If There is No Evil, How Can There Be Good?
The following essay is an excerpt from the book “Belief is a Bulldozer” by Don Hall. To purchase the book, go to Amazon.
"We fat all creatures else to fat us,” Hamlet states, “and we fat ourselves for maggots. Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service—two dishes, but to one table. That’s the end.”
My disbelief in the concept of evil is usually set aside in conversations as a semantic perspective. Friends and colleagues who use the term want to believe in the possibility that there is objective evil in the world so firmly that they play the pedantic game of "OK. Fine. What I call evil, you call..."
But I do not believe there is such a thing. Sure, in abstract, in popular culture. There are plenty of manifestations of evil in films and television. In real life? Nope.
Fundamentally, what you call evil, I call normal. What is most normal in the human species is the hubris that dictates that we are smarter than nature as if it's a competition with an amoral system of chaos and a machine designed to consume and regenerate on a microscopic level.
Most importantly, I think, is that evil is a construct we've created to avoid really looking at ourselves and coming to grips with how substantially shitty the human species can be when left to its own devices.
Walking through the Las Vegas Strip with my friend to celebrate her birthday with an annual Gordon Ramsay fix (this year we went to his Fish & Chips place at the Linq Promenade and it was crowded but delicious) we both were observing the Friday night crowd.
It's not an attractive bunch. Contrary to the glamorous view of How Vegas Works, the casinos do not make most of their money on the high stakes players but the schlubs on the ground dropping twenties into slot machines. 80% of casino revenue comes from this drooling, sunburned mass of tattoo'd and overweight bunch of idiots strolling from line to line, drinking giant plastic tubes of daiquiris.
I notice a grizzled up guy sleeping under one of the many escalators designed for tourists to easily cross the streets from casino to casino.
"I read that Los Angeles has basically made being homeless illegal but provides no alternative for those without homes."
"The world is just...evil." she replied.
"I don't know about that. I think people—and especially crowds of people—can definitely skew towards selfish and greedy and lack a sense of balance between empathy and self reliance. On the other hand, there are millions of people who go out of their way individually and in organizations to act selflessly and for betterment of everyone. We just don't hear about them as often."
"You seem to have a better view of humanity than I do."
"Maybe. Maybe just a more objective look at the creature we are. The only thing that separates us from chimps is that we have a complex language system and the ability to create complex tools. Beyond that, we're just smart monkeys."
"Maybe not so smart."
"Truth."
In the 2011 book The Science of Evil: On Empathy and the Origins of Cruelty, British Professor of Psychopathology, Simon Baron-Cohen (Yup. Borat's brother) hypothesizes that we should replace the unscientific term ‘evil’ with the scientific term ‘empathy.’
He characterizes those who lack empathy as having “a chip in their neural computer missing.” He writes that “empathy is more like a dimmer switch than an all-or-none switch.” The problem is that by reducing evil to a mechanical malfunction in the empathy circuit, Baron-Cohen also eliminates good. No one in this deterministic conceptual system chooses to be good. They just have a well-developed empathy circuit that compels them act empathetically—there’s no choice or honor in the matter.
Watching the documentary Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage by filmmaker Garret Price, I was struck by one of the guys interviewed throughout.
Unfolding over three days of intense heat and non-stop performances, Woodstock 99: Peace, Love, and Rage examines how the festival eventually collapsed under the weight of its own misguided ambition and resulted in a grim outcome, earning the event the infamous distinction of “the day the nineties died.” The documentary focuses a spotlight on American youth at the end of the millennium, in the shadow of Columbine and the looming hysteria of Y2K, pinpointing a moment in time when the angst of a generation galvanized into a seismic cultural shift. Set to a soundtrack of the era’s most aggressive rock bands, the film also reappraises the 1960s mythos, revealing hard truths about the dangers of rose-tinted nostalgia in the age of commercialism and bottom-line profits. — HBOMax
This one 40-something is tasked with recalling his experience. On Friday, he tells us, he was just a kid going to a music festival. By Sunday, he was caught up in the crowd of predominantly white 20-year olds as they destroyed everything in sight, trashing trucks and scaffolding, burning tables and debris, and sexually assaulting many of the women at the event.
