The (Reality) Problem of Evil

This week for my Film and Literature Seminar I read Joyce Carol Oates’s “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” It’s a latter-day “Young Goodman Brown” set against a backdrop of burger joints, pop music, and sexual promiscuity. In a few short pages, Oates sketches a teenage protagonist whose coquettishness and inner-melancholia combine to produce a world of sexy beats and harsh realities. Along the way, she meets evil incarnate in the form of an older, more sadistic Fonz. The story’s critique of modern American consumerism is biting, but its scrutiny of the problem of evil is more fascinating (or are they related?). It left me thinking: What about evil? What don’t we get?

First of all, Oates gets evil. She’s called the antagonist, Arnold Friend, “a fantastic figure: he is Death, he is the ‘elf-knight’ of the ballads, he is the Imagination, he is a Dream, he is a Lover, a Demon, and all that.” But we, the world, don’t get evil. Following Enlightenment-era social theory, our world sees evil as removable, as something that can be reoriented through the manipulation of social conditions. Utopia may not be achievable, but it is at least pursue-able.

At the same time, little thought is given to the consequences of such thinking. If society is right, we achieve secular Eden; if it is wrong, we risk collapsing a 21^st-century Tower of Babel. The failure of every Utopian movement ever notwithstanding, we refuse to peer into the darkness underlying existence. For all our efforts in the Middle East (or because of them), everyday people, Eastern and Western, face rape, murder, and vigilante justice. Our attempts to relieve global famine have resulted in an obese West while the rest of the world starves; our pesticides and (maybe) our GMOs jeopardize the very soil that gives plants life.

While those who speak of evil are often accused of painting morality in black and white, it is those who refuse to acknowledge its existence who risk ethical reduction. If evil can be eliminated, whether through newly synthesized drugs or D.A.R.E programs, then the world is a Manichean battle between the bad and the good; it is reduced to painting with so much white paint. But if evil is real, it cannot be conquered by men, only denied and opposed. In this case, we do not paint with white so much as recognize the eternal gray.

These musings leave me with interesting thoughts about relativism. Has anyone ever been, save maybe Nietzsche, a true relativist? Are not our modern impositions of secular morality their own unrefined (and un-relative) ethics? These are thoughts for another day, another day filled with evil, short stories, and homework (oh, so much homework).