People are fond of viewing other people
as evil. At least in the US this appears to be true.
Conservatives, especially religious
ones, view everyone else as evil (or at best misguided and/or deceived by Satan -
which is about the same as being evil).
Liberals listen to conservatives, can’t
imagine a world where the conservative viewpoint is sane, and view conservatives as
evil (or at least incurably insane – which is about the same as being evil).
So what’s with the “evil” thing?
Well, like almost everything, it depends
on a certain point of view.
From a subjective point of view, anyone
you don’t know is potentially worthy of your fear or hatred. In theory they are equally
worthy of your love or compassion, but human nature tends to default to the fear response
thanks to our genetic fight-or-flight programming.
This is reinforced by the rhetoric flying
around in the media and the blogosphere. Someone you don’t know, but whom you believe
to be outside your political or religious group, is easily dismissed as being potentially
dangerous and worthy of fear and hatred.
The thing is, once someone from side
A gets to know an individual from side B, that individual ceases to be abstract. You’ll
often encounter religious conservatives who acknowledge that individual Muslims can
be decent people, but that the rest of the Muslims in the world are evil – or at least
irredeemably corrupt and unsavable. Similarly, you can easily find liberals who acknowledge
that their few conservative friends are merely misguided people, but who wouldn’t
shed a tear if masses of conservatives disappeared off the face of the earth.
So at the subjective level there are
two aspects, bound together by the level of abstraction. In the abstract, a person
of persuasion A tends to view people not of A as being evil. But at the individual
level they make exceptions, acknowledging that the specific individual is somehow
“different” from the other people in their group.
There’s also the concept of objective
evil. Or societal evil. At some basic level there’s general agreement, at least within
a nation’s culture, that some things are or are not evil. In the US wonton murder
is evil. Genital mutilation is evil. These things fit that definition for people of
virtually all political or religious persuasions.
Unfortunately, extremists in both the
conservative and liberal camps sometimes paint other people as being murders or rapists
or torturers. Thankfully, the vast majority of US citizens, regardless of political
or religious viewpoint, never fit this definition of objective evil.
Consider that roughly half the country
is basically liberal, the other half basically conservative. If conservatives really
were wife-beating sadists, half the country would be evil. But think about your neighbors
and the people you work with. Are half of them evil? Doubtful.
Finally there’s the concept of super-objective
evil. I use this phrase as an extension of super-natural. Super-objective evil requires
an assumption, or belief, that there’s some morality imposed on the universe that
transcends humanity. Some believe this morality comes from a god or gods. Others believe
it is due to some natural order, or the programming of the human brain.
Regardless of its source, super-objective
evil is defined outside human relative terms. Conservative Christians use this definition
to condemn gays. There’s no objective human rationale for homosexuality to be considered
evil, but there are passages in the Bible that might suggest that God created a large
group of people just so they could go to hell. Very odd, but that’s religion for you.
Super-objective evil isn’t found as
much in the liberal (or at least rational) world, because rationality and logical
thinking tend to preclude super-anything as
a justification for a viewpoint.
However, there are liberals who use
super-objective thinking to grant plants and animals human-level rights. There’s no
objective rationale for such a concept, but there are spiritual or philosophical reasons
for such viewpoints – and again we’re into the super-objective.
So what’s interesting about all of this,
is that the subjective abstract fear-hate-evil
response is tied deep into the reptile brain at the core of our minds. Giving in to
it is natural, but fighting and overcoming it is one of the primary parts of being
civilized. Of transcending our base, animal natures.
The subjective
familiar exception-to-evil response is also natural, and is tied deep into the
social-animal part of the brain. Humans are social animals, and once they adopt an
individual into the group, that individual ceases to be a source of fear and instead
becomes a source of comfort.
The objective fear-hate-evil
response comes from a collective societal definition. This definition is often codified
into law, or at least social mores, and is generally a good thing. Societies need common
morality to function.
The super-objective response
is irrational. It may be unavoidable, because there’s some evidence that a large number
of people in the world are unable to cope with reality unless it is wrapped in some
type of mythology. It is this response that is most dangerous overall, because it
isn’t driven by animal instincts, nor is it controlled by societal consensus. Instead
it is created and fed by extreme viewpoints that are always irrational and are always
in conflict with reality itself.
When confronted with the choice of accepting
reality, or needing to try to warp reality to meet mythology, too many people choose
to warp reality. Due to this you end up with Muslim suicide bombers and Christians
murdering doctors and blowing up clinics. None of these people have a grip on reality,
and rather than getting a grip, they are trying to warp reality to match their twisted
mythologies.
If anyone is evil - these are the people
who meet the objective definition.
