Good and Bad
I bought a book again over the weekend. I was in this book store, passing time when I came across the book Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis. It wasn't very expensive so I bought it.
I found the first 40 pages very interesting. It sort of reminded me of something remotely relevant my friend Jonathan had to say about this. But there is more to it.
What is it about the "Law of Nature", as Lewis puts it. There seems to be a law within us that we all live by. If someone takes your seat on the bus while your back is turned, you will complain that you were there first. You are appealing to his sense of morality, some unwritten rule that dictates that it is bad manners to inconvenience others for your own gain. Sometimes such a person will simply flip out the bird, but more often such a person will think of a good excuse as to why he should be allowed to do what he is doing, in a sense explaining why he is NOT breaking any rules.
What is more, it is impossible to define right and wrong away. You may say that morality is subject to the culture of a people and might be very different, yet you will find it almost impossible to imagine a people where leaving your brother to drown or deserting your fellow soldier in a time of war is something you can be proud of.
You can also try the Duality approach, which says that there is a light and a dark side, and they are balanced out. But for this to work, evil has to be able to exist for the sake of evil only, but that is not the case. Evil is almost always used to procure something "good", that is, something you define as being good. It is a bit like trying to claim that there is a hot side and a cold side, and that they are balanced out. In reality there is only heat and coldness is simply the lack of heat. Making something cold only transfers the heat to another location.
For some reason we also feel uneasy about our inability to keep to the law of nature. Why else would we try to excuse ourselves when we do break this law? Even if we argue that this is simply something we learned from generations before us, I wonder why people who grow up in an "alternate reality" are often scarred for life. For example, if a young child is sexually mollested by her parents. He/she has no way to know that what is happening to her is wrong. She is presented with an alternate reality where it is ok for a parent to do this to a child. Yet these people turn out to be unbelievably damaged, for life.
We are therefore presented with a problem: We have some inbuilt knowledge about how we are supposed to act, yet we're unable to act that way. Perhaps the idea that something is seriously wrong with this world -- and with ourselves -- is not that far off. Perhaps there really is something wrong with us, something we cannot save ourselves from.
But I have to insist that you rather read the book. I'm not done with it yet, I just think he makes a very good argument.
I found the first 40 pages very interesting. It sort of reminded me of something remotely relevant my friend Jonathan had to say about this. But there is more to it.
What is it about the "Law of Nature", as Lewis puts it. There seems to be a law within us that we all live by. If someone takes your seat on the bus while your back is turned, you will complain that you were there first. You are appealing to his sense of morality, some unwritten rule that dictates that it is bad manners to inconvenience others for your own gain. Sometimes such a person will simply flip out the bird, but more often such a person will think of a good excuse as to why he should be allowed to do what he is doing, in a sense explaining why he is NOT breaking any rules.
What is more, it is impossible to define right and wrong away. You may say that morality is subject to the culture of a people and might be very different, yet you will find it almost impossible to imagine a people where leaving your brother to drown or deserting your fellow soldier in a time of war is something you can be proud of.
You can also try the Duality approach, which says that there is a light and a dark side, and they are balanced out. But for this to work, evil has to be able to exist for the sake of evil only, but that is not the case. Evil is almost always used to procure something "good", that is, something you define as being good. It is a bit like trying to claim that there is a hot side and a cold side, and that they are balanced out. In reality there is only heat and coldness is simply the lack of heat. Making something cold only transfers the heat to another location.
For some reason we also feel uneasy about our inability to keep to the law of nature. Why else would we try to excuse ourselves when we do break this law? Even if we argue that this is simply something we learned from generations before us, I wonder why people who grow up in an "alternate reality" are often scarred for life. For example, if a young child is sexually mollested by her parents. He/she has no way to know that what is happening to her is wrong. She is presented with an alternate reality where it is ok for a parent to do this to a child. Yet these people turn out to be unbelievably damaged, for life.
We are therefore presented with a problem: We have some inbuilt knowledge about how we are supposed to act, yet we're unable to act that way. Perhaps the idea that something is seriously wrong with this world -- and with ourselves -- is not that far off. Perhaps there really is something wrong with us, something we cannot save ourselves from.
But I have to insist that you rather read the book. I'm not done with it yet, I just think he makes a very good argument.
posted by ispburger at 11:49 pm
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