33 | Empathy and the Problem of Evil

 

Welcome to the Cow Behind the Barn: A podcast exploring humanity, the world, and the divine, as experienced and interpreted by an artist. I’m Kevin Caldwell, a co-finder of the Table Collective.

I want to begin by sharing two experiences. 

 

Experience 1: The Agony, the Cruelty, and the Question of Empathy

I have been allowing myself to feel the brutality, the blood, the raw and jagged edges of the cosmos.

Tennyson was right, nature is indeed “red in tooth and claw.”

The universe is cruel and ruthless. Animals devour each other with bloody faces. When we strip away our clinical scientific verbiage, survival of the fittest is the evolutionary process of nature plowing over species that can’t cut it, grinding them into the dust of extinction like a vast genetic glacier, burying them in the tar pits of history. 

Given the way we are destroying the environment, our species is sowing the seeds of our own destruction. For we humans make decisions to do terrible things, willful acts of evil, at the micro scale of single deeds ( a premeditated brutal rape, or an unplanned murder in an act of “passion”) and at the macro level: mass murders, terrorism, genocide, infanticide, and gendercide. 

History is riddled with the bones of our readiness to destroy one another, and every advance in technology, no matter it’s potential for good, seems to find ready use and misuse  in the hands of monsters.

Then there are random acts of nature: birth defects, a fall, a car accident, a fatal reaction due to a previously undetected allergy, tsunamis, earthquakes, floods, tornadoes.

There is “collateral evil”. A technological error and a plane crash, carrying a family on a long-anticipated vacation. A stray bullet in a drive by shooting finds a toddler.

I could go on. You can add to the list. It is painful.

We know what it’s like to live in such a world, at least during the moments in which we are honest about life.

I want to share a song I wrote which expresses something of what it is like, though I originally wrote it based on a creative prompt to create something inspired by anything we saw at the moment. As such, the lyrics incorporate the titles of novels on a shelf. 

But the song ended up expressing how it feels to live in, and contribute to, the broken world I have been describing. It is called “Troubled Blood.”

 

Troubled Blood

Troubled blood, silkworm crawling in my brain; Troubled blood, silkworm crawling in my brain

Dressed in silk and satin I’m alone on this empty outbound train 

 

Troubled blood, hear that cuckoo call my name; Troubled blood, hear that cuckoo call my name 

Voices in my head whisper things I hope I never have to explain 

 

Troubled blood lethal white inside my veins; Troubled blood lethal white inside my veins

Someday this poison’s gonna be the only part of me that will remain

 

Troubled blood career of evil left a stain; Troubled blood career of evil left a stain

I’m trying to wash it clean but troubled blood keeps pouring down like rain 

 

Experience 1 is all about intentionally trying to draw the brokenness of the world into myself, feel it as my own.

Why?

Several Episodes back I suggested the idea that, in spite of the evidence, at the very heart of ultimate reality there is big E Empathy, divine Empathy. And if that is true, then that is also what I am, in my truest self. And if that is true, then if I cultivate empathy I become more fully who I am. That is my answer to “why.”

 

Experience 2: Empathy, Palestine and Israel Went to a Chagall Exhibition.

I have a friend who is a Palestinian, Arab Muslim. We were both invited to South Korea to take part in some events and one day our hosts took us to an exhibition featuring the work of Marc Chagall, a Jewish artist. Chagall’s work incudes paintings which portray the events of WWII, the holocaust, and the creation of the State of Israel. The latter, of course, is woven through the painful nerve systems currently in place in the region, affecting Arabs and Jews, Palestinians and Israelis. My friend feels these things very keenly as you may imagine. For him the conflicts and pain of the present are very real, and personal. 

This is what he said to me afterwards:

“I felt I was Jewish. I felt what they have suffered from Egypt, the Nazi’s, I felt I was them.”

What he experienced, was empathy, not as a theory but as an existential reality inside of him.

His experience is an example of empathy in the face of the sort of massive evil I have been trying to welcome in Experience 1. It changed his way of seeing “the other,” and the experience gives me hope that empathy, when cultivated and experienced, can make a difference.

That is another answer to “why” for me, a reason to cultivate empathy. But…

 

Why is Empathy Needed to Begin With?

 In Episode 26 I suggested the possibility that Empathy may be a key feature in the nature of big C Consciousness and all of reality. Then I explored various religious heritages to see what they might say about it. If you’ve been following the Episodes you know I found that each religious heritage, with the exception of polytheism, provides at least some support for my thesis. That is not intended to imply that Empathy with a big E is central to each religion. But I see evidence of it to some degree in each heritage.

And I’ve just described ways cultivating empathy can matter. But while it is wonderful that empathy can make a difference,  as I asked in the previous Episode, why all the blood and pain and grief and sorrow and cruelty to start with? Why is empathy even necessary? 

