Good and Evil: Evil, Inc.

I’ve spoken about the nature of evil as related to the individual creature in my previous two entries: Good and Evil: Simpler Than We Pretend and Good and Evil: The Instability of Evil. But evil takes shape on a large scale far too often, especially in this modern age of genocidal wars, this age where slavery has once again become common, and this age which has been so creative in its forms of economic exploitation at the level of mega-corporations or countries. Evil seems to be larger-than-life at times, but ancient literature tells us that this feeling has been around even during ages which had far smaller populations and institutions.

Even much of what I said about evil and the individual moral actor actually has to do with the mass movements of recent centuries. But mass movements are funny in that they both do and don’t have a true reality. Moral actors are always individuals, despite our pretensions with such invitations to evil as limited-liability corporations. When we place too much weight upon the institutions, we collaborate in the dreams of those who are as greedy as Hitler and as cowardly as those who appeased Hitler. Those dreams are for power without responsibility, that is, decision-making power without individual moral responsibility. (I paraphrase Winston Churchill who said — and I quote from memory: “Journalists are like the harlots of every age. They seek power without responsibility.” Journalists have lots of company.)

But there are not just institutions out there. There are some vague forces, too readily seen as invisible spirits, good or evil. We don’t have too much of a vocabulary or many concepts available for talking intelligently about what’s really going on with these ‘spirits of the age’ or ‘gods of the marketplace’ as I call them in imitation of Kipling. Mathematicians and other scientists are developing tools under research projects with key phrases like: complexity theory, chaos theory, self-organizing system theory, and so forth. There are a number of tools which are fairly mature and useful, judging as an outsider. They are useful in various sorts of studies of real-world systems which have a factuality and complexity that renders them unpredictable and generally beyond complete understanding, but substantial understanding can lead us to a clarification of various problems in, for example, communication between two systems (a country might be an example of a system for these purposes).

At the same time, mathematics can only model aspects of real-world systems. Corresponding concepts, expressible in literary terms, need to be developed before we can really start talking intelligently about the development and operation of complex human systems. This is true of all such systems: social, political, and economic. We do have one conceptual tool which was expressed as a simile:

Human economic systems formed by men interacting as they satisfy their individual desires organize as if guided by an Invisible Hand.

This is a literary expression which has proved to be of great power in allowing some imaginative insight into the nature of what would now be called a self-organizing system. One of several mistakes made by Adam Smith has led to a lot of bad thinking over the years: he wrote as if a self-organizing human system was guaranteed to end in a morally stable form.

In anticipation of this discussion about complex human systems, I’ve already claimed that there are neutral pseudo-forces which operate when men interact, socially or politically or economically. When the underlying populations of men have morally well-structured characters, there is a high probability — not certainty as I may have implied in some places — that a morally well-ordered society or polity or economy will emerge. If the underlying populations of men are willfully evil (such as Nazis and some other perverse populations in history), no morally stable society or polity or economy can develop though that population of evil men might keep things going so long as they can conquer healthier human societies and live off the loot or the efforts of slaves or the efforts of those who are willingly absorbed into that evil society. A population of men who are evil by being morally spineless will create systems that decay much more slowly than the systems of willfully evil men — to be good is a positive matter and not a mere ‘absence’ of evil.

The West has decayed because we rejected the concept of good as the goal of a worthwhile human life. We pretended that the neutrality of self-organizing systems somehow made it likely that morally well-ordered human systems would develop as liberal politics (right-wing as well as left-wing) and liberal economics (right-wing as well as left-wing) obtained a certain type of prosperity by insulating decision-makers from moral responsibility for their decisions. Modern forms of ‘democracy’ and corporate capitalism are highly desirable from the viewpoint of both exploitive men and morally spineless men.

Depending upon our view of empirical reality, we could see these systems as being the result of the actions of angels and demons. This viewpoint is undeniably bad in at least one way: it allows us to protect ourselves from our moral responsibilities as individual citizens just as CEOs are protected by corporate laws from moral responsibility for their decisions and actions so long as it’s within the scope of their duties. (Why is it that so many self-labeled libertarians seem to think corporate forms of organization and the laws extending human rights to corporations are natural to human societies whereas the income tax laws are artificial and the result of one group of human beings imposing their desires on the general population? A little thought tells us that laws allowing the operation of General Motors are licenses for the transfer of income and power from one group to another — usually the general population to a small group defined by their ambition.)

When we see angelic forces in the societies of men, we’re really seeing the self-organizing efforts of morally well-structured men as they go about their political and social and economic activities. When we see Satan, we’re seeing the self-organizing efforts of willfully evil or morally ill-structured men as they form Nazi states or societies that exploit children or those who choose family attachments over modern mobility and selfish ambition. (I confess that I was not one of those who chose the moral path. I entered the corporate life and am stilling paying for that non-decision made by default because of my lack of moral spine and moral consciousness.)

This is the moral problem of mankind, one which we can finally see in brutal clarity:

We have trouble even seeing the larger-scale movements which are the formations and movements of nations and markets and displaced human beings. These movements are not mystical or supernatural but are the result of self-organization driven by the interactions of individual human beings who are the citizens and producers and consumers and migrants.

Am I making a claim that sin is to be found in social structures? No. In fact, I’ve already argued that the self-organizing forces are morally neutral. The moral content in societies and polities and economies which form comes from the moral natures of the individual citizens. There is a sense in which there is sin in social structures but it’s a reflection of the sins of the men of that society.

The dominant form of sin in the modern age, and perhaps most ages, is the simple refusal to become even a virtuous pagan let alone a Christ-like man. To be good requires an effort, most especially in an age where life seems safe and comfortable so that men travel the wide and easy road unless they have the personal wisdom or the guiding wisdom of others to move off that road for at least a time of training in the tougher virtues.

We have been prosperous and haven’t needed to steal or kill in order to eat or to feed our children. Not tempted to the more obvious sins of this sort, we prepare ourselves for lives as well-fed bureaucrats and other workers in the marketplaces of our ages. Not having exercised our moral character, we modern men of the West occasionally face a morally difficult situation and find ourselves in the same position as those who try to run a marathon after spending a life on the couch. This was true of the ordinary German citizen in the 1930s and was also true of those Americans who managed the war in Vietnam.

A good man has a moral character that is gained by effort, not by a lucky avoidance of temptation. A just society is formed by the interactions of good men. Jacques Barzun was persuaded to collect some of his essays, against his will if I recall correctly, and he chose for one of those collections this title: The Culture We Deserve. The culture we deserve, the government we deserve, the economic system we deserve.

We’re no better than our children who anger us so much when they try to claim the rights and privileges of adulthood before they’re willing to even try to take on the responsibilities of adulthood. We want to be taken seriously as moral creatures but we don’t take the initiative to form our own moral characters or the moral characters of our children and the others around us. When we live through periods of prosperity, we become soft in body and mind and moral nature, preferring to take it easy. If you value what is right and what is true, what is good, then you work to become a good man or a good woman even if your environment leaves you the option of sitting back and taking it easy.

We’re a sociable race. We cooperate with each other in the small in such a way that we form societies and political entities and economies in the large. Soft, genial human beings form societies which are gentle and charitable so long as things go well but those sorts of societies can be diverted by the iron will of a Hitler or a Lenin. Evil men form predatory, conquering nations. Good men form just societies.