“I spend about as much time as any other well-informed person being concerned about the problems America is facing and, like everyone else, not having a clue about what I can do to help ameliorate the situation. I feel that I should be doing whatever I can. I certainly agree with Edmund Burke’s observation that evil can triumph only if good people do nothing. But evil has no objective, ontological existence. It consists entirely of the absence of the good, as darkness is merely the absence of light, not a black fog that can overwhelm the light. Only adult human beings can intend evil, and evil is always intentional. It is simply gratuitous malevolence, the intent to harm another human being (or perhaps any living being) when doing so is unnecessary. As Scott Peck argued, evil is a mental illness. It could conceivably be cured and eradicated. And that should be a goal of any and all genuine religions.”
Aidan, I respect the work you’ve done and the places you’ve been. I salute the successes you’ve enjoyed. I can tell your heart’s in the right place. But this article is just plain awful, and as much as I’d like to stay off your lawn, I have to express my feelings. Let me begin by saying that the reason you feel clueless is that you’re standing on shaky philosophical ground.
Evil is the absence of good? Evil is not only perpetrated by humans? Your statements sound like ideas my first grade teacher might have taught me back in ’68, back when we all started the day by reciting the Pledge of Allegiance followed by the Lord’s Prayer. Now we know that chimpanzees perpetrate massacres, ants wage genocidal wars, and cats torture prey they plan to kill (eventually) but never eat. Ever been attacked by a dog? I have, and that bitch was evil.
Tying evil — and by extension good also — to humans was was your first mistake.
People
are animals. We’re never going to make progress on any front, socially and especially environmentally, until we realize that the
Great Chain of Being is one of the greatest and most damaging lies ever promulgated. Humans are not better than animals, who are not better than plants, who are not better than insects. Every living thing is necessary and equal in the web of life. We’re all evolving and everything is possible. On a long enough time line, provided we don’t exterminate them all, a Bengal tiger is going to write a book that reads like something by Anton LaVey.
Your second mistake was that you failed to distinguish between Evil (with a capital “E”) and evil (with a little “e”). “Evil” is quite a bit different from everyday “evil.”
Jung understood this better than anyone. As he said, “The unconscious is not just evil by nature, it is also the source of the highest good: not only dark but also light, not only bestial, semi-human, and demonic but superhuman, spiritual, and, in the classical sense of the word, ‘divine.'” The evils (with a little “e”) you rail against later in the article, and rightly so, are better called by their specific names — perfidy, greed, maliciousness, and so on. Those evils with a little “e” spring forth from the unconscious. They aren’t going anywhere.
Big “E” evil is just as powerful and important as big “G” Good. As Jung said in The Seven Sermons to the Dead, in which his supreme god was Abraxas, “What the god-sun speaketh is life. What the devil speaketh is death. But Abraxas speaketh that hallowed and accursed word which is life and death at the same time. Abraxas begetteth truth and lying, good and evil, light and darkness, in the same word and in the same act. Wherefore is Abraxas terrible.” Jung’s vision isn’t unique. Every pantheon has an evil deity or two, except Christianity. But then, Jung would have remedied that by making the trinity a quaternity if he’d had his way.
In short, little “e” evil is ubiquitous, normal, not unique to humans, stems from the unconscious, and therefore can’t be eradicated. Big “E” Evil is part of the Godhead, and therefore it can’t be eradicated either. So it doesn’t matter whether you meant ‘evil’ or ‘Evil.’ Either way you were wrong.
You’re a gnostic. You should know this stuff.
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Robert Mitchell Jr. 