when I started working on this problem or I guess when when it started working
on me was probably really in the mid 80s and I found myself suffering from two
things one was a very lengthy sequence of nightmares about nuclear destruction
and they were very affecting dreams and associated with that was a sense of
amazement that a dream that was that awful could reflect a reality that could
be that awful and an additional amazement at the fact that despite the production of thousands and tens and
thousands of weapons of unimaginable destruction and that qualitative
qualitative change in human capacity that represented that people could go
about their day-to-day lives without acting as if anything fundamental
whatsoever had changed now I've never really been able to figure out why that disturbed me so much when it seemed to
not disturb to any profound degree most of the people I knew it doesn't really
matter um the upshot of it of it was that I spent I probably spent my whole
life trying to understand what evil was and more importantly what might be done
about it um it's a strange pursuit in some ways for an academic to undertake because
academics tend to talk about academic things and one thing you can say about
evil is that whatever it is it's not bloody well academic like it's not an intellectual issue it's a existential
issue and it's it's not a theoretical issue it's an it's an issue that deals
with a absolute nature of reality and I guess sometimes I think that people
who go into academia go into academia to shield themselves from having to ask
questions about the absolute nature of reality so anyways I think before you
can talk about something before you can dare to talk about something like evil
you should do some thinking about what it is that you're talking about
definitionally speaking I learned this I believe from a historian named Jeffrey
Burton Russell who wrote a very detailed history of the idea of the devil in the
1980s when such histories were were strange to say the least he he was very
interested in the history of the embodiment of ideas of evil and one of
the things he his work did for me was to help me clarify the distinction between two terrible things the distinction
a distinction that has to be made and that's the distinction between tragedy
and evil and I don't think you can talk about it evil at all until you
distinguish it from tragedy and so I'm gonna try to distinguish evil from tragedy by making some reference to the
essential existential condition of human beings I would say that the nature of
human being is such that it consists of a confrontation with the bounded finite
with the unbounded infinite and that those are the bare facts of the matter
and the facts are that the the world of experience as it presents itself to us
is literally and not metaphorically complex beyond our capacity to
understand and that means that people deal in a real sense on an ongoing basis
with the infinite and I believe that that fact is the reason why religious
experience is essentially and belief is essentially endemic to mankind it's a
human universal and it's not because people believe it's because human
existence as such consists of a confrontation between the finite and the
infinite and religious systems merely take that into account
now our finitude in the face of the infinite has some inevitable
consequences and I would say those consequences are essentially the
existential conditions of life the first of those consequences is is that the
finite is always overwhelmed by the infinite it has to be because it can't
encapsulate it and so what that mean means is that it's that suffering is
central to the nature of human existence and suffering exists as a consequence of
the consequences of our limitations I mean every single person who's alive is
going to die and every single person who's alive is
going to deal with with serious physical illness and mental distress if they
don't suffer if they aren't suffering it directly immediately right now on their
own it's almost inevitably the case that
every single person who walks the earth is confronting that the bare bones of
reality at that level in the guise of an afflicted family member and so the fact of our finitude is is again no academic
issue it's essential to the nature of our being and we're forced to deal with
it on an ongoing basis so I would say insufficiency is built into human
experience and and there are existential consequences to that now I read
something a long time ago and I don't remember who wrote it but it was written
about Jewish commentary on the Torah God is omniscient omnipotent and omnipresent
what does he lack and answer is limitation and that's that's a that's a
riddle and an answer of unparalleled brilliance as far as I'm concerned because I think it speaks deeply to
something about the central nature of existence itself and that is that
without limitation there's no being now that's a hard thing to understand but I
think you can understand it in a number of different ways the first thing you
might want to understand is that I play this game with my students sometimes in
my class I'll come up to a student to pick them it poor victim at random and
come up to them say okay we're to play a game and they say okay and I say well
you move first well they don't know what to do and the reason for that is because
the limiting parameters of the game have not been defined and as a consequence of that they're stunned by their infinite
freedom into complete immobility and what that means in a sense is that the in the absence of serious constraint
there can be no choice no freedom no existence and I believe this to be
fundamentally true just as the fact that human being is vulnerable is fundamentally true here's another
example that I think is more it's more personal to me and it emerged in my
