Beyond Good and Evil

[junorhane]

At Quaker Meeting some weeks ago there was some interesting discussion of good and evil. When you're a pacifist, what is the best way to confront evil? When does inaction become an active stance? Can you slay a monster without becoming a monster yourself

Comments

[motherofjedi]

I'm not sure all mythological wisdom says we can't eliminate evil, and while I see your point that modern myths suggest the hero who destroys evil destroys himself, I also don't think that idea is necessarily a part of mythological wisdom overall; the flawed or tragic hero is a sort of modern neurosis. I was always taught that mythology represents human attempts to explain natural order, i.e., helping us to understand what happens in nature, in an external sense--why the sun rises and sets, why the seasons change, why a plant grows and bears fruit and dies and then is reborn. The cyclical nature of nature. In that respect, from the point of view of nature, is "destruction" evil? Jung, I think, then transferred the representative purpose of mythology to the inner life of humans, i.e., mythology as a means of helping us to understand what happens in our minds/emotions/etc. Inwardly, we can become aware of patterns that, like nature, are similarly cyclical. Destruction may be a part of an individual's pattern (e.g., the way some

[junorhane]

I actually tried to come up with ancient myths that backed me up and had difficulty, so I agree that it's not an idea espoused by overall mythological wisdom.

The more cyclical philosophy of creation and destruction and creation again -death, rebirth, death - etc. seems to lie outside the dichotomy of good/light and evil/dark. While destruction is often associated with evil/dark, in the cyclical view I don't think it is. Yet rebirth can't happen without death, creation not without destruction. (I guess the modern scientific explanation is that matter can't be created nor destroyed just transformed).

If we become a hero who destroys the destructive pattern, what have we actually done? If we escape destruction are we also escaping the process that includes birth and creation?

Can we imagine a world where creation and birth happen without dependence on destruction?

Sacrifice and Change

[motherofjedi]

I think that dying and merely losing a finger are two very different things. The minor losses that heros experience in modern stories are there to show us that doing good is worth it, even if you must sacrifice something important in the process. A story about a hero who does good deeds with nothing at stake, and risks nothing himself, would be a boring story indeed

[youngjedi]

Okay, so LJ told me my comment was 585 character too long. Evidently, there is a limit. So I have posted my response on my own journal.