Evil and it's Opposite

I just finished a wonderful book, The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert. This is not the place for a book review (the book is excellent, though), but there is one aspect of it that has captivated and held my attention, namely the main character's assertion that there is a flaw in the theory of evolution because it cannot account for altruism in the human (and in some cases non-human) species.

I find this odd. It seems to me clear that we are a cooperative species because we would have died out long ago if we were not, simple as that. I know that many acts of kindness or heroism have nothing to do with the survival of one's offspring, but I don't think evolution needs to be quite so literal. Birds, for instance, evolved wings because it made it more possible for them to survive, but they swoop and soar sometimes simply for the pleasure of it. There is no evolutionary adaptation there; it is more or less a side effect of a desirable trait. Just so, the extremes of altruism may not have anything directly to do with evolution, but the trait itself is highly adaptive. Or, so it seems to me.

Of more interest to me is the nature and persistence of evil. Here we truly do have a human characteristic that would seem to fly in the face of evolutionary theory. While it's true that the mass extermination of others (for instance) would seem to lead to the perpetuation of one's own offspring, such extreme acts go far beyond the level necessary for evolution to take place. Indeed, such extremes (history suggests) will eventually rebound upon the perpetrator and make the survival of his or her offspring less likely.

Caligula

I am thinking of the big evildoers here: Hitler, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Joseph Stalin, Caligula, Torquemada, King Leopold. What could possibly have motivated these men (and it's worth noting that they are all men) to the heights of murder, rape, and torture? To simply call them evil and leave it at that seems disingenuous. These were men like any others; they were not substantially different in form from any of us.

This addresses what I believe Hannah Arendt was getting at when she coined the term "the banality of evil". It is both a disservice to humanity and an untoward exaltation of the evil one to think of Evil as something exceptional or outlandish. This way of thinking can lead to an attitude that can serve to sanitize or even romanticize evil acts. Just think about how we sometimes speak of a man like Rasputin, as someone extraordinary and mystical instead of just one more normal man gone bad.

Closer to home is the thorny situations where neither good nor bad is entirely clear. Take, for instance, the aversion most of us have for lying. We nonetheless engage in this vice on a fairly regular basis—and a good thing, too! Part of the social contract is those lies that make life possible ("Does this dress make me look fat?") On a deeper level, there is the thought experiment dreamed up (I believe) by Kant: a man who believed that lying was always wrong was sheltering his brother from a man who wanted to kill him. The potential killer came to the man's door and asked if his brother was there. What does the man say? It seems clear to me that one must always consider the greater good. To be a moral absolutist is to be a moral idiot.

I ran across two linked philosophical thought experiments the other day that also challenge the way we think about such choices. Here they are:

An out-of-control trolley is careening toward a large crowd of people and will undoubtedly kill dozens of them if it continues on its way. However, you have access to a track switch. If you throw the switch, the trolley will divert to a different track where only a few people stand; they will surely be killed in the collision. You only have time to throw the switch but not enough time to warn anyone. What do you do?

Usually people recognize in this scenario that the greater good takes precedence and, even though your action will lead directly to the death of some people, it will also save many others. But what about this?:

The same scenario as above, but this time there is no switch.You are on an overpass above where the trolley will pass. The only way to stop the trolley from killing all those people is to push the fat man standing next to you onto the tracks below, which will stop the trolley. (And, no, you are not adequately hefty to serve the purpose). You don't have time to warn anyone, including him, and you have the necessary strength to do the deed. Do you do it?

For most of us, this is a much more difficult scenario. Interestingly enough, in the latter scenario, you are responsible for the death of only one person versus "several" in the first one. Yet because you must actually put your hands on someone and directly cause his death, this is much more difficult for most of us to imagine doing. (Another twist on the scenario is that the fat man is responsible for the trolley being out of control—he rigged the controls and you know it. Is it easier to contemplate throwing him in the path of the trolley now? Why?)

I don't pretend to have facile answers to any of these questions, but I find them interesting. I think the only way we can survive is through a bit of moral relativism. Yet when we take this relativism to an extreme it can lead to horrendous injustice and indifference.

Which brings us back to altruism. It is essential that we feel compassion and openheartedness toward all of those beings in our world in order for us to survive. With all that is going on around us, this can be extraordinarily difficult. How can I hold in my heart every last refugee and starving person, every whale and polar bear, and still lead a life joyful enough to be worth living? The Buddha would say that our hearts have an infinite capacity to consider and address the problems of the world, but it doesn't always feel that way, does it?

I wish you all wonderful holidays. I will write here again after the New Year. Watch out for those trolleys.

Empathy for the shooters

On Thursday I was angry, disappointed, fearful and frustrated. My bosses were talking about taking away some of my Fridays off, a schedule I have had for 12 years and around which I have organized my life. Still, weighing some days off against the death of a room full of six-year-olds makes what I was experiencing infinitesimal. But to me it was a very real and present pain and caused me deep suffering, if only briefly.

I bring this up only in order to open my heart to those who suffer mightily every day and for years upon years. Take my pain and multiply it by ten and fill an entire life with it; only then would I have any clue to what could drive a young man to take up an assault rifle and shoot little children. This act is so far in violation of everything we as human beings stand for that we must believe that only an entire disconnection from one's humanness could make it possible. What suffering, what inner and outer torture, what pain, confusion and rage must have been present in Adam Lanza's mind for him to contemplate the deed, nonetheless act on it. Not only is the mass killing of others unthinkable to most of us, but the pure innocence of children this age brings the meaninglessness of it into even sharper focus.