imagination as a consequence of my contemplation of my son's vulnerability
so I have children there are teenagers now I still like them um
so when my one of the things I was really struck by when my children were little was how perfect they were like
and I believe that that was the benevolence of God in a sense children
are tremendously difficult they're a tremendous responsibility but they're so
perfect and they manifest that perfection in such a remarkable way that
that's the payment for taking on the responsibility of bringing them into the
be into being and caring for them and the thing about being a parent is that
the vulnerability of people is made manifest to you in a way that was never
the case prior to that and and it's not it's haunting and it's beautiful but it's also exactly right in a way and I was
thinking well look at my son he's a little kid and you know you got to chase after him all the time he can get sick
people hurt him ah you know people are gonna be mean to him he's gonna be
disappointed in his life he's vulnerable and and it's it's it's a constant tragic reality that he's vulnerable I thought
well okay let's say we wanted to do something about that so let's say we
make him so that no one can pick on him so it could inflate him to about 20 feet
high and equip him with a metallic skeleton and a cast-iron exoskeleton and
you could equip him with a computerized intelligence that far supersedes his own
and you could remove his vulnerabilities one by one hypothetically and of course
more and more we're in a position where we could do that in reality and one of
the things I realized right away was that as you remove the vulnerabilities
you remove the thing you love and then I started to understand more deeply that
vulnerability was a precondition for human being and that was a desirable
precondition because the things about human existence that are wonderful and
remarkable are so integrally tied up with vulnerability that they're actually
inextricable the Jewish commentary what the infinite lacks is the finite there's
a more abstract way of getting at the same thing if you could do absolutely anything you wanted at any point and be
anywhere you wanted to be anything you wanted and if there was nothing that was
out of your reach there would be nothing to do because you'd be everything at once and when you're everything at once
which is at least in principle the position of God
there's no story and there's no being and there's something about being that
is a story and without limitation there's no story so then the question
starts to become with regards to consideration of human vulnerability is
there a way to conduct your life in such a manner that the intrinsic
vulnerability that characterizes your life is rendered not only acceptable but
desirable and to me that's the central question of existence and I tell you get
that wrong you're on the wrong track and if you're on the wrong track man
you are in one terrible place I would say with regards to tragedy
humans are vulnerable and that's tragic but if tragedy is the price that we pay
for existence then so be it if existence is justifiable and so
tragedy itself which is merely a revelation of our vulnerability can't be
regarded as evil it's just a it's a condition of existence and so it's
necessary to distinguish the tragic conditions of existence from evil before
you can even address the problem and I think what that means to some degree is you should not blame on the relationship
between the finite and the infinite the terrible failings of humanity that can
be laid directly at the feet of human beings so earthquakes aren't evil and
cancer isn't evil and mental illness isn't evil and predators aren't evil
they're they just are part of the way things are but there are certain
categories of human action that are definitely outside the parameters of
mere tragedy and those are the things we really have to get a handle on evil for
me is differentiated from tragedy by its lack of necessity and it's volunteerism and it's a tenet I think of modern
materialistic thought that there are social or material causes for actions
and it's an extraordinary useful theory and I think but I think one of
the unfortunate consequences of that is that we've tended to write off much of human misbehavior and attribute it to
say insufficiencies and material conditions which isn't is not a it's
not an acceptable theory there are all sorts of human cultures that were characterized by virtually complete
absence of material luxury well-being whose cultures were
highly functional and and highly moral and to describe the propensity towards
misbehavior as a consequence of economic inequality is entirely beside the point
as far as I'm concerned evil is more pernicious than that which is generated
for example by social inequality I think it's actually although this is a
terrifying thought in some ways it's more appropriate to consider it a form
of demonically warped aesthetic and I'll give you a couple of examples of what I
mean by that for example because the exhibit because the manifestation of
this warped athetic aesthetic makes itself apparent under certain conditions
so for example I think it made itself apparent in the imagination of the first
politician who can to coined the acronym mad or mutual assured destruction
that's an aesthetic of evil to to make a joke of a situation that catastrophic
indicates the kind of malevolence that lurks behind the fact that such a
condition exists the motto on the gates of Auschwitz I believe in the Second World War
work will make you free that's another manifestation of the aesthetic of evil
it's a terrible terrible ironic joke and it it's instructive to meditate on what
sort of imagination would have the arrogance to tell such a terrible joke
