred force, which includes destructiveness and decay no less than growing and maturing. Then we can relate to our fellow beings as fellow victims rather than as scapegoats.". M Scott Peck writes in People of the Lie (83): "Strangely enough, evil people are often destructive because they are attempting to destroy evil. The problem is that they misplace the locus of evil. Instead of destroying others, they should be destroying the sickness within themselves."

We have so much to learn about various aspects of evil. As Jung said, today our myths are mute and give no answer. Today, we are compelled to answer the problem of evil by ourselves. We are perplexed.  Many do not realize that no myth will come to our aid although we feel we need it urgently. We must learn by ourselves how much good as well as what kind of crimes we are capable of. But understanding evil may not guarantee that we shall be able to deal adequately with it. To Rollo May, we must look at the solution offered by Christianity as it is, and not as it could have been, and not as it was meant to be by Jesus, who admonishes us to love even our enemies. May says that we must remind ourselves too that love of our enemies is a matter of grace, and that such a great act of grace is, as Reinhold Niebuhr says, "a possible impossibility". When the element of grace is omitted, the commandment of loving one's enemies becomes "moralistic" because it is viewed as a state an individual can actually achieve by working on his own character alone, by his own moral effort. If so, it becomes "an over-simplified, hypocritical form of ethical pretense" . May thinks that this kind of of "moral calisthenics" can be based only upon blocking off one's awareness of reality and this may in fact work to prevent precisely those valuable actions we need to make for social betterment. It becomes "the ethics of the isolated individual, standing bravely in his lonely situation of self-enclosed integrity.", like the ideal frontier man in what was formerly the American west.  He notes that the kind of force which drives this form of moral individualism is precisely the same type of force which fosters nationalism, jingoism, fundamentalism in so many of the "religious fundamentalists" and which makes them forget the essential solidarity of man. To love the others, we must first understand them. We must be more sensitive to both good and evil each day because, in the words of May, "this dialectic is essential to our creativity...there is no such thing as pure good...if the evil weren't there as a potentiality, the good would be there either.  Life consists of achieving good not apart from evil but in spite of it.". We must in his words overcome our "pseudo-innocence". But finding a suitable strategy is always a matter of personal choice and even more, of personal effort but not personal effort alone. But whatever that may involve, one thing is certain: if we do not understand evil, we cannot even begin to find a solution!