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A BETTER HUMAN STORY #3: The Discernible Reality of a "Force of Evil" [1]

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Date: 2023-11-11  

This BETTER HUMAN STORY series was introduced here in October with a piece titled -- with chutzpah but with honesty as well -- as “A ‘Big Picture’ View that Might Help Human Civilization (and Our Democracy) Survive.” It promised an integrated understanding that puts into an importantly different light

our inborn nature,

the story of our species over the past ten millennia,

the nature of the challenges we face if human civilization is to survive for the long haul — as well as, more specifically,

the fundamental nature of the battle now raging in the American power system.

A week after that introduction, the series itself began with “A BETTER HUMAN STORY #1: The Fateful Step,” which described how a destructive and inevitable social evolutionary force got unleashed when humankind stepped onto the path of Civilization. Two conclusions were claimed to follow necessarily from the inevitable “problem of power in social evolution” (the subtitle of my book THE PARABLE OF THE TRIBES):

Any creature, on any planet, anywhere in the cosmos, that extricates itself from the niche in which it evolved biologically by inventing its own way of life — which is what “Civilization” means — will inevitably plunge into a social evolutionary process as destructive and tormented as our species has had to contend with. (Regardless of its inborn nature.) And therefore,

The Ugliness we see in Human History is not Human Nature writ large — because an inevitable systemic dynamic mandates that something one might call “the Spirit of the Gangster” will inevitably have a disproportionate voice in determining how any civilization-creating species’ civilization will develop.

Two weeks after that — in A BETTER HUMAN STORY # 2: The Fate of Human Civilization” — the series continued with a piece looking to the future. A future in which, I estimated, it is a toss-up

whether humankind will be able to order its civilization well enough, soon enough, for our civilization to survive for the long haul, or

whether it will end in some self-inflicted catastrophe.

That piece argues that it is inevitable that any civilization-creating species anywhere will eventually will face that Central Challenge, because it is inevitable that the powers of that civilization will reach the point where self-destruction becomes a possibility — through the escalation of the powers of its weaponry and/or the magnification of its powers over the surrounding systems of life out of which that creature emerged, and on which that creature inevitably still depends for its survival.

Now comes this piece which argues that the rise of civilization inevitably generates a discernible force that is the source of a great deal of what is broken in the world of human civilization. This piece will demonstrate the reality, in the civilized human world, of “a coherent force that consistently makes the human world worse.”

That, I suggest, is a useful definition of “Evil.” This “Force of Evil” is to be understood in a purely naturalistic, secular way. That “E-word” doesn’t need to be used at all: it could be called, instead, “A Force of Brokenness,” or “a Destructive Force.” But, whatever one chooses to call it, a Force whose way of operating in the world is fundamentally akin to how the traditional religious worldview conceived of how what, in that worldview, was called “A Force of Evil.”

Now, on with the show.

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Evil: Lost and Found

Over the centuries, for people whose worldview was governed by the religions of Western civilization, it was reasonably straightforward to conceive of the existence of a “Force of Evil.” Judeo-Christian religion personified such a force in the figure of Satan, or the Devil.

Imagining this Supernatural Being enabled people to form some intuitive conception of a force that makes bad things happen: the Devil. with malevolent intent, was always working to get people to do what they shouldn’t do, and to degrade the human world.

The Devil could make the world uglier by wielding his power with diabolical cleverness. (Quoth Luther: "For still our ancient foe / Doth seek to work us woe;/ His craft and power are great/ And, armed with cruel hate./ On earth is not his equal.")

The more recent movement to a secular worldview has meant that this supernatural figure has disappeared from the picture of the human world held in the minds of a major component of the Western world. And this disappearance of Satan left most of those people with no way of conceiving of something that might reasonably be called a “Force of Evil.”

And with no way of conceiving of anything so coherent as “a Force of Evil” operating in the world, many of those with a secular worldview were left unequipped to perceive such a Force even if it turned out to be an important reality.

And it turns out that there is such a Force.

It turns out that one can see, operating in the human world, “a coherent force that consistently makes things worse” (Or, “consistently spreads a pattern of brokenness.”) I.e., we can see at work in our world something that aligns in so many ways with the ancient, freighted concept of “Evil” that it makes sense to call it that.

(For those who dislike that ancient word, “Evil” – and nearly two decades of experience have taught me that includes many liberals -- I suggest forgetting about that fraught word and substitute “Force of Destruction,” or “Force of Brokenness,” both of which capture its essence.)

It does not much matter what we call it.

What does matter is that we see that there is an “It” to be perceived and named – i.e. something coherent in its operation, and consistent in the destructive direction toward which it pushes the human world.

Indeed, it turns out to matter greatly, because it turns out that the inability to see that “It” – that Destructive Force, or Force of “Evil” – can be catastrophic.