You can see the bewilderment in his eyes even two decades later as he attempts to understand how he transformed into someone he had never been nor had been after. Was it evil or merely human instinct gravitating toward mob behavior?
I read an article in the NYT entitled What We Are Not Teaching Boys About Being Human and what struck me most obviously was the author's active ignorance of actual human behavior. Humans are highly competitive, tribal, brazenly self interested, violent, greedy, hedonistic, and prone to an arrogance not exhibited by any other creature on the planet.
What we tend to describe as evil is basic human nature run amok.
Is Evil Just a Lack of Empathy or Is Too Much Empathy the Problem?
We borrow from the tragedy of others to make our empty days feel purposeful and high-stakes. We are emotional parasites. — James Dawes
Empathy is the ability to feel and imagine another person’s emotions and thoughts. Empathy gives meaning to our lives and our relationships. It plays a crucial role to bring people together. It is a vital ingredient to build intimacy in our relationships.
On the other hand, empathy can often lead to truly negative outcomes.
Empathy-based guilt can show up as survivor guilt, in which the person believes their happiness and success has come at the cost of unhappiness and failures of others. Since they falsely believe they are the cause of others’ distress, they also create false beliefs in their minds that they can relieve their suffering. This condition is pathological altruism. Pathological altruism is "altruism in which attempts to promote the welfare of others instead result in unanticipated harm."
Extending empathy to abstract strangers is a particular challenge for the human mind. Originally described by the Stoics thousands of years ago, the concept of “oikeiōsis” describes how our empathy and affinity for others declines by proximity to our lives. Imagine a series of rings: in the bullseye there’s the self, the innermost ring represents one’s family, the next ring one’s friends, the next one’s neighbors, then one’s tribe or community, then one’s country, and so on.
The problem comes when bad actors hijack these “circles of empathy” to try and sway our behaviors and beliefs. Our natural empathy for those closer and more similar to us can be harnessed to provoke antipathy towards those who are not.
In one study, undergraduates were told about a fellow student in the next room, who was in the running for a cash prize in a mathematics contest against another competitor. The undergraduates were given the opportunity to force that competitor to eat distracting hot sauce before the contest. When empathy for the student was ratcheted up, by emphasizing she was struggling financially, people were more likely to give a greater dose of hot sauce to her innocent opponent.
Politicians and activists on both sides of the spectrum often play to the idea of the Other, an Us vs Them meme, deploying empathy and identifiable victims to make a political case. It underpins some social media campaigns to “cancel” people, allows immigrants to be demonized, and can even stoke hatred and violence against apparent outsiders.
"I know how you feel."
"No you don't. You can't. You aren't me. You haven't lived my life so you can't possibly know how I feel."
"Fair. I can understand what it feels to be left out, to be discriminated against for reasons beyond my control, to be shunned. I can understand what betrayal feels like, the feeling that something here is simply not fair, that being judged sucks. While I can't possibly know exactly how you feel, I can access the universality of the human experience and come really goddamned close."
Empathy doesn't mean one knows exactly where someone comes from but is effective when one tries to understand. The lack of empathy is simply not trying to understand. Not evil but not good as it is separate from those moral qualifiers and boils down to a matter of choice.
If I walk down the street and see a homeless man begging for a few dollars and choose to keep my few dollars so that I can eat, am I evil or merely self-serving?
If I determine that the tragic murder of someone in broad daylight is a horror but decide to be skeptical of anonymous claims of culpability without factual backup for those claims, am I unempathetic or smart enough to avoid the Kool-Aid of zealotry?
If I recognize the century of disbelieving women who have been sexually harassed and in many cases raped yet do not then elect to believe every woman who today levels that charge at a man, am I evil or simply being logical?
What About the Seven Deadly Sins?
