Delphic Maxim 31: Shun evil
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each Delphic Maxim for 15 minutes a day.
31. Shun evil
There’s a really obvious thing about today’s maxim that I should say from the outset: it’s better to be good than to be evil. So I don’t think the lesson about ‘shunning’ evil is located just in thinking about our own character — though if that’s something you think is worth reflecting on, be my guest. I can’t imagine why a person would make a conscious choice to be evil, it’s so fundamentally flawed a character trait.
Of course, one of the big challenges with the concept of evil is its kind of metaphysical dimension. ‘Evil’ isn’t just a synonym for ‘bad’, it goes deeper than that. Last week one of the maxims invited us to find fault with no one, and during that response I pointed out that its pretty rare for someone to have a straight up evil character. ‘Evil’ comes from the soul of a person — it’s actually a deeply religious concept, which is why you don’t often here it in our secular, liberal, capitalist world.
The best instances of ‘evil’ are always found in fiction. Palpatine from Star Wars is probably the most compelling evil character I can think of, because he is so unapologetically riddled with it. He is obsessed with power, consumed by the pursuit of it, and by the dark side of the force. There’s no redemptive feature to his character, unlike Darth Vader who is a corruption of the good Anakin Skywalker, and who can be lured back to the light. With Palpatine, there is no moment of doubt or affection for anything other than himself and his gain. He is destructive, genocidal, and filled with hate. Palpatine is, for all of these reasons, a really interesting character.
So while I don’t think we find people in the order of Palpatine in the real world that often, we definitely do find people who qualify as evil (or at least their actions do). The cause of this isn’t metaphysical like it is in the case of Palpatine, but rather a corruption of a good person (a fall from grace: in this sense even Satan has a more redemptive quality than Palpatine, since he was once an angel but fell due to pride and envy, and even in Milton’s Paradise Lost there is an endearing charm and yearning to Satan that Palpatine lacks).
There are evil movements — those which circulate hatred, bigotry, or which practice beliefs that historically lead to atrocities. A lot of far-right movements today advocate for causes that are unquestionably evil: white supremacy, anti-semitism, islamophobia, racial prejudice.
There are structures and systems that I think are ‘bad’, but which aren’t ‘evil’. These include the kind of polluting industries that are destroying ecosystems, or that trap people in poverty. The reason I don’t regard these as evil but merely bad is because I think evil involves intent, and systems are too automatic and unthinking for that. However, the people who know these systems are bad and consciously choose to do nothing about it (or even make it worse), they are pushing into the domain of evil. How can a person consciously choose to make the world worse, when there are better alternatives. That makes someone not only a bad person (bad being the opposite of good), but also evil in that a conscious choice to make the world worse shows a fundamental defect in character.
I was actually going to talk about what it means to ‘shun’ evil, but this response has become a more general reflection about what is, and now I’m out of time. I’m sure I’ll get the chance again, but in the meantime: be good. Evil is bad for everyone.
