Chapter IV

As to "The Origin of Evil"

The Forerunner: Vol. V, No. 4 (p. 102-108)

April 1914

Here is humanity, developing naturally, like any other organism, but modified, artificially, like no other organism.

Here are we, with all our splendid intelligence, our power of communication, our long, recorded history, our wide knowledge, and our tremendous accumulated social energy which we call the human will.

It would seem as if we, above all forms of life, should leap forward, growing in a smooth, swift current with ever better and higher degrees of power and happiness.

Quite the contrary is our record.

Our behavior throughout history is a matter of wonder and shame to the few people who have the intelligence to see it as a whole. We behave, not better than other animals, but worsefar worse.

It is precisely because of and in order to correct our remarkable misbehavior that religion after religion has poured its light upon us-lights of varying color, varying power, and, of whatever quality, always submerged in the continuing misbehavior of the people.

This prominent and painful fact has stirred the philosopher in all ages, its cause being discussed in deepest perplexity as "The Origin of Evil.”

The evil referred to is not in the accidents and difficulties of nature, but in our own acts. We have not dogmatized about the evils of the world about us, but have striven to understand them, overcome them, avoid them. We make shelters, fires and clothing against the cold and wet; destroy obnoxious beasts, dam streams, harness the wind and lightning.

Nature's catastrophes, though terrible, do not begin to puzzle and distress us as do our own peculiar actions.

Humanity, growing conscious, sees vaguely and crookedly how it should behave, also how it does behave, and moralizes as vaguely and crookedly thereon, like a drunken man trying to walk an unnecessary crack.

We have no clear, satisfying, general knowledge as to our use and purpose in life, or of the conduct necessary to best fulfil that use and purpose. Where any of us have such knowledge the others fail to accept it, and even those who know, fail lamentably in their doing. So general, so permanent, is this condition, never more conspicuous than to-day, that there is some excuse for the ancient theory that "man is as prone to evil as the sparks are to fly upward."

Yet that is not true. On the contrary, man is as prone to good-as inclined to "fly upward" as those same sparks.

He has the irresistible uplifting impulse which raised him from the slime Every normal still at work within. child wants "to be good." Every normal young person looks forward to a life which shall avoid the foolish wickedness so visible in others. And even the worst of us draw the line somewhere there is always something we will not do.

The trouble with our behavior is not in lack of good impulses. They are so common, and, alas! so futile, that we have cynically paved hell with them.

To call a man "well-meaning" is to use a contemptuous epithet, yet so many of us are well meaning that we could scarce offer better proof of the As a inner direction of our souls. race we mean well, but we do not do well, and such right conduct as we do achieve is too often difficult and expensive in the highest degree.

Religion, seeing this, has advanced. its theories on this grave problem, the Origin of Evil-often pitiful theories, ridiculous theories, false theories theories which still further complicate and retard our efforts to do right.

Suppose you see someone learning to swim and going under with loud splutterings.

What is the origin of this evil?

It is simple. The devil has not pulled him under, nor his Karma, either.

All that ails the man is this: he has not yet learned to swim.

Suppose, in larger instance, we observe a ballet-master struggling with a large group of dancers; his efforts frantic; their movements discordant, irregular, confused.

What is the origin of this evil?

They have not learned the dance yet--that is all.

Humanity is engaged in an enormous game. We are set to learn How to Live Together-how to live to the best advantage, with the least waste of effort, to the highest purpose, and we have as yet hardly learned the rudiments of that game.

In all the old religions we find only one that has grasped the idea of our Organic Union. That is in the teachings of Jesus. He had a better grip on the nature of humanity than any other, trying desperately to show his hearers that God was in man, in Himself, for instance, and that "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these ye have done it unto Me."

But this burst of sociological insight was by no means accepted.

Neither the Christian theory of life nor the Christian method of action was adopted save as minor by-products here and there. The dominant doctrine of the Christianity of two thousand years has been Salvation, not Right Understanding, nor Right Behavior. Our ethical sense was so dim, is still so dim, that we have not revolted at the idea of an Omnipotent Deity, whose world had all gone wrong, and who could think of no better way of saving it from His own vengeance than by sacrificing His own Son to Himself.

We have not seen what any school teacher knows--that to climb into promotion by virtue of another scholar's work not only is dishonest, but does not teach the culprit anything. We have made of Christianity a sort of eternal selfishness.

We are in this world to learn how to behave--not to be saved by one person's virtues from the consequences of another person's sins.

The Buddhist religion rests on the terrible misconception that life is evil--a thing to escape from; the Moslem religion, with its fleshly paradise, its cruel propaganda, shows no advantages over the others in resultant conduct.

The Hebrew religion, so lauded for its ethics, is based on sheer pride of blood; it is a tribal religion, a thing one is born into, and involves the conception of a God who has "chosen" out of all the peoples of the earth just one as his favorite-a position any mother, any school teacher, would be ashamed of.

