A Temple of Texts: Essays

by William H. Gass

  OF CHEVROLETS WERE WRECKED THIS LABOR DAY WEEKEND. I have wondered how many Jews had to die before their deaths qualified as a holocaust, in contrast, say, to just another pogrom. How many Africans must starve before the UN is moved to make a motion? Which fish was it that grew too mercurial? The straw that broke the camel’s back was number—what? How much does the breakage depend on the camel? If the Iraqis kill one GI a day, how many days will it be before we withdraw? What a surprise withdrawal will be, because, every day, our casualties were light. So was the straw.

  It is apparently worse if the crimes committed against large numbers are not only intentional but organized as if they were actually one outcome. The Chevrolets were wrecked higgledy-piggledy, Africans die of unexpected thirst and unplanned famine, but the Armenians were the chosen targets of the Turks. The German solution to the Jewish question was a bureaucratic action: Offices were opened, agents hired, papers signed, file cabinets filled.

  The ancient Greeks did not trouble themselves much about evil. The malfunctions of man and nature were—to a point—easily understood: There were many gods and no dogma. The gods lusted, quarreled, were jealous of their prerogatives, and possessive about their powers. Under cover of animals, they raped young ladies, or in a fume of frustration turned the recalcitrant into trees. During wars, they chose sides and constantly interfered with the fulfillment of human intentions—bent flights of arrows, slowed swings of swords. Sacrifices were expected. If the gods demanded the slaughter of daughters, this became inconvenient. It was nonetheless like paying tithes. Evil itself was not an issue.

  Bad luck could follow a family the way original sin semened its way through the womb of humanity, but, by and large, quarrels were personal, you and the god of light or wine or wheat or war had your bones to pick the way Prometheus’s innards were repeatedly vultured, though his crime—the theft of fire from the hearth of the gods—was so serious, his punishment required renewal and his liver grew back overnight like a weed. When Prometheus suffered, he suffered alone; perhaps his mother might be disturbed in her sleep, but not, certainly, the boy next door or the grocer across town or some Spartan and his young companion. If, at Creation, the work went awry, it did so because the real was to mirror the ideal and could not be replicated in lowly sensuous materials without compromising its purity and falsifying its nature. Is Liberty really a torch-bearing lady? This world, Plato said, is but reflection and shadow.

  Evil, as something more than routine wickedness, appears when the pagan world is swept aside by the Judaic/Christian. In its place there is dogma, with heresy as its offspring; law, hence centralized authority and clerical bureaucracy; duty, thus an even fiercer patriarchy than there had been; overwhelming authority, and the dictatorship of a deity who has triumphed over other chiefs and other tribes, banishing their gods in order to rule alone. Although He (for it is a He in deed if not in anatomy) is given powers beyond dreaming, He must nevertheless assume family or saintly disguises in order to get done all He must do, and includes Himself in His creation (since it is now His) like a drawing done in the draftsman’s blood. Consequently, pantheism’s presence is assured, and polytheism is only faintly obscured, because there are acres of angels in heaven and will be scores of saints on the earth. One of those angels, fallen from favor, is henceforth blamed for everything, since he possesses weapons of mass destruction and has moles and other minions everywhere that the ferrets of the Inquisition find convenient to go.

  The realm of death is where the Titans once ruled, too deeply underground to be responsible for crops, and there the Prince of Darkness was sent, like a child to his room, for disobedience. The sun, the source of light and therefore understanding, blazed from above. The Form of the Good was the sun of the spiritual world, Plato said. Even earlier than he, light (knowledge) was identified with excellence, and darkness (ignorance) with evil. That is, ethical and epistemological concepts were fundamentally intertwined. This is the organizing premise of Susan Neiman’s splendid new history of modern philosophy, Evil in Modern Thought (Princeton University Press, 2002), though she gives a priority to the ethical chicken that I might reserve for the epistemological egg.

