If undeserved suffering is not a sign of imperfection in nature, or of an immanent divine being less than good, what are we to make of human misbehavior and malice? Whether at the retail level of people deliberately hurting one another in their personal relations, or at the whole sale level of human monsters, the Maos and Stalins and Hitlers and a host of lesser but still deadly despots and oppressors, both our personal lives and our history as a species are filled with frequent encounters of the deeds of the nasty.

Often the worst people do it in the name of good, and often other people fall in line behind them because they are incapable of recognizing the good beyond what some authority tells them.  In my opinion we see this today, as malevolent people work to destroy everything worth while about this nation and others who are decent enough in their personal lives fall into step mindlessly behind them.  The themselves then endorse, and eventually may do hideous things to others they otherwise would not have done.  Personal cowardice then keeps such people from ever admitting their error.  Sometimes for generations, as with many in America’s South.  From Auschwitz and Buchenwald to the Gulag and a hundred other man-made Hells, to the relatively smaller scale depredations of murder, rape, and general moral corruption, many people can be forgiven if they believe something is deeply wrong with human nature.

And that’s just the big stuff that makes it to the history books.  There is also an unending stream of what I might term “retail badness” which all of us have done at one time or another.  Lying for personal gain, stealing, failure to treat others with respect, taking the easy way out and hurting innocent others in the process, and on and on in an endless litany of small deeds we end up later wishing we had not done.

Why can’t we live up to our affirmations of virtue?

Sin?

Christianity as I have encountered it has little to no light to shed on this basic conundrum. Western Christians claim to have an easy answer to this issue.  They call it original sin. Along with its moral incoherence – a perfect deity made a perfect creation where two people sinned and as a result billions of others for millennia are born guilty – it solves nothing,  The term sheds as much light on the problem of human evil as the statement that opium causes drowsiness because of its soporific qualities sheds light in why people doze off under its influence.  This concept’s logical and moral emptiness is apparently why some important once Christian scholars, such as Bart Ehrman, ultimately became agnostics.

Pagans in general have rejected such notions root and stalk.  We argue that the sacred is everywhere and in all things.  Even in a Mao or a Hitler or in their would-be imitators as in the most ruthless elements in the American right.  But how can this be?

Historically the most common Pagan answer of which I know is that evil is due to ignorance: deep ignorance and not-so-deep ignorance.  The nature and causes of this ignorance varies with the person’s spiritual understanding.  Here philosophers differ.  However, there is very widespread agreement that evil is not in any sense a fundamental element within either the spiritual or the mundane world.  But how can ignorance bring forth a monster from origins that are fundamentally good?

Malice from good will

In Pagans and Christians I described how great evil could arise from sources that were themselves not only not evil, they were well meaning.  I imagine some variant of what I described has happened to all of us. Here is my basic argument:

Let us assume that I make some gesture of friendship and good will to you, and you do not respond. At least in any way I notice.  I am miffed.  Later, you ask something of me, and I refuse because it is inconvenient, and besides, I am still disgruntled at what I experienced as your sleight.  Unaware of my earlier annoyance, you are insulted in turn, and tell a mutual friend what a jerk I have become.  Your words get back to me and I escalate, denouncing you as a false friend and devious and self-centered human being. And a tragic process sets in that has often divided friends, lovers, and peoples.  Anger and sometimes violence can result.

Once violence has occurred a new dynamic enters in.  Each must seek to defeat the other. Afterwards there is ill will, anger on both sides, and perhaps in time that fullest expression of what I term “evil:” malice.

But what about that initial sleight? All of us have other things going on in our lives besides paying attention to a particular person, and sometimes that person gets relegated to a secondary position, perhaps at a time when she or he needs my attention. My gesture could have gone unnoticed.  Or its significance to me misunderstood.  If I were to know why you seemed to ignore my gesture, my annoyance would have been immediately dissipated. What is significant in such cases is that once light is spread on the problem anger evaporates, replaced by sympathy or embarrassment or relief or some other reaction.

I think we have all had such experiences. The Gods know I have, on both sides.

In this life we do not truly know the context of one another’s experiences and decisions. It is inevitable that we will sometimes misunderstand others and their motives, and when we do there is a possibility of things spiraling downwards into enmity. This is particularly the case if our misunderstandings trigger our own feelings of vulnerability.  And again, I suspect we all have them.  In this way very bad things can arise from people who are in no way bad or malignant, just ignorant of others, and perhaps themselves in ways they do not appreciate.

Love and self-love

To this explanation some of the more sophisticated Christians I have read say that it is this self-centeredness, this refusal to be able to respond lovingly to everyone, that is our ”fallenness.”  Self-love is our ‘original sin.’

No it is not.

There are two dimensions to why this alternative Christian explanation (as I have heard it) fails: the nature of the self and the nature of love.

Love expands the self, such that delighting in and cherishing another becomes an important part of who we are. We feel bigger.  Events that once would have been upsetting become less so or nothing much at all in this larger context.  This means that in order to love another we need to have a self, and to have a self we need to experience separateness, being different from what is around us. As love enters in we maintain an awareness of difference but add to it an awareness of caring connection.