None of these religions does justice to God.

None of them explains to humanity its inherent nature and its world-duties, national and international.

Religion confines itself to part of life.

Ethics, once we understand it, covers all.

We must ask of any religion: "Is it true? Is it just?" And Truth and Justice are terms of Ethics.

This ancient mysterious problem as to the Origin of Evil should be approached in this manner:

The student should understand, however brief and simple the account, that humanity is a long-growing thing. Even a little child could learn from wall paintings, pictures, museums, above all from the educational—“movies”—that human beings have risen, and that they are better behaved than they used to be.

The teacher should be prepared to show, with dates and maps, histories and illustrations, that a given people at a given time behaved thus and thus–and why.

It is no mystery. Judged individually it is confusing, of course; judged socially, it is clear enough.

We do not live alone, acting on lines of conduct of a wholly separate character. We are braided and woven together, a living tissue; and what one does is modified, inevitably, by what the others do.

Ethical problems are not on lines of "What must I do to be saved?" Merely to be saved–if the others are not–is unethical. The problems of ethics deal with collective conduct for collective benefit–"What must we do to help one another forward?”

Where, then, is our "evil"?

The evil conduct is visible enough–painfully, terribly visible. From cannibalism to newspaper lying, from the torture of captives to bomb-dropping aeroplanes from ancient slavery to modern extortion, we certainly have behaved badly.

Why, then, do we do it? Why is it that the human race has never yet generally understood how to behave?

When we have answered that we shall have found "the origin of evil."

Any human act is resultant primarily from an impulse. This may be merely reflex; it may be unconscious, but there must go out some nerve force to make the muscles work.

If the act is conscious and involves choice, it is resultant secondarily from ideas, from the complex of precepts and concepts which govern the impulse. As, for instance, the ancient impulse of mother-love urges to conduct such as nursing one's own child. But there are ideas quite competent to inhibit this impulse, as when the mother knows her milk is not good, or not sufficient, and engages a wet-nurse, or buys a bottle; or, further, where she declines to nurse her baby on the ground that it will "spoil her figure" or that she has "been kept in long enough."

In a specific act like this we may trace the good to a safe basis in natural law in mother instinct; and the evil is equally clear, based on external conditions or on false ideas.

The attitude of religion toward our misconduct varies from the free-will assumption that conscience always tells us what is right and what is wrong, and that we are quite free to choose; to the fatalistic assumption that we are predestined, foreordained, to do what we do, and have no choice whatever.

Between these two extremes discussion has raged for centuries.

In the middle ground, as usual, we may find the truth. Conscience is a most variable factor, and not a reliable Judgment rests on knowledge, and knowledge is imperfect. The will one. is as variable as the conscience, and some persons have more will-power than others.

Conduct, in individuals, varies so widely that we are continually puzzled and thrown off the track. But as soon as we begin to study it socially we find it becomes comparatively within our power to change.

We find always these three main lines of pressure always governing our conduct: Inheritance, Environment, Education. Education is in the largest sense part of the environment, but is here used to distinguish the power of deliberately implanted ideas from the power of association. The Thugs of India commit murder because they are taught to do it; the head-hunters of Borneo commit murder because of custom and association as well as education. The "gangsters" of New York commit murder because of association and the general environmental influence rather than from any deliberate cult requiring it.

Now, murder is evil—there is small question as to that among civilized people–but when we seek to check it we should understand its causes. To hang Thugs would in no way prevent their activity so long as there were any left. It would not help the victims in the least; no after-the-event treatment does. The Thugs, being hanged, would only feel that they were martyrs, persecuted for their religion. To stop the murderings by this sect we must cut off from their minds the flow of ideas tending to murder.

One way to do this would be to destroy all images and temples of their goddess Kali; to execute or permanently imprison all priests and teachers of that cult, and to penalize whatever known followers remained.

This process in regard to objectionable, i. e., differing faiths, has been repeatedly attempted in past ages with very poor results. Ideas once put in circulation are not to be obliterated so easily. No Inquisition, no governmental or clerical oppression, no popular abuse, has ever been able to exterminate ideas. They flow from mind to mind–grow, spread, persist, thrive in the face of persecution.

The only way to remove bad ideas is to supplant them with better ones.

In questioning the origin of the evil of murder among Thugs we find it clearly in their religion. Among the Dyak head-hunters it is a matter of custom, association, imitation. The two last disappear if we can change the first. But a custom is harder to change than a religion.

Our American murders are more easily understood and should be more easily handled. We have a murder rate which is a shame and a scandal among the nations, and we do not know enough to be ashamed of it.