Yes, we are still waiting for me to try and answer the nagging question, “why is everything so messed up?” In this Episode and the next one I am going to look briefly at religious attempts to answer that question. But I can tell you now the conclusion I come to at the end of it all:

I really don’t know..

 

Before We Talk Religion: the Soil of the Soul
I am not sure why, but I feel it is important to get more personal before I go to religious attempts to answer why evil is in the world. I talked about this a little bit earlier while describing Experience 1. But I want to say more about what has been happening inside of me during those times of silence. I want to ground all of this in the soil of a soul. 

I have been trying to sink down into empathy, and to open myself to feel it in a 360-degree circle.

What is 360-degree empathy?

+all of my own pain, suffering, ache, grief, loss, regret, guilt, shame, failure, fear, and more, and do so as specifically and authentically as possible.

+all of the same for as many of my loved ones and dear ones and friends as a I could.

+all of the same for whatever I know or imagine of human history. 

+all of the same for whatever I can know or imagine of cosmic history, the sum total of it all.

In other words, 360-degree empathy is the openness to feel all the pain of everything and everyone, all the suffering, ache, grief, loss, regret, guilt, shame, failure, fear, and more, and do so as specifically and authentically as possible. Like what?

Scenes of myself as a father and husband, son, brother, friend, co-worker float across my memory 

Imagined scenes from Nazi prisons, gas chambers, terrified children clinging to the hands of weeping mothers, rail thin men, uniformed soldiers, walking to dining rooms, surrounded by children of their own, some solders whose guilt is screaming inside their souls, ripping the bones of their consciences to tatters, others satisfied in the assurance of obedience to orders…

I see a mother, her sweat fresh from labor cradling a tiny newborn with a misshapen head, a cleft palate, a missing limb, fighting for breath…

I see a bear and her cub running in circles surrounded by flame, the circle of heat drawing tighter around them, melting the leaves of the bushes they turn to in a futile search of cover…the fire lit by a careless camper, or a random lightning strike…

I imagine DNA burning in the cells of a woman, an inner clock ticking down to the timed release of MS…

I see ocean levels rising…

I breathe toxic air…

I hear the screams of a pre-teen child thrown into a van by men who moments before ripped her arms away from a father whose hand was stuffing money in his pocket as he walked back home to a makeshift tent and 15 sets of eyes staring blank and numbed into the night.

I see boy who went to school in the morning with a black eye, walking home in fear that more is waiting…

I see a woman curled around herself, crippled by memories of standing helpless and terrified, hearing the sounds down the hallway.

I see headlines…bombings, shootings, rounding up of immigrants, bitter winters without heat, missing children, children found, I see…

Well, that gives you the idea. 

This has been my morning practice, allowing myself to in some way sink down into all of that, which is the same as allowing it to sink into me. And again, why do these things happen?

 

Are There Religious Answers?

I will go back to the theisms: monotheism, pantheism, and atheism in this Episode, and panentheism in the next. I leave aside polytheism for two reasons:

First, polytheism does not seem to have a coherent answer to the question I am asking, at least so far as I can see. In fact, the gods seem as trapped as we humans and I imagine might have the same questions as I do. 

Second, I have noted that polytheism does not provide a ground for empathy, and as that is a key component in my question, I don’t feel the necessity to mine it here for answers about empathy in the face of evil.

Monotheism first.

 

The Monotheist Response

I spent most of my religious years as a monotheist, in its classic Christian expression. That expression shares much with Judaism and Islam in that all three tell of a divine being that is all powerful, all knowing, just, and merciful. How does that version of the divine respond to the world I have been describing?  

If God is all knowing, God knows the agony and terror of each situation and person and knew creating the world would turn out like this.

As all powerful, God can intervene.

But God chooses not to.

One common rationale offered by monotheism is that it is better to have a world in which there is free will, even with all the pain, than a world in which God constantly over-rides human freedom.

Which is as if I were to say it is better to have a kitchen in which my toddler can cut their hand on a burner while I watch but do not intervene, than one in which I stop them.

In fact, the monotheist case is worse than this, at least in the Bible and Qur’an.

You need to know that I love the Bible, and I love the Qur’an. I have steeped my soul in their words, poured over their pages, drunk deeply from their wells.

But I am an honest lover, I see the flaws and faults. 

One of the most glaring is that not only does God allow the sorts of evil I have been talking about, but in both sets of scripture, God orders it to be done, and in some cases, does it by God’s own hand. 

Sickness, hail, fire and brimstone, men and women and children, floods, mass killing that in any other context would be called genocide.

 

I will restate what I said above:

As all powerful, God can intervene.

However, God chooses not to do so. And sometimes God in fact causes the things that create the affront to our moral senses.

Why? Classic monotheism, in my view, cannot provide a satisfactory defense of God as a loving being allowing and doing such things.

Pantheism?

 

The Pantheist Response:

Pantheism’s explanation of evil is, when push comes to shove, since the only reality is the divine, then the suffering and evil I have imagined (and to a lesser extent experienced), is also divine. 