the concentration camps are classic examples of evil and I think by
analyzing at least certain kinds of events that occurred within them it's
easier to get a clear idea of what evil constitutes and one of the stories
that's always haunted me I guess is I believe it's another story derived from
Auschwitz the prison guards in Auschwitz would take the prisoners who were
already stripped of their dignity and to whatever degree possible their identity
and their culture and their language and their status as valuable beings and yet
that wasn't sufficient they needed to be tortured in addition to that before they
were killed and the torture often consisted of ah
self-evidently counterproductive work ah a situation that also frequently
characterized activity in the Soviet gulag archipelago where perhaps 60
million people met their death a typical Auschwitz example was the
requirement for prisoners to carry 100-pound sacks of wet salt from one
side of the compound and then back again now that's evil as far as I'm concerned
and and you have to think about it from an aesthetic perspective in a sense because it's a celebration of horror and
it's a it's a conscious attempt to violate the the conditions that make
life itself tolerable and it's aimed at dehumanization destruction of the ideal and at a even deeper level revenge
against the conditions of existence itself I've tried to understand the
developmental pathway that leads to acts like that my academic research as well
as my clinical experience has revealed to me that what appears to lie at the
bottom of motivation for the excesses of behavior that characterize evil are too
tightly causally related factors one arrogance another resentment and both of
those are tied up with vulnerability of human beings in the face of the infinite
but but tied up with something more profound as well the most thorough account of this that I've managed I
think at least two partially comprehend I believe is contained in the first
couple of the stories in the Old Testament in Genesis the story of Adam
and Eve in the fall of man and the immediately following story of Cain and Abel as far as we can tell those are
very very old stories they predate Judaism at least in some of their in
some of their structural elements it's conceivable that some of the elements in
those stories are as old as the human capacity to tell stories itself assuming that they were
grounded in an oral tradition that predated the written tradition and we know that oral traditions can last at least
in some forms unchanged for periods of up to twenty-five thousand years so the
anthropological and archaeological evidence is fairly clear on that point
these are very very very old stories and people remembered them and created them
for reasons we really don't understand and they're they're strange and
mysterious and unforgettable all at the same time the story of Adam and Eve as
far as I can tell is the story of the coming of consciousness the coming of
self-consciousness to mankind and I think that the human that the human human self-consciousness is what
separates us from animals in Genesis there's an insistence that when Adam ate the Apple that Eve offered to him the
scales fell from his eyes and the first thing that he realized was that he was
naked and what that seems to me to mean is that I mean I think it means first of
all that women make men self-conscious and I think there's ample reason to presume that and there's good
evolutionary reasons for suggesting why that might be the case because sexual
selection among human beings has been a primary force of evolutionary
development and sexual selection in human beings is primarily conducted by
women so for example as Roy has pointed out in his address to the APA a few
years ago and I hope I get this right twice as many of your relatives were
women as as men and that means that women are more frequently reproductively
successful than men and that they reject most men and the rejection of a man for Reproductive purposes by a woman
is the most serious form of rejection that's possible from an evolutionary
point of view because the judgment is that well you might be nice enough to
talk to but you're sure not fit to have your genes propagate into the next
generation so it's no wonder that women can make self make men's self conscious
and I think there's some reason to presume that it's the sexual selection
forces that women placed upon men that drove rapid human cortical evolution and
the development of self-consciousness now that's a leap and there's no way I
can justify in the course of this particular talk
but I think there is good reason to presume that it's the case In Genesis
human beings become self-conscious and the first thing that happens to them is
that they realize they're naked and then the next thing that happens to them is
they develop the moral sense to tell the difference between good and evil and
it's a very strange thing because in some sense before our creature is self
conscious there is no distinction between good and evil because as I said
before a predator is not evil it's just a predator the fact of a predator like a
wolf might be a tragedy for the rabbit but you can't be assuming that the wolf
is evil merely because it wants to eat the rabbit but with the dawning of
self-consciousness there there seems to be the emergence of a moral sense that's
essentially unique to human beings and that has something to do with our
capacity to reflect upon the mechanisms of our action and then for some reason
to be able to modify those actions and to choose which ones to implement into
the future in the future we don't understand that and you can even deny if
you'd like that the the phenomena of free choice exists but our culture is
essentially predicated on the notion that it does exist and in the absence of