I don’t use that word, “catastrophic,” lightly:

It is a catastrophe that Liberal America has done such a poor job of protecting the nation against the force that has been taking over the Republican Party. And a case can be made that a major reason for that failure of Liberal America (and its political arm, the Democratic Party) is due to the inability of a largely secular liberal culture to perceive what it was up against, and thus to fight it appropriately.

The blindness of the Democrats to the rise of “a Force of Evil” demonstrates that not only is the wisdom of the world of baseball right in saying, “You can’t hit what you can’t see.” But also, “You likely will be unable to see what you have no conceptual way of including in picture of reality.”

We can learn from this history: the ability of people to protect the Good can depend on their ability to perceive the reality of a “Force of Evil.” (I.e. a“coherent force” that consistently “makes things worse”). I.e. to perceive an It that must be fought and defeated.

(I believe that FDR – a liberal at a time when the old worldview held greater sway -- understood Evil in the old way, and that helped him defeat Evil in World War II. Barack Obama, apparently, did not understand Evil, didn’t have much of a concept of it, didn’t see it when it was coming at him. And as a result, ended up barricaded in the White House with his Presidency progressively stripped of its powers — even to fill a Supreme Court vacancy -- except for issuing executive orders.

(And while the Presidency was occupied by this exceptionally decent and best-intentioned man, his failure to recognize the reality of a “Force of Evil” — a consistently destructive force — enabled that Force to gain in power. Indeed, inadvertently made it possible for what previous generations of Americans would have regarded as unthinkable to happen: i.e. for a human monster like Donald Trump to become President of the United States, and take possession of one of America’s two major political parties and command the fervent allegiance of a major component of the American people.

(In this, Obama was emblematic of a widespread inability in the Democratic Party of these times: even as the other side was being taken over by “a coherent Force that consistently spreads a pattern of brokenness, the Democrats talked about their “friends across the aisle,” because there was no word in their language – no concept in their minds -- for the kind of Force that had taken over the Republican Party, and of which their “friends” were becoming the willing instruments.)

This appears to be a major cost of the current under-development of our still relatively new “secular worldview.”

But, as I will attempt now to show, it is possible to perceive and understand “the reality of a ‘Force of Evil’” in a purely secular framework. Utilizing the Enlightenment’s way of discovering the truth: applying reason to the evidence.

That understanding takes a bit of work, but that work is worth it, because the more people who can see WHAT WE’RE UP AGAINST, the stronger will be the forces of Democracy that now are embattled against the forces of Fascism. (And the stronger will be the forces that might help human civilization to survive for the long haul against those that would drive us to self-destruction.)

It is in that spirit – as part of addressing the systemic problem of America’s brokenness, in which one side of the system went over to Brokenness, while the other side had lost the moral and conceptual understanding to recognize how the nature of the American political battle had changed, and how it needed to be fought -- that I will turn now to the task of showing that reality.

Connections in the Dense Web of Cause and Effect

The good news is that the reality of this force can be shown.

The bad news is that seeing this “Force of Evil” doesn’t come as naturally to us humans as seeing that “It” personified in the figure of “the Devil.”

We are equipped, by our nature, to imagine something like “our ancient foe.” That’s the advantage of representing “Evil” in terms of malevolent supernatural forces.

But the challenge is different when we operate within a secular worldview, from which supernatural beings and forces are excluded. The reality of this force, as I will show, becomes visible as a natural dynamic that becomes “visible” in the evidence presented in the dense network of cause and effect, from which logical inferences can be drawn.

Takes some work. But, as the American crisis demonstrates, among the strengths required of us to protect “the Good” against “Evil,” some of them require that we undertake the intellectual work required to see it.

So here’s one way that this Force – this “coherent force” that acts like “Evil” -- can be shown. (In a subsequent entry in this series, I’ll present another.)

Consider the dichotomous pairs of war/peace, justice/injustice, love/hatred, cruelty/kindness, greed/generosity, integrity/hypocrisy, honesty/deception, life-serving/death-dealing, etc.

For any particular instance of any of those on the “broken” side of such dichotomies (and the same can be done with the “whole” side of those dichotomies), we can ask two kinds of questions regarding their place in the dense web of causes and effects:

• Peering backward, we can inquire about its causes. What is it in the world that produces this brokenness? E.g. What are the factors that led to this war? What were the factors that led to this exploitative social arrangement? Or, what is it that resulted in this person being cruel, or greedy, or insistent on domination? (Many see “evil” just in terms of “evil people,” but people are shaped by their world.)

• Looking forward, we can examine the effects of that war, of that exploitation, or of this instance of human cruelty or greed or lust for power. What impact does this or that broken thing in our world have on how the human world develops from there?

