Evil is unnecessary

 

"If you had never tasted a bad apple, you wouldn’t know how to appreciate a good apple.”

The one-second-every-day app sent me this little inspirational nonsense as a notification and I have to say, I think it is actual bull crap.

I haven’t always thought that. I used to be more tragic-romantic in my assessment of the world. But I have experienced many things both good and bad in my life, and at this point it seems like a fallacy that we need bad things in order to appreciate good things.

Certainly, those of us who have experienced near-starvation might appreciate a hefty sandwich in a different way than a person who’s been well-fed their whole life. But let’s not leave all the deep enjoyment of that excellent sandwich to the person who’s suffered more (I think that would technically amount to discrimination and we don’t want anyone here getting canceled). It doesn’t take suffering to appreciate good things.

Of course, if by “appreciate” you mean “existentially contemplate and reflexively dread-grasp good things so tightly it actually prevents you from enjoying them,” then sure, we probably wouldn’t be able to do that without experiencing some bad things. But that is an unhealthy response, and actually a pretty sneaky way of evil still making us suffer, even while not suffering. If all I can do while I’m eating a good, crisp, sunshiny apple is think about that one time when I bit into a putrid one, I am not properly and fully enjoying the experience like I should.

To appreciate the good in my life, I only need to recognize where it came from. I’ve never eaten a bad apple. I have enjoyed many a good one. And when I enjoy a good apple it is a pure enjoyment. My mind doesn’t have to do backflips in order to convince me that the apple is good. It’s just what it is: a good and pleasant and simple thing. On a deeper level I believe that apple, like all wonderful things in all their pure goodness, is a blessing from God.

I won’t go so far as to say that suffering can’t be redeemed in this world. We can learn plenty about life, love, God, and cooking by making mistakes or going through hardship. It can give us perspective and empathy for others. But the suffering itself is not the agent of good–rather, it’s the work of good to counteract suffering that produces beauty from a bad situation.

I can say all this with confidence because I am prone to overthinking and mulling and brooding (and apparently, over-synonymizing). I am prone, when I look at my cats or my sleeping infant, to think of them getting hurt or dying. And it does my brain no good to contemplate evil while something good is right in front of me. So this reminder is for me as much as anyone else:

Le’ts not elevate suffering and evil to this heroic level, like good couldn’t exist without it. Good can ONLY exist in the absence or defeat of evil. Can evil exist without good to corrupt? No. Evil is good’s boring and greedy brother-in-law. It has no originality. All it can do is steal. Good, by contrast, creates from scratch–from before scratch. Don’t give evil the credit for being the next Tchaikovsky when really it’s just a mean-spirited John Cage knocking brooms over in the corner.*

I can only know bad by measuring it against good. Good defines itself, and thereby it is the standard by which we can recognize evil. Not the other way around. If we get that confused, we’re bound to live life focusing on all the wrong things.

*John Cage, for those who aren’t aware, was a 20th century composer (using that term loosely) who once got mad that he was terrible at being a music student, so he left college and made a name for himself by doing things like sitting on stage for four minutes silently or filling a piano with rubber erasers and calling it music.