Evil and the Quest of Life
The interaction between consciousness and life promotes an enduring quest to know more about reality. Thus, in a way, man becomes a question unto himself. Probing and pondering, he tackles, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, the challenge of discovering and understanding the world at large.
In examining the heritage of knowledge that is available to him in his inquiries about life, man is helped in his quest by an enormous history of attempts like his own. His effort to make sense of life is not the first, nor will it be the last. In every new generation, it seems, there are those who demand the right to fathom the mysteries of existence irrespective of the vast heritage of knowledge offered them. They insist upon finding their own new way amidst the opportunities of today.
In his pursuit of the meaning of life, however, man is frequently obstructed, prevented from accomplishing his task. This opposition or that hindrance - however one may describe it - lessens or even halts the goodness of his desires, and, concretely, man feels blocked or hemmed in by these unexpected circumstances which leave him in a not altogether pleasant situation. He feels hurt. He has met what he conveniently calls evil.
The problem of evil arises so often in life that most people come to identify human existence as involved, essentially, with it. One can't get away from its enclosures. It seems at times like a sinister power, waiting to pounce upon one's best and most innocent efforts.
Evil takes many forms, and it is often poignantly seen in the melodramas of every day. "Soap operas" such as "Peyton Place" and "As the World Turns" serialize the events that overtake many people in their struggle to live a "good life." In their endless plots, the problem of evil is rarely resolved. One finds only a slight reprieve until the next episode when circumstances and human desires once again forge a new scene for the emotionally charged battle between good and evil.
Most religions tell us to "offer it up," saying that "God will provide" or that "your reward will be greater when it's all over." But many people use this as an excuse to avoid confronting the real issue: why does evil occur at all? It is not a sign of maturity to remain naively fatalistic when the stakes are high: you could lose more than your submission. When something threatens your life, a passive attitude that tells you to back away from it may be playing right into its hands. How could life not go sour on these terms?
Let us examine, then, what it is that we call evil. Let us assume a certain working hypothesis. The major thrust of it is: life is fundamentally sound. Despite the hazards of living, existence is felt and thought of mostly in favorable terms. So, the first practical suggestion that results from this insight is that we should see everything that happens against this positive background. Another offshoot of the hypothesis is that life, or reality, enriches. Our appreciation of life increases, thanks to mother nature and human culture. Given these preliminaries, let us now examine more concretely the problem of evil and its reconciliation with life.
When we were children, our instinctive, or spontaneous, understanding of good and evil was very egotistical. I, like most children, usually considered everything from the point of view of my individual well-being. Certain realities held more interest for me than others, and it wasn't long before I set up my priorities. A toy, for example, was very important to me in my daily existence. If my older brothers or sisters took it from me, my whole world seemed threatened, and I would cry my eyes out over the pain of the loss. In my small world this breach of justice was not a minor incident; it was a catastrophe that shook my whole being; my day was ruined and my future happiness blighted, for it would probably take a miracle for me to recover the toy. While it was no consolation, at least now I knew my enemy. Evil had been met in both the personal form of my older brother and in the sense of objective loss - the irreplaceable possession, my teddy bear.
The very fact that I had favored this toy among others, that I had enjoyed it, thought about it and played with it endlessly, made the entire experience with it "good" (goodness here being that which pleased me). The additional, but unfortunate, fact that that the toy got broken, stolen or borrowed without my permission made the entire experience "evil." I wanted my toy, and it wasn't there. I wanted it in the condition in which I left it, and now it was broken. My reaction to this situation was experienced as pain, and I questioned, as a result, the overall soundness of life. Our basic hypothesis is now in jeopardy.
The tendency to respond to life based on what is good or bad, nice or evil, likeable or displeasing is not left behind in childhood. It is a basic attitude that pervades one's whole existence through time, and adults are not exempt from its compelling force. All the emotions, in fact, derive from what we apparently experience as good or evil. Very early din life we learn to gravitate towards those people and events that somehow give us a certain satisfaction; conversely, we try to avoid, or at most grudgingly tolerate, those things that dissatisfy us.
