[Paleopsych] Hedgehog: David B. Morris: The Transformations of Evil and Suffering
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David B. Morris: The Transformations of Evil and Suffering
The Hedgehog Review - Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture
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David B. Morris compares modern and postmodern views of
suffering and looks at how our cultural narratives of suffering often
serve to increase, rather than alleviate, the pain and isolation of
those most in need. Viewing suffering as embedded in events,
situations, and relations resists a static view of suffering that can
lead to inaction and hopelessness and pushes for an exploration of its
causes and consequences.
David B. Morris is the author of several books, including two
prize-winning works on British literature--The Religious Sublime:
Christian Poetry and Critical Tradition in 18th Century England and
Alexander Pope: The Genius of Sense--and, recently, The Culture of
Pain, which won a PEN prize, and Illness and Culture in the Postmodern
Age.
Evil: Modern and Postmodern
Evil has been transformed by postmodern culture. It doubtless
constitutes a truism of contemporary thought that evil has shared in
the same loss of credulity suffered by the comprehensive explanatory
systems or--as Jean-François Lyotard famously calls
them--"metanarratives" that formerly explained or contained it.[3]^1
This truism is surely accurate, if incomplete. Paul Ricoeur in The
Encyclopedia of Religion, summarizing and extending his earlier work,
describes four dominant myths worldwide that have addressed the origin
of evil: chaos myths, myths of an evil god, myths of the exiled soul,
and myths of a lost paradise.[4]^2 Myths of origin fall among the
metanarratives that come under suspicion in postmodern thought, but in
Western cultures the most powerful and still intermittently persistent
myth describing the origin of evil is doubtless the vision of a lost
paradise.
John Milton's epic Paradise Lost gave influential expression to
the long-standing view that evil is an omnipresent threat and central
event in human history. The threat of evil is felt as so powerful that
in effect Milton writes within the formal tradition of theodicies that
explicitly set out to justify God's ways to humans, especially in
creating or permitting evil. Milton depicts human history, in contrast
to the timeless innocence of Eden, as beginning with the temptation
scene and the triumph of evil, when Eve disobeys God and succumbs to
the wiles of Satan. William Blake's illustration of the scene is
faithful to the spirit of Milton's text in depicting Adam, at the
fateful moment, looking away from Eve, with back turned. Adam's
back-turned posture carries a crucial moral meaning: he simply cannot
see or will not attend to the presence of evil, as embodied in the
well-spoken serpent.
Attention is an important ethical state for Milton, more
significant at times than heroic action. They too serve God, he says
in the sonnet on his blindness, who only stand and wait, attentively.
The flowery garland that Adam has been weaving for Eve--now fallen
beside his left foot--is more than a sign of love or perhaps, for
Milton, even of uxorious folly: it is a prophecy of their own
impending fall. It locates the triumph of evil in the failed attention
that ignores the dangers--from within and without--that continuously
surround us. Human history, for Milton, is life lived, uncloistered,
in the heat and dust of constant temptation and in the all-too-easily
ignored presence of evil.
Evil in the West has never regained the prominence, theological
and dramatic, that it achieved in Paradise Lost. Little more than half
a century later, at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, its central
position had been subtly but thoroughly eroded. An Essay on Man by
Alexander Pope announces its ambition to rival Milton in the creation
of a theodicy. Pope aims to "vindicate" (not merely "justify," as
Milton claimed to do) the ways of God to humankind. Pope's lengthy
vindication of divine goodness in four verse epistles, however,
manages with only two appearances of the word "evil." His preferred
term to describe catastrophes and wrongdoing is not evil but the
milder, evasive term "ills." In effect, while Milton struggles with
the problem of evil, including the omnipresent threat, dire
consequences, and deep mystery that evil represents, Pope worries
about the appearance of evil. Evil for Pope is not a cosmic force
continuously at war with humankind, daily tempting the soul and
threatening to plunge us into everlasting fire, but rather a cognitive
illusion: what we misinterpret as evil is, if understood rightly, a
component of "universal good." True, Pope retains a trace of the older
vocabulary of evil when he employs a distinction between "physical or
moral ill" common in theological accounts. If the distinction remains,
however, its force is lost in the light of a rational theology that
has no room for mysteries so potent that they once demanded nothing
less than a mythic imagination. Now evil (under a new name) can be
handled in a single line as the effect of errant will and natural
change.
