Dec. 4: Jekyll and Hyde
My newspaper's former
publisher once said that liberals believe that people are good but have
the capacity for evil. For Conservatives, he said, it is vice-versa.
What's the difference?
-
A few years ago, I read Bram Stoker's novel, Dracula. I read it because I felt that I hadn't read enough classic literature. I enjoyed it but it won't make my top ten list.
I keep thinking I should read The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I've never read it, never even seen a film adaptation of it - but popular culture has ingrained the story in my mind. I know it's about a person with two personalities - the benevolent Dr. Jekyll and the evil Mr. Hyde. Even as a teenager, I suspected the story was largely allegorical to mankind's moral framework. Most of us like to think that we're pretty decent people. Most of us also know that we're capable of gruesome atrocity.
-
I just downloaded Jekyll and Hyde on my Kindle. It's free.
-
Hitler was probably capable of kindness (though surely not to a Jew.) The guards of the Russian Gulag and the modern guards at the concentration camps in North Korea are likely capable of goodness too. (I have read interviews with camp survivors. They say that the guards are taught - or indoctrinated - into believing that the inmates are not human and, therefore, can be treated as poorly as the guards see fit.)
And I am reminded of something the late Kurt Vonnegut wrote in his novel Timequake. He wrote about the Russian nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov, who won the Nobel Peace Prize despite the fact that he helped improve the Soviet Union's capacity for nuclear warfare. Personally, I'm not sure if I'd be able to sleep well if I knew that my job was to design more efficient ways to kill human beings.
-
During debates, one of the charges theists sometimes lob at atheists is that atheism doesn't provide a framework for establishing objective moral values. Atheists often respond that people evolved socially as well as biologically and that evolution has hardwired us to sympathize with our fellow man. It's part of how we survive, I suppose.
And so survival is good. Can we say non-survival is evil?
-
I've never been a fan of the Wiccan creed - do what you want but don't harm anyone. I mean... how far do we want to take that? If you drive a car, you're pumping chemicals in the air that pollute our cities and contribute to the greenhouse effect. Better throw your car keys away and buy a bicycle.
On the other hand, driving a car is beneficial because you're providing employment for the people at the car factory as well as people who work at garages and gas stations.
Almost any action can be viewed as good or evil. It just depends what side of the mirror you're on.
Hitler probably believed he was doing a good thing by killing all the Jews. He said this: “Providence has ordained that I should be the greatest liberator of humanity. I am freeing man from the restraints of an intelligence that has taken charge, from the dirty and degrading self-mortification of a false vision called conscience and morality, and from the demands of a freedom and independence which only a very few can bear.”
But hey... he was probably good to some people.
-
In college, my philosophy professor (a deist) held up Mother Teresa as a solid example of a good human being. About 15 years later, the late atheist journalist Christopher Hitchens published a treatise maintaining she was not. Frank Zindler, former president of American Atheists, told me the same thing years before I became aware of Hitchens.
I've heard some bad stuff said about Gandhi too but for some reason, it's much more politically incorrect to attack him than it is Mother Teresa.
-
I will end this by talking about one of my favourite scenes from the HBO prison drama, Oz.
There's this one old man prisoner named Bob Rebedow and he learns that his grandson, who is dying of cancer, really wants to go to Disneyland. So his fellow prisoners start doing this big fundraising campaign and they raise enough money to send the kid to California.
Anyway, there's this one psycho prisoner named Adebisi, who is serving a life sentence for decapitating a police officer. On this one particular night, Adebisi's young cellmate is saying that they should corner Rebedow and steal the money. Adebisi says no. Why?
"Because sometimes it's good to be human."
Title: Canadian horror novelist Michael Slade
What's the difference?
-
A few years ago, I read Bram Stoker's novel, Dracula. I read it because I felt that I hadn't read enough classic literature. I enjoyed it but it won't make my top ten list.
I keep thinking I should read The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. I've never read it, never even seen a film adaptation of it - but popular culture has ingrained the story in my mind. I know it's about a person with two personalities - the benevolent Dr. Jekyll and the evil Mr. Hyde. Even as a teenager, I suspected the story was largely allegorical to mankind's moral framework. Most of us like to think that we're pretty decent people. Most of us also know that we're capable of gruesome atrocity.
-
I just downloaded Jekyll and Hyde on my Kindle. It's free.
-
Hitler was probably capable of kindness (though surely not to a Jew.) The guards of the Russian Gulag and the modern guards at the concentration camps in North Korea are likely capable of goodness too. (I have read interviews with camp survivors. They say that the guards are taught - or indoctrinated - into believing that the inmates are not human and, therefore, can be treated as poorly as the guards see fit.)
And I am reminded of something the late Kurt Vonnegut wrote in his novel Timequake. He wrote about the Russian nuclear physicist Andrei Sakharov, who won the Nobel Peace Prize despite the fact that he helped improve the Soviet Union's capacity for nuclear warfare. Personally, I'm not sure if I'd be able to sleep well if I knew that my job was to design more efficient ways to kill human beings.
-
During debates, one of the charges theists sometimes lob at atheists is that atheism doesn't provide a framework for establishing objective moral values. Atheists often respond that people evolved socially as well as biologically and that evolution has hardwired us to sympathize with our fellow man. It's part of how we survive, I suppose.
And so survival is good. Can we say non-survival is evil?
-
I've never been a fan of the Wiccan creed - do what you want but don't harm anyone. I mean... how far do we want to take that? If you drive a car, you're pumping chemicals in the air that pollute our cities and contribute to the greenhouse effect. Better throw your car keys away and buy a bicycle.
On the other hand, driving a car is beneficial because you're providing employment for the people at the car factory as well as people who work at garages and gas stations.
Almost any action can be viewed as good or evil. It just depends what side of the mirror you're on.
Hitler probably believed he was doing a good thing by killing all the Jews. He said this: “Providence has ordained that I should be the greatest liberator of humanity. I am freeing man from the restraints of an intelligence that has taken charge, from the dirty and degrading self-mortification of a false vision called conscience and morality, and from the demands of a freedom and independence which only a very few can bear.”
But hey... he was probably good to some people.
-
In college, my philosophy professor (a deist) held up Mother Teresa as a solid example of a good human being. About 15 years later, the late atheist journalist Christopher Hitchens published a treatise maintaining she was not. Frank Zindler, former president of American Atheists, told me the same thing years before I became aware of Hitchens.
I've heard some bad stuff said about Gandhi too but for some reason, it's much more politically incorrect to attack him than it is Mother Teresa.
-
I will end this by talking about one of my favourite scenes from the HBO prison drama, Oz.
There's this one old man prisoner named Bob Rebedow and he learns that his grandson, who is dying of cancer, really wants to go to Disneyland. So his fellow prisoners start doing this big fundraising campaign and they raise enough money to send the kid to California.
Anyway, there's this one psycho prisoner named Adebisi, who is serving a life sentence for decapitating a police officer. On this one particular night, Adebisi's young cellmate is saying that they should corner Rebedow and steal the money. Adebisi says no. Why?
"Because sometimes it's good to be human."
Title: Canadian horror novelist Michael Slade
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