It is not owing to any error in the Christian religion; that is quite clear and strong on the subject, supplanting the negative Hebrew "Thou shalt not kill" with the positive "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." (Would it not save the face of religion to a considerable extent if we wrote it: "Thou shouldst not—," because you see we keep right on doing it; or "Thou shouldst—," because, though officially admitting that we should-we don't.)

We have no deliberate cult of murder in America. We have no custom of having to show so many dried heads as a proof of our manhood; and our murderers are not invariably popular idols.

But we do allow an environment around millions of our citizens which tends to produce murder. Murder does not suddenly burst forth out of a blameless life. Back of that actual murder were a thousand hates, a thousand ferocious impulses. What made them?

What previous moral injury to mothers and fathers long before left the weak will, the strong passions, the unused reasoning power?

What daily and nightly knowledge of injustice, of anger and insult and cruelty, came to the growing child?

What conditions of his lodging, his feeding, his clothing, his working, tended to increase in his heart the feelings that lead to murder?

In these is to be found "the origin of evil" in regard to our American crimes.

We make murderers in our city slums and our starved and stunted villages, precisely as we make trotting horses by means of "blue grass" and the training stable.

The human animal is a good kind of beast by nature, but extremely susceptible to social influences. Most of our life is social; our social environment counts far more than the merely physical, and also modifies the physical. A savage may freeze or starve in the open, in a clean and dignified submission to natural law, but a citizen of New York freezes and starves in sight and knowledge of riotous luxury, and this knowledge breeds murder.

The constant noise in which our city's social victims live is either a torment, or makes deaf and callous those who must submit to it. They have in their environment far more to drag them down than to lift them up.

Against this deteriorating influence our best uplifting power is that of the much despised "human nature." People in the mass are always better than their conditions, and the worse their conditions are the better they are in proportion. The wonder is not that we have so many murders, but that we have so few.

In 1906 we had 10,662 homicides, while Italy–we are so apt to lay the blame for our crimes upon our foreign population–had 3,606, and Spain 1,584; England, Ireland and Scotland together only 507.

You may say that the murderers from these countries come to us; but it has been shown that the nationalities of our homicides are as follows: Native white, 42.94 per cent.; foreign born, 16.50 per cent.; negroes, 37.12 per cent.; Chinese and Japanese, 1.28 per cent.; Civilized Indians, 1.21 per cent. (Figures from The World Almanac, 1912.)

Now instead of lumping all our misconduct together and trying to account for it all by a process of metaphysics, we should classify our acts, study the antecedent influences, and learn to account for a given line of conduct in a given people in a given locality by a plain study of conditions.

Take another common instance of evil–one of the three great divisions so feared by the early saints; "The World, the Flesh, and the Devil." They considered evil the whole effect of association, and fled from "the world" into the desert-became hermits. They were quite right in the premises. If the way they chose to live was right it was assuredly impossible in a community who thought differently.

They assumed that "the devil" was always on hand to "tempt" them, thus describing the action of the brain, the poor lonesome brain, cut off from its natural functioning and falling into a morbid condition. They would have had less "devil" if they had had more "world."

But equally they feared their own poor bodies, their natural desires for food and drink, for rest and comfort, and, worst of all, the mating instinct.

We, who live in comparative decency, should always remember that the frantic reaction of the early Christian ascetics, or of the Hindu or any ascetics, was against hideous excesses. There was evil, horrible evil, in "the flesh," in the morbid, misused, overindulged appetites of the ancient world.

So they swung back and called it all "evil," and it was really very difficult work, being a saint, in those days. Fancy setting yourself against those three-the whole influence of society, the action of your own mind, and the pathetic ceaseless demands of the poor ill-treated body, long over-indulged, and suddenly cut off altogether.

That so many were able to do it, and are still able to do it-there are said to be some 50,000 self-torturing ascetics in India to-day-shows the tremendous power of the human will guided by a dominant idea. The truth or falsehood of an idea does not matter. Once it is accepted, and conduct forced into accordance therewith, a man may suffer a lifetime of agony with great satisfaction. With that proof of our power all we need is to make wise choice of our ideas.

In the question of the dangers of "the flesh," what is "the origin of evil?"

Here we have an initial tendency not only harmless, but beneficial in the highest sense: that impelling power of sex attraction which draws male and female together in all bisexual species. We do not call it "evil" in the animals. Neither do we call it "Love" and make a god of it. In ourselves we do both. We deify and damn the same instinct—according to our views.

There is no denying that in our race there is good ground for calling this thing evil—if one is a superficial observer.

From the slavery of a servile wifehood to the misery of the prostitute, from the difficulties and diseases of those continually struggling with this impulse to the difficulties and diseases of those continually indulging it, we find evil.

What is the "origin of evil" here?

Why is the human animal afflicted as no other animal is afflicted in this relation?

It requires no revelation to account for our trouble. Any function misused, works wrongly—produces evil.