Children are loving, but they have not experienced enough yet to appreciate the complexities and histories of those they encounter.  Their love is genuine, but naïve. As they grow and mature, and go through their own hard knocks, they develop much stronger senses of who they are themselves and to the degree they are empathetic, come to appreciate that others have gone through versions of the same processes that have buffeted them.

Because children are naïve, because they initially accept the social cues and attitudes they experiences as every bit as much a part of the world as trees and rocks, they are extraordinarily vulnerable to misunderstanding what they see and experience, and then acting on the basis of these misunderstandings.  This is why their environment is so important for kids, and why no environment will be perfect because even if the parents do a flawless job, they cannot control how their child will interpret what it experiences. No one gets out of childhood unwounded, and perhaps it is from those wounds that we have our greatest opportunities to grow in wisdom and ability to love.

I think the love adults can have for one another requires developing a strong sense of self, and of that self as worthwhile.  Mature love of others requires a strong sense of self, and a love for that self.  It provides the basis for learning to love other selves, with all their weaknesses as well as their strengths.

Self-love is not the cause of  “sin,” it is the foundation for a growing circle of love.

The most serious error of the Randians and other egoists is their impoverished and ignorant sense of what a self is.  They constitute the flip side of this error by some Christians. Our self grows as the relationships into which we enter in a caring way grow and deepen.  The self is not an object, it is a process.

The story of a sociopath

I recently read an article about Newt Gingrich, a man I believe has done an extraordinary level of harm to this country as well as to many of the people around him, particularly those closest to him.  It is very easy to write Gingrich off as a manipulative sociopath who is interested only in his own power. And there is plenty of evidence that he comes very close to that image, and perhaps now meets it. But my purpose in bringing Newt Gingrich’s nastiness up is not to describe it, but to look beneath it.

This article went rather more into Gingrich’s childhood than the usual level of journalistic analysis of a political leader. And it did so in large part through the insights of his second wife, Marianne Gingrich, a woman he treated abominably, but who obviously emerged from her ordeal a wiser and perhaps more compassionate person than she had been.  She offered personal insights into his childhood, insights of great value.

There were enough similarities between Gingrich’s childhood and my own that I could appreciate how he made certain choices that would in time have enormous negative impact on him and others. Initially I was going to go into the Gingrich case in some depth for this essay, to illustrate my argument about evil arising from ignorance.  But I decided not to because the article itself is so good, and because had I done so this would be a much longer piece. Curious people can simply read the article. I learned a lot about the man and ended up having more compassion for him, while remaining as deeply opposed to most of what he stands for as I did before reading the piece.

To oppose a person’s evil acts while still having some regard for the person committing those acts is hard, at least for me.  The Gingrich piece helps because it showed how events in childhood, when the young boy could not have understood much of the context in the events impacting him nor foreseen the implications of his choices, shaped strengths and weaknesses that ultimately turned a talented mind in dark directions.

Tribalism and ignorance

There is another dimension to this issue, one we are confronting today around the world.  For the reasons I outlined above we are most able to empathize with those who are most like us: our families, our friends, our fellow workers, our countrymen, and on outwards in ever expanding circles of increasing abstraction.  We connect with what is most concrete to us in preference to what is most abstract. (The fanatic is an unfortunate whose abstract ideals are more concrete for him or her than are the concrete people they come across.)  This is why, for example people can say they believe in freedom of speech, but when the concrete case is upsetting enough, act to forbid it.

The ultimate example of this phenomena are the humans vs. aliens movies, where all humans band together against the common foe, their animosities set aside or forgotten. ‘Tribalism’ is an expression of this universal human trait of preferring the concrete to the abstract.

One expression or another of tribalism, of the us vs. others perspective, leads many people who have nothing against one another personally committing hideous atrocities against those who appear their devious, sub-human, and heartless foes. In such battles we are often not even bothered by “collateral damage,” the destruction of innocents while seeking to destroy those we regard as guilty.  And of course, those we destroy are quite concrete to others, who then regard us as the depraved and subhuman enemy. Many Americans are challenged by this with respect to Muslims, as many Muslims abroad are with respect to the United States.  This is ignorance leading to evil acts on a breath-taking scale.

But these evil acts are ultimately rooted in our capacity to care.

Spirituality and ignorance

From a Pagan perspective, and not just a Pagan perspective, spirituality is a means to overcome our ignorance.  The issue is not being forgiven.  We do not forgive a child its errors based on childish ignorance, but we do expect it to grow up.

I have tried to show how even the most hideous acts can arise from a world where there is no evil, only ignorance among well meaning people. If this is the case this does not mean the world is a good place, it may mean that we are simply spirits trapped here by our own ignorance, a kind of Gnostic view.  I also believe this is view is deeply mistaken, and that the Pagan affirmation of the goodness and sacredness of our earthly life is a far wiser approach.  It is towards questions like these that I now turn.