I read with horror the reports of more gang rape in the DRC over the past weekend. Many women and young men were raped by soldiers (of a form), with guns and violence that will impact on them for life. Many of these soldiers are themselves young men, who have grown up in a world of violence. They grew up in a world that said violence against women was their right, and was a way to prove a point to other men about their prowess and power. The DRC has been a war zone for so long, it is hard to imagine that it was once non-violent.
My question then is where the good men are who are not prepared to sustain this culture of violence? The same can be said of any other nation, especially South Africa where people bandy about our “highest rape stats of a country not at war” and the stats on violence against women worldwide are incredible. So, as they say in inception, we need to go deeper. Right back to the roots of nature nurture and ask ourselves — are we born good or are we born evil.
If we are born good, and then are exposed to evil in the world, then it is the world that makes us do things like rape, murder, steal and abuse. The evil came into us from the outside and we are influenced by the way we are nurtured. So children become rapists because of a number of cultural influences that tell them that raping is OK, or good, or from the realisation that the world outside does not punish rapists, or condemn them, so they will get away with it.
But, where did that evil come from? If the evil is in the world it had to come from someone/somewhere. So perhaps then we are born evil, and the ability to curb that evil is enforced on us by authority figures who know that Mill’s harm principle means that if we all did bad things to one another, bad things would happen to us too. So they contain their own evil, in order to create some sort of social order. In panoptican style we do not commit evil for fear of retribution. So our evil comes from within, and what we know as good is not “good” but rather ordered.
When our world is in crisis, the boundaries of good and evil become slippery. And when you look at a country in crisis, it’s hard to tell whether those rapists were ever good, and if so how to get them back there. My intuition tells me that unless men are the most vocal critics of this behaviour, and until rape becomes detached from their concepts of their masculinity, we won’t ever get them back.
What on earth are you talking about?
http://www.gutenberg.org/catalog/world/readfile?fk_files=1329790&pageno=2
Interesting additional information on this (watch the video, too):
http://www.thedailymaverick.co.za/article/2010-05-21-scientists-open-the-secret-door-to-the-kindergarten-of-good-and-evil
“The research shows that babies aren’t moral tabula rasa’s, but that they possess a basic moral foundation, or as Bloom says “the capacity and willingness to judge the actions of others, some sense of justice, gut responses to altruism and nastiness”.”
Enjoy.
Good and Evil are relative terms relating to our survival, that we have inherited from the Judeo-Christian mythology. If we perceive something to be threatening to our survival, then we label it as evil, and likewise, if something is good for our survival, we label it as good.
This is why in war, the enemy is always evil, no matter what side of the fight one is one.
Good is the willingness of a person to judge all things, except people. Evil is the judgment of people, including oneself.
It’s that simple.
So for example, these men that raped judged their victims to be worthless and gave no thought to the lives that they destroyed.
There is no such thing as universal morality. We (or rather, most of us) are restrained by the laws of society and our own relative sense of what is right and wrong.
Some (deluded) people are restrained by the idea of being punished upon death. Surely the one thing religion was good for was control of the population.
If crimes are left unpunished it perpetuates the idea that there was, in fact, no crime.
Bottome line: castrate rapists. No amount of education will suffice. People need to fear punishment.
We’re scum – unless we accept that we 1) “do the right thing” or 2) God will damm us. Otherwise we’re doomed a lot earlier!
Option 1 is what I strive for.
“Good” and “evil” are social constructs, judgements made up by man, they don’t actually exist. Well, unless you are religious. But for me, some people are born without an ability to empathise, a mental impairment. Today we call that a mental or personality disorder, ie.’psycopathy’. So yes, I guess those people are born with the potential to do evil, although most do not, because they are taught that certain things are wrong. I think ‘evil’ as you say, comes originally from within us, from the often disordered ways our mental capacites percieve things, and how we take these things out on other people, therebye passing down systems of abuse over the generations in an external way, and via genes, in an internal way.
Very simplistically I believe who we are is determined by nature, nurture and the choices we make, throughout our lives.
You do not have to teach a child to be bad, it comes naturally, eg pinching, hitting lying etc. From an early age parents have to teach them right from wrong. It does not come naturally, it is all part of the nuturing process.
As we grow up we will make choices, which are based on who we are and what we have been taught and what we believe.
That can either lead us down a path of acceptable social behaviour or the unacceptable – the evil you talk about.
Ultimately it is about the choice the individual makes.
Sadly, I have to agree with Jerome and that horribly depressing man Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche – when we get caught up “good” and “evil” as absolutes and not as concepts we have questions like this. We should look betyond good and evil, because its all subjective…
HOWEVER – while I cannot say that rape is “evil”, I can say that it is a brutal and unwarranted attack on women. And since you ask “But, where did that evil come from?” its simple, really.
The NLP guys will tell you all human actions are done for one basic principle: to improve your own quality of life. No one will make any choice, that will lower their standard of life. Every action we do, every choice we make, we make in order to improve our lives, to make things better.