The postmodern world--despite our skepticism about grand
narratives and our erosion of trust in mythic accounts--has not
witnessed the absolute disappearance of evil, nor has Satan wholly
died. In its notorious eclecticism, postmodernism retains elements
from the past, which are of course deracinated and transformed in
their new context, like an ancient Greek portico stuck onto a
skyscraper. Televangelists regularly thunder against sin and evil in
their fund-raising ministries. The so-called death of Satan becomes
the occasion for an academic critique of liberal failures to
understand the reality of evil and to give it a needed place in our
civic and moral imagination.[5]^3 Less tendentiously, a few
theologians, historians, feminists, and philosophers continue to study
the perennial issues associated with evil and to offer insightful
analysis.[6]^4 The fact is that evil in the postmodern era--even as a
topic of conversation--has not so much disappeared as taken on the
changed shapes of a period in which theological and mythic accounts of
a lost paradise no longer ring true.
Indeed, the twentieth century has witnessed catastrophes (from
world war to genocide) so immense and so chilling as to demand and, on
occasion, to receive serious discussion, such as Hannah Arendt's
influential treatment of Adolph Eichmann and the banality of
evil.[7]^5 Arendt's view of Eichmann is especially helpful in
suggesting that evil has not disappeared but rather taken on
distinctive new shapes. It seems clear that she detects a modernist
transformation of evil in the Nazi employment of such invisibly
omnipresent inventions as the assembly line, mass transit, and the
bureaucratic routine. The decades that have passed since the close of
World War II and the advent of postmodern times have seen evil not so
much transformed as turned inside out. Evil has been long understood
by theologians and by popular audiences as the cause of
suffering.[8]^6 The postmodern era has redefined suffering as evil.
Suffering becomes one of the few agreed-upon new shapes that evil
assumes in the postmodern world.
The postmodern reformulation of the bond between suffering and
evil finds examples not only throughout popular culture, where
prolonged suffering is construed as the worst thing that can befall
someone, but also, surprisingly, in the sciences and social sciences.
Timothy Anders, for example, is unusual mainly in employing the
postmodern tools of evolutionary psychology to argue that "the
ultimate source of all evil is the biological capacity for
suffering."[9]^7 Here again we see the traditional relation between
evil and suffering turned inside out: evil is no longer the source of
suffering, but rather suffering is the source of evil.
French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas provides an
especially thought-provoking account of this reversal in his essay
"Useless Suffering." Levinas writes self-consciously from a late
twentieth-century stance in which our awareness of massive cruelty and
of unprecedented suffering exceeds any possible justification in the
language of traditional theology. "This is the century," he reminds
us, "that in thirty years has known two world wars, the
totalitarianisms of right and left, Hitlerism and Stalinism,
Hiroshima, the Gulag, and the genocides of Auschwitz and
Cambodia."[10]^8 The millions of victims crushed in all this torture
and destruction cannot for Levinas be encompassed within traditional
religious perspectives which understand evil through its relation to
God's will. In this new context, which he believes requires a radical
rethinking of evil, Levinas seeks the basis for what he calls a faith
without theodicy. "All evil," he asserts starkly, "refers to
suffering."[11]^9
Suffering, in Levinas's account, takes on the quality of evil
from its combination of destructive pain coupled with absolute and
intrinsic uselessness. Suffering, for the person who suffers, is in
his view wholly without meaning. It is simply the experience of an
overwhelming, violent, and cruel negation--"extreme passivity,
impotence, abandonment and solitude"[12]^10 --in which every human
effort to affirm coherence or value drains away into absurdity. It is,
Levinas writes, the "impasse of life and being."[13]^11 Such impasse
for Levinas finds its archetype in the Holocaust of the Jews under
Hitler: "the paradigm of gratuitous human suffering, where evil
appears in its diabolical horror."[14]^12 Within the darkness of such
diabolical evil redefined as an extreme and useless suffering, within
the horror of utter meaninglessness and of crushing impersonal force,
however, Levinas also finds the hope for a saving transformation. The
source of this transformation lies in what he calls "the inter-human
order."
