Why is evil - part 3: it's really hard not to be bad

We are still exploring the conundrum of why there is is evil in the human heart. We've looked at the ideas the various religious traditions give us.

Then there are physiological, or biological or whatever factors which can account for bad behavior as well. The human species has become what it is through the interactive rough and tumble of the evolutionary process - which has left a lot of residual physical "memory" hanging around in our bodies from our pre-human ancestors. When we allow our non-human tendencies to direct our behavior, we can get really nasty.

Of course that environmental pressure thing makes life a hard rock pile to get around as well, and makes all of us a little crazy too. And if we're raised in a family that is completely clueless about teaching children social skills for compatible living, we're even less prepared for human life. We're one of the highly social species which requires extensive training to live comfortably and harmoniously in a diverse world that includes lots of people who are really really different in so many ways. Without that training, well you get adults who act out and make our shared environment even more toxic and disagreeable.

And the genetics thing is not so helpful either. This whole evolutionary production process is such an experimental methodology - we all end up with lots of parts and aspects of our self that work well, and lots of others that malfunction in way too many unexpected and disturbing ways. We never know which hormone or metabolism process is going to go wonkus on us and suddenly we find ourselves being really rude to people we really like - and then of course we completely go off on the people we don't like.

Because we are social animals, how each of us acts in society, every day, every minute, is feeding into a pool of experience that everyone else is swimming in. We are creating the environment that we all live in. And some people pee in the pool more often than others. And some of us have thinner barriers or fewer emotional resources or low tolerances and our psyches go into defense mode and we turn into the little guard duck from Pearls before Swine. Which is not helpful.

But we humans are far more than just our biology, with it's problematic residual pre-human instincts and tendencies; we are more than the complex psychological emotional and mental structures that have been formed in the social soup of our shared human environment. Those things can have a strong effect on us - but so can beauty, joy, laughter, compassion, generosity, altruism, magnanimity. There are really miraculous elements that arise from our humanity and shape who we are.

This whole "being human" thing is, like Betty Davis said, a rather bumpy ride. But what we are creating out of all this mess is really quite remarkable. We are learning how to do the human thing as we go along, recognizing the parts that aren't good for us, looking for ways to develop the good parts and diminish the bad parts.

Evil happens when we don't control the bad parts and they start to run wild and multiply from one human host to another, and become exacerbated by influences of multiple bad parts being activated in conjunction with each other.

another popular view of evil in the next blog