The Problem of Evil and the Role of Omega Spirituality

The theological problem of evil or of unnecessary suffering in the world is one of the oldest problems with theistic belief, finding its first logical expression in the West over two thousand years ago, in the Epicurean Paradox. That theological problem is also clearly insoluble, because it’s rooted in the nature of ideals. An ideal is counterfactual, since the point of having an ideal is to improve some actual situation by changing it to more closely resemble the ideal. The monotheistic God is thought of as the highest ideal, as both the ideal subject and object. Whatever we think of as most perfect (if anything), that becomes our divinity. In polytheistic systems, gods represent perfection in their spheres of operation, so that the god of wind is considered to be the primary source of that phenomenon and to have absolute control over it. All such natural powers, together with supernatural ones we can barely imagine such as the power to create the whole universe are combined in the idea of the monotheistic God. But by merely having such an ideal in mind, we condemn our religion to being badly flawed as long as we distinguish that ideal from the present natural reality, since nature must then necessarily be a letdown in comparison. The problem of evil isn’t just about the Nazis or baby animals being eaten in the wild. These are just some obvious examples of the more universal conflict between ideality and reality. We form ideals because we’re unsatisfied with something and we’d like it to better reflect the imagined possibility. But as soon as this conflict arises, so too does the question of why the world isn’t already more ideal. Why does that conflict exist? Why isn’t the world already perfect to obviate the need to imagine God? Why isn’t God all that there is? Why, instead, would God have created an imperfect world? Ideals versus reality: that’s the basis of the problem of evil.

Here’s a particularly chilling example of this problem. A month or so ago in a zoo in eastern China, a mother elephant stepped on her baby. Zookeepers treated the calf’s injuries and returned him to his mother, whereupon she again stomped on him. The zookeepers then permanently separated the two, realizing that the mother was rejecting her baby and indeed trying to kill him. The calf then reportedly cried inconsolably for five hours straight, because he couldn’t bear to be apart from his mother, not understanding that his mother wanted him dead. The story ends happily enough, with the zookeepers adopting the baby elephant, but the facts of the case are still horrifying. Infanticide among animals happens when the parents are held captive in zoos or in sanctuaries, because they lack role models and don’t know how to raise their babies, but baby-killing also happens in the wild. The evolutionary reason is that because the environment in which many animals live is harsh rather than idyllic, a parent faces something like Sophie’s choice: she has more than one baby, using one or more as backups, and as soon as circumstances reveal one to be the strongest, she focuses on raising that one and abandons or kills the others. She kills them either to end their doomed life quickly and mercifully or to make life easier for her favourite offspring, eliminating some competition for the limited resources.

So that’s why this sort of thing happens. But just consider the horror for a moment. After all, the baby elephant is unaware of any of those reasons. He instinctively loves his mother and wouldn’t have time to blame her for stomping him to death, because before he could realize that something is amiss, he’d be dead. In many species, the evolutionary reason for the baby’s unconditional love of its mother is also clear: if the baby can’t care for itself, the baby depends on the mother and the love bond ensures that the baby will stay near its protector and will do as it’s told. What’s so heartbreaking about this incident in the zoo is that something as innocent and pitiful as a baby’s love for its mother should be so inconsequential in light of certain natural necessities. We have a naïve ideal of how family life should be and then we learn that nature includes this sort of twisted family dynamic. Instead of caring for her helpless baby, the mother makes a cold calculation, born out of the sort of pragmatism you seem to need to survive for long in the wild. The environment’s inhospitality grinds down parents that aren’t born with evil intentions; presumably, this mother elephant would prefer not to kill her young, but she knows no other way to fulfill her survival instincts. And all the while, the precious baby elephant is kept in the dark. How many baby elephants, monkeys, pandas, and young members of many other mammalian species have expected their mother to care for them only to be taught a shocking evolutionary lesson, to be beaten to death by the one they most trusted! How many such deaths have gone unrecorded?

