Category: Religion and Philosophy
A question was posed at a literary forum
http://www.literatureforums.net/vb3/showthread.php?t=2757
(regarding "Clockwork Orange")
Is it better to be able to choose to be evil, or to be forced to be good?
Sitaram replies:
This is an interesting thread. I am a bit short on time this morning, so I must come back and re-read all the posts carefully.
I am reminded of something which Moses said in the Old Testament (Torah or Pentateuch). I will look up the exact reference. Paraphrasing from memory: "This day is placed before you life and death (good and evil). Choose, therefore life."
How interesting that the scriptures of the Old Testament stress that there is a freewill choice.
The Old Testament also makes it clear that we cannot always be certain what is good and evil. When the brothers of Joseph come to him in Egypt and ask his forgiveness for their attempting to murder him but then instead selling him into slavery, Joseph replies (paraphrased), "You intended evil. But God transformed your evil into good." The evil action of selling their brother into slavery made it possible for Joseph to rise in power to be number two in all of Egypt, and thereby, to have the power to save his family from famine.
By contrast, the Qur'an basically says that Allah only helps those who do good, but those who choose not to believe, are blinded by Allah, and lead further into error and deception by Allah, so that their punishment in the afterlife may be increased.
I must post this now, so I do not loose what I have written so far, and return via edit to add further thoughts.
I have done a google search to locate the quotation of Moses, above.
http://www2.jrf.org/recon-dt/dt.php?id=160
Deuteronomy 29:9 - 31:30
Ultimately this comes down to choice, and this brings us to one of the final, and most familiar, passages from the parasha. Here we read, "I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day: I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life...by loving the Eternal your God, heeding God's commands, and holding fast to God." (Deuteronomy 30:19-20). This verse is meant to remind us that, though we are given a suggested path down which we should walk, we must ultimately exercise our free will and choose the path we are to take. Hopefully this will be the path towards blessing and life and not the path towards curse and self-destruction.
Our sages, in Midrash Tanhuma (Re'eh 3) expressed this beautifully in a parable: "An old man sat on a highway from which there branched two roads, [one full of thorns at the beginning but level at the end], and the other level at the beginning but full of thorns at the end. So he sat at the fork of the road and cautioned passersby, saying, "Even though the beginning of this road is full of thorns, follow it, for it will turn level in the end.' Whoever sensibly heeded the old man and followed that road did get a bit weary at first, to be sure, but went on in peace and arrived in peace. Those who did not heed the old man set out on the other road and stumbled in the end. So it was with Moses, who explicitly said to Israel, 'I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day: I have put before you life and death, blessing and curse. Choose life, that you and your offspring may live.'"
Socrates is famous for frequently saying that "All people by nature desire (or choose) the good." Socrates stacks the deck in his favor, I suspect, by defining the very act of choice as stemming from a desire, and assuming that desire for something is ipso facto, a desire for something desirable, and that which is desireable is ipso facto, good. Now, Socrates would allow that often people are mistaken in their notion of what is good. As Solomon wrote somewhere in Proverbs, "There are ways which seem good unto a person, but the end thereof is death."
We might say that an athlete chooses to triumph and win, because winning is good in the athlete's eyes. The athlete might choose to take steroids to achieve the goal of winning. The steroids might injure health, or be discovered and ruin a career. Illness and scandal are evils, and not good, but the athlete who makes such a choice is only looking at the seeming good of triumph and awards.
The most interesting line in Milton's Paradise Lost, for me, is where Satan says, "Evil, be thou my good."
Abrahamic religions depict Satan as initially the brightest of angels, Lucifer, the bearer of light, who, in a sense, admire God so much that Lucifer desires to BE God. This misguided desire of Satan is decribed as the first sin, of Pride.
Satan is cast out of heaven, so the story goes, but obviously still holds onto a desire for excellence. Since Good is the dominion of God in heaven, and Satan has been forever cast out of heaven, I ask, what choice is left to Satan but Milton's choice, to choose evil as good, and strive to excel in evil.
In the long (5 hour) PBS (Public Television) interview of Joseph Campbell by Bill Moyers, there is a brief segment in which Campbell relates a Sufi tradition about Satan. God casts Satan out of heaven with a stentorian voice saying "Begone!" and that last word of God is all Satan has to
remember God by. The idea is that Satan really loves God, and the separation is punishment. Campbell chuckles and adds, "The last words he hears are 'Go to Hell', and that memory is all Satan has to cling to for eternity." I thought it was a very interesting story.
Sufi spirituality always seems to be greatly concerned with the notion of "a beloved" and yearning after the beloved. There is one Sufi story about a Fakir (religous ascetic), who is sitting by the roadside, begging, when he sees another Fakir passing by in a determined fashion and a quick pace. "Where are you going?" he calls out to the passerby, who replies "I am going to visit with God." The first Fakir shouts "Well, ask God what he thinks of my prayers." A few days later, our Fakir sees his fellow Fakir returning. "Did you speak with God?" he asks. The second Fakir replies, "Why yes, and he told me to tell you that he detests your prayers. They
are the worst he has ever heard." The first Faker jumps up and down joyfully, laughing and shouting. "Why are you so happy?" the puzzled traveller inquires. "Because God heard my prayers!", answers the first. Once again, we see something beloved in the act of hearing and listening, even if what is heard is discouraging.
This devilish esthetic which Milton presents of "Evil, be thou my good" becomes interesting when examined in the light of Socrates' proposition that "all by nature desire the good, and no one willingly chooses what they consider to be not good", along with Plato's Euthypro problem, "is the good good by fiat simply because it is what God desires, or does God desire what is good for some inherent quality residing in goodness (or substitute virtue, morality, holiness, or
righteousness for the word good,if you prefer).
I was a great fan of the cartoon series "Earthworm Jim". In one episode, through some bizarre radioactive accident, Earthworm Jim spawns an evil twin. They are about to battle to the death. The evil twin gives a speech first, boasting essentially the boast of Milton's Satan, that he hates
everything that is good, and likes everything that is not good." So, Earthworm Jim (who is not always the brightest of worms) reasons, "Well, winning is good, and losing is bad, and since you like what is bad and hate what is good, then surely I shall defeat you.) Of course, we know that our hero, Jim, proceeds to dispatch his evil twin in no time flat.
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