A Denial of Self-Deception

  GEORGE TEMPLETON: COMMENTARY  

When people become angry enough, they take delight in destroying. 

By George Templeton

Gazette Columnist

Preface
                 

How can God meet us face to face before we have faces?  We have to understand ourselves before we can claim innocence.  The Values Voter Summit, on October 12, 2019 makes this implicit.

Professor Charles Mathewes, a Western religious studies professor, contemplates Why Evil Exists.  We think in straight lines, trying to preserve the constant, while ignoring the much more significant slope.  It portends our future.

Professor Craig Koester of the Luther Seminary writes about The Apocalypse.  In Chapter 13 of Revelations, the phantasmagorical beast from the sea is a politician.  The beast from the land that supports him is Ante-Nicene Rome, known for the killing of Jesus Christ.

Dr. Daniel Breyer, professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies, describes Understanding the Dark Side of Human Nature.  He poses questions to help us delve deeply into the depths of our being.  If you could fly or be invisible, which would you choose?

Introduction

George W. Bush defined North Korea, Iran, and Iraq as the “axis of evil” in his 2002 State of the Union address.  Our President has explained government turmoil as an attempted coup by the “bad” guys.  Pat Robertson said, “The President of the United States is in danger of losing the mandate of heaven if he permits this to happen”, referring to the Turkish assault on Kurdish Christians.  Don’t you suppose there is more to it than they say?

Church leaders, theologians, philosophers, and politicians have wrestled in vain with the problems of sin and evil.  If they even exist, it is not clear what they are.

To frame the following I have used the sources mentioned in my preface.  They outline Western intellectual tradition, the political side of religion, and the psychology of being human.  

A Grand Self

It’s ironic. The need to appear exceptional leads to feeling fraudulent.  There is a choice between prestige and empathy.  It argues for humility.

Prestige is for the rich and famous.  Empathy is for the poor and obscure.  The decline of the middle class might be sinful, but Trump is not one of them.  His rise to President suggests that materialism, not thought, matters.  We should remember that Karl Marx was wrong about the poor overthrowing the rich.

Whenever foreign diplomacy is personal instead of policy, you can rest assured that its ground is self-interest, not public benefit.  Lavish flattery and cajolery are not diplomatic tools.   Government speaks in measurable objectives, not emotion.

Conservative Liberals

Conservatives value loyalty, obedience, and respect.  It promotes the idea that the world is just. People get what they deserve, and we are not responsible.  Liberals focus on fairness to the individual, equal opportunity, and prohibiting harm.

For Goodness Sake 

Are you one of the “good” guys?  Most of us think we are.  There is the belief that we are good and the other, well; we would never be like them!  But we think we are justified because everybody does it and they did it first.

In a burst of anger, you hurt somebody.  You feel ashamed and guilty because it wasn’t you, but when you wake up in the morning you realize that it was and still is you.  Anger can be good or bad.   It can result in unhinged, unplanned behavior.  Then it is destructive.  If it gives life to public discourse, it becomes propaganda.   It can be a motivator.  Then it is controlled.  But there are alternatives.

Do not become angry.  Does it really help the situation?  If you are our President, it won’t change the reality that the “deep state” does not agree with you.  When people become angry enough, they take delight in destroying.  Their anger takes control.  Replace anger with loving kindness.  Set an example.  Everyone seeks happiness.  Help them with that.  It’s the root of politics.

Should we turn the other cheek?  Don’t we have a right to self-defense?  There is a posture between pacifism and “hitting back”.   It is assertive and defiant but not brutal.   Kindness promotes non-aggression.  Our dark side is satisfied when someone gets what we think they deserved.  It makes hatred and revenge seem O.K.

Trapped by Happiness   

We are not happy when our desires trap us.  It springs from wants that go far beyond the necessities of life.  The Buddha realized that the reasons for suffering are our delusional cravings and uncontrolled desires.  It’s more than wants.  We all have those, but become angry when the world turns out different than we wanted it to.  Some crave the impossible and react with violence when they don’t get it.  They cannot accept a world that they deem unfair.  They may succeed or fail, just because of luck instead of hard work.  Leaders are accountable for everything while having direct control over almost nothing.  There are a lot of ways to get it wrong, and perhaps only one way to get it right.  A single stumble can change an outcome.

