Status Updates From Wickedness

'the spirit of our age replies... there is no such thing as individual wickedness, and so there are no people who can be identified as exploiters and oppressors.'
Look, I'm abandoning. It won't help my research. I've found it too exclusively applicable to a Western Christian tradition, and with the above quote, we're on different planets (or was 1984 another age?). I had a better time with Terry Eagleton's primer.

'simple Persian dualism' srsly
I get that Midgley wants to scotch cultural relativism. But (for example) to dismiss the whole complexity of Zoroastrian-inflected thought, as a dead end in serious thought about evil, is no use.

Hang on. In putting historical Christians' case against dualists as represented by Zoroaster, Mani and other gnostics, Midgley seems to say/agree that the Christian basis (a 'single system') makes the world more intelligible ('an essential presupposition for understanding the world at all') and is also 'needed for science as well as for action'.
??
She also dumps the whole of church misogyny onto legacy Manichaeism.

evil in evolution is my favourite chapter by far. long but snappy, concise, really clear with its points, easily translated into standard form and touches upon one of my favourite areas in philosophy, evolutionary philosophy. if the entire book had been like this, it’d be an easy four or five stars

death wish is one of my favourite chapters so far. it lays out freud's theory of the death wish, that the reason why humans behave aggressively is because of an innate wish for the destruction of the self and states that while this theory is far from perfect and lacks a lot of nuance, he is right in assuming that evil cannot only be selfish and that there is a form of masochism to doing evil things.

the instigators: rambly and weird chapter. had to reread passages several times to understand them, but that could be due to my stupidity. i don’t understand the point of the chapter, and the analysis of othello… what does any of it have to do with motives to evil in the real world? midgley uses a lot of literary analysis in her work, which is interesting if made relevant. i don’t see how it’s relevant here

selves and shadows: excellent chapter. i’ll admit i was a bit confused as to what the point was, but midgley summarises it well. we all have a bit of evil in us, and failing to acknowledge it leads to projecting it unto other people. this is something instigators of evil do to gain followers, namely appealing to these hidden evils. therefore leaders and led have a more complicated relationship than at first glance

evil as a vacuum as opposed to a positive force is indeed a lot more frightening. scots, ya did it again

fates, causes and free will: this chapter is…. eh. midgley argues that determinism should be used as a tool for predicting human behaviour and it is fatalism that is a threat to free will. yet she does not argue for the existence of free will, something which i and many others question. several other digs at marxism too, claiming we elevate physical forces into deities (i’m assuming she means dialectical-

”To be unpredictable, not only to other people but to oneself, is to have lost all control over one’s destiny. That is a condition as far from freedom as rolling helplessly downhill.” interesting point- we may think of free will as having the ability to do unpredictable things when in practice this means going against what we’d rather do, what is predictable.

understanding aggression is a short chapter—where it comes from, how it operates etc. midgley compares it to the motive of fear, something that can be bad when there is too much or too little of it, but is when regulated properly an important part of being human. the bit on non-aggressive cultures is interesting: these cultures don’t lack aggression but know how to regulate it, which is much harder

“Our linked capacities for fear and anger—for fight and flight—form a positive organ to be used, not a malfunction. This no more commits us to misusing it than our having feet commits us to kicking people.”