In general, I don’t believe in evil. In my toolbox of concepts, this one sits among the old screws and rusty nails and twist-ties at the bottom, rarely used.
But sometimes, when things have gone particularly sideways, or I’ve made an especially asinine blunder in my attempts to be useful to life, I have a creeping suspicion that, for lack of a better phrase, the devil is laughing.
What could this possibly mean?
I think life is a process of evolution. Over the big arc of history, from the subatomic soup of the early universe, to the Amazon rainforest, the computer I’m typing on, and the exquisitely constructed eyeballs that are now reading these words, things have become increasingly interesting. The big story of this process is probably the sequential combining of smaller wholes into larger wholes, but that’s not the whole story.
Once we get to life, evolution also seems to require resistance. The growing up of life seems to happen in relationship with death. Disease, parasites, predation, shortage — all have been both the result of and drivers for the evolution of life. It’s as though life has hacked death and decay for it’s own purposes, using them to get more and more outrageously beautiful and astonishing.
Decay may be necessary, but is in overcoming and outwitting it that life grows. Though life has a good track record overall, in any particular individual, species, or branch on the tree there is no guarantee of success.
I think this applies to the human world we inhabit as well. We are a growing shoot on the edge of life, and the beauty it can create through us is in the richness of our differentiation, connection, vitality, knowledge, enthusiasm. Our audacity, kindness, weirdness, creativity. When the soul feels alive, life is probably making progress.
Also in the human world, there is resistance, the opposing force, the entropy of slow death, the counterpoint to life. This could be in the destruction of the natural harmony of living places, in deathly bureaucracies, in small selfishnesses that combine to break friendships and deflate good works. It can be in compromises where the heart is heavy, in meaningless, unfulfilling work, in bigoted religious belief, and the actions of gurus that end up harming their followers, the actions of followers that create such gurus. It can be in hurry or in delay.
I don’t believe in evil, but I do believe that this principle, call it what you may, is real. It is the opposing force, the opponent in the game, the remover of cruft, the yin-yang opposition to the creative force, which is simultaneously guaranteed to win and almost certain to lose. The game is to evade, outsmart, hop over, see through, not buy into, apply Aikido to, or otherwise go one better than this force or principle.
As this is death vs. life, it is not a battle. You can’t fight death. Fighting itself is the domain of death. If it’s a fight, only one side can win. The opposite of death is life, so the winning approach to this tension is not to fight, but to live.
In moments when I seem to be losing, I try to remember that life is an infinite game. The object of the game is to play it more and more skillfully. We are not introduced to the rules at the outset; we have to learn them as we go along. This is not a struggle between good and evil, any more than weight lifting is a battle between a human and a piece of iron. The contest in one frame is the content of a larger frame.
I also believe (not out of philosophical preference, but as a matter of experience) that life has installed something inside each of us — call it the heart, for lack of a better word — that has the mysterious ability to tell the difference between life and death, like a compass has the mysterious ability to point north. To me it seems that people who live happily or make a difference in a positive way are generally those who follow that inner signal toward life.
The problem with clichés such as this is not that they are wrong, but that they are too easy. Implementing this platitude is far from easy. Possible confusions include getting the signal mixed up with egotism, self centered-ness, romantic delusion, thrill-seeking, or greed. The results are either suppressing it as bad, on the puritan side, or allowing other things to masquerade as and overpower it, on the libertine side.
Life is a true experiment, and we are in the middle of it. There is no guarantee that it will end well, but there is an opportunity to bring something beautiful to the game as we’re playing it. And when that happens, the devil has nothing to laugh about, but some part of life seems to smile instead. Angels, maybe?