In an unsystematic way, I’ve been asking those kinds of questions for more than a half century, investigating questions like what led to the American Civil War over the issue of slavery? And what led to the rise of the Nazi regime? And what experiences and cultural influences molded the human monsters who have played a disproportionate role in the history of human civilization in our times (like Hitler, and Stalin). What are the factors that differentiate those people inclined to hate out-groups from those who regard people different from themselves without such hostilities? (On the side of “wholeness,” what cultural currents made possible the emergence of Democracy on the North American continent in the 18th century?) Etc.

What stands out from tracing the various connections of cause and effect is a pretty straight-forward pattern:

With “brokenness” understood as whatever is the opposite of life-serving – i.e. as fostering the opposite of the well-being and fulfillment of sentient creatures (defined as creatures to whom things matter) -- what we see when we make all those connections is a pretty straightforward pattern:

Brokenness begets brokenness. (And conversely, wholeness begets wholeness.)

(For the most part: sometimes, “good intentions” can lead to hellish results, and an “ill wind” can blow someone “good.”)

In that dense network of cause and effect, one can trace how wars and injustices and hatreds and trauma and greed and cruelty and the lust for power all feed into each other over time. Each form of brokenness tends to generate other forms of brokenness, and be generated by them.

Tracing the way each thing that makes the world worse is the fruit of other things that make the world worse reveals “a pattern of brokenness” traveling through the cultural system. We can see brokenness getting transmitted – over time -- from level to level (global to societal to individual and back the other way). And transmitted from form to form.

We can see how the brokenness of hatred makes the world worse, generating for example the brokenness of conflict. We can see how the brokenness of war produces the brokenness of trauma. How the lust to dominate creates the brokenness of injustice. How unbridled selfishness generates the brokenness of human misery. How the brokenness of childhood trauma and historical trauma feed upon each other to achieve greater brokenness through having a Hitler in power, and or a Trump in power.

Something worth calling “brokenness” is moving through the human world in shape-shifting ways.

And something worth calling a “Force” cam be inferred to be pushing brokenness through the system over time.

A “Force” is something that moves things—like the elementary physics formula, F = ma. And it is like that with this Force that imparts brokenness to the human world, moving that “pattern of brokenness” through the system over the course of generations, centuries, millennnia.

This Force is a natural dynamic. It’s just how the world works, a world in which causes produce effects. Utilizing the dynamic of “brokenness begets brokenness,” this “coherent force consistently makes the human world worse” by transmitting destructive effects in shape-shifting ways through cultural systems over time. And the reality of that Force can be inferred from that movement.

We can “see” that Force the way we can “see” the wind in the swaying of the trees and the flapping of the clothes on the line.

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The idea that “Brokenness begets Brokenness” presents a “Prime Mover” problem: how does the whole thing get started? If each broken thing in the world is the product of prior embodiments of “the pattern of brokenness,” how did Brokenness get into the system in the first place?

The main answer to that Prime Mover problem is found in the previous piece in this series – A BETTER HUMAN STORY #1: The Fateful Step. There I describe how the breakthrough into civilization inevitably unleashes a destructive social-evolutionary force— how it inevitably results in systemic anarchy, which inevitably entails “a war of all against all,” which inevitably generates a selective process where only the ways of power can survive and spread.

Such is that chain of “inevitabilities,” that any creature, on any planet, anywhere in the cosmos, that steps onto the path of civilization will inevitably be condemned to have its civilization disproportionately shaped by “the Spirit of the Gangster.”

And with that inevitability, there comes the inevitability of the brokenness of trauma that comes from a “war of all against all,” and from people having to live in societies shaped by the demands of power.

From the beginnings of that inevitable war of all against all, there will inevitably arise that Force of Brokenness — that Force of Evil — in the dense network of cause and effect that will move through the world of the civilization-creating creature, regardless of its inherent nature, spreading a “pattern of brokenness” in shape-shifting ways.

Visible the way the wind can be “seen” in the swaying of the trees.

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In this piece, I’ve offered a way of understanding the emergence of something reasonable to call “a Force of Evil” in the systems that develop when a species (with the creative intelligence to invent its own new way of life) extricates itself from the niche in which it evolved biologically, which means plunging into a system — the overarching system of civilized societies — inevitably beset by anarchy.

In the next piece, I will utilize the evolutionary perspective to show how a force reasonable to call “a Force for the Good” also arises in the world of such a civilization-creating creature. This piece, too — titled “A BETTER HUMAN STORY #4: Realities that Emerge Through the Evolution of the Experiential Realm” — will propose a few other major additions to “the secular worldview.” I.e. to help flesh out further the still-incomplete way of understanding that has been available to those people in our civilization who have left behind the received doctrines of traditional religions, with their reliance on authoritative doctrine, and have sought to understand our world through the application of reason to evidence.

Leaving behind that traditional way of knowledge does not, it turns out, require leaving behind some of the important insights that the traditional religions of our civilization provided. (Like “a Force of Evil.” But other things as well.)

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