The Other Side of Evil

It's not new to me when someone asks how I distinguish "good" and "evil" between my characters, and whenever I happen to encounter this question, I feel like I should answer with a straightforward explanation. However, it turns out that my response isn't so "black and white" per say.

Being the psychology nerd that I am, I have studied and sat in on debates about the question of morality and what constitutes as good and evil. And honestly, (surprise!) there is no clear cut answer as to what is considered morally "good" and purely "evil." Thanks to the Disney movies and children's books that we were subjected to when we were younger, we thought that we had this whole "good vs. evil" thing down. Because EVERYONE knows that the bad guys wear black and the good guys were something colorful and light. 

You might also remember learning when you were younger that "good" is everything which is just and fair, while "evil" is everything which is unjust and unfair. But what do you do when you encounter a person (or even a character in a book) who is accordingly "good" but his/her actions are unjust but fair. Can you really call them evil?  Interestingly, research has begun to show that the belief in good and evil is conceptualized to be far more universal than previously thought. 

So how do we reach the conclusion to a near-universal response to a moral dilemma? In a study by psychologist Marc Hauser, he created an online questionnaire in which he presented three moral scenarios (the dependent variables) and one controlled scenario (the independent variable) and asked his subjects to explain their judgments and to justify them.
Here's an example of one conundrum from Hauser's study:
"Denise is riding a train when she hears the engineer suddenly shout that the brakes have failed. The driver then faints from the shock. On the track ahead stand five people who are unable to get off the track in time to avoid being hit by the train. Denise sees a sidetrack leading off to the right onto which she can steer the train, but one person stands on that track as well. She can turn the train, killing the one person, or do nothing and allow the five people to be killed instead."
Hauser wanted to know if it was morally permissible for Denise to switch the train to the sidetrack, sacrificing one but saving five.

The results showed that at least 89% of Hauser's subjects agreed that Denise should steer the train onto the sidetrack, which was the hypothesis that Hauser predicted. In fact, the subjects used their intuition to distinguish between which of the Hauser's scenarios were moral and which were not. It was recorded that the portrayal of each of Hauser's scenarios were shared by members of all cultures, stating that, " . . . it’s less morally permissible to intentionally harm someone than to allow them to be harmed, that it’s less morally permissible to invent a way to cause harm than to cause harm with an existing threat, and that it’s less morally permissible to cause harm directly than to cause it indirectly." Nevertheless, a majority of the subjects could not justify the actions that they had selected for their scenarios. Which suggests that this result may be the typical norm in which we process our morality. 

So where does our moral intuition come from? Well, no one real knows. But it is suggested that we rely not so much on our moral reasons but instead on our gut instinct when we take action. And then after we have made our moral conclusion, we work backwards trying to justify our actions as being morally right. Similar to the teachings in Buddhism, where there isn't a good or bad, but rather a good, or a right.  

Yet, it is no secret that we sometimes behave badly when egocentric impulses cause us to put our needs before the welfare of others. Sometimes we behave in a saintly fashion, when empathy and compassion impel us to put the needs of others before our own, resulting in altruism and kindness. But the real difference between this idea of "good and evil" and the traditional concept is that empathy or a lack of apathy aren't fixed. Although people with a psychopathic personality appear to be unable to develop empathy.

But (as I assume for most of us), empathy – or goodness – is a quality that can be cultivated. Ever heard of the saying, "without evil, goodness can't survive?" If not, the saying essentially touches upon the topic that the fluidity of goodness is recognized by the process of restorative justice. In other words, in order to know who the bad guy is, there must be a polar opposite character. A counter character, a good guy, if you will. A Superman and Lex Luthor kind of pairing. They each give a good and evil identity to the other.   

Or here's a more literary example: 
Remember when you were six and your grandma first introduced you to The Wizard of Oz? Even in the movie, you thought that the Wicked Witch of the West was an evil hag who wanted to kill Dorothy. You were convinced at a young age that the witch was evil to the core. Now, skip ahead sixteen to seventeen years later and you encounter Gregory Maguire's Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. And as you are reading this book you discover that that green witch that you hated in The Wizard of Oz, didn't start off immediately as being evil. In fact, you find out that the Wicked Witch of the West was never evil at all! 

You learn from Wicked that the witch has a name, Elphaba Thropp, and you discover that she is struggling over the fact that she can never make peace with the question of whether her fate has already been predetermined or if she has free will and has been making choices her whole life. Furthermore, she was born with green skin, so she was already at disadvantage of being accepted into society. She had a unsupportive home life, challenging social experiences at Shiz University, and, as an adult, she copes with personal ethics involving animal rights. In addition, Oz is already a corrupt government that tries to employ and later screws Elphaba over by giving her the identity of being wicked because she has the commonly sinister characteristics (her skin in particular) of being evil. 

