The Devil goes by many names. Lucifer, Shaitan, the Evil One: these are a few of his Christian and Judaic names. He is called Adversary, the Liar, Old Scratch, the man downstairs. He is called Antichrist, Blasphemer, Heretic. He answers to Illumaniti, Knights Templar, Papism, the Bourgeoisie, the Communist Threat, Anti-Patriotism; in the east he goes by West, and in the west, East. He is called America, he is called Arabia, he is called China, he is called Russia. He is, to put it simply, Evil.
We humans are programmed by millennia upon millennia of scrabbling for survival to think in twos, to make split-second decisions on abstractions of available data. When there is an immediate threat, that response keeps us alive: fight or flight, eat or spit out, kill or capture, attack or negotiate.
The problem is that our species is moving into deeper and murkier waters. These days, thanks to the wonders of civilization, that split-second judgment is only rarely necessary.
And yet we make it anyway. Guilty or innocent, right or wrong, good or evil, for us or against us. Men and women claiming to be leaders shout from pulpits and election stands that there are no shades of gray, and that we will never compromise: as if the only possible response two being faced with two choices is something in the middle and less, and not a third choice and more.
Satan, of course, is behind it all. He’s been behind it from the beginning; can’t you smell the sulfur? The evil in the world is Satan’s doing, and the good is God’s, and us, well, we’re just here for the ride. The only choice we have, the shouters say, is black or white: we will follow God’s plan, or Satan’s.
As you may have guessed from the introduction, Satan isn’t just the Adversary of the Christian church. Satan, or what passes for him, shows his ugly face as the “Enemy” most of our species’ great movements fought against. In any war, he is behind the actions of the opposing force, just as surely as God is behind ours. In any religion, he is behind every belief that is contrary to ours. In any political or philosophical revolution, he is behind the old order of things, while God (or ‘Right’) is behind the new.
The Adversary’s role is to make our decision simple. We are either for him, or against him. Black and white. Pick a side, and remain loyal to it to the end. Obedience without complaint; faith without question; sacrifice without hesitation. It was Satan in the German armies advancing across Poland, whispering in soldier’s ear that maybe the Fuhrer wasn’t as right as he claimed. It was Satan in Luther’s study, arguing that the Catholic church didn’t have a monopoly on truth. It was Satan on Mount Moriah, telling Abraham: forget God, and let your son Isaac live.
This simple interpretation of reality is incredibly attractive. The idea that powers far greater than any of us are warring along clearly drawn lines removes us of any responsibility or need for deliberation. We follow orders, and write off our failings as personal inability to obey. It’s the same idea that draws us to works of fantasy like Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings; the villains are evil, the heros are good, and there is no mistaking the difference. It allows us to simply align our beliefs according to a preset pattern, where every statement can be declared simply ‘right’ or ‘wrong,’ and every action placed into boxes of ‘good’ and ‘evil.’
But perhaps most importantly, it gives us a peace otherwise impossible to find. When an earthquake strikes and hundreds die, we can rest in the knowledge that it’s somehow part of the Plan, or perhaps the work of the Adversary; either way, it’s a strategem in a war far above us, and therefore is not our responsibility. We can even sooth our guilt at our inaction through prayer, or whatever passes for prayer in the atheistic manifestations of the War.
The Devil has many names, but he also has a secret. He, like the Power on our side, has no power beyond our belief in him. He exists simply as a thing to blame for all that is not good in the world. The Devil has many names, and the oldest is Scapegoat.
There is no grand master plan. There is no War. We are not pawns. We are not even pieces. We are tiny, fragile creatures in a vast and strange universe, who, incredibly, have begun to think. We are afraid of the darkness of ignorance, so, like children, we squeeze our eyes shut and pretend we have the light of knowledge. We look at the complex intertwinings of pain and love and hate and joy and sorrow that is our world, and, because we cannot imagine how to navigate it, we shut our eyes and pretend that from any given point there are only two paths. We invent demons that cause pain because real pain is much harder to kill. We invent angels that heal, because all too often healing is out of our grasp, and we are creatures that thrive on hope. We invent Gods and Satans because wars are much easier to wage when you’re Right.
We do these things not because we are evil, or because we are sheep, or because we are ‘fallen’ from some past greatness. We do them because we are in the infancy of our sentience, and we are terrified of what the future will bring. So: will we live in peace with our eyes closed and our decisions simple, or will we face our fears with our eyes open and seeking wisdom? Real moral choices do have value–nihilism never gave the world much–but they are never simple questions of black and white. They aren’t even gray. In real life, there are no villains, and very few saints. There are no ten-step-paths, rituals, purifications, payments, or incantations to cosmic success. There is no Right side and no Wrong side; there are no sides at all.
There is no us and them. There is only us.
amen
(your comment was a bit too short. please try again. I’m back making this comment longer.)
