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
 | A guest post by
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Seeing as we're talking about the wonderful subject of death, I wonder what you nice folk think of this that I posted to Peterson Academy today. I'd love to get your thoughts too lovely NJ subscribers.
"So, yesterday Scotland moved a step closer to "assisted dying", or Government Sponsored Suicide as it should be called.
I think the issue here is that this is always presented as too black and white. As someone whose father died in palliative care, I am well aware that he died from morphine and not cancer. I think the issue here is the codification of suicide. It takes away the difficulty and severity of these decisions. I believe that there should be great risk of prosecution to those who assist in such matters. Every case should be an individual assessment. Codification into law removes this and cheapens dying.
Is it right to euthanise animals but not humans? We are NOT just high level animals. We know it's wrong and the fact that it's always the same type of people advocating this sort of thing tells me it is wrong.
I'd love to know people's thoughts on this."
“...being wise in your own sight,”... that line struck me. A friend's husband, for the last couple years, and this past year acutely, has descended into a kind of madness where he is locked in his own mind. His descent has been fueled by an obsession with doctrinal and historical minutia in church matters that he can never quite square away in his intellect. (He fancies himself an intellectual but failed out of Oxford and was never able to finish post-grad studies anywhere else either.) The problem he has is that he thinks exactly this: he is wise in his own sight and everyone around him, all the way up the educational and hierarchical ladders are either wrong or not fully right. An ounce of humility, or even humor, would probably break the spell and put him back on the path to living life, if only he could put himself aside for a moment.