On evil and human short-sightedness

I met someone recently who had been a heroin addict. A youthful bright red-head who described falling in with the wrong influences and being “bad”. It brought to mind the old platonic distinction between doing things that are wrong because you are bad and fundamentally desire to do evil versus doing the wrong things because you are ill-informed (about what is actually good) and therefore make the wrong choices (because you pick things you think are good but which in reality are not).

The question at heart is what motivates certain actions – is it an inadequate understanding of the consequences of performing an action or fundamentally deviant motives where the individual actually wishes to do “evil”. Are there really such evil acts in existence, where even though we see the damage and understand the world of hurt we can still look into the other’s eyes and wish them death and their loved ones misery and simply pull the trigger.

I remember that scene from American History X when Derek’s younger brother gets blown away in the bathroom, leaving the other kid’s face pattered with blood freckles as he holds the smoking gun.

Although it is common sense not to question the existence of evil, even the genocidal maniacs in WWII justified their heinous crimes by referring to a good for Germany. Their ideology infected the country with a belief that such methods were necessary for a public good. Thus, there is a kernel of truth in the ultra-rational view that no evil act is carried out without some justification or reference to how it may bring about a good. Still, it is not true that evil is thus a product of logical deficiencies as if objective robots would be the pinnacle of ethics and good will. This largely misses the point that people will pretend all sorts of things are good and fool themselves into acting on perverse incentives. Nazi ideology is an example of this, as gang culture which weaves a sense of manhood around murder and aggression, or even spiking a vein may rest on the insistence that you aren’t hurting anyone else and simply flooding the body with well-deserved pleasure. Whatever these statements may be, they are not sensible attempts to get at the truth of the issue but more excuses designed to cover-up the substratum of loneliness, despair, perverse and morbid fascination.

It seems fair to say that evil is absolutely real in the moment’s immediacy – where wrath, and hatred and the desire to destroy crystallize in bullets, or the needle’s prick. But nonetheless, we humans must always weave a web of stories and justifications to convince ourselves why this makes sense, why this aims for the good – a need bred of a deep-seeded yearning for good things. And in the long-run it is hard enough to sustain these delusions. Although it is true that individuals are motivated by short-term “goods”, these often show themselves to be false goods on the long-run even though they deliver a moment of satisfaction.

The existence of evil therefore directly arises from the contradiction between our preference for short-term “goods” and their misalignment with long-term benefits. This is why most acts of violence are carried out in the moment of its motivation. This justifies why premeditated murder should be judged much more harshly than accidental killing before the law—because scheming and sustaining murderous intent betrays deeper malevolence than explosive anger. We must disagree with the Platonic formula of bad acts arise from ignorance of what “the good is” – it now seems more accurate to say that evil arises out of an excessive attention paid to the irritations and sufferings of the now along with an undervaluation of the future.

We experience things in their moment because each moment could be our last. Our senses at every instant sort through the manifold of the real and yield an interpreted slice of our environment, ready for our assessment, decision and action. This slice of reality feels all too real but it is mediated by some basic intellectual effort largely hard-coded into our faculties. Therefore, aggression, violence, contempt, hunger and pain pierce into the mantle of awareness and become the singular focus of our attention.

Reacting to this offence too immediately feels like a movement towards “the good” in so far as it may free the immediate pressure. Yet a reactive outburst may place our entire future in jeopardy, in the case of manslaughter for instance. Far beyond this tactical consideration of going to prison, abstracting from the moment’s immediacy also allows true values to surface and brings us closer to our fundamental desire to see prosperity and flourishing all around us rather than death and destruction. I like how MLK expressed this sentiment and realization by saying “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”

In contrast to the false presence of a moment, an understanding of the arc of our actions let alone the arc of history requires true intellectual strain and discipline. Planted on two feet upon the ground ready to explode in rage, how is a person expected to take their irate brain and toss it years into the future so as to see, far more than avoidance of going to prison, the ridiculousness of taking offence at an insult made by someone else who is having a bad day?

Most socially devastating actions, be they violence, be they theft or whatever the crime, occur in an environment of systematic short-sightedness which venerates immediate gratification and builds the moment-up to be something which it often is not: meaningful. The culture of criminality therefore tends to thrive where people are taught to live in the now and systematically neglect living abstractly – as mediated through a sense of concept, dreams far reaching, wayward eyes that imagine a different life through the windowpane as the bus hums to work early in the morning.

“Humans have entered a new stage of evolution” claims Stephen Hawking...

...and I agree wholeheartedly.

http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/07/stephen-hawking-the-planet-has-entered-a-new-phase-of-evolution.html

It is easy to look around into human society and to appreciate just how irrelevant a concept of physical evolution – differential mortality as caused by actual genetic traits leading to a genetic, and thus physical, drift in the human species. Our people have not changed in body since we became human over 100,000 years ago. (Despite the nonsensical dreams of the social Darwinists.)