evidence that it doesn't I'm going to take the easy way out and assume that it
does otherwise things fall apart and they fall apart badly when after Adam
and Eve becomes self conscious the first thing they do is clothe themselves and to
me that's a mythological description of the emergence of culture as an
intersession between the naked the fundamental vulnerability and nakedness
of the human form and the depredations of nature if you realize that you're
vulnerable and and prone to death the first thing you're going to do is to
start rearranging the manner in which you construe yourself so that you can
protect yourself from such an unfortunate outcome that's I think
partly why God curses Adam with the necessity of work once he finds out once
God finds out that people have become self-conscious like if you know that what's that winter is lurking in the
future for example you're gonna work and animals don't work they're just
motivated to do whatever they do but humans work and that means they subvert
their day to day motivations their immediate motivations for the purposes of future security and there's a real
cost to that I mean part of the cost is separation from the pure and
unadulterated flow of animal life and I believe that people suffer from
that absence of flow continually and and and the advantage they gain from it is
that they can plan for the future but the disadvantage is that they are
calculated and cold and separated from their own instinctual resources Eve of
course is cursed by what's going to be terrible pain in childbirth
and that's related to the development of the immense skull size that
characterizes human infants and their incredibly lengthy period of dependence
which is also associated with their immense brain after Adam and Eve become
self-conscious they hide and this is actually a comical
part of Genesis it's never really read as a comedy but it is a comedy even the
fall itself is a comedy and so they're hiding away behind a bush and god
comes walking through the garden and God the infinite is accustomed to walking
with Adam with no interruption of the flow of information between them Adam is in error God says you know where
where have you gone and Adam says oh well I'm hiding and God says which is
kind of stupid really and this is why it's a comedy like he's hiding behind
a bush this is God and he can see through bushes and like Adam should know
that it doesn't really matter he's hiding me on this bush anyways and that and God so Adam says I'm hiding and God
says well why well you know what why are you hiding that's coz Adams ashamed and
Adam says well I'm naked and this is an example of the tremendous compression of human wisdom into a few lines that
characterizes mythology say well why would people hide from God once they
realize they're naked and I would say well that's pretty obvious like once you
know you're vulnerable are do you really have enough courage to manifest any
sorta semblance of a divine destiny well the answer that is pretty much clearly
no and it's no bloody wonder and so the hiding is people hide when they're
self-conscious and vulnerable what do they hide from me they hide from their
deepest destiny and it's no wonder God says okay yeah well you figured that out
how'd that happen and Adam says and this comical too it was the woman's fault which i
think is really funny and which actually may have been the original sin and not
the eating of the apple right the first time that the man blamed the woman for
his self-conscious misery I think that's the real fall and not the rise of
self-consciousness itself anyways we know the rest of the story
God says oh well the cats out of the bag now you know you know you're
vulnerable and from here on in history starts your out of paradise you're out of
unconscious identification with the natural world you're gonna work you're gonna sweat lots of the time it isn't
gonna work and women they're gonna be beholden to their husbands not because
that's divine Fiat but because the developmental the developmental
dependency of a human infant is so extreme that women are cursed to rely on
men for protection when they're at their most vulnerable fine
so that self-consciousness and an explanation for why people would hide
away from their destiny but then the next story the Cain and Able story really
elaborates that out and describes it and so Cain and Abel of course are two sons
of Adam and Eve and they're really the first people because of course Adam and
Eve were made by God so they're really not people at all because people are born and Cain and Abel are the first two
people and they characterize as far as I can tell two canonical patterns of
reaction to the terrible vulnerability that's revealed as a consequence of the
development of self-consciousness Cain and Abel make sacrifices to God why
human cultures make sacrifices that's what they do sacrifice sacrificial rituals a human
universal blood sacrifices a human universal human sacrifice at least in
some anthropological epochs was regarded as a human Universal why do people make
sacrifices to God to please him it seems like a mystery to modern people I
ask my students what sacrifices did you make to go to university well they can
answer that in 2/10 of a second you know they can't party as much as they might
have they they can't drink nearly as much beer as they might have liked to more seriously a lot of them work a lot
of them have put their families in in serious financial straits to send them
to university they've given up all sorts of things in order to pursue pursue a course of
action that they believe will best ensure their harmonious relationship
with the nature of reality everyone makes sacrifices ok we can say that now
because we're psychologically sophisticated and linguistically