While the list—greed, lust, envy, wrath, gluttony, sloth, and pride—is not a catalog of humanity's best qualities, it should be noted that, aside from envy, we brag about each and every one of them every day.
“I can’t believe I ate that entire bag of Cheetohs!” — Gluttony
“I had SO MUCH sex last week!” — Lust
“I punched a Nazi!” — Wrath
“I slept for nearly twenty hours!” — Sloth
“I made almost $80K doing videos of myself jerking off with a ladle on my OnlyFans page!” — Greed
“Look at how incredibly gay I am in my ass-chaps and rainbow wig!” — Pride
Again, none of these represent evil but simple human impulses. Greed, for example, when properly channeled can become financial ambition. Nothing evil about that. Lust, when appropriately moderated, equals some good, solid, consensual boning. If Sloth and Gluttony are to be considered evil, a solid chunk of Americans are evil simply due to the number of holidays created in order to take the day off work to overeat and drink.
The Deadly Sins are a product of a religious desire to get closer to god via contrition, penance, and confession much like the requirement to 'check your privilege'—white, fit, pretty, financial, skinny, male—you name the privilege and the societal request to confess it and 'do the work' is essential. Any question on what 'the work' might be is met with the admonition that others are not there to teach you about your privilege. This is not evil but it sure as hell is annoyingly opaque.
One would think usury was worse than all seven. Combined. It would not be outside of reason to assume that rape (which is about power rather than lust) is a more egregious sin than any combination of the seven 'deadly' sins.
Much like the ten commandments and the laws of the Old Testament regarding the cutting of facial hair or eating of certain animals, these sins are rooted in an archaic lifestyle that is not compatible with a modern sensibility. "Thou Shalt Have No Other God Before Me" is not the sort of legitimate sin in a multicultural and increasingly secular society.
The practice of labeling completely normal human impulses as sin and thus evil is founded in a societal need to corral the ignorant masses and structure meaningful rules of behavior to ensure a certain harmony and co-existence as more and more people populated the areas of the world considered civilized.
Is Racism Evil?
Racism is first and foremost a human impulse: it can infect anyone, of any race, at any time. Tribal identity goes very, very deep, and resisting it requires work. It’s also true that, over time, systems emerge which institutionalize racism—slavery, segregation, the legal restriction to certain professions, the denial of religious freedom, bans on intermarriage, Jim Crow, redlining, lynching, etc.
Those systems do desperately need dismantling (and have been dismantled in America despite rhetoric to the contrary) but assigning a moral deficiency as the cause obfuscates the very real practical solutions required to dismantle broader systems.
In a multicultural, multiracial society as complex as ours, the cross currents, the nuances and the complexities—especially in a population becoming more diverse than ever—simply cannot be reduced to the Oppressor/Oppressed paradigm. These complexities exist in every human and in every demographic group. When you ignore that fundamental truth, you end up mystifying the human condition to the point where the only solutions available are religious in nature and ignoring the very pragmatics required to progress society.
Racism certainly can foment horrors in the form of very specific bigotry resulting in violence against minority communities but those actions are outliers as, while almost every single human experiences some measure of racist tendencies (in the forms of bias, both intentional and subconscious, tribalism, and institutionalized discriminatory practice) these overt demonstrations of bigotry are only actionable within a fairly small percentage of the population.
Is Sexism Evil?
For the same reason those suddenly obsessed with Lia Thomas being a transgender woman dominating her sport are wildly exaggerating any injustice to women swimmers—there are more than 3,100 professional swimming clubs, which include more than 400,000 members, according to USA Swimming, the national governing body for swimming in the country, of which 31 are transgender—it is likewise serious hyperbole to ignore the biological and psychological differences between men and women.
The overwhelming majority of humans fall in line with the biological male/biological female binary. The sexism that accompanies these often stark differences is, like racism, completely normal human behavior. Like racism, sexism can result in truly malevolent acts of sexual conquest and harassment, income inequality, laws prohibiting reproductive care that only affect women, and, of course, rape.
