There is evil in the world, and a viable ethics must account for it. Unlike Dante, I begin my quest for ethics in the ninth circle. Where does evil come from?
I assert that evil, and what good there is in the world, comes from people and only from people. A volcano erupting onto a hapless village is not evil -- it is grave misfortune. A random and terrible event, but a disaster that lacks any intent. Evil is initiated in intent. I should also attempt to define evil at some point, but let's defer that for a later date and begin instead with an investigation into the causes of evil.
There are only three of them, and all are actually aspects of selfishness. It may well be that all might just as easily be subsumed under the heading of "desire" -- but again let's hold off on that hypothesis for the moment.
The three causes of evil:
1) Solipsism -- belief that one is the only real being in the universe -- the ultimate selfishness
2) Greed -- selfish desire for gain in several dimensions: power; wealth; sex dominance; etc.
3) Fear -- self-centered orientation towards self-preservation
But of these three solipsism allows for the biggest breaches of ethics. When school shootings happen, we ask the same tiresome questions about "How could this possibly happen?" We act as if it is difficult to understand. But it is very easy to understand, albeit abhorent. What would murdering another matter if I did not grasp the autonomous reality of that other person? Murdering dozens would be no more significant that grinding a heel into an anthill, or worse, tossing out old mattresses that have outworn their use.
We use terms like "dehumanize" or "desensitize" but in essence, a killer is trained, twisted, and/or psychologically predisposed to deny the full existence of their victims. Those victims are props, furniture to be arranged or discarded. If you are not real, and the world beyond myself is in its entirety is not real, what would your life matter to me? And why would the praise or opprobrium of the world trouble me?
One approach to ethics might be to attempt to act in opposition to the prime causes and intents behind evil. Hence the response to #1 Solipsism might be Awareness of Being in the World, consciousness of the reality of our context beyond our own perception and cognition. In short, the world is real, and the lives of all living things within that world are real.
The response to #2 Greed might be Subsume Desire. The response to #3 Fear: Acceptance of our Human Vulnerability.
I will explore this in more depth on my next blog, but for the moment I would like to point out that this third point leads me back to my father. Because I believe my father was in fact a good man, and the crux of the question for me -- which I do not pretend to have resolved -- is whether good people can ever think themselves to be good.
I do not think my father ever truly thought himself a good man, and yet he was. And I am forced to look back on my personal experience and conclude that I never did meet a person who proclaimed him/herself "good" who adhered to anything that I would call goodness. And often in my life I have encountered people who thought themselves "not good," who I would have held up as models of ethical action.
As human beings, we are capable of powerful self-deceptions, and that self-deception arguably begins at the level of immediate perception, before even the conscious mind is brought to bear.
For the Virginia Tech killer, what comes through to me first is the sense that this boy thought himself unassailably, undeniably right -- as a person with access to a truth that, to him, burned so brightly and clearly, that alternative views were not possible. He compares himself to Jesus. He thinks himself a martyr, despite his inability to articulate a cause worthy of martyrdom beyond the self-importance he assigns to his own impotent rage. He is a pile of ash, burning with self-destruction and self-glorification.
If we do not start from the position of "I am not good," I wonder if there could possibly be any other stance that would allow some critical perspective primal enough to intercept our egos. Is it valid to found an ethics on the premise that "I am not good"?
If so, this approach is gravely in opposition to the mainstream culture of our day, where self-esteem is held and cherished as deeply as any religious mantra.
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4 comments:
Soplipsitic thinking is rarely complete. I think we all have various degrees of it. At risk of oversimplification, I think the process can be primary, in that an individual has an underlying disorder which limits their understanding of the world and empathy for others. It can also be secondary, used as a defense mechanism.
I don't know which this young man had. I do know that he willfully tried to solidify this kind of thinking. For years he spent enormous emotional energy negating the presence of value of others. He seemingly spurned every attempt that people made toward friendship or civility. The enormous energy this must have taken would be exhausting and likely worsened his ability to cope.
