Spirituality Seminar

A fourth line of exploration will treat of human psychology and what basic motives in it can eventuate in evil acts. Finally, I will try to relate all this to the theological structure of Trinity-Incarnation-Theotokos that I am proposing.

As I noted in chapter 7 (the section on “gene wars”), what we call evil has a natural history. Lyall Watson has written a book about it, Dark Nature2, in which he gives many examples of behavior among animals that may be regarded as precursors to human murder, theft, rape, lying, cheating, enslaving, warfare, cruelty, deception, etc. Marsh hens peck blackbird eggs to kill the chicks; newborn hyena twins fight until one is killed; elephant seal females gang murder another mother’s pups. Indeed, infanticide is common as a means of reducing the burden of parents or as a way of eliminating another’s offspring. Ten percent of all species are parasites on others, and there is cannibalism in every species not vegetarian. Warfare is there already among insects and among primates. And at the human level, it is no use our imagining that people who live close to nature rather than in industrialized cultures have less crime, for African bushmen have a homicide rate higher than the worst American cities.

All this is in service of the genes’ replication. It’s as though the motto of the genes is “Happiness is making others unhappy.” And the irony of it is that intelligence and awareness of the other and the other’s probable behavior evolve in this context. Deception especially, or any form of cheating takes intellegence, and, as Watson says, one of the rules of this game is “Cheat whenever possible”. But consider what cheating and deceiving imply. There has to be a mechanism for acting contrary to the facts. The organism has to “know” what is true and then inventbehavior that is not true. And it does this in a world in which particular other parties will interpret this behavior as if it were true and that will have an effect favorable to the deceiver.

I’m not saying that this is explicitly conscious, of course, but it is objectively implicit: nature itself is making facsimilies of alternative realities, of conditions that are not actually so. This seems a strange thing to do, or at least a very complicated thing to do, even if we want to hold that it comes about accidentally. It happens all over the natural world by all sorts of different imaginative devices. Even if unconscious, this must be the forerunner of imagination and intelligence. This is a fundamental exaample of how something we value and something we (say we) disvalue are intimately ties together. It’s not just that intelligence is neutral and can be used for either good or ill. It’s that intelligence as such, in its neutrality, probably was selected for (at least in part) because of its advantage in the deception game. And even more interesting is that it is precisely the untruthfulness, the unreality, of deceptive behavior that lies behind a most prized faculty, imagination. Lying is a form of creativity. Creativity is making something that is not immediately derived from a preexisting reality.

Closely related to the evolution of intelligence is the evolution of pain. This is the passive aspect of evil, evil not as we dot it but as we receive and experience it. One of our frequent complaints against how the world is, is that there is so much suffering in it. But could consciousness have developed without it? What is pain, distress, discomfort, except the subjective aspect of interection what that is harmful to us? Just as advancing intelligence became more clever at deceiving others to its own advantage, so advancing consciousness became more sensitive to detecting interactions disadvantageous to it. “Pains” differentiated, became of various types, degrees, locations. Internally caused distress could be distinguished from externally caused. Social disturbances - unhappiness, shame, guilt, lonliness, disappointment - were advances over plain fear, anger, desire. These are names we give to internal urgencies to do something to alleviate the disadvantage. Even at the level of human consciousness, we are still strongly moved by discomforts of various sorts. The higher the level of organization and consciousness, the more sensitive and responsive the being is, the more capable of more sorts of suffering.

Putting it in teleological language just to show the strength of the link, if you’re going to try to get consciousness to “emerge” from interactions of material particles, all of these “evils” are probably more or less inevitable. Complex unity is dependent on variety and interaction. Variety means there have to be different constructions of the cosmic stuff. The constructions have to maintain themselves to some extent in order to enter into significant interactions. This means that they have to defend themselves, probably augment themselves, certainly copy themselves. This entails gaining the supplies to do this from a resource location that is limited. Those structures that do gain the supplies make the copies. Those that are able to eliminate competitors will gain, and those that are able to detect and analyze hindrances will gain. And all of this comes iltimately from the fact of finitude: to have variety and differences, we have form, particularly - finite being; and then we have the necessity to maintain these beings in an environment of finite resources. In the end, all the activities that at the human level are labeled evil can be traced back through their predecessors to the fact of finitude itself.

But now let us turn to the human level and the evolution of the label “evil”. Here the concept eof inclusive fitness comes in; we protect (unless sorely tired) our own genes present in other bodies, that is to say, our kinfolk. We do not as a rule hurt them or steal from them (though these things also occur). There is a sense in which this is recognized as harmful to the group, thus evil. On the other hand, stealing from outsiders or killing them as competitors or dangers may well be considered good - until we need to make an alliance against a greater threat. Then it becomes evil to injure the allies. The men of our tribe will no longer take their women or their cattle. The men agree to recognize each other as brothers. But those outside this alliance are still fair game, and it is heroic rather than evil to harm them.

My suggestion is that very slowly the scope of evil has increased. Behaviors that had been good or had been merely natural without attracting any attention became recognized as evil. The notion of “right” appeared. Some people had a “right” to be left unharmed. To transgress a “right” was evil. As more people were acknowledged to have more rights, there came to be more “evil” in the world. One tribe, allied tribes, a nation, here and there the women, to some extent the children - these gradually acquired “rights”. Up to our own day more and more classes of people have been claiming their right to self-possession and self-determination, and to the extent that their claim has been acknowledged by others, more possibilities of doing evil have been added to our list.