  The Greeks were concerned with right and wrong, less so with law and obligation. Knowledge exercised its moral suasion from within, but when there is one God, and when, as always, that God has rules, disobedience is the source and substance of every sin. From the first, philosophers and theologians tended to differ about this, and do so to this day. With the optimism every tautology confers, Plato insisted that men would follow the Good if they knew what it was (and if they did not behave, it was because their information, like the CIA’s, was faulty). In the Judaic/Christian tradition, the law was handed out, to my mind, like leftover cheese to a starving population. What it was, was not nearly as important as that it was. Survival depended on unity, unity on regulation. Nourishment of whatever kind was the necessity. That there was a rule of law was more important than what the law ruled.

  There is a day in every year when the hours of light precisely equal the hours of darkness, and the position of the sun (on a sundial) graphically represents the advance and retreat of its shine. These facts become characters in a moral story and soon enjoy the untrammeled dance of metaphor. The struggle between good and evil in the roles of day and night was continuous throughout the world because neither could be destroyed, only temporarily diluted or delayed. The seasons similarly warred with one another, each victorious, each beaten or making a comeback, arriving like the marines or fleeing the scene. Manichaeanism is an attractive theory if you want to simplify the problem of evil by making sense of it.

  There were two warring forces, Mani, the man from Baghdad, said. Christ, the glowing God, represented the spiritual and ethical realm, while Satan, a night rider, represented what in pop cult is called “the darkside.” The tourney between them was eternal. Mani (who proclaimed his prophetic role in c. 240) borrowed from everybody, especially his Persian predecessor, Zoroaster, who had divided the region’s deities into bright and dim, set them at odds, and reserved salvation for the faithful (though my language once more favors the identification of evil with ignorance). The pleasure you might take in your own good fortune was ambiguous because someone else was paying its price, while the pain of your misfortunes was ironic, for you rarely knew who was enjoying the helping of happiness that you were being denied.

  The triumph of monotheisms (odd there should be so many Almighties and no one able to put the others out of business) put a considerable intellectual strain on their attendant apologists, who were constantly personifying the moral characteristics of human action and giving them to the deity: God was vengeful, angry, loving, grateful, and forgiving, as well as attentive and merciless. They let these reified forces run loose as hounds. “… there is almost nothing that has a name,” Hobbes complained, “that has not been esteemed amongst the Gentiles, in one place or another, a God, or Divell …” (Leviathan, part 1, chapter 12.) In an effort to restore purity to waters irretrievably contaminated, and order to thoughts irrecoverably muddled, they put polytheism back in action, as I have already suggested (God has a son and that son a surrogate mother, Saint Christopher fills in for Hermes, imps hide in closets, dybbukim take possession of the innocent, and witches fly through the skies).

  Between a gloriously perfect God and the human soul, imprisoned in the dirt of life and its own body, intermediaries were deemed necessary, and countless numbers of them appeared immediately if not before the need was seen. No ideology can exist without them. They literally keep it alive. Call them Popes, prophets, Mahdis, saints, bishops, mahatmas, lamas, rabbis, mullahs, merely clerics: they were as human as you and I, and as hungry—therefore as greedy; as fearful as you and I—and soon as cruel; as agile and inventive, as lusty and carelessly knockabout as you and I. They murdered their enemies and were murdered in turn, urged righteous war on infidel nations, and occasionally preached peace as if they believed in it. They pursued the evi
l in others the way some sought the deer and the fox, and scoured their religious institutions till they were cleansed of heresy. Like nations, leagues, and alliances, these institutions needed evil, the enemies who harbored it, and those who threatened them. Evil rarely feels so confident that it will risk appearing naked and without the tailless, unhoofed look of the good. Never mind that the world was made better because some of its members were burned alive.

  You don’t need a theory to explain this. You need only history.

