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I once made a statem ent in a room full of college students that the most important thing a young person could acquire in college might be a sense of her own limitations. I realised when I said it that it was not a very fashionable thing to say. Popular books on how to therapy, stress the glorious potential of very human being and urge us to accept ourselves, finally as being only a little lower than the angels. I heartily approve of any celebration of human potential, but I believe that we must acknowledge our potential for limitless evil as well. We must understand what we can do in the way of evil before we can even pretend to be good. This is the beginning of morality, the psychological or spiritual or in a religious tradition, the mythical basis that makes morality possible. One of the most moral book of the past century is Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, because Conrad faces the problem of evil in people, he tells us that we must recognise in ourselves the ability to put the head of our enemy on stick and dance around a fire with it, and only when we recognise that can we even begin to deal with any moral question at all. Students who have been nourished on pop psychology and told “I’m O.K.” have some trouble dealing with Conrad, and some of them regard him as perverse. I am amazed at the num ber of educated people who believe that we are somehow better, more moral than our ancestors were. I have seen otherwise intelligent people grow red in the face at the suggestion that human beings are not better now- less cruel, more considerable, less animalistic, more humane- than they were when Nero ruled Rome or when the Pharaohs ruled Egypt or, when the Druids at Stonehenge readied their sacrifices.
In one way, we are more likely to have become dull to our potential for evil (and so discover it suddenly and with disastrous consequences) today that we were a few centuries ago. This is because we actively suppress the kind of self-knowledge that makes intelligent moral decisions possible. Sin and guilt are such old fashioned terms that most of us are embarrassed by the very words.
I once made a statem ent in a room full of college students that the most important thing a young person could acquire in college might be a sense of her own limitations. I realised when I said it that it was not a very fashionable thing to say. Popular books on how to therapy, stress the glorious potential of very human being and urge us to accept ourselves, finally as being only a little lower than the angels. I heartily approve of any celebration of human potential, but I believe that we must acknowledge our potential for limitless evil as well. We must understand what we can do in the way of evil before we can even pretend to be good. This is the beginning of morality, the psychological or spiritual or in a religious tradition, the mythical basis that makes morality possible. One of the most moral book of the past century is Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, because Conrad faces the problem of evil in people, he tells us that we must recognise in ourselves the ability to put the head of our enemy on stick and dance around a fire with it, and only when we recognise that can we even begin to deal with any moral question at all. Students who have been nourished on pop psychology and told “I’m O.K.” have some trouble dealing with Conrad, and some of them regard him as perverse. I am amazed at the num ber of educated people who believe that we are somehow better, more moral than our ancestors were. I have seen otherwise intelligent people grow red in the face at the suggestion that human beings are not better now- less cruel, more considerable, less animalistic, more humane- than they were when Nero ruled Rome or when the Pharaohs ruled Egypt or, when the Druids at Stonehenge readied their sacrifices.
In one way, we are more likely to have become dull to our potential for evil (and so discover it suddenly and with disastrous consequences) today that we were a few centuries ago. This is because we actively suppress the kind of self-knowledge that makes intelligent moral decisions possible. Sin and guilt are such old fashioned terms that most of us are embarrassed by the very words.
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