Seen in that light – can you imagine how torturous the lives of the people you mention in you blog must be, if rape and pillage and total disrespect for anyone and everyone else is an IMPROVEMENT? I am not quick to judge them as evil – I look at them and think “you poor soul – I cannot begin to imagine the hell you must find yourself living in.” (And trust me, I’ve got a vivid imagination!)
So there’s your answer – people aren’t good or evil, born or otherwise. We just “are”.
Surely every human being is born with a sense of right and wrong…?
And if a woman is begging and pleading not to be abused, screaming and crying even, should it not be obvious to the rapist that he is doing wrong?
Rapists are PURE EVIL!
When you have something that breaksdown, go to the owners manual. The owners maual for mankind says: “They have all turned away and are worthless. There isn’t one person who does right. Their words are like an open pit, and their tongues are good only for telling lies. Each word is as deadly as the fangs of a snake, and they say nothing but bitter curses. These people quickly become violent. Wherever they go, they leave ruin and destruction. They don’t know how to live in peace. They don’t even fear God.”
You have very muddled thinking. I think the belief in ‘good’ or ‘evil’ is dependant on the belief in some higher power: Some god that can say for sure what is right and what is wrong, like the 10 commandments. But to me that is just lazy and wishful thinking. Surely behaviors that are ‘right’ are just the behaviors that would promote social cohesion in a particular society. And these behaviors would be different according to societal values. What is happening in the DRC is a breakdown of society, and consequently a breakdown of the boundary of what is right and wrong. The high rape statistics in South Africa are a manifestation of a breakdown of societal values due to do a range of problems such as unemployment, lack of service delivery etc etc. What you are doing is promoting the idea that there is something intrinsically wrong with boys, and that they are born rapists. You lament the lack of ‘good men are who are not prepared to sustain this culture of violence’, but it is this attitude of women such as yourself, that all men are born rapists, that stops me from even wanting to help women’s rights movements. And I don’t think you are doing yourself any favors in believing in the concept of intrinsic ‘good’ or ‘evil’.
Why do you assume that good and evil are mutually exclusive? Why can’t humans be born with both?
There is NO god or magic about this. The logic is simple, in the simplest terms you have three nervous systems, one of them senses (the sensorium), one of them thinks (the brain) and one of them acts (the motorium). The sensorium continually scans for extremes of good or bad because these affect survival. The brain remembers things sensed and their effect on survival and influences subsequent action. The motorium only ever steers for good (if it steered for bad you would be quickly dead). So our basic logic, even as a new-born baby, leads us to prefer good over bad. Simple really. No surprises there.
I suspect that most people in this blog are “educated” and have read books on Moral Philosophy judging from their arguments.In that context I need not try to outline the problematic nature of defining “good” and “evil”. Even the “Golden rule” so beloved by Christians is shown to be problematic as a principle but only useful as a rough guide to morality.
Being a descendant of those who were conquered colonized and “converted” to Christianity I know very little about the religion that my great grandparents had in its original pure form (unaffected by Christianity). From the little that I know the religion of my great grandparents was that we were born good and only allowed evil in by failing to perform certain religious rituals.On the other hand Christianity teaches that are “born evil”/”are intrinsically evil” and can only get salvation by praying or performing certain religious rituals(yes rituals)
My response to this blog is: What is Jennifer Thorpe getting at exactly? Is she raising a Philosophical point for debate or is she trying to raise an argument for a specific ideology?
Why be surprised at manifestations of evil in Africa? be surprised at manifestations of good, – a much more rare human quality. Then ask the question why is this so and the real debate can begin.
@Thandinkosi It was purely for debate sake. Just really interesting.
@hippiegoth Really great comment.
@ Thandinkosi Sibisi
I don’t think the traditional African worldview allowed for the existence of good and evil in an abstract sense. The rituals were meant to ward of evil in the sense of preventing bad things from happening to the person. Evil was simply that which could harm you or your tribe – be it evil spirits, animals, accidents or enemies. A person doing something objectively evil – poisoning an enemy, stealing cattle, etc. – might have performed rituals for the same ancestral spirits to assist him. He would still have considered his deeds to be good deeds as it was meant to benefit him.
I am not sure that Christianity teaches that we are intrinsically evil. The doctrine of fallenness means that we are prone to choose to do evil. Evil here is obviously understood as an abstract entity since it implies that the doer, who will naturally be acting for his own or his tribe’s benefit, might nonetheless be doing evil if it involves harm to someone else or transgressing the laws of God.
I seemed to agree with Locke; that we are innately some kind of blank slate. Good and evil are merely concepts introduced much later in life.
We are born with ability to recognize pleasure and pain but it doesn’t have to be good and evil.
I wrote a simple post on this topic myself:
http://thesoulsanctuary.us/2010/08/the-end-of-good-vs-evil/
While I also found a more thorough article about this… maybe you’ll be interested:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-harris/the-moral-landscape-q-a-w_b_694305.html?ir=Religion