devil – Fluid Imagination

In her classic work, Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy, Susan Neiman shows how people who lived during the Lisbon Earthquake of 1755, which struck on All Saint’s Day and did particular damage to Lisbon’s many churches, considered the natural disaster to be a true manifestation of evil. Nowadays, we tend to equate evil with human cruelty and earthquakes with plate tectonics, but there are still vestiges of this 18th century way of thinking among us.

We see it in the lessons of the Presidential Cabinet’s Bible study leader who believes the COVID-19 pandemic is a divine punishment for America’s sins of godlessness, environmentalism, homosexuality, and depravity. But we also see it in the widespread urge to scapegoat Asian-Americans for what the President of the United States has repeatedly called “the Chinese Flu,” as well as the spread of conspiracy theories that hold half-a-dozen people or groups accountable for the pandemic, from the financier George Soros to the Democratic Party to 5G technology to the Chinese government to Bill Gates to the Rothschild family.

This need to find a “guilty” party is as old as the species itself, finding its origin in our species’ proclivity to see agency behind every natural phenomena. In his book, The Natural History of Religion, the philosopher David Hume wrote, “We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds; and by a natural propensity, if not corrected by experience and reflection, ascribe malice and good-will to every thing, that hurts or pleases us.”

Evolutionarily speaking, this instinctual urge to imagine what caused certain phenomena has benefitted us. It allows us to detect the difference between the wind’s rustling of the grass and a predator’s stealthy movement through the plains, but even more, it allows us to see elements of the natural world as being in possession of agency — or as Daniel Dennett, the co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University, puts it in his book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, we adopt the intentional stance when it comes to describing and predicting the behavior of others.

The intentional stance is the ability to treat animate objects in the world as being “agents with limited beliefs, specific desires, and enough common sense to do the rational thing given those beliefs and desires.” Some theorists call this the “theory of mind” — i.e., the belief that other creatures (including other humans) have a mind, which allows us to then imagine what that mind might believe about the world and what it might want, which in turn allows us to manipulate the other’s mind towards our own ends. Lying is an example of this: we imagine that the other person’s mind has a certain belief about the world, a belief we don’t want them to have for whatever reason, and so we give them false information to manipulate their belief and accomplish our own goal; but so is our relationships with our dogs: we imagine our dogs have minds that love us and are loyal to us, and so we act as if that is true.

Humans are not the only animals who adopt the intentional stance — some mother birds will pretend to have a broken wing in order to distract a predator from attacking the fledgelings in her nest; other creatures use fantastic displays to convince potential partners of their fitness and health, regardless of their actual fitness and health; dogs and monkeys will bluff others to get access to a preferred toy; etc. — but humans are the undeniable masters of it.

The entire social fabric of us naked apes comes from our expert ability to adopt the intentional stance. “We experience the world,” Dennett writes, “as not just full of moving human bodies but of rememberers and forgetters, thinkers and hopers and villains and dupes and promise-breakers and threateners and allies and enemies.”

He continues, “So powerful is our innate urge to adopt the intentional stance that we have real difficulty turning it off when it is no longer appropriate.” Dennett and other researchers postulate that the religious impulse of human beings has its origins in this urge: “Much as our ancestors would have loved to predict the weather by figuring out what it wanted and what beliefs it harbored about them, it simply didn’t work.”

As the COVID-19 virus winds its way through the human species, our urge to provide it with an intentional stance remains — except now that we’re guided by an understanding of viruses as “teetering on the boundaries of what is considered life”, we’re far too sophisticated to give COVID-19 an intentional stance, thus we channel our urge towards the creation of conspiracy theories that allow us to establish some kind of power and control over what is, quite naturally, an uncontrollable situation.

The historical post mortem of the COVID-19 pandemic will surely find fault in the behaviors, decisions, and indecisions of hundreds of government officials all throughout the world, not to mention the willful ignorance of tens of thousands of ordinary citizens and the malicious intentions of dozens of self-serving capitalists and authoritarians, but it will not be able to name a single agent or group of agents as the primary cause of COVID-19, for indeed, its cause is not some evil one who wishes to do us harm, but evolution itself — the mindless, intention-less process by which the living and “the teetering on living” reproduce and survive.

What does it mean to say there is a negative force in the world?

We have images of negativity that we use to talk about the idea, Heath Ledger’s Joker being one of them, the Christian Devil being another, the Dark Side of the Force being yet another, but the Joker, the Devil, and the Sith are just stand-ins to help us comprehend something much larger, something much more significant.

Incredibly intelligent people have believed in this negative force (St. Augustine, for example), and if they didn’t believe in this negative force as some kind of personified Devil, they still felt compelled to pass the idea down through the myths and stories they told their children and grandchildren, whether in the forms of Loki, Coyote, or Pan, all of whom are stands-in for the chaotic aspects of our universe.

But hold on a second, and witness the mistake I just made: I equated negativity with chaos. We’ll have to unpack that a little bit.

There is no trickster god in the Christian pantheon, if only by virtue of there not being a Christian pantheon. The closest the Christians come to a trickster god is the Devil. In a monotheistic universe, where God is One and God is Good and God is Merciful and God is Great and God is a jealous God, there is no room for a trickster who would pull one over on God; there can only be defiance.