The question I have is: Is willful solipsism more evil than primary. If it's primary, is it more of a tragedy like a volcano.
In hearing about his life, this problem seems to be long-standing -- and may be primary. Patch-work psychological counseling late in life was probably too late. Yet parts of his thinking seem the product of the trauma of impotence and powerlessness that he felt; his coping mechanism is like many of ours -- solipsistic thinking -- but his seemed willfully taken to the extreme.
As an aside, I also don't think you can commit evil just based on greed or fear. I think those require solipsism, as well.
I agree with you about good people not seeing themselves as good.
It's interesting that you imply that an ethical principle should be based on the concept of "the fall" and our acknowledgement of it.
I’ve only just started reading this blog. I have thoroughly enjoyed what I’ve read so far.
I want to expand and comment upon the comment to your April 19 post. The commentator posits two types of solipsism which he calls primary and secondary. Note that the same duality can be applied to fear and greed as well. There is, for example, a primary, mechanistic kind of fear—a healthy fear that makes me start at an unexpected thunderclap, for example, or that moves me to jump out of the way of a falling object. This kind of mechanistic fear can also become aberrant, a “malfunction of the brain.” PTSD comes to mind. On the other hand, there is a kind of fear that, as you say of “willful” solipsism (a term with which I must disagree, but that is the subject of another discussion), is “manufactured, developed, nurtured.”
I think the commentator hints at a good idea in his aside. He states that he does not believe that one can commit evil solely through fear or greed, that these too require solipsism. I would like to amend this. It is not that they “require” solipsism but that there is a point, some invisible line somewhere between the mechanistic and the manufactured, where greed and fear become solipsisms.
Martin Buber asserted that all of us spend most of our lives in an ich/es relationship to the world. Only for brief moments and with great personal effort are we able to experience a true or complete ich/du. This is one way of thinking of the fall, another theme your commentator perceptively found in your blog, a world of effortless ich/es and frustratingly difficult ich/du. The ninth circle of hell is the frozen, immovable ich/es. The ich/es that has not only not experienced the ich/du but cannot imagine even its possibility.
Brian and Rink,
Thanks for the input.
For Brian, I'd love to hear more on your opposition to the term "willful opposition" -- Buber's I/it vs. I/you relations are extremely salient, and thanks for bring them back to mind.
For Rink, I mentioned in one of my first posts the possibility that all terms may conceivably fit under the rubric of "desire", in the pejorative sense of the Buddhist.
I wonder whether fear or greed necessitate solipsism except at the final pathological endpoints. So long as I don't end the very existence of another person, I don't need to dismiss the reality of their existence to such an extreme.
I wonder if you could say more on this subject...
Kip,
I have two problems with the term "willful solipsism." First, "willful" can be just a synonym of "intentional," which opens up the thorny issues of intent you discussed in the April 21 post.
Second, in the context we have been discussing, "willful" can mean simply "non-pathological." This opens up another set of problems. For one, we would have to decide what is and isn't a pathology. We might also ask, "willful in what way?" For example, is a person solipsistic because he has rejected the value of the other or is he ignorant of the worth of the other? Can we distinguish between a knowledgeable-willful-solipsism and an ignorant-willful-solipsism? If he was ignorant of the value of the other, should he have been aware? Was there or was there not adequate opportunity to see or discover that value? Can we distinguish between an irresponsibly-ignorant-willful-solipsism and a responsible-but-ignorant-willful-solipsism?
As I reread what I've just written, I realize that this sounds like I'm splitting hairs. I may be. I suppose the point I want to make is that at least at this point in the conversation appending any adjective to "solipsism" is going to open up a hornet's nest of qualifications that will probably not be very fruitful.
To address your other question. I don't think fear or greed (or any other human failing) necessitates solipsism. Rather, I see solipsism as the extremes of these failings. I think your comment that all of these could be subsumed under the Buddhist notion of desire is closer to the point. I plan to post a comment to your April 24 entry that may shed more light on this.
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