I am going to refer to the Bhagavad Gita, even though I know it is simplistic to say that the Gita is a pantheistic text, and the reality is much more nuanced. However, it is a source of inspiration for views of the divine that are pantheist.

Just as I love the Bible and the Qur’an as an honest lover, so too with the Bhagavad Gita. There is so much I love in the text, and so many ways it has helped me spiritually. But does it solve the question of evil?

The Gita is set in the context of a battle scene, in which one of the main characters, Arjuna, is distraught by having to fight in a setting in which relatives will kill relatives, and all for a cause that he deems futile.

While I find some of the wisdom Krishna offers to Arjuna deeply moving and helpful, one of the core pieces of wisdom is, in essence, “don’t worry, those who will die in the battle will not really be dead.” 

Yes, there will be bloodshed and agony and grief and loss, but these are actually illusions.

I realize that there is some truth to this, but at the core it does not take the suffering seriously, in my mind. But it is in keeping with the pantheistic view of evil. To rephrase what I said above, pantheism’s explanation for evil is that since everything is divine, so too are the events and outcomes I am calling evil.

To sum up so far:

For monotheism: God is apart from all this, knows about this, and allows this, could do something to intervene but chooses not to do so, and in fact sometimes commands it to happen or causes it directly.

In pantheism: God is not apart from what I see as evil, God is not just allowing it. God is also not just doing evil things or commanding others to do so. The things I call evil in the world are showing me the divine. This evil stuff is also what God is like.

At this point, I admit the atheist point of view makes a lot of sense, does it not?

 

The Atheist Response:

For atheism, there is no divine dimension at all to the question of evil. The only question in terms of “why” evil happens is the question of determinacy. That is, especially in relation to humans, do we have a choice to be brutal and cruel, or is this how we are pre-determined to be? Are our wars, then, just a way that humans work out the process of survival of the fittest with the suffering along the way being just the detritus of evolution? 

To be fully honest, in the face of the data in my meditations, of these three theisms, atheism would be the only option I could stomach. I would have to be either an ontological atheist, one who says there is no such thing as God, or an existential, practical atheist: one who says, “if there is a God, and this is the world, and if pantheism and monotheism as described above were my only options, no thank you, I want nothing to do with you.”

That is in a way like the child of abusive parents who cuts off all contact and for all intents and purposes became an orphan.

 

What Is This Like?

I find myself unable to accept the explanations offered by pantheism and monotheism for why evil exists. I find myself concluding that if the only other theism available to me were atheism, then I would likely, and reluctantly, sadly embrace that conclusion.

I say “sadly”, which inspires me to insert here an attempt to get at the emotional texture of living in a world in which the non-theist or atheist way of seeing things is in fact the way things are. In a way it is a description of how it feels to be a human being who can no longer assume one’s prior belief systems. 

It is a poem called St. Patrick. 

 

St. Patrick

1.

You are silent and still

In a circle of firelight on the cold moor

Hills ripped skinless

By the whip tongued wind

Outside the light’s frail rim

Thin, scaled muscles slide, ripple

And slip from holes into the night

Beneath a greying moon

Spill over stones

         Drool down ledges

                   Over door steps

                            Onto fresh swept floors

The mown fields are writhing nimble poison

The dust paths between crops

Signed in cursive rings

You left the fire

You returned, they were gone

The night lay silent around you

         Your bruised heel left you limping

         You could still hear, ear pressed to stone,

         Faint slithers down deep in the dry river’s veins

         The fire warming your old bones 

         Lights a sliver of trembling light

         On molting skins

 

2.

In my place in this time

The green walls grow scales

 

An old road around the mountain

Is living, sliming, coiling one gasp tighter 

The raw core inside

 

I can hear without strain

The scrape and slither

Down deep where stone is a burning river

In the green earth’s heart

 

I see you there, back then,

Gazing into the fountains of your fire

Where the red ashes ripple the air,

Send flickering waves to lick 

At the shore of black surrounding you.

 

Around me is the scrape of scaled bellies

Scratching nearer in a fatherless night.

I heave cold prayers at a clouded moon

And strike, match after match,

Damp matches on a rain dripping stone.

 

That closing picture of being alone in a fatherless dark, captures for me the emotion of being in a “divine-less” dark. If that is reality, this is what it feels like to me.

 

The Only Options?

But as I said before, these three theisms are not the only options. As Yoda says in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, when Obi-Wan Kenobi says that Luke Skywalker is the last Jedi, the only hope, “No, there is another." 

In this case, there is another theism. Panentheism.

And although I have already admitted that when all is said and done, I will have not good answers, panentheism is the only theism other than atheism that I can embrace in face of evil.

But panentheism has its own unique set of issues in this regard and explaining why this is the theism I can embrace and how I understand it considering the problem of evil, will require an Episode of its own.  

So…I will tackle that next time.