Good & Evil Are Next Door Neighbors – Pretending to Live a Million Miles Apart
We are finally beginning to realize that human acts are as capable of producing destructive, as they are constructive outcomes. What’s more we don’t know ahead of time which alternative will dominate. Most acts are undertaken with the intent, even great passion to produce benefit – and yet in retrospect often do the opposite. Such unexpected consequence happens in both directions. For instance both Israel and opposing Arabs, when killing each other, act out of the virtue of self-determination. Yet the suffering and terror that prevails on both sides of the moral equation has become normalized – as if when in conflict these consequences are unavoidable, and must thus be suffered by all as a public duty.
Yet in spite of this newly emerging realization of ambiguity at the core of our moral perceptions, we cling tenaciously – addictively – to the notion that acts are either good or evil… but never both, which is far closer to the truth. There is no act we can commit, no matter how well conceived, that doesn’t have potentially negative consequences. Consider the daily loss of Amazonian rain forest that provides poor farmers with the opportunity of supporting their families. Indeed the consequences of this caring policy may already have contributed significantly to global warming.
We have the same trouble in dealing with our personal intimate affairs, where good or evil is unavoidably of vital importance to us. Take for instance the issue of divorce affecting the longevity of the family. In the moral ambiguity of love, two things have become very clear in the 50 years since the ’60’s when loyalty to any group, including the family, became something to be seriously reexamined.
The first revealed truth is that adults, in the successful evolution of their own life, need the flexibility of divorce, because people change, and move, at different paces, and often in very different directions in the course of a lifetime. The huge emphasis upon the sacramental sanctity of marriage for eons prevented, or at least seriously retarded that change.
But then again there is a second apparently contradictory discovery – that beyond any reasonable doubt children despise divorce, intrinsically defining it emotionally as a betrayal of their birthright to live in a stable and supportive social context until they are ready to leave it. To lose one parent is like cutting off their right arm; children in fact most likely could benefit enormously from having more than two parental figures – to model multiple options in life, instead of being bound to just one.
Emotionally, visiting parents have lost their function as “parent” by not living with their offspring. Their children will not absorb a visiting parent’s spiritual and emotional nature, depriving both children and parents from those subliminal links. And living halftime in two locations alternately is an equally dysfunctional – unstable – solution serving parents, not children. What’s more, the stronger that family solidarity is emphasized over individual differences, the more these children will have to deny the emotional truth of divorce as abandonment, suppressing their awareness of being both separate and critical of what their parents are doing.
Nature has made us both very individual and very social. How these seemingly contradictory elements are interfaced is of vital importance to our wellbeing. Our usual assumption that everybody can work it out together is a false premise… because we don’t yet have the tools and the wisdom of knowing how to do it. We’re still working on it. We still jump to highly oversimplified conclusions that something is either all good or all bad.
The good news is that our awareness of this intrinsic moral ambiguity in human understanding is increasing, enabling us to learn how to perceive our own acts as producing mixed results, sometimes even as it’s happening… not 10 or 100 years later. Unfortunately some people have taken our increasing awareness of human perfidy to an extreme, in asserting that we are the destructive unwanted species on this planet. How utterly dysfunctional are these ideas in their self-deprecation; though this extreme reaction to experiencing our limits does convey the despair we sometimes feel in figuring things out. So we see once again that even the most dysfunctional notions possess meaningful aspects. Nothing we do or imagine should ever be condemned as all good or all bad. Everything is both/and. How else could it be in a reality that’s always changing? Yet in our fearful search for security we have tried to nail the truth down with such certainty that what we believe now will last a thousand years. When wisdom would encourage us to consider changing what we know just a little every day of our lives. That achievement requires flexibility of understanding the good or bad potential of anything we commit to doing.
My additional works can be seen at this website: http://donfenn.com