Wickedness by Mary Midgley

Author:Mary Midgley
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2010-11-05T20:05:29.953000+00:00

6

SELVES AND SHADOWS

1 THE PROBLEM OF SELF-DECEPTION

We come back now to our original problem—the attempt to make wickedness understandable—absolved, if all has gone well, from various objections to the whole project, and equipped with some concepts which may help us. The problem, however, can still look an uncommonly awkward one. A cartoon of Edward Kliban’s may suggest why.1 It shows a cheerful mechanic, tools upraised in triumph, pointing to the open bonnet of a car and telling the owner with satisfaction, ‘Well, there’s your problem.’ Inside the car there is nothing but a huge, prickly monster, crouched together in a sinister manner and baring its huge teeth in a knowing grin. The owner knows what’s wrong now. But what is he going to do about it?

I have been suggesting that the wrong kind of approach to the problem of wickedness does make it look very much like this. Evil, considered as something positive, would indeed have to be an alien being, a demon which had taken possession. The only possible kind of treatment would then be to cast it out somehow from the possessed person. (That feat is indeed often expected, not only of witch-doctors and exorcists, but also of educators, of psychiatrists and of psycho-analysts.) This casting-out will not get far unless it is somehow replanned to take account of the fact that evil traits are not just something alien. In one sense they are simply qualities of the person who owns them, though in another they are indeed something extraneous which has attacked him. This duality is a most puzzling feature of our mental life, and a continual practical as well as theoretical problem. We try to avoid ‘owning’ our bad motives, not just from vanity (though that is important) but because we feel that to own or acknowledge is to accept. We dread exposure to the hidden force whose power we sense. Our official idea of ourselves has no room for it. It therefore does not seem merely humiliating and depressing (as our known faults do), but alien, inhuman and menacing to an indefinite degree. When this sense of menace gets severe, it is almost certain to get projected on to the outside world, supplying fuel for those irrational fears and hatreds which play so central a part in human destructiveness.

In what may be called contentedly wicked people—and in all of us so far as we are contentedly wicked—this process is far gone, and may involve no more conflict in the inner life than in the front shown to the world. It is the fact that no conflict is visible that makes this kind of case so opaque. But this need not force us either to assume a special alternative morality at work, or to give up the attempt at understanding altogether. Instead, we can approach this kind of case by way of the much less opaque ones where conflict is still visibly raging. Hard though this is, it seems necessary to attempt it since self-deception, in spite of its chronic obscurity, is a topic which we badly need to understand.

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