I really don’t believe in evil. If anyone or anything is evil, then the rest of us have to decide what that is. To believe in the concept of evil presupposes that we can detect it in our world, and that we can separate good from bad. The concept of evil thus conditions us to believe that we have the capacity to tell what evil is, and who is evil.
If we believe in evil, it’s more likely we’ll make judgments to decide who is evil from who isn’t. And that means we have to form our own exclusive clubs of us versus them, kind of like Stalin and his henchmen did during the Great Terror, or like Hitler did once he assumed power. The other side had to be evil, and that which is evil is below human. It must be dehumanized before it’s eradicated. Witches were considered evil, but the only way to tell was it to try and drown them on a dunking stool. If they died, well, that meant they weren’t really witches after all. If they lived, they were burned alive, since that was the only way to destroy them. Today, it may be someone on the other side of the political aisle, or anyone beyond a nation’s border. If you look back in history, you’ll see that the criteria by which evil was determined have changed many times. We look back today and see how false, how subjective and even sometimes random, those measures were. Yet the horrors, the pogroms and genocides which resulted, were based upon righteous classifications of evil. And we’re no different today. Our standards have just changed.
The ability to discern good from evil comes to us because we believe we have the capacity to make accurate judgments about what’s good or right for ourselves, for others, and for the world. And we don’t really have that ability to judge, because none of us has the objective capability to see things as they really are. If an objective reality exists, you and I can’t see it. We can see part of it, yet not the whole reality, because we ourselves are only a part of that whole. If we think we can see the objective reality –whether that reality is scientific or moral – we’re deluding ourselves. Our perceptions, and the thoughts and judgments which are founded upon those perceptions, are distorted by our subjective experiences and our individual natures, and by the unique point in space, in time, and in history which each one of us inhabits.
Each of us has different concepts of what should be called evil. Yet none of us has complete or accurate information dating back to the beginnings of the universe in time, and we would need to have that since that’s when everything obviously began, every cause, which became an effect, which became the cause of something else. Uncountable causes leading to innumerable effects. We’re unable to trace every cause and effect back from now to its beginnings. We see some causes, but not others. For example, in our legal systems, we must detect the good from the bad, allot culpability for the bad, and then mete out some sort of punishment. We must judge. In deploying this faculty of judgment, we must attribute cause and effect and separate the two. When we make these judgments, we must cut the chain of causation at some arbitrary link and impute blame based upon some proximate cause to the effect for which blame is assigned. We ascribe guilt or liability to the actor whose contribution to the act is more proximate in time than to those actors whose contributions which are more remote. We punish the immediate abuser who commits the crime, but not the father which abused him and remotely contributed to the criminal act. And we can’t see all causes which contributed to any action, only the obvious, not the tenuous. Ultimately, since we’re all connected, we all have a hand in any action, good or bad, committed by any one of us. We’re either all responsible, at least to some extent, or none of us are.
No one really has the capacity to judge any occurrence with objectivity. Laboring under our own peculiar distortions of an unreliable, truncated, selective and incomplete memory, our thoughts and perceptions, our judgments of evil, can be dangerously off-target.
The way out is to realize there really is no such thing as evil. And that no one has the capacity to judge any person or group for anything.
© 2023 by Michael C. Just