Following up on the previous entry, exploring whether good or evil is our natural state, it is interesting to consider the two opposing sides to this argument.
In recent years, there seems to have become a tendency for people, even those who never knew the victim, to express their grief very publically when someone dies violently. Giles Frazer, a lecturer in philosophy and Anglican priest, suggests that this identification with the victim may be a way of protecting ourselves from the realisation that there could be some of the perpetrators violence within us. This suggestion he makes in the context of the holocaust in the following passage:
“My worry is that the identification with the victims of the holocaust protects us from the much more disturbing thought that we may have something in common with the perpetrators. Placing oneself along side the victim may leave intact a fundamental complacency about our own potential for violence and hatred. The idea that we might catch a glimpse of our reflection in the face of the Nazi guard is a terrifying thought but is one that is more likely to lead to genuine transformation.
Often we protect ourselves from the thought of our own capacity for wickedness by describing wickedness as something foreign and alien. That’s the problem with our tendency always to use the Nazis with the default example of human evil. This encourages the thought that evil is done by people with funny accents and sinister uniforms, people who lived in the past, people very different from us.
One of the most terrifying messages of European anti-Semitism is that evil is perpetrated by apparently ordinary, respectable men and women with nice families and good taste in wine and music. In other words, people like you and me! Those who refuse to face it are often the most dangerous people of all.”
If we accept this, it would suggest that violence is a dangerous urge lurking within us all. However, to counter that proposition, Sudhir Khan, a philosopher and psychologist, proposes the following:
“If you are asking, ‘is violence a fundamental drive in human beings?’, then I would say no. But, if you mean we are all prone to violence, to do violent acts, then yes.
What we are prone to is what we would widely call love, which includes altruism and empathy: the fundamental aspects of human nature. We have pain networks in our brains that are activated when we see the pain of others. This shows that we are capable of great empathy. If an adult drops a toy, a little baby will pick it up and give it to him.
I believe that the religions which have postulated that there are two forces in the world, good and evil, have distorted the view that evil or violence is a fundamental part, as is the good. I believe that the good is fundamental and that the violence is a reaction to many things.”
If Khan is correct, this would suggest that, in order to connect to this deeper part of the self, there is a need to learn to control ones’ reactivity, to nurture our natural nature, our loving nature and to allow it to express itself. How? Perhaps, by looking to a more spiritual background for an understanding, we can both diminish that violence and accentuate the ‘benevolent self.’
If the inner violence is not addressed and resolved, it will have lasting, damaging effects in that the person becomes cut off from looking within; from any psychological, emotional or spiritual life. This results in a life of great poverty.
More and more, in a world in which reactivity takes the front seat, we need to create and encourage time and space for personal silence and reflection, both for our self and those we work with. Only then will we recognise, unequivocally, which is our true nature …. and the true nature of others.
Comments
RSS feed for comments to this post