The "inter-human order" for Levinas signifies not merely the
everyday political or social worlds but the ethical position of the
self (prior to all practical politics or implied social contracts) as
inescapably bound up with others. From this ethical perspective based
upon a recognition of the Other, the suffering of another
person--while absolutely useless, meaningless, and inexorably evil to
the person who suffers--can take on a meaning through the
"inter-human" claim it makes upon us as witnesses: it solicits and
calls us, invoking the recourse that people have always recognized to
help one another. Further, where such solicitation finds an answering
response, absolute and meaningless suffering does not lose its quality
of evil for the sufferer but instead becomes transformed, in the self
who responds, into what Levinas calls a meaningful suffering for the
suffering of someone else. This difficult reciprocity within suffering
makes sense in the context of Levinas's distinctive style of
postmodern thought, where an Ethics of the inter-human is not an
obligation derived from higher principles but rather the principle
from which philosophy and Ethics must begin. The importance of Levinas
here lies not only in his identification of evil with suffering but
also in his demonstration that postmodern suffering--cut free from
traditional theodicies--clearly differs from suffering as it was
understood at least from the time of Milton through the modernist era.
Suffering: Modern and Postmodern
Postmodern thought differs from modernist thinking not only in
the creation of an absolute identity between evil and suffering but
also in the development of a new idea of suffering. The famous poem
"Musée des Beaux Arts" (1938) by W. H. Auden offers a strong example
of the modernist view that is rejected or revised in postmodern
versions of suffering. Auden's poem--based upon the famous painting
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (1555), by Pieter Brueghel the
Elder--depicts suffering as a quintessentially individual, private,
and solitary experience. This modernist view construes the act of
suffering, even though embedded in a rich social context, as occurring
in an almost impenetrable solitude, like Icarus falling into the sea
as the workaday world goes about its business, with only his lower
legs visible in the extreme right corner of Brueghel's canvas.
As Auden depicts it, such impenetrable solitude is almost built
into the structure of suffering. The problem is not that we turn away
from evil and disaster, Adam-like, as if unable to foresee or to bear
it, or as if deliberately refusing to assist. While suffering
regularly disturbs and threatens us, Auden does not represent the
turning away from suffering as moral failure, a lapse, say, of
foresight, charity, or courage. He depicts aversion or detachment,
instead, as the outcome of a structural position we cannot help but
occupy. Suffering occurs in a social world where non-sufferers always
find their own lives more absorbing and immediate, where nature and
commerce continue in their appointed course oblivious to individual
disaster. The plowman never looks up; the expensive ship sails on. If
suffering should fall unavoidably within our field of vision, Auden
insists that we cannot escape our built-in position of detachment. Not
even the Old Masters, he suggests, could somehow place us in direct
relation to another person's suffering. Their triumph--straining the
limits of art--lies in forcing us to recognize and to contemplate our
fated detachment as each of us, like Icarus, suffers alone.
The significance of Auden's poem lies in the clarity with which
it presents the modernist myth (a myth it represents as uncontestable
truth) that suffering is an individual, private, and solitary state of
inwardness. From a postmodern perspective, it seems clear that Auden
invokes Brueghel and the Old Masters in effect to universalize and
confirm what is a historically and culturally specific modernist
interpretation of suffering, as recognizably modernist as the gaunt,
skeletal, solitary human figures sculpted by Alberto Giacometti. As
heirs of modernism, of course, we respond to a persuasiveness in
Auden's view that the normal human "position" in relation to suffering
mandates a glasslike separation and detachment. Yet, this modernist
myth concerning the inwardness and isolation of suffering is not
necessarily confirmed by Brueghel's painting. It is uncertain, in
fact, whether Brueghel's painting deals with suffering at all. The
painting could equally depict violent death or the consequences of
over-reaching. Even if we grant that the painting deals with
suffering, Brueghel's luminous depiction of everyday life--the shining
furrows, dazzling sea, and dreamlike city--might suggest that
suffering lies wholly outside the realm of daily experience: it is not
so much private and inward as utterly alien. We cannot grasp it any
more than we can make sense of a demigod falling from the sky. Auden's
reading of Brueghel is powerful precisely because it seems to validate
as universal what is at last merely a limited and historical modernist
interpretation of suffering. From a postmodern perspective, suffering
is never wholly individual, private, inward, and solitary, despite our
inability to inhabit another human consciousness. Postmodern suffering
contains important public and social--or inter-human--dimensions.
The postmodern interpretation of suffering as necessarily public
and social stands in vivid contrast to the modernist emphasis on
isolation and silence. The silence attributed to suffering in
modernist views is almost a cliché: a corollary of the argument that
suffering is private, inward, and unknowable. There are obviously no
words to convey an experience construed as so inaccessible to others
that it lies beyond language. The cliché of silent suffering, however,
while it recognizes real limitations of speech and knowledge, must
somehow be reconciled with an equally obvious and proliferating
discourse of lament, elegy, litigation, and victim-mongering.
