coromandal

 So, why is evil so sexy?  And good so profoundly unglamorous?  Why does virtue seem so boring?

[2:42]  Regarding virtue:  the ancients believed the opposite to what we do.  They saw virtue as being very very good at the very very difficult task of living well.  We, on the other hand see virtue as having patience and honour and other hard to define, if not entirely wishy washy qualities. Regarding evil:  the ancients believed the wicked were particularly bad at the art of living.  We, on the other hand, see evil as a triumphant quality:

“I don’t think its virtue that’s boring, so much as a particular conception of it … Being a virtuous human being for Aristotle is a practice, like being a skilled diver or an accomplished tennis player.  And those who are really brilliant at being human, what Christians call the Saints, are the virtuosi of the moral sphere.  They’re the Pavarotti’s and George Best’s of virtue … In this very ancient Aristotelian view, virtue is a kind of prospering in the precarious affair of being human.  A prospering, if Sigmund Freud is to be believed, among others, none of us manages particularly well.  The wicked are those who haven’t developed the knack of fine living.  Those who botch the business as we all do to some degree.  Christians know this as original sin … We all botch the business, but the wicked do it in a spectacular dramatic sort of way.

[4:38]  The wicked are cripples; the virtuous are full of life:

So the wicked on this view, which later is elaborated by I suppose the greatest theologian who ever lived, Thomas Aquinas, the wicked are inept and crippled and deficient and really rather tedious people who never get the hang of human existence.  People who in a sense stay toddlers all the time.  They are like poor artists who can never really knock themselves into shape.  Whereas the virtuous, on this theory, are those who are like good artists … who realize their powers and energies and capacities to the full … The virtuous are those who are able to do this in as diverse and rich a way as possible, in this particular theory of morality.  And because of this they are brimming with life and high spirits.

[6:16]  God moral?   Nonsense!  Rather the very essence of delight and life, not to mention a good sense of humour:

Virtue is here a kind of energy or fullness of life, abundance of life … It’s a sort of exuberance which is why it’s thought sometimes, by some people to have something to do with God.  Because to say that God is good, traditionally, theologically, is not to say that he’s remarkably well behaved, that he eats his greens, polishes his shoes … But, in fact, most theologians these days wouldn’t think the term moral is applicable to God at all.  But rather to say he’s good is to say that he is an infinite abyss of self delighting life.  Which no doubt, I suppose must entail that he also has a boundless sense of humor.  He sure needs one.

[10:30]  defining evil

On this theory evil is not something positive.  It’s a kind of lack or defectiveness.  It’s a sort of nothingness or negativity.  It’s an inability to be truly alive.  It may look lively and sexy and seductive and flamboyant, but this is a flashy show it puts on to cover up the hollowness at its heart.  It’s the paper thinness of evil, it’s bitter unreality, its poor, botched parody of reality which is most striking about it.

[12:20]  the redefinition of virtue: no wonder people prefer vampires

As the middle classes came to exert their clammy grip on western civilization, one thing that happened was a gradual redefinition of virtue.  So virtue now came to mean not exuberance and self realization and self fulfillment as in the long tradition from Aristotle to Aquinas to Hegel to Marx in a so called virtue ethics tradition.  But it came to mean things like prudence, thrift, meekness, chastity, temperance, longheadedness, longsuffering, industriousness and so on.  No wonder people prefer vampires.

Terry Eagleton – On Evil from The School of Life on Vimeo.