sophisticated and we know something about human psychology but thousands and thousands of years ago before people had
this explicit psychological acumen the best they could do is act out and tell
stories about human psychology because they hadn't developed any further than
that and Cain and Abel is one of those stories the sacrifices are burnt on an
altar why well the smoke rises well so what well god's up in the sky and if
the smoke rises up there and he gets a whiff of it he can tell what the quality
of the sacrifice was and you can laugh about that and you can think it you can think about it as primitive but it's not
primitive it's artistic and it's beautiful and it and it's accurate and
here's why is because before the invention of the electrical light and
maybe before the invention of fire and the closest to human being could ever get to direct confrontation with the
absolute unknown was to look up at the night sky because the night sky
especially when its sprinkled with stars confronts you directly with the fact of
the infinite and to make the presupposition that God resides in the
infinite and and you're having a direct experience of the infinite at that
moment is not a primitive notion it's a it's a very intelligent and and creative
hypothesis and so the notion that God occupies the sky the day sky being
equally as impressive as the night sky is not a primitive hypothesis it's a
reflection of the nature of a certain kind of human experience you burn something and you send the smoke up God
gets a crack at determining the quality of your offering the quality of your
sacrifice well let's get let's be perfectly clear
about this if your sacrifices aren't first-rate the nature of your relationship with the infinite is going
to suffer dreadfully and that's exactly what the story of Cain and Abel reveals
now Abel he's a trusting character he believes in the nature of experience in
the nature of existence when he's called on to make a sacrifice he sacrifices the
best that he has to offer and that makes God happy and as a consequence
everything that Abel touches turns to gold everyone likes them they respect him his crops multiply he
successful with women plus he's a wonderful guy so you could hardly
imagine a more annoying creature if you possibly attempted to do it whereas Cain
see Cain has reacted to his self-consciousness by withdrawing from
the infinite and there's a tremendous danger in that because it starts to mean that he relies purely on his own devious
devices to sail his ship through the shoals of life he believes as his
arrogance develops as a consequence of his withdrawal from the infinite contact
that he can't tolerate because he can't tolerate his own vulnerability that he's
able to deceive the structure of reality itself to offer second-rate sacrifices
to God himself who can see absolutely everything because the infinite is
absolutely everything and to prevail nonetheless well needless to say this does not work and it it doesn't work in an
obvious way if you talk to people and they reveal to you their unnecessary
suffering it's very straightforward to look behind what it is that they have to
say they'll tell you the poor decisions they made in their lives and the
opportunities that they didn't take and the chances that they didn't they didn't
have enough courage to grasp and the sacrifices they fail to make there's
nothing mysterious about it and their own experiences teach them full well
that they pathologized the relationship they have with the nature of reality
well that's a terrible thing well in Cain is dreadfully unhappy he's unhappy
because nothing he ever wants happens and that's partly because he doesn't really want it because if he really
wanted he'd make the right sacrifices the salt is rubbed into his wounds by
the existence of his brother for whom everything seems simple but of course really isn't Cain goes to complain to
God and I had to read three or four different translations of these
particular verses to figure out what this meant and he says what in the
world is going on here I'm marking myself to the bone I'm sacrificing
things left right and center everything I touch turns to dirt everything turns
against me like what's up with the nature of reality Cain's essential
vulnerability is revealed and exacerbated by his pathological attitude
towards his own actions God says to him essentially sin is a predatory cat that crouches at
your doorway and leaps on you at will it but if you only wanted to you could
master it and that is absolutely the last thing that Cain wants to hear
because if things are going from bad to worse for you and you're playing a
causal role in it there's nothing more horrible that some that someone can
do you but reveal to you in a way that you can't deny that you're entirely
complicit in your own demise and that's exactly what God does to Cain and so
what is Cain do well the logical thing would be listen because if the structure
of reality itself tells you something it's best to listen since there's no way
out of it but that's not what Cain does he's so incensed by his
essential vulnerability compromised and exacerbated by his failure to make the
appropriate sacrifices and to conduct himself appropriately that he decides
then and there number one to destroy his ideal to reduce the tension that he
feels when that ideal exists as a contrast point and number two to destroy the favorite son of God and so he goes
out into the field and kills Abel and God comes along and says where's my
favorite son and Cain says I killed him and it's so interesting to me that that
story is placed really it's the third story in the Old Testament it's it's
with the archaic stories and it's a story that reveals as far as I can tell
that there are two essential patterns of reaction to the self-conscious vulnerable conditions of existence and
one is humble approach to infinity with determined attempts to make the