Postmodern suffering not only seeks a voice but also, however
imperfectly, enters vigorously into the public discourses and speech
genres of specific communities. A postmodern approach thus recognizes
that suffering in some sense follows the contours of various
established discourses, much as an academic analysis like this one
will follow the conventions of scholarly discourse, including
footnotes, reference to contemporary thinkers, and correct grammar.
Methodist hymns, by contrast, treat human suffering within a speech
genre where none of the social patterns that govern scholarly essays
applies--or even makes sense. Suffering, from a postmodern
perspective, cannot be disentangled from the linguistic and narrative
turns that so deeply color contemporary knowledge. Postmodern
suffering belongs inside--inextricably connected with and shaped
by--the public, social domain of story and language.
The specific question at issue here is quite basic: Why does it
matter for an understanding of evil that postmodernism asks us to
recognize how every voice is shaped and constrained by the speech
genres of a specific social community at a particular historical
moment? It matters because the public discourses of distinct
historical communities also shape and constrain how we talk about
suffering, how we talk when suffering, and, ultimately, how we suffer.
The major change that typifies postmodern versions of suffering
and of evil can be identified in the concept of social suffering.
"Social suffering," as Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das, and Margaret Lock
contend, "results from what political, economic, and institutional
power does to people and, reciprocally, from how these forms of power
themselves influence responses to social problems."[15]^13
Contributors to the book-length volume Social Suffering discuss the
forms of affliction that characterize such political, economic, and
institutional applications of power as the rape of women in India
during the struggle for independence from Britain, the imposition of
Maoism in China, and, inevitably, the Holocaust. Moreover, the
writings of Michel Foucault have shown how social power works not only
through traditional top-down political, economic, and institutional
hierarchies but also through widely distributed informal networks of
professional knowledge and cultural discourse. Suffering, when viewed
in this postmodern perspective, is never strictly private, inward, and
individual. It is transpersonal, discursive, or, as Levinas says,
inter-human. Its sources lie not in some unknowable or ungraspable
fatality--like the will of the gods or the operations of a mysterious
curse--but rather in social structures and in cultural practices.
Individuals suffer only within the context of far larger social forces
and actions that give their suffering its distinctive historical
shapes. One way to think about this postmodern conception of evil as
social suffering is to imagine a shift from myth to plot.
Myths deal with archetypal patterns or large abstract structures
of experience that always exceed the dimensions of a single culture or
society. In discussing myths of evil, Paul Ricoeur emphasizes how myth
"incorporates our fragmentary experience of evil within great
narratives of origin."[16]^14 The postmodern skepticism concerning
grand narratives carries over into a skepticism concerning myths of
evil. Myth and plot clearly overlap, of course, in the sense that
every myth tells a story, but plot introduces us to a more detailed
and prosaic level of narrative. It moves us from timelessness to time.
Plot gives us heroes or heroines who are not the thousand-faced
figures of myth but distinctive people with local addresses: Quixote,
Crusoe, Pip, Mrs. Dalloway, Joseph K. Plots, too, tend to focus on a
specific, concrete, and unique sequence of actions. They describe a
world in which this unique sequence of actions and choices, not an
underlying mythic pattern, is what determines individual destinies.
Plot, moreover, invites a detailed analysis of causation. It gives
wider play than myth to the operations of chance and contingency,
while also allowing readers or spectators to recognize elements of
narrative structure, such as the recognition scene or turning point,
that distinguish causal sequences from mere happenstance or fate.
Plot, in short, immerses us in a world where suffering and evil emerge
as distinct from the universal forces represented in myth. It allows
us to understand evil and suffering as, no matter how deeply imbued
with ineradicable traces of mystery, at least in part the outcome of
specific inter-human actions and distinctive social arrangements.
These heuristic differences between myth and plot--evoked as a
framework for analysis of suffering and evil in the postmodern
age--find a clear illustration in the work of Gustavo
Gutiérrez.[17]^15 Gutiérrez, known as the founder of Liberation
Theology, is a Catholic priest who works in the slums of Lima, Peru.
