Michael Prescott's Blog

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Moldy oldie: "Evil"

I'm a little too busy and preoccupied with personal matters to do much original blogging right now, but rather than leave the blog idle, I thought I would republish an older post. The one I picked, "Evil," appeared for the first time on March 12, 2005. I'm reposting it here with no changes other than correcting a couple of typos. The "coda" following the three asterisks was part of the original piece.

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I just finished reading The History of Torture, by Daniel P. Mannix, and I have to say the book's relentless chronicling of man's inhumanity to man was pretty depressing. I had liked to think that we are making moral progress, but Mannix's book made me wonder if I was wrong, and if my optimism about humanity was misplaced. I ended up writing some notes to myself, in which I came to some sort of understanding of the perennial problem of human cruelty. Rather than tidy up these notes, I'm going to reproduce them with only minor editing and abridgments. Maybe some of you have gone through the same thought process and will recognize yourselves here.

Here's what I jotted down:

The thing that haunts me is the fact of human evil. The use of torture, the cruelty, the demonic aspect of people - what is it, if not Original Sin? And yet I don't believe in Original Sin. I like to believe in moral progress. But if someone held the Roman "games" today, wouldn't people show up? They enjoy the emotional pain and humiliation of reality-TV shows, even the surgical disfigurement of The Swan (a show in which contestants are put through plastic surgery). They attend cockfights, dogfights, bullfights, boxing matches, car races that end in deadly crashes. There seems to be something inherent in human nature that responds to blood sport. Maybe we haven't made so much progress, after all. Or perhaps it's better to say that whatever progress we've made is painfully slow, painfully hard won.

I used to think this kind of cruelty was an outgrowth of materialistic culture. The Romans, after all, were materialists who believed in nothing but sensual gratification. On the other hand, the Inquisitors believed they were saving souls, and the Aztecs believed they were placating the gods. It's not a simple matter of "materialism bad, spirituality good." It goes deeper. Any belief system is compatible with torture - as if the lust to kill is so deeply ingrained in human beings that it can be rationalized under any system of thought. If so, it's incorrect to "explain" cruelty by reference to ideology or philosophy or culture. Ethics can mitigate cruelty, but the potential for cruelty is always there, and we are all capable of it.

We all mistreat people, abuse people, insult people. No one is ever blameless. When I was a big sports fan, I used to root so hard for my team that I actually hoped the opposing players would be injured.

And why was I rooting so hard? Because my ego was invested in the team. Their victory was my victory, and their defeat was my defeat - my humiliation.

The ego is the key. The small-minded, petty, grasping, insecure, defensive part of us that wants to be superior, wants to control others, wants dominance and power and safety. Only by getting beyond the ego can we escape from violence and cruelty.

The Roman mob rooted for slaughter because they were powerless and frustrated, and it pleased them to see someone worse off than themselves. The Inquisitors were willing to torture because of their egoistic conceit that they, and only they, were in possession of absolute truth. The Nazis worshiped Hitler, a megalomaniac, the personification of ego. The Aztecs, too, were operating on an ego level - they were terrified of the gods, and to propitiate these deities they engaged in wholesale massacres. (The ego is all about fear and vigilance and saving oneself regardless of the cost to others.)

Religious and ethical traditions have always opposed the ego. Greek myths warn of "hubris," or overweening pride, and the myth of Narcissus is a critique of excessive self-love. In the Bible, violence enters the world (Cain's murder of Abel) right after humanity acquires an ego (Adam and Eve's defiance of God). The Ten Commandments stress the need to subordinate the willful self to God, to parents, to social norms. Do not covet = don't be envious or jealous (ego qualities). Do not put any false gods before God = don't elevate the ego to godlike status.

The ego is part of human nature and can't be eradicated. The best we can do is keep it in check. Moral systems teach us this truth. If we have made progress since the days of the Roman "games" or the Inquisition, it's only because we have a long ethical tradition that attempts to put some restraints on the ego.

So it looks like there really is such a thing as Original Sin - and it's the ego. It's part of us all.

***

That's the end of my notes, but as a coda, here's a quote that just occurred to me. It's from Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, a play about cruelty and hubris:

But man, proud man,
Dressed in a little brief authority,
Most ignorant of what he's most assured
(His glassy essence), like an angry ape
Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven
As makes the angels weep ...

Measure for Measure, II, ii. 122-127

The disappointed utopian

I'm really busy at the moment and haven't had much time for blogging, but a piece in the political blog Ace of Spades caught my eye, and I feel it's worth linking to.

I realize that whenever I post anything about politics, some readers get mad and abandon the blog, usually muttering imprecations as they depart. So I should probably stop doing it. But I won't, because I'm a jerk.

Anyway, Ace starts off talking about David Mamet, who has apparently decided he is not a liberal. This leads to an interesting meditation on liberalism vs. conservatism.

