Comments on journals.
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Some characteristics of the notion of good and evil as approached in this class.
1. We are not studying good and evil in order allocate rewards or punishments. That is God's job. A judgment of that sort would require that we take an all-knowing objective perspective outside of the human condition. There is no way we can do that. / 42. Rather than looking at externally imposed rewards or punishments, we tend to emphasize the long range effects of good and evil. Lewis, for example, presents to us the idea that evil is its own punishment, and results in a hellish existence where people are alienated from one another, and progressively isolated, where knowledge is not sought with any integrity, where people are too absorbed in themselves to do anything really well. Narcissism is the main quality of Lewis' hell: absorption into one's own perspective, and resistance to change; difficulty to admit one's wrongs, a tendency to use everything and everyone as an instrument toward one's end. In the extreme, such persons want to go to heaven, but only if they can control it, which is of course not possible. They do not want God for himself, but as an instrument for their own aims. This is why they do not like heaven. To live this way is to be a mere shadow of what you could be (hence the ghosts), and life, while apparently giving you all that you think you want, is a life without meaning. Meaning and joy have to do with interests outside of yourself. Hence life in Lewis' hell has the dreariness of an endless drizzly, cloudy day. Quite a contrast with our usual picture of hell as fire.
Similarly, an openness to good leads one to a life where meaning and happiness are possible. Being open to the good means being open to something else than just oneself. That enables someone to love another person, and also to seek God for himself, not for the purpose of manipulating him. That is the first step, this first willingness. This first step can be very hard because it seems sometimes that you let go of things that are very important to you. There is in that first step, a willingness to surrender something of oneself to God, and explore the resulting walk. It is the moment of conversion. Then other steps follow, which become easier. Doing this makes one real, able to take a sincere interest in others, in the world, and in God. This results in a sense of wonder, in increased creativity, joy, love etc. There could be some pain in the process, but, since you are increasingly capable of community, the joy and support of it carries you along, and you don't pay much attention to the possible discomfort.
This is a natural process. Because of the nature of good, and the goodness of God, everyone who seeks God finds him (as the Bible says), and is received. In this process, as you lay down your life, you save it: when you open yourself to God, it seems you may loose some of yourself, but that is not so. In fact, you become more real, more solid. It is to be noted that this is a process lived one step at a time. Not instant perfection. The process of conversion sets you on a radically different type of walk, but you aren't perfect all of a sudden, neither does anyone expect you to be. / 10
3. In this class, we focus on the notion of good and evil as it applies to a life, a duration, a path, a pattern, and we are not as concerned with individual actions. Our main concern, in doing this, is to learn to recognize a good pattern, or an evil one, so that we may orient our lives accordingly, turning them more toward good. The persons that Peck calls "evil" are engaged in a pattern that is very destructive to themselves and to others, and because of their defensiveness and willingness to scapegoat others, seem to have very little chance to change the direction of their lives. Persons who are committed to such destructive patterns (as Bobby's parents, or Roger's parents, or Sarah , are dangerous to others also. We would do well, says Peck, to be careful. We too, says Peck could be victimized or become participants in evil patterns. Peck does not think that we should abandon such people. In fact, later in the book, he expresses the hope that evil may be "cured" in some of the people who are affected by it. He does however think that such reaching out is not in most people's realm of capability, and should be undertaken most cautiously (and with community support)
4. There are at least two basic kinds of individual evil.
The first one could be called chaotic evil. Chaotic evil is characterized by a lack of control over our lives, lack of self-discipline, and impulsivity. It leads to things like violence, promiscuity, drunkenness, stealing etc.... People engaged in this type of evil become generally quite uncomfortable, as their behavior becomes more driven and less pleasurable. They may get in trouble with the law. They experience many obvious difficulties in their personal lives. They may come to experience this as a bondage, and seek relief by joining organizations that will help them control their behaviors. A number of such people seek churches for that purpose as well, and come to know Christ as someone who frees them (which is true of course). One could say that a person who experiences these problems identified perhaps too much with his/her shadow, or dark side, and that for them, conversion means moving their identification to the "light" side of themselves, and renouncing the dark side's rule.
The second kind of evil could be called respectable evil. It is the one Peck had in mind when he titled his book People of the Lie. The people who fall into that category are not in any kind of trouble with the law. They may be very self-disciplined and successful, yet something is seriously amiss. They are in bondage to an internal, non obvious evil. The chaotic evil, mentioned above, has been driven underground, probably because of fear. The most obvious among these people would be blatant hypocrites, who do one thing in public, but another in private, and deny it; or people who claim one motivation, when in fact they are acting out of another. Hypocrisy itself though, can also be driven underground, and people become unaware then of their own shadow side, and deny the existence of any questionable motives, or unacceptable feelings or desires. If a person does not come to terms with his/her limitations and imperfections, then that person will be likely to project his/her shadow unto other people, and accuse them (often with a great deal of passion and loathing) of the evil that in fact is in themselves. If that other person is a child, or an otherwise vulnerable individual, s/he may act out the evil that was projected because of the expectations that are set for him/her, and reinforce behavior that goes in that direction. It is interesting to notice that often we find most irritating in others those behaviors or feelings about which we are most uncomfortable or ashamed in ourselves. Jesus for example pointed out that when people have a plank in their eye (which they do not see), they want to remove specks from other people's eyes (because they are blind to their own condition). One could say that someone who does this may have rejected his/her shadow too much, and attempted to deny it, and cut it off from him/herself. Conversion, for such a person, would involve coming to know oneself as a sinner, and accepting one's imperfections.
