Who's really evil?

It’s hard to talk about anything that is controversial in Pagan groups. There are so few of us, that anything about which people have strong opinions can tear a group apart. But given the current political climate, I’m going there. Not because I would want the reader to agree with my opinions, but because the evolutionary function of religion is to unite us by transcending what keeps us separate. [There’s a body of biological argument for this.]

Jonathan Haidt, who does research in moral psychology, says that it is our genetic tendency toward caring about our reputation, combined with our ability to sacralize group activities, [such as soldiers going to war] is what allows us to work in groups and thus increase our changes of overall survival. Humans who could work in larger groups did better than those who tried to survive alone or in smaller groups.

Our notions of evil are something that can divide us. I recently came across a reel of a a woman who was angry about the outcome of the election. She was explaining how she was dealing with her feelings about sitting down for the holidays with her family who had voted different than she had. She maintained that her choice was to believe her family was either ignorant or evil to vote as they had. She chose to believe they were ignorant.

This is hardly a pleasant choice, and while the former is hardly more palatable, and still comes across loud and clear, it still allowed her to be in the room. This is still better than the total estrangement of people deciding they will never speak to their families again, if just barely.

Growing up, my understanding of the Christian notion of evil was that it was an external ‘bad.’ A force that was polarized to ‘good,’ pulled us to do bad things… Admittedly, this was vague. I understood that some things were to be avoided: lying, cheating, stealing. Murder was so obviously wrong that it wasn’t even a conversation. But that left a whole lot of grey area. Was it cheating on a partner if everyone involved was aware and agreed the act was a good idea? Christian morality said yes, it was evil. In the Wiccan/feminist Pagan circles where I hung out in my 20s, the answer was no, because ‘all acts of love and pleasure are my rituals.’

On the other hand, hurting people was obviously out, and that included lying, cheating, and stealing. By definition this couldn’t be consensual. The Paganism of my 20s barely acknowledged the existence of evil. There was only ‘bad behavior,’ and ‘don’t hurt people.’

The polarity of good versus evil wasn’t a strong theme in the ancient world. The gods of the ancient pantheons were more like representations of human existence. [If that sounds clinical, be assured that I am not in the least clinical when I interact with them.] Their stories told the repercussions of behaving in a way that made one unlikeable to other humans. Being arrogant, cowardly, greedy, cheating, or ignoring religious duties, was bad.

The first [known] religion that posited the drive to be bad was an external force, was Zoroastrianism. Angra Mainyu [bad] stood in opposition to Ahura Mazda [good,] with the prophecy that good would someday win definitively. Sound familiar?

Greek Pagans didn’t take that view [even if later neoplatonists revered the Chaldean Oracles, which were based in Zoroastianism] the view of evil was that it was the result of separation from the gods.

In my 20s, I struggled with concepts of right and wrong, good and evil. Wicca didn’t offer much guidance. ‘Do no harm’ wasn’t helpful when my head said something should be fine, but my gut said it wasn’t. People having agreements about behavior didn’t necessarily make it feel good. Just because I consented to sex, [or even pursued it] didn’t make it feel right or safe. Nor did ‘feeling good’ necessarily improve my life. There is no prohibition in Paganism, either ancient or modern for taking drugs or alcohol. But I knew perfectly well that path would lead me down a bad road.

I’m not sure when I came to the definition ‘sin’ that I’ve used since then. I realized that sin was any behavior that separated us from deity. At the time, I didn’t notice that this also meant reaching for something higher. Nor was I clear on what that ‘something’ was. Only a few years ago, I learned that the original Christian word for sin was hamartia, meaning ‘to miss the mark.’ [Which makes me think that we might have a bone-deep understanding of what behavior is good, and what is bad.] This was first used in Aristotle’s Poetics to describe a character’s mis-step which led them down the path to tragedy.

In Emma Restall Orr’s, Living with Honor, she says “It is only when we are disconnected from the web of wyrd, From the wholeness of a moment with in the cycles of nature and each so present, that we risk making choices that missed the mark.”

This sounds very holistic, but the only judge of whether or not one is in sufficient alignment with nature and the people around them is the person themselves. There’s no language here about what to do if someone is wrong, or how one might tell.* Nor does good and bad exist in a vacuum. While something as simple as finding edible food can be done alone, for humans to thrive, the provision of enough food to survive difficult conditions requires interaction with others. Making and raising new humans definitely requires others. Our feelings cannot be the sole judge of what is ‘good’ or ‘right.’

However, it’s also entirely possible to make the right decision and not be at all in alignment with the people around them. What if people around you are just wrong? All the people around you believe the Jews are bad should you then just go along with it because that’s being in alignment with them?

So how does one balance the individual feeling versus the survival of the group?

I think that - as Pagans - we need to re-examine what we mean by evil. But why?

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Three reasons:

1. The ethic of ‘Do no harm’ isn’t enough. It isn’t based in anything our ancestors did, but in John Stewart Mill’s idea of morality. While useful and [possibly] appropriate on a political level, this ethic isn’t helpful when addressing the full spectrum of human behavior.

2. While our ancestors certainly experienced violence, the twentieth century bought us methods for not just mass death, but for torture on a scale not previously seen.

