I am fascinated by evil. My years spent studying the psychology of individual behaviour was eclipsed by a subtle paradox: Why do people do evil deeds? I am now attempting to formulate why, how, when and what it means for us. This is the domain of us as humanists, attempting to bracket ourselves within naturalism; It is important as we have removed the chains of supernatural explanations; We have removed the hope of balanced scales in an afterlife with angels and scales and Pearly gates. We therefore have to look at those we dub evil, whilst holding refrain from reflection – for indeed, they are human like us. A broken mirror reflects despite its breakage. As much as we coat them in the brush of “monster”, the tabula rasa of a human being resides. They are not “monsters”, they are humans. We might not like them (we might rightly loathe them), but we need to engage with the essence of what warps the human frame into the crooked posture of monstrosity.
I have yet to distinguish what I find more fascinating: That people do good or that people do evil. Rodrigo’s beautiful post describes his (and my own) awe at the inherent good that resides within people. I am an optimist about our species, though that often does not come across in my work. I have yet to be disappointed with the ordinary person refusing help in accidents, collisions, muggings, and other unfortunate events that might befall us within the blink of a passing eye. A reaching hand is grasped because it is from another human. The fingers find others and there is a fit, the completion of the human puzzle.
But my optimism is not shrouded in naïveté. And it is for this reason I am heavily focused on evil. I believe that nearly everyone wants to help others; I believe nearly everyone understands respect, tolerance, freedom and wants it for others (especially loved ones); and this occurs everywhere beneath the politics and religions. What then turns some of us “evil”? And what does it mean for us?
These will be a series of ongoing posts and many answers will not be reached or even dealt with now.
What is evil? Is evil the 150+ children a day raped in South Africa? Is it the torture, raping and killing of children all over the world? Is it the systematic dehumanising that occurs to women, in religious countries? Is it the millions suffering under the “Dear Leader” in North Korea? I’m sure one could sit for days conjuring these lists like genies out of lamps. I want to funnel out the large scale into a singular key-hole vision on which to focus.
I define evil as the deliberate removal of the human within another human (known in psychology as dehumanisation); it is the forceful pain, torture and abject abhorrent treatment of another living creature (I want to restrict it to other humans in these articles, though I do not feel any less for the cruelty toward other animals).
I define it also as a useful linguistic device, as Professor Adam Morton writes in On Evil
We call acts or people evil when they are so bad that we cannot fit them within our normal moral and explanatory means. To call what Hitler or Pol Pot did ‘wrong’ seems to understate its nature to the point of error … [O]ur horror drives us to a special terminology.
The extent and purpose of his book is to show how dangerous this linguistic gymnastic we all perform can be: We tend to think that these “monsters” are so far from normal human sensibility, they must be something we can never know. Evil might be seen as something of an empty vessel, in which the dubious nature of incomprehension is seeded. Basically, we say evil when we think “I could never do that!”
Why is it dangerous? Because we tend to think of ourselves as not capable of such acts, of such horror, of such… Evil. But there is extensive literature within psychopathology which destroyed that view for me, several years ago. Whilst writing a paper on the Truth & Reconciliation Commission (TRC), I witnessed videos of the ordinary policeman confessing untold horrors to the victims’ families.
I distinctly remember one black police officer.
Already there is something loose and clanking in the works: A black person working for the “wit mense” (Afrikaans, pronounced vit mensa) was tantamount to treason for the oppressed black communities. As a police informant, one was exempt from all the dangers that lay like paths of daggers beneath the feet of all non-white races. But one was also the target of scorn from one’s own people. Thus, this officer seated on an old plastic chair; thus his cemented face and distant eyes; thus the sunlight behind him sending dust clinging to the tissue clutched in the quivering hands of the mothers before him. His small voice began describing each and every assassination he helped commit, each target one of the women’s sons. His sad, downcast eyes were raised and held with great strength, as he sought some humanity in the eyes of the mothers. Speaking in Xhosa, he described each and every death, to each individual mother. Even as I write this, I am struggling – so vivid was the video and the emotions.
