The Terrifying Power of Good

In the process of life, we somehow arrive at the awareness of good and evil. Altruism — strange acts that don’t immediately benefit our individual advantage in any material way — feels reassuring and nourishing to act out.

There are these extraordinary videos of strangers linking arms to form human chains stretching out into dangerous surf and riptides to reach a drowning human; each person staking their trust in the goodwill and strength of everyone to counter the mysterious and immensely powerful forces of the sea.

There are also places where are hair stands on end, where we feel sick and vulnerable, and know instinctively that something “bad” happened here. We become diminished, a guttering flame, and slink away as soon as we can.

These places often are tight quarters with normality, often having a slightly neglected, stale quality to them — an eroded smudge where beauty and sorrow failed to mix well.

We immediately know how to behave in both situations, as easy as knowing the natural cues of nourishment and poison, and how to respond to them.

Theoretical binary opposites rarely exhibit as well in real life as they do on paper. I don’t mean the hackneyed truth that things are never entirely this nor absolutely that. (Actually, the assumption that the truth always lies in the middle of two extremes is a dangerous logical fallacy.) What I mean to say is that the extremes often reveal themselves to be complex situations, and not as simple and hardboiled as we presume them to be. Good and Evil are not simply polar opposites; they circle back toward each other, and wind and twist around each other, and become each other in ways that leave us profoundly uncomfortable — until we learn to adjust to the reality.

What do we mean when we label certain outcomes as evil or bad or wrong? We have ideas of how things should go, how we want them to go. We are builders of reality, we are creators. Furthermore, when we’re not creating, we seek stability. Destruction is that mysterious and unwanted turn of events which reviles us (at least, on the surface). Think about it: most everyone knows without being told otherwise when to look sad because someone else has lost something or someone valuable, or a relationship has fallen apart. Four horsemen ride in our imaginations as the enemy of all we hold dear.

Yet, destruction is not purely the opposite of creativity. For, there is destructive-destruction, which poisons the possibilities of future creativity; and then there’s creative-destruction, which makes room for new possibilities. There is a difference between a wildfire and an atomic blast, and it’s not just a matter of scale.

So, we refine the concept further. Evil is rooted in the energy of malice, the desire and will to do harm. It isn’t destruction, per se, that is bad and wrong, but this poisonous energy that imbues it with sharpened meaning. And yet, it is here we notice something rather bizarre (and that often goes unmentioned): malicious destruction has a short shelf-life. It doesn’t hold a candle to the restorative capacity of time and and the inherent fecundity of reality.

Are there certain dark and dismal corners of the world where something so awfully evil has happened that a cloud hangs over the space forever more, blotting out joy and renewal? Well…that does not appear to be the case. Gettysburg is again serene and picaresque — as indeed it was for all but a brief window of incredible violence. The pitted, corpse-rotted, barbed-wire violated ground of the Western Front has returned to pastoral nature. The secret dungeons of torture and brutality don’t typically operate that long. (Evin Prison in Iran is a modern exception, enduring long enough to have provided interment and misery to the presidents of Iran when they were young revolutionaries jailed by the Shah and now subjecting the opponents of the revolutionary government to the same conditions.)

Many ancient conquerors attempted to devastate the lands they captured by plowing the fields and sowing salt, poisoning the ground against living plants. More recently, the United States dumped more than 20 million gallons of the most toxic herbicides then available on the jungle forests and waterways of Vietnam in a deplorable effort to strip a landscape of food and shelter, ruining an ecosystem in the process. So many became sick. “Only you can prevent a forest,” the GIs joked.

But none of these efforts to kill the Earth succeeded.

Perhaps, you think that the evil which can punch a hole in time and space and leave darkness in its wake as a lasting stain, halting the world in some way, is a very personal and vicious evil. We devour sordid tales of family murder, lives spoiled by lust and fury and addiction. Sometimes, the scenes of these transgressions become energized by coalescing aggressive darkness itself — we are fascinated by the presence of demons.

There are basements in certain houses where a malevolent energy seems stuck: lights flickering, walls growling, objects flung from shelves, shadows looming, scratches on the doors and on the people who try to reclaim the place. But how long do these “vortices” last, anyway? Is it truly the case that an dark power will wander restless for an eternity? Or, might the demons of Amityville and the Sallie House, not to mention those haunting Annabelle and other troubling artifacts give up the ghost a few million years after humans are no longer around to frighten and goad into paying attention?