What makes this all the sadder is that, in response to the same natural world that sometimes compels parents in the wild to kill their offspring, we suffer pangs of nostalgia because we want to be rid of the hard-won knowledge of nature’s flaws. You only have to be around a normal child for a moment to vicariously experience the bliss of losing yourself in play, of not knowing the difference between the real world and an imaginary one. And yet children painfully learn that lesson soon enough. Infants tend to get whatever they want as soon as they want it, but when they reach the age of two and try to assert their independence, they come smack up against the reality they can’t control, when their parents are forced sometimes to say no to them.

Children vs Reality

I’ve written elsewhere of my nephew. Recently, I visited him and his parents and just minutes after I walked through the door, I realized a crisis was underway. My nephew, whose name is Gabriel, wanted an almond, but his mother (my sister-in-law) insisted that he could have more almonds only if he let her finish cutting his nails. Apparently, he had only one foot to go, but he refused, likely because he feared the nail cutters. So he had a tantrum and he cried inconsolably until his father took him away for a time out. Afterwards, he was allowed to return and his mother asked him what he wanted for supper. He said he wanted almonds. She insisted that he could have almonds only if he let her finish with his nails. And so again the battle was joined. He whined and cried for almonds, his mother stood firm, trying not to spoil her child because she knows the value of teaching him that the world will often say no to you. In the end, he didn’t get his almonds. I asked him what else he might like to eat and he said rice (of all things), because he doesn’t care yet about the food groups. He went to the cupboard and tried to pull out a heavy bag of rice, as if he knew how to cook it. While the rice was cooking, he wanted to play his version of tennis, to take out two wooden spoons from a drawer, give one to his play partner, balance a tennis ball on the end, hurl it awkwardly forward or to the side, and then squeal in delight as he gets to chase the ball and start the process anew. When he hands me the wooden spoon, I like to see how many times I can knock the ball in the air before it touches the floor. Gabriel becomes hyperactive when he sees his game extended in this fashion; he’s just overwhelmed with glee, taking the ball away to have his turn even though he doesn’t even try to emulate this twist on his game, because he lacks the arm strength and the balance.

Alas, no sooner had Gabriel pulled out the spoons while his rice was cooking than he was faced with yet another dire reality: no games until after he’d finished eating. And so Gabriel was forced to endure a waiting game which isn’t nearly so fun to play. Of course, Gabriel doesn’t understand the need for this sort of rule. He just wants to play and have fun no matter what he’s doing. But such training is evidently needed to ensure that he eats his food. He has to learn the lesson of conditionality, of cause and effect. If you want this, you have to do that. But this is far from ideal since most children are taunted, as it were, by the immediate, unconditional gratification they experienced during their infancy. Anyway, Gabriel ate his rice and we played “tennis.” I could go on and on with such stories. I’ve said this before, but perhaps most heartrending is to see how much a child must be soothed so that he’ll go to sleep at night. Everything must be just so: he must have his favourite toys on hand, the night light must be on, his parents must say goodnight in the right way, and so forth and so on. This is the primordial fear of being alone in the dark, which seems related to the instinctive fear of death.

What I’m trying to get at is that the problem of evil isn’t just an annoying philosophical argument for theists; it’s the central tragedy of natural existence and appreciating this tragedy isn’t just a matter of tallying up all of the suffering in the world. Instead, the melancholy few are cursed with appreciating the bittersweetness of all the myriad mini tragedies, the way events fall short of the ideal, innocence is abused, and death at least brings further suffering to an end. The world produces innocent children only to force them to abandon their naivety through confrontations with indifferent, alien reality. We may long to return to a childlike sense of wonder, to the mythopoeic experience of the world’s enchantment, but in biological terms that innocence is only a stage in the development of a more capable creature or society. At the same time, that development is existentially perverse since the knowledge needed to succeed as an adult or as a member of a modern society condemns us to being aware of the problem of evil, that is, of the fact that the world isn’t ideal, which is why we imagine ideals in the first place.