The problem with having this as a founding element of one’s worldview is that it disrespects chaos, and chaos is an essential element of our universe. Acceptance of chaos imparts an understanding that not everything can be controlled, and if you can accept that, then you hardly ever look at those who act out of control as acting defiant. Instead, you respect that chaos is the nature of the universe and search for some kind of rationale to explain whatever behavior you don’t yet understand, some line of cause and effect that you can trace backwards until you’re able to find a situation where you can exert some influence and actually start to gain some element of real control.

I’m thinking of ISIS at the moment, and Donald Trump and the millions of people whose worldview he represents.

When we think of Loki, Coyote, or Pan, when we think of a trickster god, we generally think of someone who’s just a real pain is the ass. He may be charismatic in the moment, but in the long run, he causes nothing but trouble for everyone involved.

That doesn’t sound like ISIS.

But that’s because our concept of the trickster is wrapped up in personifications. What the concept of the trickster actually represents is the human experience of thinking one is right when one is actually wrong and then having the universe prove your mistake in some enthusiastic fashion.

The continued existence of ISIS demonstrates that, despite the military might its able to exert onto any surface of the planet, the United States still cannot completely control the world.

Donald Trump (and the millions of people whose worldview he represents) are angry at that fact. They cannot imagine a world where the United States is not completely in control. They saw the downfall of the Soviet Union as the end of history, the final victory of Western democracy over the Evil Empire. We now live in a mono-superpower world, where America is Good and America is Merciful and America is Great and America is a jealous Superpower, and there is no room for having any other country or entity get one over on us. To continue to exist when America tells you not to is defiance, and defiance must be met with swift and powerful violence: Loki being slammed into the wall by Thor, the Joker’s face being slammed into the table by Batman, Assad’s airbase being blasted with six dozen warheads by Donald Trump (and the millions of people whose worldview he represents).

In a worldview that equates chaos with negativity, defiance is not acceptable.

(And yes, I realize that I just conflated Assad with ISIS, but I feel comfortable equating a head of state who used chemical weapons on his own citizens with a Muslim military that primarily decapitates Muslims; I also have no problem equating both of them with a negative force in the world.)

But in a worldview where chaos is not only acknowledged as its own kind of force, but venerated to the point where it earns its own festivals and shares traits associated with the gods of the various arts, the actions of ISIS and Assad can be placed within a larger context, one with such complexity that our need to understand and control can only be met by the universe’s laughing contempt for our vanity.

There is a lot less action in a worldview that accepts the reality of chaos, not because it feels the need to exert less influence than a defiant worldview, but because it believes that one should only exert one’s influence where and when one is able to make a real difference.

If this was just a philosophical difference, then this would be merely academic. The problem comes when the person (and the worldview he represents) actually has real power and yet no understanding of how or when to use it.

The worldview that sees chaos as defiance uses its power (consciously or not) to smack down the defiant one. The other sees chaos as natural element of the system and so attempts to trace down its origin, biding its time until it knows its power will do the most good.

The first results in innocent bloodshed, as anger always does. The other results in feelings of helplessness; and yet, it also results in a commitment to put one’s best minds to the problem and to not give up until they discover a reasonable solution, and if such a thing never happens, it results in the guilt that comes from feeling that one might have saved someone if only one had been able to solve the problem sooner.

Both worldviews have negative consequences.

But that’s what it means to have a negative force in the world. It means to have disorder (in the sense of entropy and its negation of order) constantly chasing us down.

ISIS exists not because they are evil. They exist because the once-unified conception of Islam is breaking down into a variety of sects, each more atomistic, and hence more fundamental, than the whole from which it came. As an embodiment of Islam’s militaristic and world dominating underpinnings (rather than an embodiment of its merciful and peaceful underpinnings), ISIS necessarily confronts The Other with violence and negation.

The only rational response to such an entity is containment and education, the same as one would do to the outbreak of any disease. Yes, people will die because of ISIS, just as they die because of ebola and AIDS. We can influence the numbers, perhaps, as well as the timeline, but total and swift eradication is simply beyond our control.

Assad, for his part, exists not because he is evil. He exists because the world order created in the 20th century is falling apart, its march toward global unification fracturing into hundreds (if not thousands) of disparate ethnicities and nationalities, just as Syria itself is dissolving into dozens (if not hundreds) of disparate militias. “Syria” no longer represents a specific center of political power; the word “Syria” itself is an anachronistic relic of 20th century cartography whose signifier now marks a localized region of 21st century chaos.

The only rational response to the Syrian situation is to come to the aid of all those who have been tossed out of their homes by the whirling chaos of that all-encompassing war, to provide succor to its refugees and food and first aid to those still stuck inside. To join the battle with any larger mission is to find oneself caught in that swirl of chaos with no logical end or exit in sight.

To say that there is a negative force in the world is not to say that there is evil; it is, instead, to acknowledge that we do not, and cannot, live in utopia — and rest assured, if we don’t remember that, the universe will continue to teach us, again and again, and in enthusiastic fashion.