A curious change, however, takes place during human growth. During the years of growing up there is often a voluntary reversal in our thoughts and values. Those toys and particular activities that so fascinated us at a certain age, or period of life, gradually lose, in the least imposing way, their attraction. Before, one was ready to spill life's blood in the defense of a possession. Now the recent months of growth, biologically and emotionally have prompted new interests that have eclipsed some of the older ones. A special object that we lavished with undying attention receives hardly a cursory glance as it gathers the dust of the passing seasons. Not only can my older brother now borrow the things, but in the most casual manner it is dismissed forever to his domain.
These former possessions or activities haven’t suddenly become evil or repulsive; we have simply lost our interest in them. Now that we are older, occupied with our teen-age interests, the objects and activities that formerly engaged our attention at, say, the age of ten, have only a distant relationship to our current interests.
Our center of attention has expanded. We don't look upon these former playthings as sinister or infused with evil; we have simply lost interest in them; the energy that we invested in them is no longer there. This analogy continually repeats itself, under different forms, throughout life's journey. We begin to recognize that what we considered good at one time in our lives has proved to be only temporarily "super" in our estimation. While we may very well recognize its intrinsic value, still its attraction wanes with no hard feelings. Life moves on, and we try to keep up with it.
Likewise, some of the "bad" in life, when we look back, may not have been so appalling after all. Those events that seemed to be so ominous, provoking fear and trepidation, may later be experienced without negative feelings. Thus, there is a certain dimension of relativity to whatever we considered to be good or evil. This flexible feature of reality is based upon the reflection that every concrete object in this world has its limitation, and in that respect, it can only offer so much satisfaction. Experience reminds us that no single, concrete item can utterly satisfy our quest for what we may hypothesize as the "perfect good." And to the extent that something is less than comprehensively good, we can, due to our dissatisfaction, view it as something evil.
Conversely, there is nothing that may be called completely evil. People may be efficient in their actions and thoughts, things may be imperfect in their makeup, but no existing reality can embody evil. In realizing that both good and evil are relative, and even convertible depending on the way one looks at a situation, one can learn to become less intimidated and overwhelmed by their impact. In understanding their function in life, through experience, one begins to balance the presence of good and evil in the overall context of personal growth.
Our daily experience tells us that we grasp reality in partial installments, a little bit at a time. As we gradually accumulate exposures to life's crosscurrents, we connect these partial and limited exposures into a coherent whole. At least this is what we attempt to do in our quest for the meaning of existence. We make mistakes, and that's bad; but we learn from our mistakes, and that's good.
Nothing we experience through our senses is perfectly good or perfectly bad. Most of the time life can be improved upon. When evil asserts itself, for example, in conflicts and among people, in natural catastrophes involving injury and even death, our personal investment in the situation may prevent us for a while from coming to a reasonable judgement on the facts. On the other hand, a strong personal interest, painfully endured, may be a surer guide to the truth than merely being an aloof bystander.
When the problems and reverses of life can be balanced against the good of continual growth, then there is room to confront the pain of the day within a broader context. Life seems to be a continual preparation, painful at times, for the next stage of experiencing - this time with greater richness through the insights gained from the pain. This can be compared to the cycles of the seasons, in nature, where winter is followed by spring, death by regrowth. In many religious scriptures, too, death is seen as the threshold of a new life. Thus, the evil of nonexistence gives way to the greater goodness of the next stage of development. The evil, or fear, of pain is only temporary; it is endured for the sake of something more abundant to come.
Evil, surprisingly, thus helps us to discover the meaning of life. From experience I have learned that when something hurts me, when I feel the evil in myself in the form of pain, this is a signal for me to grow beyond this restriction. If I fail to understand the various kinds of limitations, or restrictions, that are placed on me, then my lack of discernment may cause the effect of pain. For example, if I eat something that doesn't agree with me, my stomach aches. The felt evil of this pain is the direct result of my not understanding, here and now, the correct relationship between this kind of food and the current condition of my stomach. In this way, the distress is good, for it reminds me to make an adjustment in this area. IT signals that something is in disorder and, thus, needs reordering.
So evil is not a primary principle in life; it is merely a limitation that occurs in a situation of overall good. If our stomachs were not substantially sound, we could not become upset. While the stomach aches aren’t good, the fact that we can detect it is good; we can use that knowledge for our benefit. This disclosure is possibly only because of the overall health in that region of the body. Consequently, evil always presupposes something good.