In the beginning of Elphaba’s life, her nanny is the only person who is not repulsed by Elphaba’s odd green skin, compared to Elphaba's parents who treat her like an outcast. Eventually, the nanny insists on integrating Elphaba socially, declaring, “We must take Elphie to Rush Margins and find some small children for her to play with” (Maguire 61). But Elphaba's mother counters with this speech: “But you have to be jesting! How cruel to, to inflict the outside world on her! A green child will be an open invitation for scorn and abuse. And children are wickeder than adults; they have no sense of restraint. We might as well go throw her in the lake she’s so terrified of” (Maguire 61). But the nanny does not withdraw her argument, and Elphaba joins the playgroup, thus beginning her life of ridicule and social discomfort. The nanny tries to do what is best for Elphaba by introducing her to other children her age, but by pushing Elphaba out into the world, the nanny is also exposing Elphaba to more hardship and discrimination. Therefore, society, in addition to her family, treats Elphaba like an outcast, someone who is inferior to other humans, thus beginning the demise of Elphaba in her predestined path towards wickedness.

The final example comes again from another literary source. Do you remember reading Beowulf  for one of your high school English classes? Remember the monster, Grendel, that Beowulf had to fight off? Well, Beowulf has little psychological depth compared to its successor, Grendel by John Gardner. Gardner deepens the psychological aspects of the Beowulf story by creating thought and dialogue for its famous creature. 

Compared to when you read Beowulf and cheered for the hero to slay the monster, Gardner – like Maguire – adopts Grendel's point of view. And by doing so, the monster becomes more of an adolescent than a fully formed creature. Gardner draws the readers into Grendel's personal quest for understanding his place in the universe. By depicting Grendel's earliest encounters with the random acts of violence toward him by the humans, Gardner gives Grendel a motive for his anger and frustration toward humanity and the world in general. However, a struggle that Grendel faces is his identity. He doesn't quite know where he fits into the world until he overhears the Shaper (a singer) depict Grendel as a monster and an enemy to the Danes. It is the Shaper, Grendel later figures out, who has the power of art and imagination to change people's perceptions about themselves and the world in which they live.  

For Grendel, taking this decisive step in creating his own identity is a liberating, empowering event. In part, Grendel has decided to punish humans for their infuriatingly naïve belief in the righteousness of their moral systems—systems that Grendel knows have no foundation in any kind of universal moral law. On the other hand, Grendel has also chosen to accept the role the Shaper has set for him, as the humans’ ultimate nemesis. He states, "I had become something, as if born again. I had hung between possibilities before, between the cold truths I knew and the heart-sucking conjuring tricks of the Shaper; now that was passed: I was Grendel, Ruiner of Meadhalls, Wrecker of Kings! But also, as never before, I was alone" (Gardner, 80). When Grendel refers to himself as “Ruiner of Meadhalls, Wrecker of Kings,” he replicates the Beowulf poet’s tendency to use a cluster of titles for a single character. Grendel once wished for the Shaper’s vision of an ordered, morally coherent world to be true, even if it meant he had to be the villain. It is difficult to tell, then, whether Grendel is taking the intellectual path or the emotional road the Shaper wants him to follow. Furthermore, Grendel feels more alone than before because, with his act of symbolic aggression, he has severed the possibility of ever joining the humans in anything but an antagonistic relationship. 

Like authors such as Gardner and Maguire, they choose to illustrate their characters motivations from the evil treatments that mankind has acted on them. In other words, the reason why people are evil in the first place is because we (humans) make them evil. The humans were the ones that created an evil identity for these individuals. Both Grendel and Elphaba are left no other choice then accepting society's role for them as evil beings. This stigma followed both characters throughout their early childhood and into their adult lives as they continued to live a life filled with discrimination and social discomfort. Ultimately, due to the predestined fate of these two characters, they are both eventually driven to embody the monstrous identities that have been given to them. 

So you see, good and evil isn't easy to categorize. The presence of the archetypal good and evil figures riddle our literature, media, children's stories and movies without investigative questions into why these characters are the way they are. Notably, the grey area between good and evil binary is now more prominent in society than ever, but is widely neglected. So until we finally understand the grey area between good and evil and transition to a modern morality, we risk losing what makes us human: empathy. 

I mean, this nice enough looking kid ended up becoming that evil guy in Star Wars. 

Sources:

Psychology Today by Alex Lickerman, M.D.: http://www.psychologytoday.com/collections/201405/morality-matters/the-truth-about-morality

Maguire, Gregory. Wicked: The Life and times of the Wicked Witch of the West: A Novel. New York: Regan, 1995. Print.

Gardner, John. Grendel. New York: Knopf, 1971. Print.