Ignorance and absurd overconfidence

A recent statement by Steven Pinker caught my attention at a time when I have been  thinking about some of the reactions I have seen online about Islam in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris.

What's intriguing is how Pinker uses a line from Shakespeare (Measure for Measure)--"most ignorant of what he's most assured"--to connect what psychologists have been discovering: "that human beings are absurdly overconfident in their own knowledge, wisdom, and rectitude.  Everyone thinks that he or she is in the right, and that the people they disagree with are stupid, stubborn or ignorant. People rightly overestimate their own knowledge and misjudge their own accuracy at making predictions." (emphasis added)

It's intriguing to find a connection with an insight by Shakespeare and the conclusions, 400 years later, of social scientists.

I hope there are exceptions to Pinker's generalization, but I know in academia, it is commonplace to be surrounded by know-it-alls, experts in history or science who think they understand religion, for example, or politics, and betray in their opinions their own ignorance.  Or people in the media who argue about beliefs, always convinced that they are right. They don't try to find the gray area between the extremes of black and white that too often are at the root of racism and bigotry, whether in Ferguson, Mo or France or the Mideast. They don't make the effort to understand those with whom they disagree.

A little humility goes a long way. I have always thought that, the more I know, the less I really understand; yet I am sure, in this blog, I have, by the very nature of the beast, been encouraged to pontificate about matters in which I have little expertise. I trust the effects are harmless.

When people attack another religion, Islam or Christianity, especially, they are prone to the arrogance of rectitude because they fail to take in the big picture of human nature and history.  They fail to look at the other faith from within, knowledgeably, and so resort to dangerous oversimplifications, as Bill Maher did on TV a few months ago.

And when arrogance leads to bigotry and violence, I am reminded of why Plato said that the greatest evil is ignorance.

Evil and the Will

In the back of my mind recently, when I wrote about a strong-willing Irish friend, was the more serious, eternally mysterious question of human evil and to what extent it results from our free will.

Of course, Hitler comes to mind. Just recently, I found an article by Ron Rosenbaum, author of a new edition of Explaining Hitler.  Having studied his subject more thoroughly than most people, Rosenbaum concludes that what made Hitler want to do what he did remains ultimately unclear.

Will power he had in abundance, and hatred. Some (Alice Miller, the Swiss psychoanalyst, among others) have argued that young Adolf's upbringing--being beaten by his father--led to violent hatred and shame, compounded by the defeat of Germany in World War I.  Others have seen Hitler as a demon or monster or madman who ultimately wanted to destroy himself and ruin his beloved Fatherland.

It is interesting for me, having taught a course in evil that put emphasis on the choices we make, to find Rosenbaum concluding that it wasn't a combination of external forces that led Hitler to become Hitler: "it required him to choose evil. It required free will."

The full source of the "continuous series of choices" that Hitler made in his life may never be understood. The author says we may never know what effect an alleged hypnotist had on Hitler after the first war. So rather than indulge in endless speculation, Rosenbaum, lacking definitive proof of the potent combination of personal and social forces that drove him to annihilate millions, concludes that "we may never know with certainty what made Hitler Hitler."

This means that some basic issues about the war and the Holocaust remain uncertain since Hitler's racial war was unlike any other. Hitler arrived on the world scene at just the right moment, in a country eager for authoritarian control and willing to participate in his evil monstrosity.

And yet the greatest evil of the modern era remains, like so much human evil, a mystery.

Wrestling with Simone Weil

To read Simone Weil is to exist on a high level of abstraction where such concepts as God, joy and evil predominate. Rather than try to discuss the problem of evil--how can the existence of God be maintained in a world of evil?--or the existence of God or the meaning of joy, I focus on a statement in the form of a question that nags at me.

Weil, the always challenging French philosopher and mystic, wrote:  "To say that the world is not worth anything, that life is of no value and to give evil as the proof is absurd, for if these things are worthless, what does evil take from us?" (Gravity and Grace)   I am trying to figure out what she means.

What, she goes on, does suffering take from the one who is without joy? In other words, if I may presume: A glimpse or experience of joy is essential if we are to see what is real beneath the misery of life.

