This Could Be A Very Creative Post (according to Rollo May)

Providence, Evil, and Suffering: Assignment 4

I'm intrigued by how angry I get reading some of these texts. I take these topics tremendously personally, which catches me by surprise. For example, it just infuriates me to read in Rollo May's essay that "for any great creation there must be rage" (p. 73). Not only do I think this is factually incorrect, I also believe that it is a pernicious, somewhat romantic notion that seeks to redeem certain pathologies by tying them to something positive or, conversely, to take certain gifts of creativity and deglorify them by linking them inextricably with something negative. I can think of many, many brilliant works of art that were neither motivated by nor in any way expressive of rage. And let's suppose we accept that the universe in all its magnificence was the result of a supreme act of creativity; do we really want to say that God harbored rage in the act of creation? I don't think so.

Rollo May seems to specialize in sweeping generalizations that sound good at first blush but don't make sense to me. Here's another: "I think wiping [evil] out is quite impossible, and is itself the most evil thing imaginable." (p. 73) I'm prepared to grant that wiping evil out is impossible for anyone but God. I'm NOT prepared to grant that wiping evil out is the most evil thing imaginable. I would venture I can name a dozen things that are worse than wiping evil out (presuming God can and does do it), starting with, say, the torture and murder of puppies and innocent children.

On page 74, I believe May misunderstands the quote from Faust, "I am that which always does evil which turns into good." May interprets this to mean "Evil as that which is caused by the Good," which seems exactly backward to me. I see the quotation as Mephistopheles's acknowledgment that all his evil-doing is ultimately made into an instrument of Good (by God).

May then goes on to a tangent about how American society and Western civilization are foundering and vulnerable to evil because, essentially, nobody in America reads the classics anymore (or listens to Beethoven), and cites Harold Bloom to bolster his claims. He declares, "This present illiteracy is the destruction of the souls of modern young people," (p. 79) which also enrages me. (I must develop a thicker skin.) Is this not the cry of the elder generation of the educated elite in every society throughout all time? It boils down to: "Kids these days!! They have no culture and their morals are degenerate!!" We can be sure that Rollo May is unlikely to ever see how, for example, the evil of the drug and crime-ridden circumstances of the underclass are expressed and brought into the good through the aesthetics of rap. (I'm not a rap fan, myself, but that's not the point; substitute the medium and genre of your choice.) The nostalgia for "a previous America" and a golden age when "great discords were turned into great beauty" conveniently glosses over our very blood-soaked history of oppression and genocide, as well as the vast quantity of mediocre, kitschy, and downright embarrassing cultural product that has mercifully faded into obscurity with the passage of time.

By contrast, Karl E. Weick is a model of analytical probity, who actually offers some useful strategies for addressing evil. He gives us a useful analysis of how evil can, as he puts it, "start small" (p. 87) and grow if empowered by conformity and unchecked by empathy. He claims, however, that to understand evil would "strip it of its raw wickedness and make it more distant and acceptable" (p. 84), and that "if we understand evil and how it works, then it may be easier of us to dismiss it or become indifferent to it" (p. 89). Personally, I don't see why it follows at all that we would become dismissive of evil or indifferent to it if we understood it thoroughly; I should think quite the contrary. (On some level I wonder if this isn't the reaction of an academic who is used to his intellectual activity diluting some of his emotional response, like the literature student who complains that his joy in a poem is destroyed by analyzing its rhetorical strategies.)

Gregory Curtis opened up a useful insight for me in his discussion of the appeal of evil: "Evil accepts us. Evil does not require us to improve. No matter how great our faults, evil will embrace us. Evil validates our weaknesses and our secret appetites." (p. 94) I was struck that one could substitute "God" for "Evil" in the first and third sentences and they would still be true, but that it would not be true for the second and fourth sentences. God does require us to improve, and forgives us when repent of our failure to do so. God acknowledges our weakness and our secret appetites and saves us in spite of them. Because God is love, God prompts us with guilt to help prevent us from getting worse. God is not indulgent of—but rather generous in response to—our sins.

Curtis gets to the heart of evil's greatest challenge when he discusses how evil has its own values. (p. 95) He rightly points out that the greatest evils are perpetrated by those who are entirely convinced that they are acting for the good. We do not have to look far into the past to see how "true believers" can be the most dangerous people in the world. Their certainty of moral rectitude should serve as a humbling reminder to the rest of us that we are in constant peril of making the same disastrous error.

Reading:
Facing Evil, eds. Paul Woodruff and Harry A. Wilmer, Open Court: Chicago and La Salle, Illinois, 2001. pp. 71-96