“He who does not punish evil commands it to be done.” – Leonardo DaVinci
So the website tells me I’m Evil Neutral, which anyone who knows me would tell you was a crock of shit. But it did get my mind thinking: What is evil? When I was a child, I saw evil as plain, black and white. You were either good or you were evil. It didn’t take me long to change that view, and I blame it on Batman.
Superman was always good, always right, and always the Boy Scout. Batman, hell, his title was the Dark Knight. This was the guy who crossed the line between super hero and vigilante with the finesse of a bulldozer. He got the job done, and while he wanted to save the world as much as Superman did, Batman never forgot that there were such things as acceptable losses. Batman would have kicked Superman’s ass at chess, and in the long run, you can’t help but wonder who would win if the two were evenly matched.
In the TV show “Angel,” I recall a moment where Angel (the requisite vampire with a soul) locked a group of lawyers in a room with two hungry vampires. First off, one of the vampires was his sire and the other his ‘child.’ Secondly, and all lawyer jokes aside here, the lawyers had raised Angel’s sire from the dead, and really it was a minor case of just deserts. But the catch, and you know there’s always a catch, is that Angel’s goal is to redeem himself for the wrongs he did as a soulless vampire. So what stains cover his soul for the act of intentional murder, locking lawyers in a room with vampires? Is it wrong to do that? The lawyers were evil, there’s no doubt in anyone’s mind that they were. The vampires were his family, and yet Angel had killed his sire once before (long story, convoluted, watch “Buffy,” moving on).
There’s also a new movie out, “Punisher,” based on the comic book of the same name. The Punisher, Frank Castle, is a ‘Nam Vet whose wife and child are killed in front of him by gang violence. Frank had gone through a lot of shit in ‘Nam, and I wouldn’t call him the sanest fellow around. Much like Batman before him, Frank snaps and can’t believe that this is the America he fought and bled for. What was the point, he asks? Well, after much soul searching, Frank ‘dies’ and comes back as the Punisher. The Punisher lives to destroy the evil underbelly of America. I didn’t like The Punisher as a kid. He was too dark. Oddly, I found a lot of like for him in the Armory comics (and if anyone wants to send me a passel of them, I’ll love you forever!), where you got to hear short tales from Frank’s perspective. It was neat, different and something that I enjoy to this day.
Outside of comics and TV, there’s religion. In Judaism, there is no ‘good’ and ‘evil.’ Before you all run off to convert, I should explain what that means. There’s Yetzer Hara, which is our inclination to evil, to not do what G-d wants us to do, to harm people in any way. The contrast is your Yetzer Hatov, or inclination to do good in the world. G-d doesn’t ask a Jew to do something (unless you’re a prophet, and that’s another story), G-d merely sets us on our path and lets us do as we will. If you notice, the Jews in the bible fuck up a lot, and that is meant to demonstrate how even our ancestors struggled against their inclinations. As they suffered, so will we. Does this mean that man in inherently evil? No, it means that all men and woman face moments where they could be evil, but it is our choices that make us the people we are.
But what is evil? What is our obsession with right and wrong? One could argue that common sense would prevent us from doing that which is wrong. And yet as the rising murder rate shows, it does not. I know of few people who would say Hitler was anything but evil, so obviously there’s a baseline we should all be able to agree on. Most nations and peoples believe killing is wrong, but those same nations and peoples have armies who kill. Where is the line drawn?
Columbine aside, children are being raised in a world where violence is ‘more obvious.’ I’ve been told that. Then I watch a movie like The Patriot or read a book on history, and I wonder when in time were people not inundated with death and pain? Today’s media blitzkrieg doesn’t make our children worse, it’s the time we don’t take to sit and explain why wrong is wrong, and why right is right.
A rabbi once said that our inclination to evil was born with us, but our inclination to good only came when we were adults (at a Bar/Bat Mitzvah). That means that the inclination within us to do wrong has, roughly, a thirteen year head start. We’re always playing catch up, but this suggestion reflects, to me, the concept that children are not expected to understand right and wrong to the degree that we adults are. It is the duty of a parent to explain those things, to teach children what is and is not acceptable.
Every day, each of us struggles in some way to subdue in us our inclination to evil. We try to not think badly of the people who irritate us, we try to forgive the slights that don’t matter. We try to be better people, not because of the promise of a better after life, but because, simply, it’s the right thing to do.
Isn’t that enough?