The rise of misandry in response to centuries of misogyny ends up fueling far more misunderstanding and contradictions in behavior than any progress forward. Relegating the human tendency toward sexism to moral grounds eliminates the possibility of cooperative reform to the very institutions sought to repair.
For example, the rhetoric behind rape is that one out of every five women has been raped. At best, this is guesswork.
"Did you know that one out of every five people has shit their pants in public?"
"Huh? How did arrive at that number? Most people who shit themselves don't report it or even tell their friends."
"Well, we have to assume that lots of people drop a load in their pants in, say, a CostCo, but never tell anyone about it so we decided one/fifth seemed reasonable."
"But you're really just guessing, right?"
"..."
Are there systems in place that utilize our natural bias toward one another based upon sexual and psychological differences? Absolutely. Are they solved by demonizing men? Nope. Not even close.
War is Hell but Is It Evil?
The best description of war is "Man's inhumanity to man."
As with so much of aspects of humanity we relegate to the trash bin of evil, war seems to be the most obvious but humans have been waging war since the first cave dweller beaned another with a rock for a slab of mastodon on rye.
As technology became more advanced, the rock became more heinous and more destructive with the ultimate rock being a bomb that split atoms and destroyed entire cities.
With war comes torture, maiming, the rending of human tissue almost casually. Certainly, if there is such a thing as evil, this must be it.
Except that war is a necessary evil depending on which side of the battle you are on. Few these days would call the alliance against the Nazis and Japanese 'evil' despite the torture, maiming, and killing done by the English, American, and Russian soldiers. So war is only evil if it's against you and your way of life which makes it wholly subjective.
That's the crux of this thing—the term 'evil' is entirely subjective and like all things open to individual interpretation, thus it cannot be held to objective scrutiny.
'Evil' is Like 'Beauty' and is Up to the Eye of the Beholder
Nothing is clearer about how murky the territory of the subjective belief can be than the defining of common terms from a lens of the personal opinion. From the perspective of belief.
"A belief cannot be either proved or disproved. If you wish to believe that invisible flower spirits are causing your string beans to grow, there is no point in my trying to dissuade you, because these entities are invisible and immaterial. Something proposed as a truth can, however, be put to the test. In recent years, people have confused beliefs with truths. From this confusion have come ideologies and dogmas—the characteristic of a dogma being that it’s proposed as an absolute truth and cannot be disputed, and if you try disputing it, you’ll be burned as a heretic." — Margaret Atwood
One may sniff a hint of snark when I write the word belief and that, too, is subjective. The need to believe in ideas that explain the complexities of the world and, more importantly, the bizarre nature of being animals that have the ability to see and question our own mortality is as normal for humans as our inherent fear of the Other. We need to believe in order to find any sense of hope for our futures.
For over a decade I've written a regular column for LiterateApe.com entitled I Believe... The thing started as both homage to the old Paul Harvey This I Believe series and a bit in a sketch show directed by Matt Elwell featuring myself and the brilliant Joe Janes. Joe and I would volley things we believed back and forth—mine were angry, Joe's were funny. It was a solid bit of comedy. I ran with it. Every Monday, five things I believed in the course of my week. To be fair, unlike Paul Harvey's show or the philosophers of ancient times, my column was mostly a list of things that annoyed me with a serious belief in there once in a while.
I published Belief is a Sledgehammer in 2018.
Bill Kurtis, legendary news host and anchor, wrote "Don Hall writes the way you want it—bold, brash and darkly humorous. Every aspect of our day to day lives is ripped open for his surgical assessment. No sense running for the corners, because that's where he shines his light first. Going with Don on his journey is one amazing and amusing ride."
The concept of belief is one I ponder routinely. In my earlier days, I was seduced into the belief in a god, in the sovereign martyrdom of Jesus Christ, of the comfort of knowing without question that this Christian paradigm is reality. Along the way I encountered too many inconsistencies and hypocrisies for that state of mind to sustain.