Everybody likes to win, but we learn more from our losses.  It is painful, yet it helps us understand.  Sometimes personal desire overrides judgment and working for the common good.  A leader is substantially to blame for his decisions, but not for the consequences of those decisions.  Those who are hurt don’t agree.   Al Wilson’s poem about the snake illustrates this.  In it, a woman kindly cares for a snake that bites her just because it is a snake.  Buddhist philosophy holds that the viper’s fundamental nature lies beyond praise and blame.

Mind over Morality

Calvinists explain that everyone wants to sin, but some of us do resist evil.  They work to repair the damage done.  But all that is required for evil is a rational mind.  When we become self-conscious we make excuses.  We know things that are not facts.  It is human to have a mind, inhumane to be unfeeling.

Our minds are a prediction machine constructing illusions based on our cognitive history.  An incomprehensible pallet of black and white blotches is seen as a butterfly when its color representation is first revealed.  It’s why propaganda needs initial exposure to help it do its dirty work.  There is an “ultimate reality”, but its components are ruled by our perceptions.  It’s in Hindu philosophy (Brahman, Maya), explained in modern terms in the September 2019 issue of the Scientific American.  Simply put, the world is not as it seems.  It is easy to have a mistaken view of the truth because anything that challenges belief strengthens it. 

Is a robot’s “life” moral because it follows its program?  Your job does not give you a raise for what you could have, would have, or should have done, but recognition of these things testifies to one’s moral character.  You can join the crowd.  It provides strength through numbers, but you lose your individuality.  When power is at stake, the more ridiculous the lie, the more important it becomes to side with it.  When you can’t trust anything, what is left besides the self?  We can march to the beat of a different drummer, but we become lonely.

Evil Exists?

“And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.”  Genesis 1:31

Augustine of Hippo (354 – 430) must have agreed, but even before his time there was a Christian emphasis on apocalyptic conflict.  Augustine viewed evil as a perversion of good.  It was an ignorance of reality, that the truth cannot be denied.  It wants empty, meaningless things.  Then evil is not a thing in itself.  It is not even a property of anything.  It cannot be seen.  It seems to have something to do with personhood.  Its inward manifestation is more important than its outside objectivity.  But aren’t some evils (nuclear war, genocide) beyond the everyday and ordinary?

In the Qur’an, Iblis rebelled against God.  His evil was both his action and something he watched himself doing.  It was committing to nothing.

It seems that a person can be evil even though he hasn’t done anything. And a person who has done terrible things might not be evil if he has a normal sense of right and wrong.

Evil is more than morally wrong.  Morality goes beyond the rules that people create.  Some things are wrong because of the law, others no matter what.  But evil is something more than immorality.  Morality is neither sensational nor profitable.  Like Augustine’s theory of privation, ignorant superficiality is not a thing or action.  It is an absence.

Nietzsche (1844-1900) said, “God is dead”.   He replaced good and evil with health and sickness.  Humanities’ guilt was their author.  Religion does not get along with him in principle, but it often does in action.  The strong do not have sympathy for the rules the weak live by. 

True evil cannot be redeemed.  The Anti-Christ is its personalization, identified as a tyrant, a world conqueror, a deceiver who never settles on any of his possibilities, a false prophet, a magician, and a severe persecutor.  He can be found in the theology of history.  Our fascination with a literal belief in him traces back to Sir Isaac Newton.

Christianity is overly optimistic when it comes to today's problems.  The church moves away from individual morality toward social thought as the world becomes increasingly entangled.

The author, Albert Camus (1913-1960), thought that there could be something in human nature causing us to not take evil seriously.  It was pointless to try to define evil.  We must fight it when and where we encounter it.  We must learn how to live with our guilt, because there is no way to escape it.

I Have Sinned!

Morality comes from reason and sentiment, but it is not the same for everyone.  Rationality works in the service of our passions.  Sound judgment should lead us to harmonize, but envy is dissonant.

We choose violent movies, games, and assault rifles.  Murder, mutilation, and suicide fascinate us.  We enjoy the stimulation that comes from fear, disgust, and catastrophe.  We become desensitized to cruelty, injustice, and suffering.  Could it be that we are masochistic?

Most of us have had murderous thoughts that we don’t acknowledge.  Having second thoughts is what keeps us from getting even.  Would you kill another person?   Aggression is a fundamental part of human nature.  You cannot excise it without cutting out an essential part of our being.  You could be envious and violent instead of caring and kind.  But this legitimizes evil.  It was duty and normal loving families which led to the Holocaust.  When you are obligated, and you act correctly, without reward, are you being moral?