appropriate sacrifices the other is arrogance resentment the keeping of
everything good for oneself and the degeneration of the soul into something
that's homicidally murderous well this story doesn't stop there and it gets
really compressed in this part and that's perhaps because some of its being
lost with the passages of time but the next thing that happens is that well God
doesn't punish Cain and you think that's kind of strange
I mean Old Testament God he's punishing people left right and center it's right
why not Cain and you think well he marks Cain and he says to the people
who around that they should leave him alone
because he's been marked by God as to be left alone and the reason for that I
think and this is something that's reflected on our legal system is that
murder promotes revenge and revenge destroys societies and so God puts an end
to the situation right there and then by telling people that despite the fact
that Cain has has committed a terrible crime that there will be no retribution
Cain goes off and gets married and he has a number of generations of offspring
if you insult a member of the first generation of Kane's offspring he
doesn't kill you he kills seven of you and if you insult a member of the second generation of Cain's offspring he
doesn't kill seven of you he kills seven times seven of you and then on down the
rate down the road of the offspring of Cain is Tubal-Cain and Tubal-Cain is
the artificer of weapons of war and this stunningly brilliant story says in it's
incredibly compressed fashion that the motivation that drives the commission of
the worst human atrocities is an inevitable social consequence of the
refusal of the self-conscious individual to make the sacrifices appropriate to
establishing a harmonious life and their consequent degeneration into a kind of
murderous and resentment filled raged rage propagating endlessly through its
variations in society until everything comes to an end and the next story is
the flood and it's not surprising because if things go from bad to worse
long enough everything falls and it's a terrifying story and I didn't understand
that story I didn't understand that story for years it wasn't really until I
read Alexander Solzhenitsyn that that I developed I think the cognitive capacity
then to even understand what the story meant because Solzhenitsyn said in his
Nobel Prize accepting speech a single who stops lying can bring down a tyranny
which is a stunning thing to say but I would also say something that's been
aptly demonstrated in the 20th century because we had we have historical
examples of people who did precisely that Gandhi did it Vaclav Havel did it
Nelson Mandela did it Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago was definitely one of
the axe blows that brought down the Soviet Union a stunning achievement for
a person who started writing that book by memorizing it when he was a
concentration camp victim this far away from starvation it shows you as as clearly
as anything possibly can how powerful the human spirit can be if it's willing
to take on the obligation of its relationship with the divine and also
how terrible things can become if the responsibility of that burden is not
shouldered now it's no wonder as far as I can tell that people don't think this
way because thinking this way is it's catastrophic in a way because the burden
it places on the individual is so extreme that it's almost unbearable well in a but but that's exactly why it is in
in Genesis to begin with that Adam hides what he becomes conscious of his own
vulnerability it's like he thinks well a creature such as I I could never bear
such a burden well there's a lot more to people than meets the eye
and the only way I learned that was by looking at peoples and my own people and my own capacity for evil because I
started to realize that we regard ourselves as narrow little beings in a
particular kind of box and there's real comfort in that although there's
tremendous limitation you cannot see your way out of that box until you know
well what I teach my students I teach them about Nazi Germany and I try to
make them understand that there's an overwhelming probability if they were in
Nazi Germany in the 1930s that they would have been perpetrators and Nazis
an overwhelming probability and if they can't accept that because it's a
historical fact they have absolutely no idea who they are now imagining yourself
as a Nazi perpetrator is an unbearably terrifying thing to do but I don't
believe that you can do I don't think that you have any insight whatsoever
into your capacity for good until you have some well-developed insight into
your capacity for evil because people can tell you till they're blue in the
face about your capacity for good it just sounds like ah it sounds like
wishful thinking it sounds like the sort of thing that an advertiser might tell
you on TV it's just too good to be true and
don't think people believe it but I think that if you tell people that you know in the cold dark corners of their
mind there are motivations that are so terrible that they would they would
traumatize themselves if they were ever revealed that everyone knows at some
level of analysis that that's absolutely true you think there's evidence throughout
history that it's possible for people to be enlightened and you would think since
enlightenment is viewed as the medication for vulnerability and death
that everybody would be struggling as hard as they possibly could to be enlightened if such a state exactly and
precisely exists but if the barrier to enlightenment is the development of self
consciousness of the individual humans infinite capacity for evil then you can
be immediately convinced about why enlightenment is in such short supply
