On Compassion, Evil and Morality: Spiritual and Philosophical Musings

I always liked the saying, "We are spirits having a human experience."

I think compassion is natural to human beings and that we tend towards it a great deal more, and certainly more easily, than we do towards hostility and warlike behavior. The latter is acute and profoundly draining. You simply can't keep it up all the time. The former is heartening, rejuvenating and reassuring. It makes us feel better to be on either side of it.

Rather than think of lofty ideological reasons for why we care about what we do to and with others...why we care about others and take account of them in our decision making..., I think it is fair to say that we do it because it feels good. We were made to interact this way.

We are also built to make meaning of events in life. We are meaning-making creatures. That is what the Fall, the eating of the Apple of the Tree of Knowledge did to us. It granted us not just consciousness, but self-consciousness -- the ability, no, the NEED to make meaning of our circumstances, and the need to feel that we are doing the right thing.

Just the ability to make sense of something makes it possible to get through incredibly challenging and upsetting situations. If it makes sense to you, you can deal with it. If it doesn't, it's very upsetting. One feels helpless. That is the worst.

So we vary in our need for contact and interaction which is often in tension with our need to protect ourselves and have reasonable personal boundaries.

What is amazing are the insights of minds such as Solzhenitsyn, who said that people do not commit genocide or perpetrate atrocities because they woke up one morning and decided to be evil dictators. They do such things because they believe it is the right thing to do...that they are justified. We need to feel justified.

In "People of the Lie," N. Scott Peck described evil as people who could turn off their consciousness, and kind of blank out to the evil of what they were doing. They made it okay with themselves. Such as the parents of an 11 year old boy whose brother had just committed suicide by shooting himself in the head with a rifle... Peck discovers that on the Christmas after the brother had died, the parents gave the surviving boy a rifle for Christmas.

Peck, stunned, asked the boy how he felt about receiving the same kind of gun that his brother had used to shoot himself. The kid replied "It wasn't the same kind of gun."

Peck gently presses the point that it is the same kind...to help ease the kid of out of denial.

The kid insists. "It wasn't the same kind of gun. It was the same gun. It was THE gun.

Peck talks to the parents about this, they explained: "It was a perfectly good gun. Why let it go to waste?"

THAT disconnect RIGHT THERE, my friends, is where immorality happens.