On a larger scale, the question is often asked: "If God is good, then how can there be evil at all?" In current Christian theologies - both Protestant and Roman Catholic - there is the conventional reply that evil is permitted so that greater good may come out of the situation. Human suffering and destruction are tolerated in order that, with the help of God's grace, virtue and spiritual growth may result. A mother loses her child at birth; a good and wholesome person is found to have cancer; innocent visitors lose their lives because of big-city gangsterism; abductions take place, wars break out, a plague devastates a village - a multitude of evils continually perpetrate themselves.
If God loves all, and if man's relationship with the divine is enclosed within a single lifetime, then the disparity between the various levels of human existence is more pronounced. In terms of world population, the few born into an abundance of enriching opportunities for personal and cultural fulfillment stands in shocking contrast with most people who will never even hear of these opportunities. Viewed in this cosmic context, the easy answers limp.
Can the imbalances at birth and throughout life in so many cultures be somehow "tolerated" by the belief in divine bounty? From a survey of the livable conditions confronting most of the world, one could draw the inference that God love, but not uniformly. Yes, this contention would eventually undermine the belief in the essential justness and infinite goodness of the divine. So, in attempting to resolve the ambiguity of global evils in its most personal and horrendous forms, it becomes increasingly difficult to restrict our field of vision to a single lifetime.
If we look, on the other hand, at the dynamics of human thought and action as they shape one’s personal history (rather than theorize about the structure of divine providence), then fresh questions open a wider vista from which we may explore the solution. Given the imperishable core of man's nature, must his journey through life be kept within the parameters of sixty or seventy years? Is it unreasonable to suppose that the experiences necessary for human fulfillment, in a total sense, may require more than one life span? Without being fatalistic, we can admit certain causal principle underlying nature’s workings in general: certain effects normally- at least for the most part - follow from determinate causes. IF this principle isn't true, then there is no good explanation for existence. Life would be sheer chaos; there would be no coherence whatsoever. Anything could happen at any time. In other words, every form of existence would be self-destructive; there would be no rhyme or reason for it as far as the human intelligence could detect.
Presupposing, then, a sufficient degree of rational consistency behind life's complexities, everyone may have more responsibility for the fate of his personal and collective environment than suspected. The circumstances surrounding my birth, for instance in conjunction with the subsequent opportunities for growth unfolding within the family and community, may be more of my determination than Providence's. Perhaps birth in this century is not my first initiation to life, but a continuation which I chose, one that allows for new phases of my development. The personal and social texture of birth may be the product of past decisions that now opens a few futures for me that will provide the experiences for further development. In other words, is my current situation not a result of past decisions and their consequences?
There is still enough room between my decisions and their effects to permit me to reevaluate the resulting situation and decide to make new adjustments. Hopefully, we learn from our mistakes, and this shows that there is room for us to make a choice in the face of unexpected, or dire, consequences. Life thus beckons me to work through the pending obstacles I will meet.
The question remains, could human progress take palace in a responsible way without my choosing a total life plan? If it becomes a working hypothesis, in combination with the statements at the beginning of this essay, then the good and evil that befall me can become opportunities for spurring my progress. Instead of blaming God for the woes of this world, then, I can exercise my human freedom and go beyond the limits of "evil" restrictions. Even if the circumstances of my present life are the consequences of what I have accomplished through my choices in the past, the exertion of a life plan for self-emancipation can ultimately free me from the bondage of the past. I am not doomed by my past unless I choose to be.
In overcoming petty evils, one can gradually realize, through painful experience, that the exercise of choice and discrimination increases one's personal freedom over these restrictions. I thus shape my future by sustaining a personal, enduring responsibility for it is progress. Anything less will impose the constraint of suffering - and suffering consist s of self-imposed restrictions that prevent me from overcoming evil.
Meeting the challenge of life's obstacles, then, increases my power to overcomes them. Instead of being evil, they are invaluable signs that urge me to transcend their restrictions through the immortal freedom of my spirit. The achievement of this goal dissolves evil into a mirage.
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