I've been thinking about motives, about protagonists and antagonists, and about good and evil.
I'm confused. Are good and evil absolute or are they relative? And if they are relative, then how can they exist at all when the most common assumed definition for both of them entails being the opposite of the other?
Everything I come up with as an example of pure evil turns out not to be when attributed to nature (you try).
So what is evil? What is good? Do they exist outside of society, outside of consciousness?
Any thoughts?
in short, no.
I was once asked what the absence of evil was. Like this. "What, then, you un-Christian ...what, then, is the absence of evil."
And, being so witty, I said: "The absence of good." Ha-HA! I still believe that to an extent.
I think that good/evil are silly, perhaps arbitrary abstractions. But I also think they can be useful in creating happy and/or peaceful living situations.
Relativism is easy. Nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so. It means to some extent that anything goes (but some might say that there should be a recognition that anything goes for any-one). We create contexts/civilizations in our own heads: our own self-created contexts (none exist, really, but let's pretend) allow us never to be wrong. Whatever. Easy.
I believed in relativism for a while.
Then my queer mentor took me to Germany, to Berlin (see, he's a filmmaker) where hundreds of thousands of people were marched to their deaths, by nazis. Isn't what those people did evil? If so, were the people themselves evil? By God, they were Absolutely Evil, right? And perhaps in hell now?
But why? How?
This sort of absolutism is wishful thinking, and revealing of us. What does it say about we who wish for others eternal suffering? Hmm?
What else? There's more egocentrism: what benefits me, or pleasures me is good. What harms me, or causes me grief is evil.
What else? Simone Weil once said that goodness is in absorbing suffering, while evilness is in passing it on. I like that, but there's still this business of 'othering' that bugs me so.
What else? I think from the POV of, say, the universe, good and evil are human abstractions. If they exist, humans are made up of both. It might be that we can all find things we hate about ourselves. Things we'd call evil. And likewise, we still might defend our existence as if it is good! Is it more than self-preservation? Are we more than animals? More on that...
now: Well my take is that civilization (collective ID) deems what is to be done and what isn't. What isn't (violation of mores, norms; i.e., tabooooos) is other'd, is evil. A sociologist, historian, anthropologist, etc could tell you why this happens, or why what I've written is utterly wrong. Perhaps there are good reasons, for example, that Murder is widely known as ... ha ... taboo? Evil? Wrong?
We are, in part, animals. It could seem that our entire civilization is darwinian: we only use our reason to more effectively fulfill our desires. Will and power decide what is good and what is evil. But I don't personally believe that. My take is that there are elements of humanity (empathy, understanding, awareness, love) that make us capable of examining what brings the most happiness to the most people. But does that make these elements Good, really? No, I don't think so. Yet, "good or evil" does not dictate what I do. I personally (as an example) see suffering, feel it, and try to fill it. That is, as you might suggest, what I believe is human -- nothing good, bad, but human.
AMC