when I finished my first provisional examination of the sorts of motivations
that drove people to set up concentration camps and to torture
people terribly in those camps I came to a terrible conclusion it was a
conclusion that I think in some ways was the worst thing that had ever happened
to me maybe intellectually and morally I thought I came to understand why it is
that people depended on their group identity in their cultural
identification because that helped protect themselves from their own
vulnerability you have to believe things because you just don't know everything
so you have to believe things they fill in the gaps the beliefs fill in the gaps
if the beliefs are stripped from you then your defenses against the infinite are stripped and it's no wonder
that people will defend their beliefs I thought well you do if you're too
involved in defending your beliefs you're going to be willing to kill other people in their defense and we're so
technologically powerful now that we can no longer be willing to kill other
people and the defense of our own beliefs because the time for that is
passed and I realized well with you if you don't stand up for your beliefs you leave yourself bereft you're open to the
depredations of the infinite that's equally intolerable it seems to leave no
way out there is a way out you know and I think it's the way out that genuinely
religious people have tried to offer humanity
for thousands and thousands of years and the way out of the conundrum posed to
you by your reliance on ideological beliefs and your vulnerability in the
face of the unknown is the development of a truly integrated and powerful
character and that's a individual development and it means constant
confrontation with things you don't understand and constant attempts to
ensure that your character is composed of truth and solidity rather than deceit
and to make of yourself something that's built on a rock and not predicated on
sand and the thing is it's it's one thing to tell people that because maybe
they should take care of themselves but I don't know if that's enough to tell
people because they don't take care of themselves that well but it's a
completely other thing to say look you know every time you make a pathological
moral decision you move the one the world one step closer to complete
annihilation and I absolutely believe that I think the historical evidence is
crystal clear and I also think that every time you make an appropriate moral decision and you manifest moral courage
in the face of your own vulnerability then you move the world one step farther
from the brink and every that's the case for every single person you know
Solzhenitsyn said drawing on his Eastern Orthodox Christian background every
single person is the center of the world a center of the world not the center of
the world the world is a complicated place it can have all sorts of centers
it's hard to believe that you might be one of them but everything about human
existence is a hard to believe the fact that it's here at all is hard to believe
the nature of it's hard to believe everything that human beings does is so ridiculous and remarkable that it's like
it's a consistently and constantly unfolding miracle the idea that each of
you might be a center of the cosmos in that infinite admixture of
ridiculousness and absurdities is hardly more than one more ridiculous thing to
swallow well Ill summarize I guess I said that tragedy is a precondition for being
being is the interplay between the finite in the infinite and in that
interplay there's tragedy and there's no way out of that evils something different
evils the conscious attempt to make the conditions of existence more
pathological than they have to be and it's motivated by conscious intent the
motivations arise because people pay a terrible price for their self conscious
awareness and that awareness is their awareness of their vulnerability and that is a terrible thing to be aware of
that vulnerability can be confronted forthrightly accepted and the
appropriate decisions made alternatively people can retreat into their own
rationalistic arrogance and attempt to deceive themselves and everyone else
about the nature of their own existence and about the nature of reality that
pathway leads to nothing but destruction I think that there's good reason to
assume that it's too late in the in our developmental course as a species for
that path to be acceptable anymore because we're too powerful and if too
many people stay on that path we're gonna do ourselves in and so I would say
as we've become more technologically powerful an increasing moral burden is
being placed on each of us it matters to the to the to the destiny of the cosmos
whether or not you get your moral act straight and I don't mean that in a
trivial way I believe that that's as close to an empirical fact as anything
that can be demonstrated and also believed that's as terrifying a thing to
consider as anything you could possibly imagine and maybe it's too much to ask of people but you know our great
religious traditions do continually remind us that inside every human being
there's a spark of divinity and that idea is a precondition for our entire
system of law there's always the possibility that it's true and if it's true it means that there is a there's a
there's an infinite avenue of potential that lays open to every single person
and that the ability to transform the terrible conditions of reality into
something not only acceptable but worthy of celebration actually lies within our
grasp and the alternative that the alternative to that is the continual
generation of a kind of hell that's so incomprehensibly awful
that by any reasonable persons standards it has to be regarded as something to avoid that's all I have to say about
that [Applause]
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