As a philosopher, I agree with you; however as a Christian I have another insight which I believe is drawn from Divine revelation. If he wished to do so, God would have no motivation not to portray Himself as our champion against the wily Satan. In fact, Scripture is often ambivalent about this.
In Genesis, God permits the temptation of our first parents, judging both them and the Serpent but intimating that the judgment of the Serpent would not come from him directly but through the Woman’s offspring. In Job, possibly the earliest written of any book in Scripture, the devil is evil to be sure, but completely limited by God’s will. Ultimately in the narrative, he slides out of the picture. God seems to be using him merely as the setup for a teachable moment between him, Job, and Job’s friends. Again we see God placing human beings at a high value, but the narrative does not support the kind of Manichean duality into which we human beings so readily assign God and the Devil.
This duality you describe (and wisely disparage) is perhaps a manifestation of our own bid as human beings to achieve mastery of our own fate–by playing off God and the Devil against each other for our own ends. We think that by managing them in this way, we can carve out a domain of autonomy or self-rule within the universe.
It is just this tendency of ours which is the concern of Scripture. In reproving Job’s friends, God is reacting against the notion that man can live comfortably in his own closed ethical universe. He confounds their assumptions about natural justice.
Thus, moral philosophy, though able to reach a certain level of correctness within its own rational boundaries, isolates itself by definition from revelation and is thus without insight into those things that occur outside of rational and political experience.
Although I agree that God (Allah,Shiva,Karma,Fate) can often serve as a scapegoat as well, I’d have to disagree as to motivation.
Namely, that I think the scapegoat effect appears most often when we fail to achieve mastery over our own fate. It takes strength to control the path of one’s own life, and those who achieve it often give credit to a higher power of some sort, however mistakenly.
Those who fail to achieve that mastery need someone to blame, for, being too weak to master themselves, they are often enough too weak to accept their weakness. Thus, the devil made me do it.
As to the last paragraph, it’s an interesting point, and one I believed myself for a number of years–and I like how you defined “political” as a different event from “rational”. This seems accurate enough, given the way large herds of humans tend to operate.
To be serious, though, I no longer believe there is any human experience to be had beyond the realms of reason (ie, the operation of this universe-system). I haven’t quite figured out what this means for morality yet, but I intend to write something on it soon.
Tim, that really is the key question: whether there is any human experience ‘beyond th realms of reason.’ For that reason I’d like to keep the distinction between ‘rational’ and ‘political’ experience vague, since I actually wonder whether there is any difference. Now it is beyond disputing that people do not always or often act in a way that one might consider ‘rational’–yet even so we may put them in the category of ‘rational’ actions because they are pretty much what we expect from human nature. Thus the political and ethical aspects of human life, one might argue, are within the ‘natural’ or ‘rational’ sphere.
Well, yes. In fact, it is when humans are behaving most irrationally that, often enough, they behave most predictably–in other words, most according to various neurological impulses left over from our days running away from lions and hunting mammoths with rocks.
Humans are as much part of this universe as everything else in it, and I would be very surprised if we possess anything that is beyond it.
Honestly though, is that such a bad thing?
It is very interesting that a distinction is being made between ‘rational’ and ‘irrational’ human actions, if both are a result of the same evolutionary process; two sides of the same coin as it were. This rather suggests a dialectic movement resulting from the interaction of the two, and examples of this could be found through history. However the ability to recognize and discriminate between ‘rational’ and ‘irrational’ actions is one that should not exist in a closed system; the distinction rests upon Platonic conceptions of an unchanging natural order in the universe which can be accessed by human reason. This natural order is not the same thing as supernatural revelation–quite the opposite–but all the same it can’t co-exist with the evolutionary process model.
It can, actually. Richard Dawkins, among others, has discussed the distinction. The difference lies in the functioning of brain as “reality simulator” and the functioning of brain as instinct drive, a relic of our more primitive days.
When the brain functions as a simulator of reality, it tries to determine the way the world actually works, in order to accurately predict the future. Language gave us the ability to pass these simulation models down from generation to generation–the “second replicator,” which allowed a new type of evolution (cultural/intellectual) to begin.
So while our genetic models are very similar to primitive humans and prehumans, our mental (linguistic) models have advanced exponentially. The rational/irrational distinction is the distinction between mental simulation and genetic instinct. Einstein’s theory of relativity, for example, is non-instinctual–ie, it doesn’t “make sense” to our mammalian brains–but it is rational, because it is a mental model which can accurately predict the workings of the universe system.
Your claim assumes that the evolved biology of the human brain is the full expression of the closed system of the universe. Because it is an infinitesimal subset of that system, and because it is still evolving through the new vehicle of language as well as the old vehicle of genetics, the rational/irrational distinction becomes possible. It is useful (if not entirely accurate) to think of it as the difference between evolved and less-evolved modes of thought.
Hello
I really liked this post, thumbs up
However, does anyone happen to know the title of the painting used? I really appreciate it!
Thanks!