[Mamet's]  big thing is the liberal belief in intrinsic human perfection, coupled with their paranoid/demented belief that "everything is awful." Which is, of course, a perfect contradiction and a childlike conceit -- it's the stance of the disappointed utopian who, emotionally upset that not everything is perfect, begins claiming that everything is terrible.

Harlan Ellison, who's a bit of jackass, did make the now-so-obvious point that while 50's utopian science fiction was hopelessly naive, 60's and 70's dystopian science fiction was no less naive. In fact, they were both animated by the same childish conceit in human perfectibility. But whereas utopian science fiction boats of human perfectibility, the angry, paranoiac strand of dystopian fiction is simply the petulant overreaction of a teenager to disappointment and veering wildly in the opposite direction -- but impelled by the exact same jejune motivation. If humans aren't perfect or at least perfectible, well than damn it, they must be total s--t.

Conservatives, who embrace the "tragic" view as Mamet terms it (I would call it the "realistic" view myself, but then, I'm not a dramatist), are less childish in their starting conceits. We believe that people are selfish, self-serving, self-interested, self-obsessed, and only vaguely self-aware. It is the nature of all of us. And we do mean us; when we speak of human failings, we are really not, as the liberals are, speaking of other people only. We say "we are all selfish and flawed' and we do in fact mean we.

So for conservatives, the question isn't "Why is the world so awful and cruel?" The question is really "How do humans, especially those in the west and particularly those in America, manage to get so very, very much right so much of the time?"

A different set of starting assumptions creates wildly differing expectations and thus wildly different judgments.

I find this a very cogent analysis, especially his point that liberal idealism leads almost inevitably to crushing disappointment and a concomitant anger at the way things really are. Or as Ace describes it, "the stance of the disappointed utopian who, emotionally upset that not everything is perfect, begins claiming that everything is terrible."

When I was a utopian (of the libertarian/Objectivist stripe), I had exactly this same emotional outlook. On the one hand, there was my fantasy of a perfect world populated by perfect people - of whom, naturally, I would be one. On the other hand, there was the daily reality of the world as it is, not to mention the daily reality of me as I am. The result of this cognitive dissonance was that I was angry and/or depressed nearly all the time.

I feel much better now.

Tidbits of trivia

A random collection of semi-coherent thoughts for Sunday reading.

R. Craig Hogan sent me a copy of his new book Your Eternal Self. It's a compendium of evidence for life after death, and looks well worth reading (even if he does include a certain British "materialization medium" among those he considers rigorously tested) ...

Rod McKenzie emailed me to recommend signing an anti-whaling petition. I'm not much into petitions, but for those who are, here's the link. Warning for those at work: the site plays music ...

The new Indiana Jones movie actually looks pretty good. And the John Williams theme music still soars ...

The campaign to eliminate plastic bags is apparently based on an amateurish journalistic blunder ...

Google Books includes a preview of Jenny Wade's excellent (but challenging) Changes of Mind, for those who are interested ...

The new Amazon Video Unbox service is pretty cool. You can buy a TV show or movie and download it to your PC or portable device. Rentals are available too. High-speed connection required ...

Spiritualist Chatroom, which has been hacked at least twice in the past, is now offline again. More hackery? Or just a technical snafu? I don't know, but the site has been down for at least three days ...

Rolling Stone tells the sad, bizarre story of how Britney Spears lost her mind. With most celebrities, "losing one's mind" would be a purely figurative expression ...

George Clooney is cool. Here's how he responds to a Web site calling him "gay, gay, gay": "No, I'm gay, gay. The third gay – that was pushing it." Heh.

That's all for now. 

Transcend and include

In his book A Brief History of Everything, Ken Wilber makes a simple but important point. He says that as things go through the process of evolution, they will inevitably transcend and include their earlier stages of development. In other words, each higher step on the evolutionary ladder not only transcends all the previous steps but also includes them.

An obvious example is the multicellular organism that both transcends and includes the individual one-celled life forms that gave rise to it. Another example is the molecule that transcends and includes the atoms of which it is constituted, just as the atom transcends and includes its subatomic constituents.

But where the idea is really useful is in the evolution of consciousness. Probably the best book I've read on this subject, at least from a scholarly perspective, is Changes of Mind by Jenny Wade. Though Wade's book is written in rather dry and technical language and is not always easy to read, it comprehensively outlines the stages of development of consciousness all the way from the prenatal to the postmortem (as indicated by near-death experiences). Wade does a fine job of showing how each stage of consciousness transcends the previous one -- but I'm not sure she is equally clear in showing that the higher stages also include the lower stages. Yet this insight seems critical to me. It means that, no matter how far we may travel in the development of our own consciousness, we will still embrace what we might call the "lower elements" of our nature. To put it another way, even if we manage to largely transcend ego-based behavior, our ego will still exist, and we will still find ourselves acting egoically in some situations.