Can we sin by miscalculating or having an imperfect aim (collateral damage) or does one just have to not care about laws, rules, and regulations?  Is morality a matter of social scale?  Is it only actions that matter?  They come from our thoughts, but thoughts alone can be sinful according to the Bible.  Actions deliver us from harm, not just knowing.

Truth and Consequences 

When you have nothing to lose by lying, evil starts to come out.  Lies grow in the dark, where there is secrecy.  Corruption spreads from the top down.  We do whatever benefits us as long as we can get away with it.  It is one thing to lie with the intent to deceive and fool others.  It is quite another to make a mistake within the complexity of interdependence.  Recognition of nuance is an impediment to simple “truth” and personal security.  We cry out for a short easy explanation.

Man is not the only creature that deceives, lies, and cheats.  Evolution developed camouflage, mimicry, and deception for the mindless survival of bugs.  Humans are con artists for intentional, intelligent reasons.  Scientists tie consciousness to reality in strange ways.  The Tiantai Buddhists believe that a single thought contains all worlds.  If evil can be found anywhere, then its potential exists in us.  A contrary view holds that anything visible is moral.

Sodom and America

We are like the drug addict who accuses his dealer.  Is it who acts that makes it immoral?  Victims are like a lettuce plant.  It is not the plant’s fault when it doesn’t grow.

Does forgiveness have a statute of limitations?  Professor Breyer writes, “Forgiveness is more than forgetting and less than excusing.”  Buddhists remind us that if we don’t harm another person we won’t need to be forgiven.  We can change our ways even if we are unforgiven.

Nations sometimes need the world to forgive them, but resentment gets in the way.  It makes things harder to change.  There is a connection between forgiveness and redemption.   Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) thought mankind could not pay his debt to God without Jesus.  Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) built on Anselm’s idea.   We should contritely apologize and repair the damage done.

Explaining Human Nature

You can take an optimistic or pessimistic, or neutral view of the behavior traits we are born with, but most people think that we can learn even if we are born sinners.

The bigger the lie, the harder we have to work to believe it.  How can we believe something that we know is wrong?  It is mutually exclusive simultaneous belief.  It seems paradoxical.  It requires a split personality, one part where the truth exists and the other not.  This is not self-convincing or wishful thinking.  It is intentional self-deception.  It is not “just believe” or biased news.  It is about lying to oneself.  There can be no conscious when self-deception is complete.  In that case, one does not realize what they are doing.  The self grows without bounds.

Adam (freely?) ate the banned fruit from the tree of knowledge.  Innocence was lost.  Guilt was born.   It created responsibility.  The serpent said, “You will be like God, knowing good and evil.”  But do we?

Eden may have been the first falling, but it was not the origin of evil.   Community expanded and deepened sin.  Individual guilt became public culpability.  Shamelessness was liberation.  We have moral freedom and infinite individual value according to Christian tradition.  We inherit as children do, and that includes the relational dimension of sin.

We say that it was God’s will when things turn favorably, but we are not so certain when they don’t.  Lincoln, in his Second Inaugural Address, framed the Civil War as God’s judgment for the sin of slavery.  But probability springs from the expansive ground of possibility.  That is our blind spot.  We are fooled by randomness.  It is disorder that is more than uncertain.  It lacks sustained trend. 

We have to be free to be responsible.  The sixteenth century Jesuit theologian Luis de Molina tried to eliminate the conflict between our free will, God’s providence, and his complete knowledge of the future.  It was an uncertain logic that threatened cause and effect.  Christian determinism can lead to inaction.  After all, it’s God’s will.  Why would a perfect God who knows the future and controls everything allow us to sin?  We are commanded to not sin, but allowing evil must somehow promote God’s plan.  It was not God that Dostoevsky rejected, but rather the world that he created.

Ignorance is Innocence

Evil promotes self-deceiving because it operates hidden in solitude without connection to others.  Simple final solutions lead to fanaticism, but a lack of zealotry is permissive.  It is an ignorant world that has no measurable objectives (business), no cause and effect (science), and no difference (math).

What is at stake is losing the “why” of things.  It is what humanity and consciousness is all about.  We should envision ourselves in every situation, imagining how we would act.  Only that way will we stop fooling ourselves, and begin to understand who we are.  There is no policy that can replace having an open mind and a connection with disparate humanity.  This way, we can avoid becoming preoccupied with ourselves.  We can focus on service to humanity, speaking truth to power, and making principle greater than profit.