If I may…
…pick your brains some more.
I just read through all of the comments you made on this week’s News Day Tuesday post, about the “eye for an eye” punishment handed down to Majid for blinding Ameneh with acid. I wanted to thank all of you for voicing your thoughts and opinions, which ranged from total agreement with the court’s decision to total disagreement, and many views in-between. I know it’s a touchy subject, and it’s not easy to throw your hat into the ring for fear of being viewed as being too different from others. So thank you again.
Anyway, I noticed that a lot of the same themes kept coming up in your responses – words like justice, revenge, evil, deserve, suffer, punishment, pain, violence, humanity – and I wanted to see if we could explore that a little more. It is the weekend after all, so why not, right?
The first thing I wanted to ask all of you about is this concept of evil and its relationship to us as people. Some say that people are naturally savage and brutal, and if there wasn’t a system of rules in place, that we’d be stepping all over each other looking out for ourselves. Others say that people are innately good, and that it’s everything else that ends up corrupting our natural goodness. Still others say that we are blank slates, and our behavior is shaped by how we grow up. And then there are people who say that we come into this world with both good and evil natures and it’s up to us to nurture one side or the other. This is pretty much what John Lennon said in the video Kristin posted, about how each of us is both Christ and Hitler inside.
Here is my question. Regardless of which perspective you choose, it doesn’t seem that individuals just up and CREATE evil out of nowhere. Whatever it is that you believe evil to be, people are either born that way – whether entirely or in part – or molded to become that way, through their environment and experiences, or some mixture of both internal and external influences. If this is true, then where do you determine the root cause of the evil to lie? Let’s take Majid for example. It’s easy and convenient to place all blame on Majid the man because a man is a discrete being, an individual, someone you can point to and say, “Here’s the guy to blame.” But a person isn’t just made of a bunch of cells. What about his upbringing? His experiences? Injuries that he may have suffered himself? It is true…no one forced Majid on penalty of death to inflict the terrible pain that he did upon Ameneh. But neither did he grow up in isolation, cut off from all human contact. There is also the fact that Majid IS made of cells, with a brain and a particular body chemistry. What if his biological make-up predisposes him to make rash decisions, but he either wasn’t aware of his condition or didn’t have the support he needed to properly deal with it? Where do you place the blame then?
There is also another thing I wanted to bring up about evil. Someone once said that no one commits evil for the sake of committing evil. That the people who do wrong generally believe they are doing RIGHT and ultimately good, in one way or another. You could make this argument even for someone like Hitler, who really did believe he was saving Germany in some sense. The point being that what comes across as absolutely horrific to one group, doesn’t to another. How, then, do you come to some sort of consensus, and how do you determine whose formulation of what is good and what is bad prevails?
And another thing that someone once said – that there is no such thing as bad people, only bad actions. Agree or disagree?
I actually have a lot more questions to ask you – about violence and justice, but this post is already too long. So I’ll save them for next time.
Here’s to a good discussion!
kristina
March 20, 2009On the subject of the root cause of evil, I believe that there is good and bad in all of us. It really is a matter of which side we are willing to let out, the “angel” side or the “devil” side.
Regardless, people aren’t born evil–they act the way they do based on what they observe in their everyday environment. Their upbringing. How they were raised, taught, and treated during the childhood years have a lot to do with it. For example, if you were raised with strong morals and a sense of right and wrong, your good is more likely to overshadow your bad.