Beyond Good and Evil, With Apologies to Friedrich Nietzsche

The language of good and evil stops short of considering the facts. Long before the appearance of good and evil, mankind had to deal with survival. Because mankind has been successful in meeting the challenges of survival, at least for many people, we, using our brains and captive to our emotions, created cultural artifacts such as the morality of good and evil. However, with the prospect of irreversible damage to our species and much other life on this planet, we must again make survival a priority.

One need only contemplate the amount of human energy and natural resources consumed in our conflicts over cultural, religious and other value issues or the sheer will to dominate, to see the dissonance between values and the facts of survival. This is especially glaring when one compares them to the energy and resources expended on threats to our survival, e.g. global warming, massive food and water shortages and pandemics.

A paradigm for much of what is going on in this world because of the failure to look beyond values to reality may be found in the small country of Yemen. What began as a protest by the people for greater representation and a government focused on their needs has now been hijacked by the rivalry between two tribes that has now killed hundreds and continues to do so. This is happening in a country that UNESCO says is one of the poorest on the planet, with 40% living below the poverty line and suffering from severe water shortages, fuel shortages to deliver water by tanker trucks and by rapidly rising food prices.

This is not so different from Defense Secretary Robert Gates' recent trip around the world visiting many American military installations and foreign countries declaring that America must and will remain strong in Asia and elsewhere to protect its access to global resources and markets. Our well-being requires control of a substantial portion of the planet? Why? Sweden and other small Scandinavian countries have a higher standard of living than we do and have no such pretensions. Do I smell the odious stench of corporate profit demands in the pronouncements of Gates? His comments were intended to reassure America's allies and especially to warn China, which is now the focus of Pentagon war planning. Shall we now return to the "evil yellow peril" of the 19^th century? Will we again talk about evil empires while our planetary home suffers the ravages of our over population and over consumption? Will we now engage in an extremely wasteful global competition and perhaps a global conflict? Will we demand of our government a halt to this idiocy? Or once again will we be led down the path of good and evil, killing wantonly and understanding nothing?

If we are to think productively and act appropriately we will have to continually focus on human survival and what it requires of us, not on others and what they have done and are doing wrong. The language of good and evil is a linguistic trap that goes nowhere except to a polarized world. It cannot lead to insights or deal with the complexity of human nature. Additionally, it is easily manipulated because the terms are so emotionally loaded. Witness how Ronald Reagan used it to describe the Soviet State as an evil empire, despite the fact that it had transformed a quasi-feudal society into a major technical power, and was the major reason the Nazis were defeated and put the first satellite into orbit in a little over seventy years. Did not we try to kill it in its cradle with our invasion of 1918-1919? Was it a tyranny? Was it brutal in perusing its ends? Did its citizens, in the main, have a high regard for it? Yes, it was all of these and more, but Reagan, the ideologue, would sum it all up with the word "Evil." In this he differed not a bit from the Ayatollah Khomeini who called the United States "the Great Satan."

In all of this I am aware that, if carried too far, humans can peruse the facts at great harm to others as the Nazi human experimentation projects and the science practiced by Doctor Mengele demonstrate. Nothing was done here that humans have not done to other animals, which is why Sam Harris insists that the so-called value of human life, so easily dismissed in war and ideological differences, be extended to all sentient life. This observation points to the fact that while values are necessary to some extent they are usually prejudiced in the interest of those promoting them, e.g. the value of human life. This alone should be enough to keep us on our guard when we hear of the politics of values.

In any event, we live in a time when the values entertained by humans and their institutions pose a far greater threat to our continued existence than does a robust pursuit of the facts. T. S. Eliot supposed we would end with a whimper not a bang. I suggest we may end a badly confused species, never having understood itself sufficiently to distinguish between its own creations and those of thee plant it inhabits, unless by something unforeseen allows us to get a grip on our collective selves.

Bob Newhard