The solution to the problem must be found in a heroic way of life, not just in some sophistical response to the old philosophical question about why the traditional monotheistic God would allow evil to occur. Knowledge of nature’s imperfections is inevitable in the modern context. I speculate elsewhere that high technology might be altering that context, by forming a more congenial, practically supernatural environment that allows us to play at being gods, children, or like our mythopoeic ancestors. But short of reconfiguring all of nature or of disappearing into a fantasy world, the problem of evil will remain.

Postmodern Illuminati

The way I see it, then, we might benefit from a postmodern version of the Illuminati. The original Illuminati was an Enlightenment-era liberal and atheistic secret society, dedicated to eliminating superstitious religion and especially the Catholic Church’s domination of science and philosophy, and to what we’d call feminism. This secret society was modern rather than postmodern, in that its members had faith in rationalist myths about the power and benefits of reason. Now we know that despite technoscience’s obvious power, rationality is as much a curse as a blessing. We know that when we form collectives, the result is never utopia but some form of dominance hierarchy in which the leaders are corrupted by the power they need to run the system. Neutral, unselfish Reason (pure logic or science) has little to do with our life choices or with managing a society. No matter how well-informed our experts are, reason doesn’t tell us which goals to pursue or what to regard as sacred or profane. Science itself has shown us to be peculiar animals that turn themselves into outsiders within nature, thinking of ourselves as alienated supernatural spirits lost in space and time and yearning for a way back to our true home. We take leaps of faith to cope with our existential predicament, and some of these leaps are heroic and aesthetically laudable, while others are degenerative, clichéd, and uninspiring.

There are many non-governmental organizations (NGOs) now, each dedicated to a particular mission, such as feeding children, saving certain animal species, or acting as a watchdog in democracies. But is there an NGO today that focuses on the philosophical problem of how to live in a postmodern society? Would such a group have to act as a secret society? Of course, religions take up normative questions and prescribe ways of life, but the exoteric forms of the traditional ones are for unenlightened folks who don’t suffer the full effects of Reason’s curse. The wisest of us are atheists as a matter of course, but they don’t blindly trust reason or science or the modern institutions of capitalism and democracy. They’re humble, melancholy, and disgusted by most of what they see. But does this mean that the illuminated ones must be antisocial, that they wouldn’t band together either to encourage each other or to help enlighten everyone else? Is global enlightenment even possible, let alone wise?

Those questions interest me, but regardless of the answers, we’re all faced with the problem of evil, with the mismatch between reality and our ideals. Thus we must choose how to solve that problem with our life choices. Most people in modern societies trust in rational institutions like democracy and capitalism or in ancient religions, but the latter aren’t compatible with philosophical naturalism and the former provide cover for the dominance hierarchies that inevitably form, by sanctifying them as the fruits of reason and individual freedom. Is there a third way? Liberal secular humanists have their New Atheist movement, their Skepticons, The Daily Show, and so forth, but where do the Nietzschean atheists go? What of the omegas who occupy the margins of society and use that vantage point to arrive at unsettling philosophical truths? Are they doomed to being isolated and ineffectual or does their insight give them spiritual if not earthly power, which might inspire a way of life that’s fit for our time? 

Nietzsche understood that reason is cursed and that philosophy is subversive, and he wondered whether a creative class might save postmodernists from slave morality and apathy by inspiring us with their art. A think tank or an NGO serving that postmodern spiritual agenda might itself be an inspiring work. Then again, it might become just another corrupt collective. Perhaps the only way to avoid the corrosive effects of politics is to see to your own enlightenment and to be content knowing that fellow outsiders are secretly doing likewise. The outsiders' voices wouldn't be heard, because divided they'd stand and united they'd fall, but their revolts against certain social and biological norms would nonetheless stand as tragic artworks. They would be useless and the matrix of illusions and the happiness machines would continue to control the unenlightened masses, but precisely that contrast would vindicate our species. We came, we saw, some of us were properly horrified and they dealt heroically with that horror.