Hitler and Satan: Separated at Birth?

I am part of those forces which ceaselessly plot evil and eternally create good.

     -- the Archdemon Mephsitopholes, to Faust

A couple of hot news items on the Evil Personified front this week. 

The first is the impact of the Kony 2012 video.  I haven't seen it myself, as the internet is kind of sketchy over here.  Kony is the head of the rebel Lord's Resistance Army who have been busy killing, raping and pillaging in Central Africa for a good 25 years now.  He's one of your more colorful warlords, given to making children hack their parents to death, and claiming magical powers. 

He's in the Idi Amin school of warlords.  Most ruthless dictators like to maintain a veneer of civility and  moderation--Assad, Mao.  When asked to stop torturing people, the response will be "Me?  Torture people? Noooooo."  But Idi Amin was all "But I like torturing people!  Almost as much as I enjoy eating them. "

Also in the news:  the Norwegian subhuman who killed some 77 kids in cold blood was charged last week.  You may recall that he dressed up as a cop and went to an island filled with kids at some summer camp for liberals and pretty much hunted them all down.  Stupid looking fellow.  Apparently used to protect the weaker kids in his school from bullies.  Go figure.  I expect his last words will be "The horror! The horror!"

I apologize in advance if I am not giving Evil Personified its solemn due.  I really have to learn to be more serious when discussing Evil.  I'm bad for Hitler jokes too.

When the US invaded Afghanistan in 2001, the Taliban were Evil Incarnate.  They liked to kill civilians, enslave women and burn schools.  Still do.  They gave Osama bin Laden a place from which to run his terrorist activities, including launching his horrific attack on civilians in New York.  But we've been in Afghanistan over ten years now.  And Evil continues its relentless march with or without the Taliban.  F-15s do not seem to kill it.

The Taliban here in Afghanistan have not died like Absolute Evil should--that is with a big boom and 10,000 Bonus Points.  They are just lying there. Very still.   Playing possum with us. The West is bored.  Meanwhile there is new and interesting Evil running around in Iran and Uganda.

I don't really understand the Dark Continent.  I guess I see it as a place of suffering and starvation and plague.  Life consists mostly of trying to get enough to eat and fleeing marauding hordes.  It fills me with a sense of helplessness because it never changes.  One of earliest memories is listening to George Harrison's  1973 Concert for Bangladesh. (Yeah, my parents were big-time hippies.  Had Jesus Christ Superstar racked on the turntable all the time, too.  I still know every word.)  Then there was Bob Geldoff's LiveAid in 1985.  And here we are twenty-five years later.  Having a receptacle in which to put all the Evil of Africa fulfills a need for us, but eliminating Kony will not extinguish evil from Africa.

That's not to say I begrudge the effort.  It would be pretty cynical to ride a guy who wants something done about a sadist who victimizes children with such impunity. 

The only thing that bothers me is that we, by all this attention, exalt Kony to some apotheosis of Evil.  Deify him.  When a wasp stung my daughter a couple of summers ago, I squished it. I didn't torture it, or handcuff it and asked it why it went around stinging cute little girls who never did it any harm.  I just killed it so it wouldn't sting again, and then went back to my book.

Evil is banal. You never learn anything from its perpetrators when you ask them "Why?  Why?  Why?"  They never have an answer.  No insight into the nature of their wickedness.  They seem as perplexed as the one asking the question.  I've always found that quite odd.   And the perpetrators never seem equal to the chaos and misery they've caused.

Voltaire said Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer.  "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him." (Hey, we're bilingual over here at Mindfingers!)  The same, it seems, applies to the devil.  We have a need to personify evil.  The Christians at least admit as much.   All their evil is in one convenient package--Lucifer, the Fallen Angel. 

Secular types talk a big game about moral relativity, but when their moral sensitivities are outraged, they want to package and personify evil too, albeit in human form, instead of divine. 

Take Hitler for instance.

Hitler has become that invented, secular Satan.  it's impolite to even mention his name in civil company.  Express any sympathy with his ideas and you'll wind up in legal hot water--shades of the old blasphemy laws.

But when we vest all the vileness of Nazi Germany in Adolf Hitler, we forget the true lesson of the Holocaust--that it was brought about by a million smaller evils, from guard at Dachau who was "just following orders" to the woman who quietly closed her blinds when the Gestapo came for her neighbor.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the Russian writer imprisoned for eight years in  Stalin gulag, knew something about evil.  He said the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.

You Are Free to Think What You Will of This

We have, in Canada, enshrined in our Constitution, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.  The Charter, among other things, guarantees any person in Canada certain fundamental freedoms including: freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, freedom of thought, freedom of belief, freedom of expression, freedom of the press, freedom of peaceful assembly, and freedom of association. 

Canada, unlike the US, also has a limitations clause (Section 1), that these freedoms are "subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society."  For instance, inciting hatred against identifiable groups or publishing child pornography are not protected by these fundamental freedoms.

I must admit to be a little puzzled at Freedom of Thought.  What would Canada look like if that particular fundamental freedom were removed?  After all the state has no idea what someone is thinking and no definitive way to find out.