For Gutiérrez, the suffering of the innocent and impoverished masses
who inhabit the slums of Lima does not raise traditional theological
questions about God's will. He is not concerned with mythic
explanations of evil as originating in a lost paradise. For Gutiérrez,
we will understand the suffering in the slums of Lima only by
identifying the historical oppression of the poor by powerful
landowners who receive the support (if not outright blessing) of the
Catholic Church. Plot here is not merely an analytical tool that helps
clarify the social causes of suffering in the historical actions of
wealthy landowners and churchmen. Unlike myth, where the outcome is
already foretold, plot has access to the realm of contingency, where
human actions may change the outcome of events. Suffering in the slums
of Lima, Gutiérrez insists, will not be reversed by medicines or
compassion or improved social services, however welcome they might be,
but only by the creation of a new and just historical plot that
redresses the oppression of the poor. A postmodern vision that
understands suffering as inter-human and historical (not solitary,
private, inward, and inscrutable) matters for Gutiérrez precisely
because it contains an implicit imperative for mobilizing effective
social resistance to evil.
Conclusion
Evil, from a postmodern perspective, is as malleable as the
suffering with which it has increasingly come to be identified.
Filmmakers, of course, continue to create stories depicting evil as an
indestructible cosmic force, breeding new legions in a distant galaxy,
or as a deathless Gothic legacy that lives on in vampires, swamp
creatures, and ax murderers. As we might expect, there is no single
postmodern voice of evil. Some postmodern voices prove especially
gripping because they call upon an archaic and primitive dread that
may belong to the evolutionary history of humankind. The malleability
of evil, of course, ranks among its most ancient features: Satan is
the archetypal shape-shifter. Yet, a postmodern perspective provides a
major difference in viewing the malleability of evil as, at last, a
cultural artifact. Moreover, the new identification between evil and
suffering throws a new light onto suffering. Suffering, from a
postmodern point of view, now appears not a permanent, ungraspable
mystery of the human condition--something always enigmatic and beyond
comprehension--but rather an event, even when locked within the
privacy of an individual consciousness, that expresses much of what
our cultures have taught us. In the extended social history of evil,
one solid advantage that accrues to the postmodern moment lies in the
implicit promise that we may, at least in part, address and redress
the suffering that we have so thoroughly helped to shape. We may,
unlike Adam, begin to turn towards the evil around us.
________________________
[18]^1 Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on
Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1984) 34-37. ] [19]^2 Paul Ricoeur,
"Evil," The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade (New York:
MacMillan, 1987) 200. Ricoeur's text is based in part on his
well-known study The Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (New
York: Harper & Row, 1967). ] [20]^3 Andrew Delbanco, The Death of
Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1995). ] [21]^4 See, for example, Jeffrey Burton
Russell, The Devil: Perceptions of Evil From Antiquity to Primitive
Christianity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977); John S.
Feinberg, Theologies and Evil (Washington, DC: University Press of
America, 1979); Mary Midgley, Wickedness: A Philosophical Essay
(London: Routledge, 1984); John T. Wilcox, The Bitterness of Job: A
Philosophical Reading (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989);
Nel Noddings, Women and Evil (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1989); David Rey Griffin, Evil Revisited: Responses and
Reconsiderations (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991);
and Lyall Watson, Dark Nature: A Natural History of Evil (New York:
HarperCollins, 1995). ] [22]^5 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A
Report on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking Press, 1965). ]
[23]^6 See, for example, Anthony B. Pinn, Why, Lord?: Suffering and
Evil in Black Theology (New York: Continuum, 1995). ] [24]^7 Timothy
Anders, The Evolution of Evil: An Inquiry into the Ultimate Origins of
Human Suffering (Chicago: Open Court, 1994) 334. See also Leonard W.
Doob, Panorama of Evil: Insights from the Behavioral Sciences
(Westport: Greenwood Press, 1978); and Howard K. Bloom, The Lucifer
Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History (New
York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1995). ] [25]^8 Emmanuel Levinas,
"Useless Suffering," trans. Richard Cohen, The Provocation of Levinas:
Rethinking the Other, eds. Robert Bernasconi and David Wood (New York:
Routledge, 1988) 161-162. ] [26]^9 Levinas, "Useless Suffering," 157.
] [27]^10 Levinas, "Useless Suffering," 158. ] [28]^11 Levinas,
"Useless Suffering," 157. ] [29]^12 Levinas, "Useless Suffering," 157.
] [30]^13 Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das, and Margaret Lock, introduction,
Social Suffering, eds. Kleinman, Das, and Lock (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1997) ix. ] [31]^14 Ricoeur, Encyclopedia of
Religion, 200. ] [32]^15 See especially Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology
of Liberation: History, Politics and Salvation, trans. Sister Caridad
Inda and John Eagleson (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1973) and On Job:
God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent, trans. Matthew J.
O'Connell (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1987). ]
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