The Eternal Battle of Good and Evil
It's cliché, but hey, I'm thinking about it, so whatever
I realized today, with something of a surprise, that I've somehow switched places with my wife when it comes to how I see the action of good and evil in the universe.
When we first met, way back in our early 20s, she had a sort of dualistic view of the universe. She believed in something a little like Taoism, where there were good and evil forces in the universe that were arrayed in something roughly like balance. She did not see the evidence that good was stronger, or more willing to take the fight to the enemy. This was a spiritual sense as much as it was a metaphorical one.
In part through my intervention, she began, over time, to adopt a different view, and she eventually converted to Catholicism. In that view, God always prevailed, evil could only act where and how he allowed it, and in the end, victory was certain.
Now here I am, two years after leaving Catholicism, looking at the world through new eyes, and without a doctrinal lens. Today, I suddenly realized that I’m seeing good and evil much more like she did back then. But instead of something approximating balance, evil appears to be the side that most often wins.
Evil, it seems to me, is more common and pervasive. It therefore almost always has the upper hand.
Good strikes me as more potent — the works of one good man can offset the works of a number of evil men — but it's in much rarer supply. Powerful, but greatly outnumbered.
With my apologies to the Thomists in the audience, I also no longer see evil (if I ever really did) as a privation of good, but, instead, (as a friend of mine put it to me a bit ago) "an alien force with its own life and agenda...Much more similar to Lovecraft than traditional demons. Just, wholly alien and driven by incomprehensible hungers."
This seems to fit. Evil moves on its own. It embodies itself in various barbarities and horrors. It is highly active in the world. In a spiritual sense, I do still believe there are malevolent, parasitic forces that feed off of the misery of our race. Are they demons? It’s as good a word as any. I’m just not so sure the theological understanding we’ve tried to cobble together of how they work is entirely accurate. I don’t think men who strive for goodness should play around in the dark.
What I do not see is an overwhelming force for good. I do not see a God who intervenes to aid the righteous. I see the work of malevolent forces, even spirits, if you will, and the light that shines from those who strive to be good. But it feels like a losing battle. Everywhere you look, good guys are finishing last, while evil wins. Sometimes, it's exposed, sometimes, it's put down, but there are a hundred horrors waiting to take its place.
As I said to someone yesterday, who accused me of letting evil shake my faith: “It’s not evil that did it. It’s the lack of response from good.”
I wonder how many believers, if they could just turn off the programming for a minute (I don’t mean this to be demeaning, but I was that guy and I know how programming works) and actually look at what's going on, would disagree with me, at least from an empirical standpoint. Not come back with, "Well, I believe..."
Can they just admit, when they gaze upon the world and see the forces arrayed as they are, "Truthfully, it really does look as though evil usually wins."
It seems as though if there is a God, or any sort of higher force for good, that it's important for temporal, sensate creatures to have, within the reach of their senses, their innate capacity to acquire knowledge, access to some kind of reassurance that "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well."
Just hoping or believing that “Good wins in the end” isn’t enough for me. I can’t be sanguine about Tolkien’s “long defeat.” For me, at least, I need to see more than that.
What do you think?
The title reminded me of a story. Eight years ago, I made a commitment to improve my understanding of philosophy (apologies if I annoy you by bringing that up all the time). I started old school. I went to the local library, with real books, and asked the librarian where to look. She led me to a few rows with dusty books that appeared untouched for decades (hyperbole). The first book I selected was Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil. I began reading when I got home, and in the first paragraph of the first chapter, I read, "Granted that we want the truth: why not rather untruth?" It stopped me cold. I put the book down and did not return to it until a year later (I did take that copy back to the library on time). I had no idea what to make of a statement like that. I did not know anyone who even thought to ask a question like that. I was unprepared for it and could not go back. I went to other writers and came back to Nietzsche more prepared. He was way too smart for me, to say the least.
The reason I bring that up, besides the title of your post and its familiarity to me, is that I love your questions. You ask really big questions - the ones we can only answer with a sense of superficiality in a comment box, no matter how deep we try to be. My experience has been that the value of these questions you ask is not the answer we suppose we have - because our answer is always inadequate to the task - but the search it inspires in us.
That's a long way of saying, eight years later, I still can't answer your questions. But your big questions help move me along on the journey. I love them. And I'm recovering from Nietzsche-shock.
By the way, if you want to nail Catholics, and I'm one of them, Nietzsche is your sledgehammer.
As one of those Thomists, albeit a flexible one with Scotist and Palamite enrichment, I actually agree that the mere privation view of evil is insufficient and reductive. But that would take the conversation in a philosophical direction nobody else is probably interested in. All I will say here is that the Thomist weakness is analogous to the conceptual insufficiency of a mathematician who knew and understood the utility of the number zero, but not that of the negative numbers.
However, what I don't understand about this post is the apparent assumption that traditional Christianity would lead us to expect good naturally triumphing against evil overall and an ongoing movement in this direction historically. The NT is premised on contrary assumptions eschatologically. That is, evil rules the world (e.g., Eph. 6.12), only supernatural intervention can make good triumph (whether within individual humans by grace or at the cosmic level by the Parousia and consequent "cosmic reboot") and human history leads inexorably before the end (and new beginning) towards increasing outward domination of the righteous by the wicked (e.g., Rev. 13.7-10) with great tribulation.
Of course, there are simultaneously signs of the progress of light at a broader level in certain ways (Mat. 28.18-20, Luke 13.20-21). Certainly, modern views of equality of human dignity and rights and the need to protect the needy and oppressed would have had little purchase in our psyche were it not for the revolution in ancient thinking brought on by the Gospel. Nietzsche saw this and was annoyed by the triumph of the "slave morality". And Christianity has spread and still spreads, often making the biggest difference and causing most joy and refreshment (and miracles) amongst the newest converts or most persecuted.
And the tension between seeing the Last Days as present and as future is also common in the NT. For example, 2 Tim. 3.1-8 slides from future to present tense in discussing the protagonists of the last days. In other words, we expect there to be great tribulations before the final Great Tribulation. None of this is terribly optimistic in the ordinary sense, but neither is it anything but the common view of Scripture and the Fathers.
So, in the end, the Church loses (in terms of earthly power), then Jesus wins, fully vindicating the righteous and innocent sufferer at the beginning of eternity, so to speak. In the meantime, any victories of light will be localised or interior until the divine "reset". I have to be honest and say that, God forgive me, I find these facts to be naturally disappointing (just like the Jews in Christ's time found his style of Messiah-ship disappointing!), but I can hardly complain that I wasn't warned, so to speak. Indeed, what I see around me seems self-evidently in complete conformity to what was predicted.