The concept of evil is center-stage for most major religions. Lucifer is the host of all evil in Christianity. Muslims have Shaytan, a creature that is in perfect tandem with the Christian notion of evil. Hinduism has no devil character and defines evil as simply an absence of good. The religion that most closely demonstrates my own view is Judaism, which loosely dictates that humans may behave in certain ways that seem evil, but they believe that whatever happens on earth is the result of God’s plan. By teaching suffering to be a punishment for sins, the Tenakh makes it clear that something bad is bad from being punished.
Which is correct and how do we justify the differences?
My mother is a devoted Christian and is, in my opinion, exactly what a truly religious-minded person should strive to be: thoughtful, humble, and thirsty to learn as much about her faith as she can manage. She is also one who does all she can to embrace and live the very precepts behind her faith with compassion for all, service to those in need, and a joyous spirit of inclusion and invitation.
I ask her what her definition of evil was and this is what she replied:
"The story of God is that Evil is an entity. It is a will, a force that is the very opposite of Good. God create, Evil destroys, God is light, Evil is dark. God is truth, Evil is lies.
Mankind was created and was Good, created in the image of God. However, Evil portrayed as a serpent tempted, lied and mankind was cursed to die. Death so that they would not be forever apart or a stranger to God.
The fall was sin, man is sinful but I do not believe mankind is evil. We can become vehicles for evil to act. But we cannot create evil.
God does not will or intend one of us to die in sin, or apart from Him. His mercy and love was shown in the awesome work of God becoming Man, redeemer.
So evil has been defeated by Jesus Christ son of God. The end of time is set, then evil will be locked up unable to escape to the New creation. Jesus said Look I make all things new. I am sinful, but my spirit is new and I will never die, only shake the dust off in passing!"
My non-belief vexes her. She feels I am judging her for her belief (I am not). I'm happy that she believes. It hurts no one and she actively helps others from that fundamental faith. If it makes her life fuller and with a sense of stability it's a good thing. She's my mom, after all.
The question her answers leave me with is how do I define evil if I don't believe there is a god in the first place? Her faith in the existence of an all-powerful deity is the bedrock to her definitions of good and evil. If that foundation is not present, the subjective definitions can't exist for someone not 'of the faith.' Every definition of evil I can find has the same conundrum. If you already believe in the existence of a god, the definition is easily explained. If you do not, the moral center that objectively centers good and thus evil is absent. Evil becomes just another circular word in a quest for some sort of objective explanation of its presence or absence.
Belief is a bulldozer in so many instances. A heavy thing designed to destroy and clean up. A bludgeon against those who disbelieve. A double-edged sword that cuts both—Christ, there's a metaphor stew for you.
I recall as a kid watching Leonard Nimoy in In Search Of and believing in Bigfoot, the Loch Ness Monster, and UFOs. I know people today (as in, I'm acquaintances with) who firmly have faith that the world is flat, that 9/11 was an inside job, that Hillary Clinton eats babies, and that the United states was founded in white supremacy that persists to this day. All solid beliefs. None smacking of capital 'T' truth. Subjective like my belief that Roadhouse is a cinema classic and Billy Joel is a musical god.
So where does that leave me in search of (where was Nimoy when it came to objectively finding existence of genuine evil?) evil? The moral quandary exists in that if evil is just a subjective label used to describe things and people we despise, is there good? If evil is subjective, then so must the concept of good.
I believe that human actions are no more evil than a hurricane. We assign evil to problems as if repentance will solve them. Contrition is no more helpful to fixing society than looking at the floodwaters and winds and falling to your knees to pray and blame someone/something for them.
I also believe that as long as faith doesn't get in the way of progress, belief doesn't obfuscate pragmatic reform, and one refuses to allow, say the conviction that Bigfoot is real, judgment and cruelty, go for it. Be careful how you label things: greed, selfish interest, bias, mental illness are none of them 'evil.' These things are human.