By contrast, natural destruction, even at its most severe, is always creative, and therefore (paradoxically) more enduring. Even the most “violent” entities in the Universe, black holes, are now revealing themselves to be something other than the terminal end of all light and form and being. Information escapes them; and what is more, they seem to perform an incredible indeterminacy-and-entanglement act upon physical objects that fall into them — a behavior which is otherwise only seen on the quantum scale, and which will likely yield clues to the architecture of the Universe as a whole.

If black holes are a straight flush in the hand of creative destruction, malicious evil (whether demonic or the product of human imagination) is a pair of twos, at most.

All of this raises an interesting, profound question. If intentional evil is a poor imitation of the awesome power of natural, creative destruction, is there an analog for something beyond (and more powerful than) intentional good? Also, if we (most of us) instinctively shun malicious impulses and embrace altruistic ones, we can imagine practicing a greater tolerance for creative destruction, differentiating it from evil — but, is there also a set of behaviors that might be less comfortable for us than simply “doing good” (being kind, loving, peaceable, decent) which throws wide the door to greater possibilities in the manner of creative destruction?

You bet your bippy there is.

Beyond-good ways of behaving are our birthright, even if they don’t come as naturally as being nice. They involve inviting our capacities for fluid understanding, for trickery, for imagination, for inhabiting our own dangerousness and inviolable serenity. We are able to change, in a moment, the scale of reality and community we identify with. We are able to step outside the shroud of self-preservation and also we are able to fiercely defend that which needs protecting in a moment.

The thousand yard stare is a phrase that was coined to describe the condition of soldiers on the killing fields of the Pacific Theater during World War Two. In the trenches of World War One, it was called shell shock: a constellation of symptoms including the inability to walk anymore, sudden blindness and muteness, pain, malaise, terrors. (A sobering and astonishing documentary on the subject can be found here.) Initially understood as being caused by exposure to the high-explosive artillery shells that were introduced to the battlefield in WWI, shell-shock quickly revealed itself to be an escalating and spreading phenomenon that affected those who were not exposed to shells just as much (if not more) than those who had come under fire.

What the nascent study of trauma psychology was discovering is that there are experiences too horrible, too dark, too malicious and contrived for the purpose of suffering, which the human spirit simply cannot accommodate or endure. WWI brought together a convergence of technology and industry, mass manufacture, mass enlistment that shifted war to an economy-of-scale equation, and ensured that those on the ground witnessed a hell on Earth like nothing any human had encountered before — a pure distillation of horror, revulsion, misery, and macabre cheapening of the wonder of life, the grotesque mutilation of the boundaries of the sacred and profane.

The charnel ground was vast and boggling to the imagination: miles upon miles of formerly bucolic landscape reduced to mud, artillery craters filled with stagnant water, grim mazes of barbed wire, a constant hail of machine gun rounds, and bodies — bloated, rotting bodies beyond the reach of recovery or burial, severed, destroyed, piled, hastily covered with lime and sandbags in the hope that they would be cemented into place and not rupture, sickening their still-living comrades. Moreover, trench warfare was a scene that was stuck in place, without progress or resolution. From early on, it stank of a hideous futility. War psychologists eventually realized that the inescapable experience of waiting for doom — waiting, waiting, waiting — was a large contributing factor to the onset of shell-shock. Human beings are made for movement, we thrive on transformation, and we die in the nightmare of stagnant anticipation.

WWI was a manifest evil that was never to quite repeat in the same way again; technology ensured that future war would be always on the move, more of a storm and less of an infestation. At the same time, the technology continues to bring new levels of horror into play. By the time the Pacific Theater of World War Two became an active battleground, the military had developed ways of propping up the psyches of its enlisted men, giving them shore leave and temporary respite to recover their sanity before being plunged into the melee again. But, the bombs were bigger, the gunfire more automatic, the secondary weapons like flame-throwers, grenades, mines, and tanks more nightmarish and prevalent. The airplanes with their death dealt from above were everywhere. The duck-and-cover soldiers exhibited a new form of shell-shock: the thousand yard stare. Unblinking, expressionless faces stared off into an invisible distant horizon, no longer able to register a response to the battle around them.