And this is not necessarily a bad thing, because there are circumstances in which an egoic reaction is probably the most desirable. We do not, after all, want to become doormats who let people walk all over us.

The ideal outcome is not to lose the ego entirely, which is probably impossible anyway, but to minimize the extent to which the ego controls our behavior. The ego then becomes part of a repertoire of possible responses in any given situation. Most of the time, an ego-based reaction will be counterproductive -- but not always.

Maybe there are some spiritual masters who reach such an exalted stage of personal development that they no longer have any ego-based responses at all. But I suspect that this level of development, if it exists, is exceedingly rare. More often, we may see through the illusion of ego-based behavior in most circumstances but still fall back on it occasionally. Even Jesus is depicted as becoming angry and violent at certain points in the New Testament -- when overturning the tables of the money changers, for instance, or in his heated arguments with the Pharisees. This is not to say that a spiritual master like Jesus did not transcend the ego, but only that in transcending it, he still included it as part of his makeup.

Anyway, the idea seems useful to me. It means we don't need to beat ourselves up on those occasions when we revert to immature or even infantile behavior. The possibility of behaving like a child or spoiled teenager or a narcissistic twentysomething remains part of our nature even if, for the most part, we've moved beyond it. We never lose anything. We transcend and include.

Last rites

Here's something a friend of mine sent me, concerning a Buddhist ceremony for her late mother-in-law, Jane. (Names have been changed for privacy.)

I’m not a particularly spiritual person, but I was very impressed yesterday evening when the Buddhist monks came. There were two of them, and one was clearly the accomplished famous monk.  Of course Jim, Gary and I made many jokes about the monk coming – Monks R Us, we might need a back-up monk, are there monks on the bench?  But this was really good.  There were about fifteen of us in Susan’s living room.  One wall is all glass, and she has a huge mirror that reflects the outdoor garden.  We were sitting on the couch where I could look straight into the mirror and it was incredibly beautiful, because the late afternoon light backlit some fan palms so they were bright green, against a background of blue-green-gray oleander that moved wildly in the wind.  It was gorgeous. I couldn’t take my eyes off it, except to look at the monk in his dark red robe.  And the monk explained what he was doing. He was matter-of-fact and made a lot of sense, talking about how life was only completed by death, and this is not a sad thing.  He had a way about him that made me feel Jane really was going on up the path to enlightenment. The monk wasn’t trying to convince anyone. It just was. There was no self-consciousness in any way – he wasn’t the arrogant Top Monk, and he wasn’t plaintive.  I was moved by his presence.  We were to give her her favorite foods by throwing them into the fire, as well as water and tea.  He told us Jane was present and her consciousness was there, but in a different way. She lay on a gurney and had been dressed in a beautiful midnight-blue tunic, she looked like a monk herself.  He said that he hoped everyone would let her go on her path and not try to keep her from it, that this was a part of life.  He embodied acceptance of the way things were, and acceptance of what could be done to help Jane on her journey.  He helped her reach up to a higher consciousness.  I was deeply moved. 

If you ever get a chance to participate in a ceremony like this, it’s worthwhile.  Especially since you are interested in death and the afterlife.  The chanting can be a bit onerous, but I left thinking I don’t know everything.

Paranormalia

Stephen E. Braude points me to a blog called Paranormalia, which looks to be of extremely high quality from the bits I've read. It seems to have started up in September of 2006, but posting was infrequent until the last two months.

The blog description reads:

Parapsychologists think some paranormal claims are genuine. Sceptics say they can all be explained in terms of fraud or misperception. Paranormalia takes the view that parapsychologists are right, but recognises that the issues are hard to penetrate. It comments on recent controversies, research and books to help shed light on this fascinating and much misunderstood subject.

The blog's author is  a British freelance journalist, Robert McLuhan.

It's good stuff. Check it out.

Of rats and ruts

So I'm taking a walk and thinking about an issue that's been on my mind lately, when all of a sudden I take a mental step back and say to myself, "Wait a minute. Am I really thinking about this again?" Because, of course, I've thought about it before, several times, and already worked it out as best I can. So why is my mind going back over this familiar territory?

I think the mind is sort of like a lab rat running a maze. The rat tries various avenues in an attempt to reach the cheese. Eventually he finds one that works. From that point on, he runs the same route over and over.

Similarly, the mind tries to work its way to the solution of a problem. When it's found a solution, it keeps going over the same mental pathway again and again -- not because there is any utility in doing so, but because the path is familiar and leads to the desired result. In this respect, much of our everyday thinking is no more creative or inspired than the lab rat's hunt for cheese.

And yet we do have an advantage over the humble rat. It is possible for us to jolt ourselves out of this mental rut and to realize that what we're thinking is merely a repetitive series of thoughts produced reflexively by the mind. We can step back and see our thoughts for what they are -- just thoughts, not reality, not anything we need to attend to, not anything that matters.

Just thoughts, which we can take or leave.