Yet we would be very confused to assume that this irrelevance of physical evolution implies the irrelevance of the concept of evolution as such in our species. Nothing could be further from the truth, for there is nothing in this world that has evolved as quickly as our particular breed of hominids. And all on a different plane from that on which evolution usually applies -- the plane of thought. We are now the organism on which the fate of the planet rests. Have we not become the destroyer and creator of worlds? Time will tell which trait is dominant and which recessive.

Our evolution has been one of culture, thoughts, dispositions – it has been the mind and the interface between mind and body that has changed so very drastically both on the individual level and on the social level. We are a computer whose hardware has not changed but whose software is updated continuously – innovating new ways of connecting with each other and producing as well as consuming information. Innovation has been the name of the game since we abrupted onto the world of thought. This unfolding of a clearing of being at a deeper essence than the blank stare of brute physicality meant that recognition in language could take flight as a very real birdling – struggling to gain control of its clumsy wings at first, and later carving up the air with the slightest calibrations of its deft feathers. These feathers have reached the moon and back, spliced into the core of existence unleashing the power of the atom, formed gods of characters to captivate the mind and soul and raise goosebumps in lovers of Shakespeare.

Weapons, gossiping, scheming, love, hatred, leaders, tyrants and freedom fighters, thoughts of the sacred and metaphysical meanderings – all these things have built up a rich substance into which every human being is now born. A baby born to day is given the same physical limitations and capabilities than one born many thousands of years ago – yet it its thrown into an ether rich in information and in which cultivated crafts abound to harness talent and further its becoming. And this makes all the difference.

All these things matter tremendously in the success of this quest for overcoming that has marked the human journey. The trouble with this evolution in the landscape of though is that it can be as limiting as hostile elements to thoughtless creatures. Devolution is possible too – and this is the downside of the information game – it produces all the trash that holds us back. It produces despots and racists and weak liberals and people enraptured with shoes. It is riddled with bugs that serve no purpose and destroy our collective potential.

For nothing constrains us individuals anymore – except the persistence of wretched habits in human society. For the same faculties that have blessed us (and spawned a ridiculous population explosion over the last thousand years) might be what condemns us to a life wasted and a planet torn apart. We are locked into our suffering, and our pleasures are the seal. And if we rupture our climate, make war, overpopulate the planet to dust and ashes, it will only be due to the vices of our culture – all because we misinformed ourselves to death.

Thus, the critical faculty is crucial in our society as it is in each individual. But the relativistic stance that would insist that there is no such thing as progress, and that all different cultures and ways of doing things are different without seeking to find how to do things better, is an unfortunate enemy to all those who would try to correct the misconceptions of the day. Sadly, anthropology is a discipline which frequently adopts an extreme relativism in view of human progress.

The master of the critical stance, it is attractive and liberating because it lashed out against many of the dogmatic vices of dominant and provincial European culture. Thus it is more advanced in this respect than many of the dominant disciplines which still preach from a supremely world-denying solipsism (which is destroying the world and has been doing so for hundreds of years).

Anthropology is able to deftly point out the crucial contradiction in most dogmas of modernity. It shows how our social claim to universally is culturally contingent, and thus misleading. But like most things – the discipline does not go far enough. It disavows all progress in the name of cleverness, rather than harness the critical faculty to progress.
The point is to embrace the contradiction wholeheartedly (in deference to Hegel) and to realize that it is because and not in spite of its very cultural contingency that there is a real quality of the universal in our fabricated global order.

Of course – this language ceases to be language of the social sciences and crosses the line into philosophy. This is discipline which at its greatest never ceases to have faith in the power of truth to light the way. No discipline pursues pure revelation so systematically. And in an “overinformed” world, where information is incessant but transmits useless commercials rather than messages we should all receive, it is not surprising that the discipline has almost become irrelevant. There are no philosophers, merely scholars of old accomplishments.

But – being able to steer a world that is fast spinning out of control to a virtuous path will take much applied philosophy. Either we bring philosophy back, reflective thought with purpose, or we bail from the ship of life like rats from a sinking ship. Certainly the political transformation in the US is a step in the right direction. But there is a world of work to do still and lots of interests mindlessly committed to perpetuating ills due to their lack of appreciation for philosophy!

You desire to LIVE "according to nature?"

Oh, you noble Stoics, what fraud of words! Imagine yourselves a being like Nature, boundlessly extravagant, boundlessly indifferent, without purpose or consideration, without pity or justice, at once fruitful and barren and uncertain: imagine to yourselves INDIFFERENCE as a power—how COULD you live in accordance with such indifference? To live—is not that just endeavouring to be otherwise than this Nature? Is not living, valuing, preferring, being unjust, being limited, endeavouring to be different? And granted that your imperative, “living according to Nature,” means actually the same as “living according to life”--how could you do DIFFERENTLY? Why should you make a principle out of what you yourselves are, and must be? In reality, however, it is quite otherwise with you: while you pretend to read with rapture the canon of your law in Nature you want something quite the contrary, you extraordinary stage-players and self deluders!

-Beyond Good and Evil, #9, Nietzsche