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms (T.S. Eliot, 1925)

There are hells too terrible to remain ordinary in receipt of them, vistas too beyond scale of human life or comfort or happiness to allow upon the landscape of consciousness and remembering. Some of those creative-destructive realities (like a black hole) might be totally undoing of our socially constructed personas, if we ever experience them first-hand.

Yet, I have known people who met the eruption of a volcano with its spewing molten rock and death and fire with wild dancing. I have heard a Roma woman join her baby in a caterwaul that shook the night on a train bound from Istanbul to Bucharest (the child’s father was torn from the train and left in the dark of nowhere for lack of proper papers); their cry was not wholly sad, but something far more wild and eerie. Bomb-blasted soldiers are not the only ones with a thousand yard stare. So do the sadhus have it, who renounce the creature comfort of four walls and seek the mystic fire, who are beyond the normal variance of emotion. Truth of all kinds, the light and the dark together, does that to people. In fact, it is the knowledge of the intertwining of the light and dark, the creative and the destructive, the permanent and the transient, the joy and the sorrow, which draws our eyes to the farthest horizon.

Both the Jewish Kabbalah and the Hermetic Qabalah describes the archangels of heaven. They are not sweet. They are encountered as immense beings of fire and power, millions of miles tall. The archangels perform the necessary tasks of heaven with terrifying ability. They are messengers. They are gatekeepers. They contest the will of evil. They are only recognizably “good” in the sense that they restore and promote the celestial order of the Universe. Mostly, they are alien to the human family of experiences. Some of them have never been directly witnessed. They are as strange as a nuclear weapon keeping world peace.

Yet, the magical orders that grow out of the Hermetic Qabalah teach ways of invoking and channeling the presence of the mighty archangels. Rites and spells open the door to ways of behaving that are beyond-good. The archangels are a metaphysical map — an archetypal metaphor — for a terrain of benevolence that is larger than we traverse in our instinctive love of altruism.

In the 1830s, a battle of theories pitched between the supporters of two visionary geologists shook the world with a profound cosmological and ethical question. The British geologist Charles Lyell advocated a theory that the world is shaped gradually through the slow application of the same forces that we witness now in the natural world: wind, water, ice, fire. This was a very satisfying and comforting idea because it suggests that the world is not stranger than our knowledge, it is not full of hidden menace. Additionally, it implies that events will unfold at a rate which is palatable to human experience — if anything, the challenge of geology was the enormous patience required of humanity to observe and accept incremental change in the enormity of time.

The continental champion of Comparative Anatomy, Georges Cuvier, noticed a different tale in the fossil record. Creatures that were abundant in one rock layer suddenly vanished from the next. Something very dramatic had happened in the window of time encompassed by those rock strata. Cuvier put forth a startling theory: the world, he said, is fine…until it isn’t. Every so often, the Earth is consumed by cataclysm, as God destroys the living world and sets the stage anew for another epoch. Although Cuvier’s idea was embraced by continental Europe, it threw mud in the eye of Enlightenment philosophy. The world, he says, is not safe. The Architect of Reality is mercurial and violent, more Jehova of the Old Testament than the new. Nothing that seems dependable and comforting to us as human beings maps onto the big picture of life on Earth. Our efforts at collectively expanding the Good (i.e. civilization, wonders of the world, masterpieces of art, building a just and wealthy society) flounder in the larger unknown scheme of psychotic Creation.

The debate between the gradualists and the catastrophists was fierce; and ultimately, both positions have been uncomfortably incorporated into our theory of how the Earth evolves.

We live in the shadow of calamity. We are never sure when the rug will be pulled out (further) from under us. Is this evil? Is this good? Is this nature? Is it something outside such limited definitions and controlled considerations? Our instincts are geared toward the steady and incremental progress of the world, the avoidance of pain, banishing sorrow (and therefore shunning the mystery of time. But, the archangels, as they were encountered by prophets and visionaries, stand as towering sentinels guarding the realm of a terrifying power of creation: not a black hole, but a star — a blazing inferno, a radiant light.