This function has one admitted general purpose-reproduction. It has, in the minds of many of us, a further function, as the expression of mutual love. We will here grant both uses-not to reduce the area of possible agreement too severely.

Quite beyond either of these has arisen a very general error, maintained by half the world, and religiously taught to the other half, that this function exists mainly for the pleasure and well-being of the male sex.

The first use, that which we have in common with other and healthier creatures, is not an evil; it is a good. No one, except in protest against enforced unwilling maternity, or as a measure of protection against poverty, thinks reproduction an evil. Neither is the second use considered evil, save by those ascetics who would bar both, and by a few earnest extremists who preach–and practise–the theory of continuance aside from reproduction, even in marriage.

But when we come to an indulgence which avoids or prevents reproduction and puts slavery in place of love, we find a condition visibly evil. It is here that disease and unhappiness arise; in a brutal excess in marriage, or in the sordid horrors of prostitution.

So far the world has fully agreed that prostitution is an evil; at the same time solemnly asserting that it could not be helped.

We have drawn the line between "legal" and "illicit" relations. We have confused our seeking intelligence with arbitrary distinctions of law, arbitrary regulations of religion, and have failed to follow up the plain natural laws of the right and wrong.

Study them for the moment in another natural appetite–the desire for food. It is "right" to eat good food. It is "wrong" to overeat, or to eat bad food. Now suppose laws are made against overeating. Or suppose religion insists that none may eat without a sacrament, but with it, being blest, may eat all they please. Neither law nor religion would make the "right" and "wrong" in question. That distinction rests on the laws of the body.

The origin of evil, in that great sad field of happiness, misery and shame, the human sex-relation, is merely the misuse of function.

A simple cause, this. It might happen to any function; it has happened to many. We misuse our stomachs; we misuse our eyes; we misuse our teeth. We have outgrown instinct and have not substituted reason. We spend our intelligence in devising means to combat the results of our misdoing instead of using that intelligence to discover the cause.

How are we to account for this gross error in human life: Shall we look for it in Inheritance, Environment, or Education?

We may find it in all. To-day the weight of inheritance is heavy upon us. For long ages we have accumulated our present characteristics, and now must face them calmly and see whether we choose to carry on the transmission forever, or to modify it.

But inheritance is no explanation. It only transfers our problem farther back. Sometime a change began, which made our conduct in this field differ from that of other creatures. Education is a strong force too. There is a cult among men commending and upholding their habits, transmitted by word of mouth and in literature; a cult which preaches one law for men and one for women. Among the forces of education we find the heaviest weight, as usual, in religion.

Of all the educational forces contributing to the abuse of this function none is more conspicuous than the doctrine of many ancient religions that women are made for the pleasure and service of men.

Christianity has been heavily discolored by the dictum of St. Paul. Not Jesus, but Paul commanded: "Wives submit yourselves to your husbands," and gave that gross sanction of marriage still repeated by those who uphold "early marriages" because it is "healthier" for the young man.

Back of all this, however, lies that degrading old Hebrew legend of the creation of Eve out of Adam's rib, because, forsooth, it was "not good for him to be alone." The nobler and older first version gives no such paltry explanation. "Male and female created He them, and He gave them dominion over the earth, to rule over it."

Later knowledge of the development of life on earth supplants all legends with the facts. We know now that earliest life was asexual, growing on through stages of improvement to the bisexual, and the one later called "female" was the original organism, the male, as a separate organism appearing far later. We know further that in many species he is even yet of the most fractional and temporary service, but one being selected out of ineffectual thousands, and that only in long ages of growth did he rise to equality with the female.

This knowledge, once generally admitted, will displace the Hebrew story. It will be difficult for an intelligent Jew to utter with such heart-felt pride and satisfaction his daily thanks that he was not born a woman.

By preaching the inferiority and subjection of women many religions have been heavily responsible for the evils of our conduct, but even this is not the origin.

Those legends did not appear while women were strong and free–they grew out of her subjection.

We must look to environment, to economic conditions to find the beginning the simple natural beginning, which led us step by step into this deepest of our racial pitfalls.

Just as an unobserved angle in the road, a fork that seems to lead in the right direction may turn farther and farther from it, and as, in seeking to return, we may find many forks, and not know which was the unnoticed turning that first led us astray, so has man, in his long upward journey, made many a slight misstep, with consequences lasting for thousands of years.

Moreover, in studying our "problem of evil" we must not confound consequences with culpability.

A perfectly innocent babe may commit suicide by falling out of the window, or homicide and arson by playing with matches. It is a great pity-but the child is not to be blamed in proportion to the mischief done.

Baby mankind made as many mistakes as any other growing thing, more, in fact, because of his greater intelligence and the widening area of opportunities. But only the other babies, owl-eyed and solemn, ignorant and weak-minded, could make the mistake we have made, thus far, in blaming and punishing him.

(To be continued)