`At the Mercy of Fortune'

On Friday I interviewed Moshe Vardi, a computer scientist at Rice University and a native of Israel. After finishing the business at hand we talked about his parents, Jews from Rumania and Hungary who survived the Holocaust. Late in the war, his mother endured a Nazi death march and now lives in Israel. I told Moshe about Miklos Radnoti, the Hungarian poet murdered by the Nazis during a similar march, whose final poems were found on his disinterred body more than a year after his death.

Apropos of something I no longer remember, I mentioned Spinoza and Moshe said he had delivered the annual Spinoza Lecture in 1998 at the European Summer School on Logic, Language, and Information, in Saarbrücken, Germany. Dark thoughts had been flickering all week, and the convergence of Spinoza and Germany helped to rekindle them. In his preface to Part IV of The Ethics, the section titled “Of Human Bondage, or the Strength of the Emotions,” Spinoza writes:

“Human infirmity in moderating and checking the emotions I name bondage: for, when a man is prey to his emotions, he is not his own master, but lies at the mercy of fortune: so much so, that he is often compelled, while seeing that which is better for him, to follow that which is worse.”

And I thought of The Idler, No. 52, published April 14, 1759, in which Samuel Johnson expresses similar thoughts:

“No man, whose appetites are his masters, can perform the duties of his nature with strictness and regularity; he that would be superior to external influences must first become superior to his own passions.”

By these reckonings, Seung Hui Cho was a slave. He was not “troubled,” he didn’t have “issues,” he wasn’t in need of “support services.” He was, as Peggy Noonan describes him in the weekend Wall Street Journal, “a walking infestation of evil,” and the package he mailed to NBC News contained “the self-serving meanderings of a crazy, self-indulgent narcissist.” Trying to understand Cho is as pointless as trying to fathom the motives of the suicide bombers who murdered hundreds of innocents last week in Baghdad. Human evil is not reducible to simpler, easier-to-comprehend categories like “low self-esteem” or “political grievances.” It simply is.

Moshe and I were in his office in the building that houses much of the university’s engineering school, not unlike Norris Hall on the Virginia Tech campus, where Cho worked out most of his issues. At that same hour on Friday, a few miles south of where we were sitting and talking, another gun-wielding narcissist, this one at the Johnson Space Center, took two people hostage and ended up killing one of them and himself.

It’s our nature to question when faced with the implacably irrational: Why do we persist in our self-defeating selfishness? Why do we will our own suffering and the suffering of others? Moshe and I shook our heads, and he promised to e-mail his mother what I had told him about Miklos Radnoti. In Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity, Rebecca Goldstein helps us understand how Spinoza tried to understood evil and human bondage and suffering:

“The mystery of human suffering, its inevitability and extravagance – he had contemplated it often enough in his boyhood…. But the mystery is no mystery. The world was not created with a view toward human well-being. Logic entails what it does, despite our parochial wishes. It’s not surprising that out of the vastness of logical implications there are a profusion that threaten our endeavor to persist in our being and to thrive. So nature will produce such illnesses and disasters as make men’s lives a misery. And so, too, men will through their blind bondage to their emotions compound the misery of their own lives and those of others. It is only reason that can save us. Why then, we might ask, did not God make men more reasonable? Why then did he not make them more intelligent? That is what the problem of evil comes down to: the stubborn stupidity of mankind. Why did God make men so stubbornly stupid?”