  When Susan Neiman takes up the tale of woe that is our Western intellectual enterprise, it is 1755 and Lisbon has just been shaken by an earthquake, with much loss of life, property, and confidence. Moreover, the disaster has taken place on the Day of the Dead, November 1, a calendar moment that would nowadays, like 9/11, be subject to many fanciful interpretations. Intellectuals sent twitters of pity to the ruined city, but to the side of their injured views they brought palliating judgments and soothing rationalizations. The air had been sweet with the optimism of Alexander Pope, and a light breeze bore Leibniz’s phase—“This is the best of all possible worlds”—to every attentive ear. Newton had banished chaos. “God said, let Newton be, and all was light.” The argument for design had been triumphantly upheld. Every event served a noble purpose and revealed the hand of divine providence in all things. Indeed, the human hand was evidence enough. It was how cleverly it held its knife that was admired, not the thrust that lodged it in a victim’s chest.

  In response to the tragedy, Voltaire first wrote a poem, a copy of which he requested a friend pass on, along with another on natural law, to Jean d’Alembert, Denis Diderot, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Upon their receipt, Rousseau objected to the Lisbon poem because it appeared to be an attack on Providence and therefore upon God himself. He complained that by overemphasizing human wretchedness, Voltaire had caused us to be more conscious of that wretchedness. This presumably made us more miserable, instead of more informed. Then, like a schoolmaster, Rousseau summed the problem in a single sentence: “If God exists, he is perfect; if he is perfect, he is wise, powerful, and just; if he is wise and powerful, everything is for the best; if he is just and powerful my soul is immortal.” This domino-arranged rhetoric made its fall-down easy for Voltaire. If the Lisbon earthquake was not for the best, then, according to Rousseau’s reasoning, God did not exist. But, we might reply, as if philosophy were a game, that the quake was for the best after all. Didn’t fires encourage cities to build in brick and stone? Plagues compel them to improve their sanitation systems? So who knew what good would come from a vigorous shaking up?

  A poem was an insufficient response to twenty thousand deaths, so Voltaire, familiar with the satirical tradition of Erasmus, Montesquieu, and Swift, as well as the pessimistic Pope of the Dunciad, in the space of a few days, wrote Candide—a better idea. The absurd could only be answered with ridicule. A few important facts did not escape Voltaire. The problem of evil was as much an invention of the human mind (and the emotions that often drove it into nonsense and contradiction) as it was the result of human nature or its environment. It frequently took catastrophes to stir us into action. Superstitions fell as well as buildings; dogmas died when all those people did. Good and evil were seen to be significantly intertwined. Good intentions did sometimes pave the road to hell, but malicious emotions and wicked ambitions often produced profitable politics, greed useful inventions, and envy many masterpieces.

  Indeed, the victims of such catastrophes were all remembered as loving helpmates, breadwinners, heroic rescuers, decent citizens, devoted parents, consumers you could count on. After all, among the victims of 9/11 were bankers and brokers. Business and its commerce suffered. It was an attack on affluent America and its secretaries.

  The problem of evil comes in two ontological sizes. The first is factual: Does it exist as a part of the human condition, and if it does, what is its nature? What are its causes? And how may we rid the world of them? Agents of evil are often identified with evil itself, as the members of Al Qaeda were after 9/11, making evil easier to remove, as if punishing them would fumigate Enron or allow Serbs to walk upright. The second is philosophical: How shall we define evil? Is its character human, natural, or divine? What is its justification? And what does its presence indicate? (Ordinary things signify; evil “portends.”) Evil seems to be something added to simple immorality the way we put bananas in pancakes … or is it the way we brown a roast? Rape and theft, for instance, appear to differ the way cats and dogs or species do, whereas evils are more unified, like shades of red: the rape [of one’s mother (is evil)], the theft [of donor organs (is evil)]. There are numerous subsidiary questions, of course, but these are the main ones. Occasionally, an issue will wear out its welcome and, without further argument, dwindle away. Events like the Lisbon earthquake or the Holocaust may prompt intellectual inquiries, and their results, in turn, may influence how we choose to cope with evil in the world; but many cosmic moral problems are purely philosophical because they are the result of assumptions that have been embarrassed by facts or come to grief on the shoals of events. Following the Final Solution, God’s apologists had a lot of explaining to do. Humanists were equally shamefaced. A few threw up their hands. Wasn’t it futile to speak of morality after such a failure of morality? Nevertheless, a thousand thumbs were thrust into the dike. Excuses were released like birthday balloons. The majority of these rationalizations continue to be theological and are not regarded with much seriousness by professional philosophers.