3. What we think we know can be gamed when clever people manipulate our instincts.

The problem with not defining what we mean by ‘evil’ [and this is true of any word] is that It can then be used as a tool by people who have reason to control how others think. JSM’s utilitarianism/libertarianism doesn’t address this. It’s totally possible for people to exercise control while sincerely believing that what they are doing is ‘the greatest good.’ Certainly, Hitler thought this. So did Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, all of whom killed far more people than Hitler.

Pagans who want more than ‘do no harm’ often engage with virtue ethics. This is a set of goals such as being generous, hospitable, courageous, etc. These goals change depending on the culture and weren’t explicitly written down. They were gleaned from the stories told in that culture. Only Aristotle expleicity wrote them down.

Basing our behavior on virtue ethics - whichever set we choose - is better than ‘do no harm.’ However, we should be careful about taking virtues from the culture of our ancestors. Their world was very different from ours. Brendan Meyer [Yes, he’s Pagan.] in The Other Side of Virtue makes an error in claiming pride as a behavior we should engage in because our Celtic ancestors held this as important and necessary.

20th century humanity had enough pride to think we knew more than the gods. Complain about the Crusades all you want, but the ideology that sought to remove religion from humanity’s consciousness killed 100 million people. [Genghis Kahn ‘only’ killed 40 million.] this was catalogued in Alexandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago which documents the full list of how people’s minds were twisted by ideology and what they did to each other as a consequence. It is a truly horrible read. What made it terrible was seeing how ordinary people were so easily turned into totalitarian snitches in the service of the state.

Our pagan ancestors didn’t have to deal with having their brains twisted in this way on a grand scale. They were concerned with basic survival in a world where the threats came from the neighbors and nature. They understood chaos and did everything they could to keep it at bay. But chaos wasn’t dark the way Satan is dark. [I’m not talking about LeVey’s utilitarian Satan] The Christian Satan is the stuff and subject of horror movies. The problem with Satan is that he stands outside humans, tempting us to do bad things. As Solzhenitsyn saw when he spent years in the Soviet gulags, a deep and terrible darkness resides within the human heart.

WE are the darkness.

Having humility is far more important than pride, or even honor. Our world is insanely complex. Far more than what our ancestors dealt with. They weren’t damaged by poisons deliberately placed in their food, water, and air. They didn’t have dopamine-inducing news and social media. Any propaganda was mediated by the neighbors and the realities of the world they lived in. There is so much in the 21st century that we not only don’t understand, but can’t understand. We don’t have the brain capacity for it.

Our ancestors understood that chaos is always close at hand. Seeking to be more like the gods by being virtuous and doing the rituals that connect us to them is armor against that chaos. Limiting ourselves to an explicit moral code armors us against our internal darkness.

The women in the video who suspected her family might be evil - as opposed to ignorant - is both lacking in humility, and captured by the complexities of 21st-century America. She’s a person who’s stripped herself of FtF relationships [as indicated by the fact that she’s airing her issues on a video instead of talking about it to humans who might give her perspective,] at the behest of talking heads who our brains think we know, but don’t. We need other people for our mental well-being and deciding her family is ignorant is nearly as isolating as deciding they’re evil.

She’s been convinced by the talking heads that her loved ones are evil.

That’s evil.

In the middle ages and even into the colonial era, many people were declared ‘evil’ and tortured and/or killed by the Christian church. In the 20th century, many more people were declared ‘bad communists’ and tortured or killed by the various totalitarian governments around the world.

How many of these people were actually evil? The people who acted as accusers, torturers, and executioners almost certainly believed they were doing the right thing, or justifiedin their actions. We could have been any one of them. If the deaths of the 20th century teach us anything, it is that the capacity to harm others is inherent in all of us. That number of deaths could only have been achieved if enough people believed they were doing the right thing.

WE are the evil. But we don’t have to be. Actively practicing virtue is a bulwark against the behaviors that lead us to evil.

I’ll leave whether or not a person can be actively evil for another discussion, because I’m still rolling that one around in my mind. [sociopaths, and such] But it is certain that we can behave in a way that is evil, often when think we’re doing the right thing. Perhaps the more certain we are, the more humility we should have.

So I don’t believe evil is some sort of external power. Pagan’s don’t believe in Satan, and I think that’s good. Such belief grants bad behavior too much power and removes responsibility for the actions involved. None-the-less, we should never assume that the pits of darkness are beyond our personal sphere.

So before we declare someone else evil, we had better look inside ourselves, commune with our gods, and closely examine the complex environment in which we live to make sure we haven’t missed something important. Video woman would be well-served to do all of these. [I’d be shocked if she had a religious or spiritual practice.] Her mental health depends on it.

*Orr is a vegan [or at least she was when she wrote Living with Honor], and since that appears no native culture in humanity, I take her opinions about what’s natural with a grain of salt.

If you’re curious about Paganism/Heathenism/Wicca/Druidry, please feel free to message me and I’ll be happy to answer questions.

Selina Rifkin, M.S. [Nutrition], LMT, has been Pagan since she was 14 [which was a long time ago] and been to Hades in a handbasket. More than once. This has given her some opinions. She has direct communication with her gods and they’ve always given her answers when she asks. [One does have to ask.] Like most of her generation [X] she’s okay with snark. Most days she tries for good writing. But the snark, and side comments creep in. Be warned.

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