It is clear that all of us perform both kinds of evil. Balance in one's relationship with the shadow is a tricky endeavor. This does not necessarily mean, however, that we have chosen an overall evil path, especially if we experience any struggle in relation to these issues. People committed to the path of respectable evil do not worry about their inner lie. If they did, they would be at a point of possible change.
5. Are there degrees of evil?
Certainly. Again, we are not talking here in terms of God's judgment, because that aspect belongs to God. We are talking about our own perspective and the type of danger evil presents to the conduct of our own lives. We could determine degrees of evil according to two perspectives at least:
a. The effect of evil upon its victims. We could call this outside destructiveness. It is the effect of the murderer on its victims, the effect of Roger's parents upon Roger etc. It could also be the effect of the alcoholic, the person who commits suicide upon him/herself (because it is an outside, visible destruction). Generally, if we follow this perspective, we will tend to classify murder, violence, overt sexual sin etc. as the greatest forms of evil. It is of course the type of evil on which the law will focus, because one of the main purposes of the law is to make society physically safer for us. It is difficult to estimate degrees of evil according to this perspective, because we don't directly see all of the consequences, and it is often difficult to assess exactly the impact of these consequences.
b. The effect of evil upon the people who are engaged in the pattern itself. This is the perspective most relevant to our study. Evil being a destructive pattern, one that keeps you alienated from life and from God, imprisons the individual in his/her own narcissism, it is not something we would wish to be drawn in. We would also wish to recognize any such pattern of which we might currently be a part, so that we might work our way out of them and seek alternatives. This is for example what George did in the course of his therapy, and what Schindler did, as the war progressed. According to this perspective, the more difficult it is to get out of a pattern, the more dangerous it is to us. Hence, respectable evil (see above) is more dangerous than chaotic evil because it makes us less uncomfortable, and because we can deny it. The most dangerous evil is the one which we deny, push into our unconscious, and of which we are not aware, and do not wish to be aware. This was the problem the Pharisees experienced in Jesus' time. They thought of themselves as righteous, but were not, so they could not experience healing because they thought they did not need it. In contrast, people who were aware of their own evil had an easier time coming to Christ: they knew that they needed help.
6. Evil and mental illness. There are several approaches one could take in dealing with this topic, here are three of them.
1. The evil personality, a new personality disorder?
Peck views evil (as in some of the people in his examples) as perhaps a type of mental illness, a type of personality disorder in itself, for which he lists symptoms. One should be cautious however to not link all of mental illness with evil.
2. Mental illness as a struggle against evil.
A person who is a part of an evil system (ex: Hitler's Germany) may feel s/he has no power to buck the system, and surrenders to it, but there remains an unconscious resistance to it, which is then translated into deviant behavior. Children in very dysfunctional families will often act out. One could say that perhaps Amon Goethe, in Schindler's list, became so aberrant because the system of which he was a part was so evil, and that his disorderly cruelty was perhaps less evil than that of people who were able to coldly plan and implement the murder of millions, without ever loosing their cool. Perhaps Amon Goethe was at some level a man very angered and wounded by the system, but with unsufficient courage to fight it. Perhaps also, his horrible behavior displayed in full view the true darkness of the nazi system, which brings us to a third possible view, given below.
3. Mental illness as acting out the shadow of a system or relationship.
When a system is dishonest, and hides its evil under a cover of respectability, some of the members of the system will start acting oddly, and will then be scapegoated and become the carriers of the evil within the system. Roger is a very good example of that in Peck's book.
Important note: While these dynamics are very real, it would be very dangerous however to infer that because someone has problems, or shows deviant behavior, that person must come from an evil system. They are other reasons for maladjustment as well (ex: biological reasons, other traumatic experiences, etc.)
7. Nudity in Schindler's List.
Several students, in watching Schindler's List, came to terms with the graphic violence as necessary to portray the evil of the system, but objected to the use of nudity, both in the concentration camp scenes, and in the more sexual scenes (both Schindler's and Amon Goethe's). Perhaps we should ask ourselves the question of why nudity is for us a greater carrier of evil than violence. How do we interpret it, and do we still at heart believe that the primary evil is sexual, and if so, why?
Nudity in the concentration camp setting, of course had nothing to do with sexual attraction. Forcing the prisoners to disrobe for medical examinations and sorting was a way to objectify them, make them feel, and render them totally vulnerable. It was part of the central message of the film, and, I think, the concentration camp portrayal would have been incomplete without it.
The sexual scenes may be more questionable, although in the case of Amon Goethe, they shed light on his pathology: there was a strong sexual element in Goethe's madness for power, and his sexual life itself was very objectifying. Being Goethe's girlfriend must have been terrifying, almost as bad as being a concentration camp inmate. Perhaps the Schindler scene was added for balance. Its usefulness is less clear, except that of course, it was part of Schindler's life. It may have been shown also to create a contrast between the desire to love and connect with people, and the horrors that were taking place. The main point of this particular sexual scene is that it was interrupted by an emergency. It was there primarily to be interrupted.
8. Living in the Kingdom of God.
Living in the Kingdom of God does not necessarily mean an afterlife situation. Jesus emphasized several times that the Kingdom is here. Now. What do you think he meant by this? If the Kingdom is there now, in some ways, how do we live in it? What are its characteristics? Its inner and outer manifestations?
Reflecting about this will help us create for ourselves images of good.