But here we must pull ourselves up sharply. It is far too easy to disassociate ourselves from Adam Lanza, to make of him a monster with no relation to us. This is the very impulse, the creation of Us versus Them, that keeps certain people and even whole swaths of people out of our hearts. I find myself vilifying "gun nuts" and the NRA, thinking of them as monolithic entities rather than as convocations of like-minded human beings. I find it far too easy to assign blame; to Lanza, his mother, those who missed his mental illness, a society which didn't treat it, those who use the Second Amendment as an excuse to own the means to kill hundreds of their fellow humans. I, too, have the knee-jerk impulse to lock down every school, arm every teacher, put sharpshooters on the roofs. I have the desire to take away from every person in the world their guns and other weapons. I want, in other words, to do anything but feel that Adam Lanza was me. He was and is each of us. To think otherwise is to let ourselves off the hook. We are responsible. For one thing, to deny this association is to claim that we never feel a murderous rage, even rarely and briefly. Where we fail to empathize we cannot help but fail to understand.

I know there are those who will excoriate me for suggesting that we should in any way feel badly for someone who would murder children, that I am somehow condoning the act or aligning myself with who he is. This is an odd perspective which would seem to argue that hatred is the only moral response to a hateful act, that finding someone to blame or placing Those People beyond the reach of being full members of the human race is an effective response to our confusion and pain. Part of the punishment for a heinous act is to be utterly reviled and to fill my heart with contempt and venom.

The Buddha was unambiguous in his renunciation of the impulse to divide ourselves. We are one. We are so thoroughly interdependent that not one of us could exist without the efforts of us all. The post-apocalyptic stories of the lone man or woman making a go of it on this Earth are simply silly fantasies, not to mention the fact that without bacteria, bugs, rodents and other creatures we wouldn't be here. With every breath we take, oxygen molecules that have been in and out of billions of other beings and forms enter our lungs. The stuff which makes our bodies has been stars, Rottweilers and bacon. The border between us is artificial, porous, a chimera, without substance or form in the real world.

It is only useful to see into the hearts of those who suffer and cause suffering. Or, more precisely, it is only useful to see into the Heart that is the center of us all. The more I inveigh against the NRA or those who sell assault weapons without recognizing their connection to me, the more I encourage the very divisiveness that drives someone like Adam to abandon his humanity to rage and revenge, encourage the deep-seated fear at the center of the impulse to stockpile weapons to defend against unknown terrors. I am these people. They are me. Only beginning there can we even begin to understand.

Don't get me wrong. I oppose the private ownership of most weapons. As I am devoted to the Dharma, I am philosophically opposed even to the use of guns for hunting. (In response to those who say that deer and other animals must be thinned to avoid their becoming a nuisance, I recall the Gary Larson cartoon with two deer speaking, one saying to the other, "Why don't they thin their own damn herd?"). At a minimum, if suddenly in charge of the world, I would ban assault weapons and handguns (the latter designed for the sole purpose of killing other people), except for the military and police. If we must have them, how about gun clubs, where guns for hunting and target practice are kept in a central location and locked up, only to be accessed for licensed, planned activities, then locked up again? (And, if the end times come, where the militias would know where to find them, just to reassure that faction).

I would ban first-person shooter video games. Yes, yes, I too have seen the studies denying a link from these games to gun violence in the real world. But should we really be breaking down the moral horror that (one would hope) comes over us at the prospect of pointing a gun at another human being and pulling the trigger? Would we condone a video game in which we practiced the fine points of rape? When I visited them a few years ago, I was horrified to see my sweet greatnieces and -nephews calmly mowing down bad guys with assault rifles. This sort of game also reinforces the divide between Us and Them. When we depersonalize those we view as Other, it becomes much simpler to take them out without qualm. Think of the degrading epithets used to describe our opponents in war: gooks, krauts, japs, towel-heads, filth, Charlie. If we downgrade them from fully human to something less, we need not feel quite the same dismay when we end their lives. We may, in fact, feel that we are doing our holy duty by killing the Other, much as the Nazis did the Jews and others they demeaned. I read of the recent shootings in Pennsylvania on Yahoo and was more devastated by the comments on the article than the article itself. These mostly centered in "now the state will come for your guns, be ready to kill them" and, most chilling of all, "You are next". We have hammered out ideological bulwarks and are hunkering down behind them for the long fight. This can only lead to more and worse violence.

The Buddha's message was clear: it is the creation of suffering to leave any person or any creature whatsoever out of your heart. It is the source of personal suffering, societal suffering, the suffering of the whole world. In fact, there is no other source; this is the wellspring of all suffering. We can choose, instead, to turn to the wellspring of all that is good, the understanding that we are all one--the deer and the hunter, the NRA vice president and the pacifist, the shooter and the shot. Adam Lanza is that cute six-year-old girl he killed and she is he. It cannot be otherwise because it is the core truth of our existence. There is no other place to begin to heal and transform our world into one of love, harmony and understanding. This is possible. It is never too late to begin.