  The history of philosophy can be roughly described as a series of proposed solutions to specific intellectual puzzles, followed by evaluations and rejoinders that lead to new solutions and fresh mysteries. That is: A thinker finds himself in a fix, thinks he has found a way out, is told he has failed dismally, valiantly, narrowly, utterly, tries to fix his fix, only to have more faults found, and so on; meanwhile, the kibitzers adopt one version of the fix as their own and begin to tinker with it. In this game of serve and volley, God has been called upon to rescue many a system from disaster, a savior indeed for principles that have been threatened with their own kind of extinction.

  God certainly existed, at least as an apparently viable hypothesis, at the time Susan Neiman begins her history with the Voltaire-Rousseau quarrel, and she immediately examines Immanuel Kant’s reaction to Rousseau’s belief that the impulses in man that have led to the establishment of corrupt and corrupting societies are not evil in themselves but could have been (and can be) used to create social relations that do not suffer from the mistakes that have been previously made. Rousseau suggests that if children were taught, by word and example, that life punished vice and rewarded virtue, they would be able to follow their basically good impulses with confidence instead of trepidation. As it is, the virtuous are victimized, being more than usually defenseless. But Rousseau’s view of history has insufficient scope, for the good are not handicapped, surely, if it is the classical virtues they possess. Wisdom, courage, temperance, justice: These are not traits of the modest and humble, but of the strong, assured, and forthright. Pagan virtues give their owners an edge, allowing them honesty, for instance, because the truth takes grit to give and guts to receive. In their lives, inordinate demands have not been made on attitudes or emotions such as “sympathy” and “love,” nor has obedience become the center of their moral interests.

  If you are a Kantian, and believe that virtue should be sought for its own sake (as Aristotle also did), then to wish, out of a sense of fairness, for a world where goodwill and good character might be rewarded rather than exploited would be a terrible mistake, because, in such circumstances, no one could say whether virtue or its profit had been pursued. Suppose there were a Providence and that no leaf fell without its say-so; then, Kant argues, “all our morality would break down. In his every action, man would represent God to himself as rewarder or avenger. This image would force itself on his soul, and his hope for reward and fear of punishment would take the place of moral moti
ves.” (Quoted in Susan Neiman.) I think, on this point, Kant underestimated our human capacity for self-deception and forgetfulness. Many people believe in Providence and its Overseer, but when a tornado blows away the trailer park they lived in, they thank God for sparing them and congratulate themselves, neglecting to notice who the wolf was who sent the wind their way and flindered everything they treasured. We know that gambling is for losers, that unprotected sex is risky, as drinking and then driving at high speeds is murderous, but we do these things all the same, and even congratulate those who escape the consequences; so I’m sure we’d be happy to call ourselves virtuous for investing in good deeds only because they paid prolific dividends. We want our happiness to be crowned with laurel leaves, as if we deserved our prosperity, our reputation, our suburban ease. At best, we may have earned it.

  As Kant points out, happiness is a legitimate human end, but it is not virtue’s medal. The virtuous can only hope to be worthy of happiness—like Job, whose suffering instructs us how far from justice are its deserts.

  People are fond of excusing the deity from theological difficulties by maintaining that we cannot know God or His intentions, but they don’t really believe what they say, since they continue to attribute to Him all sorts of enterprises. Prayer similarly assumes too much. That God has intentions of any kind assumes too much. That God cares assumes too much. That God exists in any form, or does not exist in any guise, assumes too much. Most human worship is idolatrous: It is commercial, narcissistic, childish—“Watch me, Daddy, while I somersault on the lawn”—“Jesus is looking out for me”—“God made my first million, and for that reason I have given it to the church, the remaining forty mil are mine.” Instead, “Whereof one cannot speak, one should keep trap shut.”