The mothers allowed the tears to flow, mimicking the morbid words. Each a tiny dagger aimed at her once-dead heart. That part of her that was once alive was killed by this man, and yet he would revive it one last time – only to describe how he killed the son. All the sons were anti-apartheid activists, some from the same village as himself. All the mothers were incredibly brave, taking every word and transforming them into a tear, which left never to return to rage inside them. Only one mother stood up, tore her clothes and stormed out crying. After the end of all his tales, he sat back and said: “All I ask is that you accept me as making many mistakes. I do not ask forgiveness from you. That I must ask from God. That I must gain from myself. I am very sorry. I am very sorry.”
Before you let the tears flow, the most beautiful moment occurs later. After many minutes, one mother rose, took his hand and said: “You are one of our children. We can not hate you. Those times were dark.” Another rose and took his other hand and said “My son is gone. You are not. You are our son.” The others joined them and each began hugging him and promised “We must all do what we can now that the darkness is passed. Now, we must go forward together into the bright future.”
These are the brave people of my country. These are the people who looked at evil, sitting before them. Each looked and heard the evil done unto their son and witnessed their hearts quiver with bitterness; Yet they felt, like an alchemist transmutation, their leaden hearts change to gold.
Was this man “evil”? Perhaps, under the circumstances he performed an evil deed. Before the cries of “Nuremberg replies” ring out, I still consider what he did wrong. I still believe many ordinary, loving people, we brought to evil acts because of the oppressive regime that clutched this beautiful land. The sunlight only rose to send fingers further through this country, with no abject repayment in sight. Only forgiveness and what that means to other humans. The TRC and such interactions were at the very essence humanist: They sought the engagement of one human to another, or perhaps many. They sought their forgiveness, their understanding (in many cases, they did it to avoid prosecution and therefore that defeats my argument. But I hope, dear reader, you will allow me to focus on those who did it for the sake of seeking forgiveness). What happened here was the identification with one human to another; one human realising this could have been my son, my daughter, my husband, my brother. Thus, the human was restored in every one and the crooked frame of monstrosity shattered, and the ambling human walked upright.
I am minimising to a great extent in an attempt to seek the beautiful moment that is possible (the most difficult and often never claimed one), past the horror, past the evil. I am attempting to make the case that evil is a dangerous and alienated paradihm, in cases where perhaps more good could arise from looking past the monster, which is only a shadow, and into the being that casts it. I have done this in my own life, with particular instances, and become better for it. What I am interested in seeking now is whether this holds, whether this is true. I do not know, but I want to. I believe it to be. Though we are not angels and evil is too often so vile that no heart is big enough to transmute our abhorrence into forgiveness.
I do not know. But I hope this stirs something. I believe too strongly in my species for it not to be so.
I will continue in my next article dealing with how ordinary people become evil and what we should be aware of in ourselves.
Visions & Mind-Reading
Sunday, December 21st, 2008My doctor (who happens to be my father) gave me a cold stare: He gave that infamous doctor’s look of being thoroughly unimpressed with my self-maintenance. His folded arms mimicked his frown. “If you want to have less headaches,” he said, “you have to read less!”
Read less? Why not ask me to severe my right leg, too? To be denied reading and comprehension would be my worst handicap. If that happens, I would start parking in the “disabled zone” and pushing myself around in a wheelchair.
Our bodies are our only access into the physical or phenomenal world around us, though they may simply be carriers for future progeny. Beside that, taking care of it is important. But one can’t help that when one is obsessed with words.
There are two things I always carry with me, as much as possible: A bottle of water and a paperback. I believe this is one thing that if everyone did, we would live in a world of less suffering. It would be healthy physically and mentally. As Rousseau said in his Confessions: “We are so little formed for happiness in this world, that of necessity the soul or the body must suffer, when they do not suffer together, and a happy condition of the one nearly always injures the other.” Healthy people, then, means a clarity for good thought to flourish This is just my opinion but one I find reasonable. However, there does seem to be the downside to reading copiously: A rising headache-rate.
Consider your eyes: Light hits an object and is projected, by criss-cross intercessory pathways, into your eyes. The light is caught by the retina; an appropriate name since retina is derived from rete, ‘net’ in Latin. In contrast to insects’ compound eyes, which are incredibly sensitive and able to take in a great amount of the environment onto the smallest number of cells (therefore without the creature moving its head), human eyes are bulbous and accord greater ‘resolution’. The images travels through all parts of the eye, like the cornea, lens, etc. only to be upside down. It is then ‘flipped’ – an incredible array of neural activity occurs during this time. Our knowledge into vision gives us great insight by manipulation. Us social scientists, especially psychologists, are famous for our conjuring tricks to discover a part of human processes.
