As with so many topics these days, the terms of discussion of our anxious times have been ripped out of the hands of disciplined servants of language and employed with lower and lower fidelity to their original underlying concepts. It’s a bit like the common reporting of scientific studies when complex and somewhat ambiguous findings are reduced to a compelling if not entirely (or even vaguely) accurate soundbite.

Nowhere is this linguistic drift and violence more marked than in the apocalyptic rantings about good and evil coming from the various aspirants to various thrones. Good and evil have been favorite memes of humanity for a long time, probably as long as we’ve been dissolving the actual world into a rendering of words and art. It certainly has been a fascination of philosophers and clerics as long as they’ve been documenting their thoughts. 

It’s not surprising this dichotomy has persisted as a worthy topic of discussion and discernment. It’s a gnarly dichotomy. Both ends are tough to accurately define and the relationship of the two has never been fully articulated without significant caveats of logic, faith, and just common sense. All told, the perfect subject for exploratory and experimental pathfinding. 

While I normally prefer to lean my focus to the positive end of any scale, in this case, I think there is some benefit in trying to refine my sense of the negative end of the scale, that is to say, evil. In other forums I’ve made a point of saying one cannot oppose evil using the tools of evil, as that simply enhances and expands the evil. To avoid picking up said tools of evil, one must be clear on what evil is (or more accurately perhaps isn’t) and what the related tools are.

First a caveat. Or perhaps two. The first is that I don’t want to suggest I’ve adequately absorbed what the great minds have had to say about good and evil. Yeah, I’ve read Plato and tales of Socrates, Marcus Aurelius, Isaiah, Job, the Gospels, St. Francis, Copernicus, Newton, Einstein, Nietzsche, Ghandi, Mother Theresa, Martin Luther King, Mary Daly, Max Planck, Carol Gilligan, Marilyn French, and… well a lot of folks. You put all those cats in a bag and, Shrödinger be damned, the result will be several things all at once no matter how closely observed. I am, after all, a pathfinder, not a map maker. My world is always emerging, never quite fixed and so my answers often look more like questions.

The second caveat has to do with notion of good and evil as a thing. I’m not ready to accept that absolute dichotomy and am actually suspicious the persistence of it is one of the primary ways evil sucks us into using its tools and advancing it’s ends. Aaaaaand here we go, because I have to also resist the idea of evil as a having some kind of ultimate goal it is seeking to achieve. That lack is what makes evil… well evil. So if I can’t even let myself talk without interrupting, good luck on all the other folks. 

But I persist. This is important. Though it can be scary, stressful and exhausting, I feel some kind of mission to be an ameliorating presence in the face of evil, comforting its victims (which, by the way, include its perpetrators), addressing its impacts, and shortening its life in the moment and in the grander scheme of things.

It is tempting to ask who this enemy is I’m fighting, but like the dichotomy of good and evil, I’m suspicious use of that terminology is defining the field of play in ways that promotes what I am resisting. In my calmer moments, I don’t believe evil is sentient like the divine presence woven through all I that I know and feel, both explicitly and tacitly. I think of it as more akin to a vacuum, defined more by what’s missing than what’s there. 

So what’s missing? Well, certainly love. Compassion. Integrity. Humility. Contemplation, reflection and discernment. Understanding and Intelligence. Creativity. Community. Hope. Empathy and sympathy. Just about anything that make life worth living. 

That aspiration, a life worth living, requires an understanding of the tools I acquire and employ. I must dig deeper to understand their nature and proclivities, for indeed, when one picks up a hammer the entire world begins to look like a nail. Some are obvious. Violence (physical, verbal, emotional) as a means to almost any end is likely to perpetrate more evil. It is very difficult to wring evil ends from compassionate effort. Others like power, pain, or empathy can drift closer to love or evil based on how they are employed. I’ve come to think of all of these as social tools, the tools we use to interact with one another for better or worse. 

We humans, all of us, the best and the worst, the merely average, are not purely one thing. We have a will to transcendence, to be more than the petty facts of ourselves. Managing that transcendence is the work of every life and is perhaps our greatest virtue while also being the source of our greatest sorrows. The tools we pick up along that path shape the journey more than we might care to admit.

For my pathfinder’s sacred first step with respect to morals, to good and evil and everything in between, I’m going to be more deliberate focusing not on the hurting absence, but rather on the healing presence. Yes, absolutely acknowledging the hurt. Healing is not possible or necessary without that acknowledgement, but the acknowledgement is only one point and not the entire journey. I will aspire to give my energy to the healing and not to the hurt. I will pick up the tools of love and healing, not the tools of the evil and trauma. It is and will be a journey so I’ll be writing more on social tools in the coming months, but for now, I’m thinking carefully about my selection of tools