As there is and never has been any state power over thought, why include it as a freedom?  Even North Korea, which controls every facet of its peoples' lives, cannot know or control what those people are thinking.  Sure the serfs prostrate themselves before Kim Jon Il's portraits, but how do the rulers know that the guy in the seventeenth row, fifth one in, isn't thinking, while groveling, "Geez, what a douchebag."

How would they possibly regulate thought anyway?  Without Freedom of Thought, I suppose they could constitutionally pass a law making it illegal to imagine a colander.  Wouldn't that be interesting.  Were they imagining a future where the imagination could be read, and safeguarding against that?  Were the writers of the Charter mindful of Orwell's of "Thoughtcrime" in his cautionary tale 1984?  What were they thinking?

I also note that the Canadian Constitution contains no right to life itself. Interesting.   The founding ideals of the American Declaration of Independence are the rights of "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."  (Just the pursuit of happiness; apparently actual happiness is unconstitutional.)  Compare that to steadfast, boring old Canada's ultimate ideals of "peace order and good governance."  Interesting.

In a related note does anyone know the difference between a right and a freedom?  I was once told that a freedom guarantees that the state will not interfere (so if you say you don't like the current government, they will not, for example, arrest you), whereas a right is a guarantee the state will interfere (so the state will actively intervene against others threatening your freedom of expression).

This seemed to make intuitive sense to me, however I ran into some folks who were offended by that interpretation because it defined rights and freedoms in reference to the State.  Fundamental rights and freedoms, they argued, arose not from the State but from being human. This is expressed in the US Declaration of Independence: "We hold these truths to be self-evident that that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights."  Beautifully written. 

So, this view holds, despite the fact that a given state does not grant human rights (such as in Syria, where the security forces have turned on their own citizens to horrific effect), those people still have these fundamental rights and freedoms.  A fat lot of good it does them; a right won't stop a bullet.

If a person is born with these rights--if they are, in fact, unalienable--then where are they?  I can see a baby's nose and her cute little toes. I can hear her heartbeat and feel her warmth.  But in which toe can I find the right to freedom of conscience?  What instrument can I use to find the gene that expresses her freedom of belief?

The idea that we are born with these rights is essentially metaphysical.  A human right, by this definition, is not rational, but metaphysical.  A freedom is not empirical, but ineffable. 

More importantly, who put that freedom there?  Where did it come from?  Societal mores and ethics change incredibly over time and space--every virtue was once vice and vice versa.  Yet these Human Rights are specific, unyielding, and absolute.  (NB Brad H--note the use of the Oxford comma!)  To my mind then, you can't say that every human is born with human rights without positing the existence of an Absolute Good, which is tantamount to God.  Perhaps that is why ,in its preamble, the Constitution of Canada recognizes the supremacy of God.  It's an inexorable precursor to an unalienable human right.

The Darwinian approach to rights is different.  In this model rights started out as good ideas, which grew to habits, and evolved to tradition, and then were codified in law and ultimately became morals.   The idea here is that morals are "good" because civilizations that adopted these morals were more successful than civilizations that did not.  There is, for example, a commandment that says "Thou shalt not kill."  My brother is a bit of a biblical scholar and he informed me that a more accurate translation would be "Thou shalt not murder."  Every high-functioning civilization I can think of makes allowances to kill--war being the classic example. 

However, a society cannot function if people can kill each other arbitrarily, without consent from the state.  So the prohibition against murder makes a society, from a Darwinian perspective, more fit to survive.  I would argue (without having the time to research this extensively) that contemporary states that that assert fundamental human rights are more successful, in terms of both peace, order and good governance and life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  Historian Will Durant agrees:

The development of external danger and competition unified the members of a group into some measure of fellow-feeling (sympathy), group-feeling (kindness), sociability, and mutual aid; those simple virtues... were really social necessities for group survival; and the strange paradox appeared that the very violence of competition and strife among societies was the cause of cooperation and peace within; it was war, or the possibility of war, that make morality, as it made morale. ...In the light of this biological approach it becomes sufficiently obvious that the natural and inevitable basis and definition of morality is the cooperation of the part with the whole

Nietzsche made a differentiation between the two types of good.  There's good=successful, as in being a "good hockey player," and there's good=virtuous as in being a "good man."  The Darwinian model says that rights and freedoms are good in the former sense; the Absolute Good model, in the latter sense. 

This is exemplified in the doves versus hawk game in fundamental games theory.  A dove will never fight for food and a hawk will always fight for food.  The perfect civilization would be all doves, but it is unstable; a single hawk would wreak havoc.  John Lennon could have sung "Imagine being able to perpetuate indefinitely the unstable solution of an all-dove society."  Hard to rhyme I guess.  The optimal solution is a some mixture of hawks and doves based on the boundary conditions.

In the Darwinian model, the precursor to human rights is the effective rule of law (law, being essentially, codified morality).  And I also note that the other ideal, besides the supremacy of God, to which the Constitution of Canada commits itself in its preamble is "the rule of law."  They covered both bases--the Absolute Good model and the Darwinian model!  Maybe those drafters of the Constitution are more clever than I give them credit for.  But I still have my questions about Freedom of Thought.  You're free to think what you will of that.