The psychologist Peter Wason had a test, which I would like you to look at. And what’s interesting is that this test is mostly not about vision at all. But have a look:
You are given four cards. The cards have a number on the one side and a letter on the other. Two of the cards facing you have a letter facing; the other two have the number facing. The cards you see are:
You are given a rule: “If a card has [D] one the one side, it has a [3] on the other.” A simple if-then statement, if you will. The question is this: Which cards would you turn over to see if the rule is true? Have a think, then read on.
Wason found that most people choose simply [D]. Or perhaps [D] and [3]. The correct answer is to turn both [D] and [7]. If you turn [7] around, it would falsify the proof if you found [D] on its reverse. This is where the great Karl Popper’s influence shows, in this test.
What has this to do with vision? Aside from the nauseatingly obvious answer that you looked at the cards (nothing stops the test from also using other senses!), it reminds one of the development in children. We are not psychics, we have no extended vision wafting like ethereal pipelines to journey through space and time. For most of us, the most important position of according possible psychic abilities would be with other people: What they are thinking, what they are going to do, what matters to them, etc. We imagine that the ‘psychic’ thoughts would be like hearing our own thoughts. Or perhaps your ‘reader’s voice’ that you have whilst reading this article.
Yet, everyone has this ability!
A child, for example, learns to mimic the actions of mouths, hands, eyes, words. It notices the tongue and the light changes. As we grow, this is where ‘reading’ people comes from: Our vision. It is a pity that such a beautiful word is sometimes usurped by the demagogic legion of superstitious quacks. We learn about people from their nonverbal communication – it’s why people move their arms, even when talking on the phone. It helps clarify the visual ideas into a physical format: the vibrations from their vocal chords and movement of limbs. When giving people directions, we point with our fingers, we wind them through pathways unseen. When people greet each other, we can tell a lot from their nonverbal gestures: Consider two men in business suits, shaking hands. Now, consider a casually dressed man and a casually dressed woman embracing, holding each other for a long time, caressing each others’ backs. Now, consider a suited man shaking hands with a casually dressed woman, perhaps pecking her on the cheek. There are many inferences you can make, no doubt you are doing it automatically right now.
We are incredible creatures, learning and knowing intricate details from simply watching. From the use of our eyes. The stimulation accorded to the fluctuations of light, bouncing off the skin of other humans, as their bodies fluctuate to the dictates of their brains is the most important form of learning we garner. Being psychic is a cop-out; learning to read people, to heighten their experience of social interaction, is a true gift. Don’t fold your arms, don’t look away to often, lock their eyes and blink every few seconds – occasionally glance away when you speak. These are pieces of advice many body-language consultants give and they can enhance our interactions. But it all comes from watching, from being alert and from vision.
So, no. We do not have ‘psychic abilities’ but we can achieve the same results: We can infer from their appearance, their disposition, their body-language. And then we can just simply ‘ask’. The information is transferred, as we lock gazes and inquire as to the well-being of a fellow human. No psychic additives or preservatives needed to maintain a conversation or interest.
And this is why I read. My vision extends further, I feel my empathy expand upon contemplation of even fictional characters. My knowledge of our beautiful planet and our troubled species is minuscule – and it will always be so. One can not be aware of the extent of one’s ignorance but one can be aware of ignorance itself. This surely is a virtue. Books humble us, as words slide into our eyes. The feel of a soft page turning, as our brains are nourished. These are important. And it is a sad fact that my headaches will continue because I just can not stop reading.
“You read too much,” people tell me, with a kind of accusatory stare. How much is too much? What does that even mean? Life is short, Milan Kundera wrote, reading is long: the paradox is that I will never be able to read everything I want. Confound mortality for that and that alone. Perhaps my own Mephistopheles will arise from the ashes of my forsworn hellish domain to proffer a bargain. If so, I need to do some reading now to make sure I don’t sign anything too valuable away.
How interesting: Apparently, you only need one kidney….
Tags: interaction, mind-reading, people, peter wason, psychology, reading, rousseau, science, vision, words
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