Letter #241: Inside-Out World

You were the chosen one!

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Dad,

Call it the Anakin Skywalker theory of good and evil: he could only become Darth Vader because he began as the most promising Jedi. Only the chosen one could fall so far.

This is how the Romans talked about the great rebel villains of their history, men like Catiline and Coriolanus: they were monsters precisely because they had all the makings of heroes. Augustine put it plainly when he said that good can exist on its own, but evil can only exist as a corruption of what was once good. Etymologically, most languages have words for wrong that express the sense of something twisted, or rotted, or fallen from its original path: deviance. Perversity. Corruption.

When we were kids our teachers would sometimes tell us that we couldn’t fully enjoy the good times without the bad times. It’s like your dinner plate, they would say: without the vegetables, could you appreciate the ice cream so much? Well maybe not in practice, I always thought, but in principle I’d take a world where everything tasted like ice cream. Or better yet, I’d take a world where the pleasure of broccoli was as intense in its way as the pleasure of chocolate chip cookie dough.

Our teachers meant well, but they had it backwards. Somewhere deep in the human psyche there’s a suspicion that evil is evil because life is good—and not the other way around.

Maybe this accounts in part for our impulse to wish the bad things away—to change the moral universe to suit ourselves rather than changing ourselves to suit it. It’s an understandable, if not strictly a logical response: as Augustine points out, we invert our whole moral system just to pretend things aren’t broken. Isaiah saw it: “woe to those who call good evil and evil good, who put the bitter in place of the sweet!”

Shakespeare saw it too. When Macbeth couldn’t wipe the blood off his hands, he concluded that the whole world must be stained to match. “Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather / The multitudinous seas incarnadine, / Making the green one red.”

Isaiah calls this “being wise in your own sight,” I think because it means distorting the whole world to accommodate your personal deformities. One last point Augustine makes, quoting Jesus: “from the evil of a man’s heart he brings forth evil.”

The man who is wise in his own sight is forever alone. How could he not be, when everything that contradicts his personal morality, everything that doesn’t arise from himself, must be wished away or snuffed out? The way back into life—the good life, the real life, the life made for love—is to let go of that inside-out world you wrap around yourself like a shroud to hide your shame. Very truly it was said: the kingdom of God or the life of the self. One of them has to go.

Love,
Spencer