For Weil, the reality of life is suffering, yet this does mean that reality is evil or worthless; suffering is the precondition for moments of transcendent joy. (She wrote extensively about affliction.) We must endure pain and suffering, which do not de-value life any more do than human evils (war, racism, hatred, etc.).

Another way to express this is to focus, as Justin E. H. Smith does in a recent blog (jehsmith.com), on love as the essence of God.

The problem, he says, with most concepts of God is that they include God as king or tyrant or powerful father rather than simply "the love that charges through all of creation."  The anthropomorphic images of God, it seems to me, are useful metaphors for children, but prove dangerous to mature people who want to pray.  God is not a being, but Being itself.

Since God is not a being, Smith says, God cannot be a monarch.  God should be a reason to rejoice: so the love that is God and that is seen in creation leads to joy. We see this love in the God's creatures, and to experience it is to know something deeper and longer lasting than mere happiness. In other words, joy.

I assume this is something Simone Weil would agree with.

Ambivalence, Money, and Evil

Whenever we face issues of any complexity, especially those involving strong feelings, we are bound to feel ambivalent. We have mixed feelings about our own bodies and sexuality, about pleasure in general, about love and marriage and God and death and, especially, money.

I was reminded of this from a recent article by Sarah Payne Stuart in The New Yorker. She talks about growing up in New England, in Concord, Mass., a town with strong Calvinist roots, where those who have wealth must look as if they don't. Their big homes must be in the fashionable part of town, she says, yet the owners must claim that they really can't afford to live there. There is in New England a "deep respect for the money it loathes."

Stuart escaped from Concord, where the women spend their lives saving money, mending their own swimsuits and never touching their guest towels. I remember a few of my wealthier relatives in St. Louis spending money for European tours and cars yet skimping on the heating in winter. I was always puzzled by such behavior. Whether its origins are necessarily in Calvinism is doubtful; it seems that we are ambivalent about money, generally.

In the course of her otherwise revealing article, Stuart makes one common error: she says she heard plenty in Concord about "money as the root of all evil."

In fact, the line (from the opening of Paul's first epistle to Timothy in the New Testament) says, "the love of money is the root of all kinds of evil," in a good, modern translation. Or as Chaucer's Pardoner says in the Canterbury Tales, quoting the Latin scripture, "Radix malorum est cupiditas."

But "cupiditas" for the medieval theologian does not mean money; the Bible does not say that money is evil but that our attitude toward it can lead to evil. Avarice or greed, the excessive love of money and what it can buy, is a form of spiritual death--a point made dramatic clear in the story the Pardoner tells about three revelers who set out to eradicate Death and end up killing themselves over a pot of gold.

At issue is selfishness, which is the broader meaning underlying avarice: we care so much about ourselves and our own pleasures that we ignore others, failing to love anyone but ourselves and thus failing as citizens of the community. Love is life-giving; selfishness is cold-hearted and deathly. This theme is found in much great literature, most particularly in Dante. See the icy lake in which Lucifer is encased at the bottom of Hell.

No wonder we are ambivalent about money, even if we quote 1 Timothy 6:10 correctly. Money can be used for good, selfless purposes, as Bill Gates and other philanthropists show, or it can lead, as it did for those women in Concord, to shrivelled lives and hearts. It has a power to change us, often not for the best. It is no wonder that those on the spiritual path are advised to cultivate a poverty of spirit--no matter how many investments they have. It is always the attitude we have toward material things that matters.

To say that the money is the source of evil is to simplify the meaning of evil, which resides in and emerges from within us.

Being Ayn Rand

I could never understand the appeal of Ayn Rand or see why otherwise intelligent folk, even big shots like Alan Greenspan, were/are devoted fans.

After seeing an excellent Showtime movie starring Helen Mirren, "The Passion of Ayn Rand," the appeal becomes more understandable. The movie reveals the emptiness of this Russian-born novelist's ideas and her own absurdity. An opening scene reveals much: she has died, and cult-like followers are lined up to see the corpse, which is situated beneath a gold statue of the dollar sign.

So it's capitalism, ruthless individualism, and selfishness presented with impressive-sounding jargon like "social metaphysics" that would appeal to some right-wing types even today, 29 years after her death. This movie, which deals chiefly with Rand's unorthodox sex life, also reveals the truth of her "philosophy," which has duped many readers for the past fifty years. It is wonderful to see Rand contradict herself in scene after scene. Extolling the virtue of reason, she is, in the deft hands of Mirren, a passionate advocate of herself at all cost.

