(Click title above.)Regardless of whether one favors the word “evil,” experience establishes that some persons, beings, or patterns must be so discordantly constituted at some fundamental level of mathematical essence as to be incorrigibly unable or unwilling to be recast in respect any wider sort of existing harmony or holography.
Psychologists often fancy that empiricism may eventually lead us to comprehend the problem of evil under a more predictive or rehabilitative model. However, science is not yet there, and seems unlikely ever to enable civilization to remove from its midst the problem of evil.
Meantime, “evil” can be as handy a label as any, to refer to such persons or tendencies as seem beyond hope of civilizing redemption. Hereafter, who can say whether aspects of evil in each of us may call for being reworked, perpetually, in a higher sort of karmic body shop? Perhaps, some (evil?) aspects of existential angst forever challenge (troll?) even God.
2 comments:
Re: “The idea that obscenity can be defined by contemporary community standards has always been controversial.” (See http://www.talkleft.com/story/2008/6/24/04328/2864#19.)
Well, to begin with, if you believe in any moral basis whatsoever, you do not seek to justify what we ought to do based only on what we are doing. Such a standard, based mainly on what is, is no standard at all. It is just blowing in the wind. Rather, by definition, to aspire beyond ourselves, to what we should do, we measure also against ideals, rather than only against facts.
A better test for proper standards pertains not to how we presently meet our existential challenges, but to how we should seek to improve and surpass ourselves in how we evolve and morph in meeting our existential challenges.
In this day and age, we cannot enforce obscenity standards by prosecuting consenting adults regarding their bedroom behaviors. Yet, for promoting moral exemplars, especially when it comes to child abuse, shame retains an important function.
Respecting and enforcing community sensibilities regarding ideals, rather than community behaviors, is a more important standard. For a civilized community to accept behaviors that debase it is for a civilization to devolve towards ever deeper debasement. We become what we aspire to be — or what we fail to aspire not to be.
About Evil and Trolls:
Quote snippets from http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/magazine/03trolls-t.html?pagewanted=4&em :
Weev told me about his day — he’d lost $10,000 on the commodities market, he claimed — and summarized his philosophy of “global ruin.” “We are headed for a Malthusian crisis,” he said, with professorial confidence. “Plankton levels are dropping. Bees are dying. There are tortilla riots in Mexico, the highest wheat prices in 30-odd years.” He paused. “The question we have to answer is: How do we kill four of the world’s six billion people in the most just way possible?” He seemed excited to have said this aloud.
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To build a robust global network with no central authority, engineers were encouraged to write code that could “speak” as clearly as possible yet “listen” to the widest possible range of other speakers, including those who do not conform perfectly to the rules of the road. The human equivalent of this robustness is a combination of eloquence and tolerance — the spirit of good conversation. Trolls embody the opposite principle. They are liberal in what they do and conservative in what they construe as acceptable behavior from others. You, the troll says, are not worthy of my understanding; I, therefore, will do everything I can to confound you.
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Why inflict anguish on a helpless stranger? It’s tempting to blame technology, which increases the range of our communications while dehumanizing the recipients. Cases like An Hero and Megan Meier presumably wouldn’t happen if the perpetrators had to deliver their messages in person. But while technology reduces the social barriers that keep us from bedeviling strangers, it does not explain the initial trolling impulse. This seems to spring from something ugly — a destructive human urge that many feel but few act upon, the ambient misanthropy that’s a frequent ingredient of art, politics and, most of all, jokes. There’s a lot of hate out there, and a lot to hate as well.
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That the Internet is now capacious enough to host an entire subculture of users who enjoy undermining its founding values is yet another symptom of its phenomenal success. It may not be a bad thing that the least-mature users have built remote ghettos of anonymity where the malice is usually intramural. But how do we deal with cases like An Hero, epilepsy hacks and the possibility of real harm being inflicted on strangers?
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Many trolling practices, like prank-calling the Hendersons and intimidating Kathy Sierra, violate existing laws against harassment and threats. The difficulty is tracking down the perpetrators. In order to prosecute, investigators must subpoena sites and Internet service providers to learn the original author’s IP address, and from there, his legal identity.
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If we can’t prosecute the trolling out of online anonymity, might there be some way to mitigate it with technology? One solution that has proved effective is “disemvoweling” — having message-board administrators remove the vowels from trollish comments, which gives trolls the visibility they crave while muddying their message.
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