The Environment and Literature of Moral Dilemmas by David Aberbach

Author:David Aberbach [Aberbach, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781000400038
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 56356865
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-08-18T00:00:00+00:00

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Modern literature, even when little concerned with religion, has similar, even worse attacks on the uses of new technology to serve greed and the lust for power: for example in Zola’s Germinal, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.11

At the same time, the Keynsian notion that damage done by capitalism is a necessary evil for the greater good of creative enterprise has pre-modern antecedents embedded in religious tradition. The language of the ‘sinful good’ of capitalism is strikingly similar to that of Lurianic kabbalah, by which ‘there is no evil that does not contain an element of good, nor is there a good entirely free of evil’.12 Keynes acknowledges in The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936) that he took from Mandeville the idea that society is driven by vice.13 The evil involved in capitalism, in Keynes’s view, is unavoidable.

Central in rabbinic literature is the yetzer ha-ra (evil inclination), starting from Adam and Eve; a rabbinic image for ‘necessary evil’ of the yetzer ha-ra as the active ingredient in human motivation and action is ‘the yeast in the dough’. Kabbalah expands the imagery of yetzer ha-ra in its conception of aliyah tzorekh yeridah, ascent to holiness requiring descent to sin; of a world of shattered vessels whose scattered sparks of holiness (nitzotzot) must be gathered through virtuous deeds and made whole once again. The rabbis regarded Kabbalah as dangerous, for it could be used to harness divine power for unholy ends.

At times, writers recognize in industry a creative force of evil and in their art too, a demonic destructive force of Nature. Ambivalence to power and wealth as an expression of evil is felt, among others, in works such as Milton’s Paradise Lost, Blake’s Songs of Experience, Goethe’s Faust, and Ibsen’s Peer Gynt. The energy and enterprise needed in human advancement are invariably alloyed with evil. Milton’s devils in Paradise Lost are efficient as bees, rapidly building an entire city, Pandemonium, a creative masterpiece, well-ordered, functional, and aesthetic, not inferior to the Pantheon on the Acropolis, the most admired building in Milton’s time. But the devils are also similar to an invading army, guilty of wanton destruction, pillage and rape:

There stood a hill not far whose grisly top

Belched fire and rolling smoke; the rest entire

Shone with a glossy scurf, undoubted sign

That in his womb was hid metallic ore,

The work of sulphur. Thither winged with speed

A numerous brigade hastened. As when bands

Of pioneers with spade and pickaxe armed

Forerun the royal camp, to trench a field,

Or cast a rampart. Mammon led them on,

Mammon, the least erected spirit that fell

From heaven, for even in heaven his looks and thoughts

Were always downward bent, admiring more

The riches of heaven’s pavement, trodden gold,

Than aught divine or holy else enjoyed

In vision beatific: by him first

Men also, and by his suggestion taught,

Ransacked the centre, and with impious hands

Rifled the bowels of their mother earth

For treasures better hid. Soon had his crew

Opened into the hill a spacious wound

And digged out ribs of gold.

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