Who cares if others are hurt badly by her actions? Who cares if she laughs at altruism ("the cowardice of self-sacrifice") and claims that every emotion can be controlled by logic and reason, even when the story of her life as a adulteress reveals just the opposite?
Everyone else, as she says, is a "lesser person" incapable of understanding her genius. She is portrayed as a person tragically incapable of love.

The life of Ayn Rand, it seems, is a study in the dubious appeal of self-interest, which is at the root of most evil and as appealing as evil can be. It demonstrates how easily many people are taken in by simple answers to complex issues.

Just before viewing this movie, I read several articles on evil as seen by neuroscientists, who are claiming these days to have the key to all wisdom. One promiment neuroscientist, Steven Pinker, uses data to support his dubious contention that people are becoming less violent, with each passing century. Others ask whether science has finally destroyed evil, or disproved it, as they claim to disprove free will.

As Will Wilkinson points out in a recent blog, the existence of evil can't be proved or disproved by looking at human brains since evil is not a neurological reality. Anyone who doubts the existence of evil is "just confused." And what about people who are apparently normal (not lacking empathy, not being psychopathological) and still do awful things?

I would send anyone interested in exploring evil today, not to neuroscience but to Terry Eagleton's recent book On Evil. He may be a Marxist, but his view of the subject is essentially in keeping with the mainstream Christian tradition going back to Augustine.

As one who used to teach courses in evil, I am glad to see the topic re-surface regularly in the secular sphere. As for the possibility that there is less violence, hatred, and attendant evils than in the past, I can only think of otherwise intelligent people like Ayn Rand, who scoffed at the very things the world needs more of if it is to "overcome" evil: empathy and altruism and love.

Why does goodness happen?

The title of this post will seem strange the day after a mass shooting in Arizona that killed at least six people. The question should be, Why does evil happen?

Having wrestled with that one in various classes and readings, I found myself last night thinking of the obverse question, equally mysterious: why do some people step forth in times of crisis or danger and help others while many are apathetic or simply afraid? (And, of course, what would I do...?)

Such questions were posed by a Holocaust film, a documentary about a Polish Catholic woman who rescued 15 Jews by hiding them; we saw it last night. "No. 4 Street of Our Lady," despite its title, offers no religious reason why the woman, Francisca Halamajowa, took considerable risks to do what she did when it would have been easier and safer to act as her neighbors did and do as little as possible.

In addition to hiding and feeding 12 people, crowded into a hayloft over the pigsty of her farm, Halamajowa also cared for three others hidden in the cellar; this family only learned about the other twelve 63 years later, when the film was made, when the amazing rescuer's carefully kept secret was revealed long after her death.

Neighbors were suspicious in 1942-44, but Halamajowa was clever as well as courageous: she pretended to be a German sympathizer and so people were wary of her. She had no sense, apparently, that, in working for two years to cook and care for these people, she was saving not only 15 lives but those of their many descendents.

As the family members in the film go back to Sokal, the town where this unprecedented bit of heroism took place, they can only cry and ask, Why did she do it? She even lost her home and her son after the 1944 liberation of eastern Poland. No one, in either the Halamajowa family or in the two Jewish families, can understand why she chose to save these lives.

Like most others in Europe who hid Jews, this courageous Polish woman told no one about what she did: was it fear or shame in front of her neighbors that prevented her from talking about what she did?

In any case, her long-forgotten story reminds us how essentially good it seems to me people are--or want to be--and how some are able to summon up great courage in the face of peril to help others. Sociobiologists might say we humans are genetically altruistic and socially cooperative; yet the record of wars, hatred, racism and other violence in human history hardly points in that direction. Rather it suggests that we are a mixture of good and evil and that our inherent self-interest dictates how we behave in most cases.

I regret that the religious title of this film was left unexplored. I would like to think that it was Mrs. Halamajowa's faith or Christian upbringing that contributed to her determination to do what seemed impossible. Yet perhaps it's best for the viewer to be left with the questions, and the mystery, since no one can really explain evil or goodness.