How’s this for a conversation-starter?: “This morning I introduced the subject of the origin of evil.”
Unlike us, our forebears were unembarrassed by serious things. Their concern with ultimate matters was pragmatic. Their souls were on the line. There was nothing theoretical or abstract about their moral earnestness. Above, Boswell is speaking, as he recounts in his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson (1785). In 1773, the pair visited the highlands and islands off the west coast of Scotland. Here is Dr. Johnson’s reply, dated August 26:
“Moral evil
is occasioned by free will, which implies choice between good and evil. With
all the evil that there is, there is no man but would rather be a free agent,
than a mere machine without the evil; and what is best for each individual,
must be best for the whole. If a man would rather be the machine, I cannot
argue with him. He is a different being from me.”
This sounds
like the plight of Alex in Anthony Burgess’ novel A Clockwork Orange (1962). Evil is a choice. Among his other
embarrassments, Emerson’s utter incomprehension of evil may be the most
laughable. “He has no great sense of wrong,” says Henry James in an 1887 review
of A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson by
James Elliot Cabot, “– a strangely limited one, indeed for a moralist – no
sense of the dark, the foul, the base. There were certain complications in life
which he never suspected.” In We Are
Doomed (2009), John Derbyshire characterizes Emerson as “a key progenitor
of modern smiley-face liberalism.” Evil has thrived in our time, become systematized.
The world is no place for the naïve. Boswell responds to his friend:
“A man, as a
machine, may have agreeable sensations; for instance, he may have pleasure in
musick.”
And Johnson
replies: “No, sir, he can not have pleasure in musick; at least no power of
producing musick; for he who can produce musick may let it alone: he who can
play upon a fiddle may break it: such a man is not a machine.”
Some of the
people I work with seem to envy machines. It would certainly make life easier.
Being a human is so messy and complicated. So many decisions to make. So many
other humans to tolerate. With a little routine maintenance, life could be Easy
Street. Boswell’s final comment on Johnson's summation:
“This
reasoning satisfied me. It is certain, there cannot be a free agent, unless
there is the power of being evil as well as good. We must take the inherent
possibilities of things into consideration, in our reasonings or conjectures
concerning the works of God.”
In his
biography of Johnson, W. Jackson Bate suggests that the trust he inspires in
readers is because of his “awareness of evil knit up in the very nature of the
human situation, of the frightening omnipresence of egotism, greed, and envy;
and, above all, of what he called the ‘treachery of the human heart’ in our
almost infinite capacity to delude ourselves (while imagining we are deluding
others) about our own motives.”
2 comments:
From Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either -- but right through every human heart -- and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years."
You, Henry James, and John Derbyshire are unfair to Emerson. We don't know that he found evil incomprehensible. The fact the he is said to have offered material aid to John Brown prior to Brown's unfortunate raid, suggests that he was aware of, and outraged by the evil of slavery. His journals and early sermons from the pulpit have flashes of darkness. It may be that as Emerson got older, he came to see the evils of the world as self-evident, and that the real challenges lay in the direction of how seek and manage the energies of our developing culture. Or it may be that analyzing evil was not part of his project. He was no finger pointer, Puritan or supporter of any orthodoxy, political or otherwise.
Post a Comment