If you happened on this newsletter mid-hatescroll, en route from one repulsive exhibit of the Current Bad Thing to another, I may be about to spoil your fun. Or at least to interrupt the wide-eyed dopamine binge that often passes for fun online, a tortured imitation of the genuine article sustained by a steady intravenous drip of other people’s offensive misbehavior. I know you’re not supposed to “yuck anyone’s yum” anymore, but forgive me for a moment if I make so bold as to yum your yuck. Stick with me; you might even like it, and anyway it’s free. If you’re not convinced you may return without further interference to your regularly scheduled two-minutes’ cringe.
The internet doesn’t run on electricity or on servers: it runs on the inexhaustibly renewable resource of our limitless indignation at one another’s mistaken beliefs and destructive life choices. This is well known. But it only recently occurred to me why exactly that particular drug has proved so intoxicating, and so deadly. No one can dispute the high, of course: there is a queasy satisfaction in loudly deprecating the worst of what our species has lately devised. And it’s not as if the well of depravity is ever likely to run dry. Ailing societies furnish no end of flagrant ugliness.
We console ourselves in thinking that by dunking on the Bad Guys, we distance ourselves from their Badness: even if only tacitly, we imagine that by naming evil for what it is, we become good. And that is a thought so tantalizingly almost-true that it could only have been dreamed up in the laboratories of hell as the latest in self-deceptive technology. Because of course really trying to do and love the good—really seeking virtue—does lead us to know and identify evil by contrast. When you can say of something, “this is best,” you can also say of something else, “and that is worse.”
But the devil’s secret trick is that this doesn’t actually work the other way around. If you begin with an example of evil, you can’t in fact work backward to a standard of the ideal. The reason for this is to be found as much in the study of physics as it is in Aristotle and Augustine. The second law of thermodynamics states that heat only moves spontaneously in one direction: from a warm body to a cold one. Another version of the same idea is that “entropy”—the measure of disorder and disarray—naturally increases.
Release gas into a chamber and it will diffuse into a general haze: it won’t coil back in upon itself to its original compact arrangement. By many classical accounts we ought to be able to play the tape backward, deriving an ordered state from a chaotic one. But like the angel with his flaming sword at the gates of Eden, the second law blocks our journey homeward. You can’t un-stir milk out of porridge or recover the scattered sequins of a torn gown. Broken things bear only inconclusive hints of the order that once made them whole.
Evil is a kind of entropy, an unmaking. St. Augustine writes in his enchiridion that vice is like a parasite on virtue, twisting and perverting what was once lovely. “Every real thing in nature is good. Nothing evil exists in itself, but only as an evil aspect of some actual entity.” Once you know what good looks like, you can imagine all sorts of ways for it to go wrong. But if you only know what evil looks like, you cannot always see your way clear to making things right. It’s like trying to draw on a sheet of paper that is already covered over with a tangle of dark scribbles, working out how to unravel the confusion into an image.
There follows the eerie consequence that evil doesn’t even fully know itself, whereas good knows both itself and evil altogether. A wall can exist without a hole in it; the hole cannot exist without a wall to puncture. To be brave, or wise, or self-controlled is to be something; to be cowardly or rash or foolish is only to fail at being something. It is so easy to be enraged at injustice and to despise one’s enemies. But resentment burns the image of the hated thing into your retinas, keeps it always before your mind. And if you can’t clear your vision of your enemy’s leering and detested face, you are not the one who’s winning.
We are so sick with saying what is wrong. I wonder how many of us can say anymore what is good. C.S. Lewis had his devil Screwtape seethe over a moment of inattention on the part of his demonic protégé—not because the man he was supposed to damn had spent time praying or even doing anything especially admirable, but because he had spent time away from the city on a walk with a book he genuinely liked. I wonder if sincere pleasure, even of the most apparently inconsequential kind, has some balm of Gilead in it, some aroma of a good that evil cannot even touch.
Rejoice evermore,
Spencer
PS for more on the classical virtues, listen in on my new series at Young Heretics.