Digging Deeper into Supernatural Evil

A Tonic Discussion on my recent article

In addition to MindMatters, I also do (almost) weekly Tonic Discussions with fellow Substackers

Daniel D

,

Doctor Hammer

,

Grant Smith

,

John Carter

,

L.P. Koch

, and

Mark Bisone

. This week’s episode was inspired by my article on supernatural evil:

And Mark’s latest:

Damage Control

Here is the talk. Please take some time to listen and subscribe so you never miss the experience of our brain thoughts slamming directly into your grey matter in raw, audiovisual form. (Audio available here, among others.)

In the last minutes of the talk I tried to tie some thoughts together from the preceding discussion. Here is an expanded version of that.

Several of us agreed with the idea that there is an asymmetry in awareness when it comes to good and evil. One who is truly good can understand what it is to be and do evil. But one who is evil cannot truly see or comprehend the good. There is a blindness inherent in evil. And perhaps that blindness is reflected physically in the form and function of the individual who does evil—appearing as damage and dysfunction in certain areas of the brain, for instance.

Riffing on Mark’s article, we don’t know that the abnormalities we see in psychopaths (for example) are the cause of mental, emotional, and behavioral dysfunction, or if the dysfunction causes the abnormality. Aside from clear-cut examples of traumatic brain injury, where external cause and internal effect are clearer, could we be seeing the result of evil in the brain? Is this what your brain looks like on evil?

I think that’s a definite possibility, though I still think that genetics probably goes a long way to preparing the ground, so to speak. I do think that some individuals are essentially born evil—or at the very least, born with a very strong predisposition for it. Perhaps the brain abnormalities seen later in life are the product of repeated thoughts and choices that leave their mark—atrophied, perhaps, through disuse. Or some brains are just much easier to damage than others.

But whatever the cause, it’s still a stunning picture of the blindness that characterizes extreme forms of “Dark Triad” psychology. Psychopaths in particular do not “see” normal human morality. They are emotionally and morally blind. The nuances of human affect and relationships escape them. And when they see outward signs of these in others—like expressions of love, compassion, tenderness, tact, inner conflict, self-sacrifice, cooperation, self-restraint, honesty—they don’t register as they do for us. They see such things as ridiculous fantasies and weaknesses to be exploited. They are blind to all the things we consider most human and hold them in disdain. They don’t feel these things for themselves, and thus can’t recognize them in others.

But what is the deeper significance of this blindness? I think it actually masks a deeper awareness. To be blind to something is only to emphasize it by contrast. On some level, evil must recognize goodness, even if it never reaches conscious awareness—even simply to identify for itself what it is not. Without some unconscious awareness, evil might casually stumble upon the good, and that doesn’t seem to happen in practice. Instead, they seem to have a kind of negative awareness.

This is similar, but not identical, to ordinary denial, in which a person will consciously be unable to acknowledge something that causes them emotional pain, even if it’s staring them in the face. Maybe it’s the fact that their partner is cheating on them, their father is actually a notorious criminal, they really do talk too much, or simply that something they’ve believed since childhood about the world has turned out to be a lie. But the very fact of their denial suggests that at some level they are aware of it—aware enough to avoid it.

This is because perception is selection. Out of the vast quantity of sensory information we receive every instant, only a small fraction of it gets presented to us—our inner observer. We focus on objects with our vision. The harder we focus, the less we see that is outside that narrow field of interest. The same goes for our other senses like hearing and touch. We aren’t always conscious of the sensation of our weight on the ground or chair we occupy—because we don’t always need to be. And sometimes your partner literally hasn’t heard you. He’s just been focusing his attention elsewhere. And everyone has experienced tuning out a conversation, only to ask, “What was that?” when asked a question, and then for the question to register the instant after you’ve asked what it was.

But the phenomenon I have in mind goes even deeper than denial or dimly heard conversation. In the discussion, I referenced the similar ideas of Alfred North Whitehead (Process and Reality) and James C. Carpenter (First Sight). The basic idea is this: on the most fundamental level of experience, everything is aware of everything else. In the case of the simplest entities—subatomic particles and atoms—each one takes in a snapshot of the entirety of the cosmos. All the positions and states of all other particles, and all their histories. It then coordinates its own self-creation by reference to this extended continuum, incorporating those data relevant to it, and ignoring the rest. The result is the stable spacetime of our everyday experience.

For Whitehead these selections of data are “negative prehensions,” data incompatible or irrelevant for the prehending subject (positive prehensions are the compatible and relevant ones). As he put it in Process and Reality: “every entity in the actual world of a concrescent actuality has some gradation of real relevance to that concrescence” (p. 41); “The actual entity terminates its becoming in one complex feeling involving a completely determinate bond with every item in the universe, the bond being either a positive or a negative prehension” (p. 44); “In fact if we allow for degrees of relevance, and for negligible relevance, we must say that every actual entity is present in every other actual entity” (p. 50).

Whitehead came to his conclusions in the course of developing a philosophy of science consistent with relativity theory and quantum mechanics (among much else, like human cognition and perception). Carpenter, by contrast, came to his ideas from the opposite direction, through a study of human psychology and parapsychology (psi). For him, on the deepest level of the unconscious, every human mind is aware of everything else—part of an “extended universe of meaning.” But through a process of selection (which he calls weighting followed by signing), the self highlights those data of the most immediate relevance to the subject at hand, which is usually physical survival, and ignores the rest (negative signing). As he puts it:

Our unconscious psychological processes seek to construct reliable experience and to perform adaptive behaviors, all in accord with our basic needs and intentions. Direct sensory experience of events and our sensory awareness of trusted others—the things they say and imply by what they do—are our most reliable sources of information for constructing experience and behavior. The mind will turn naturally and habitually toward them when they are available. This is why intense engagement with the purely implicit information of psi is normally short-lived. The mind moves automatically and quickly on to what it understands to be most reliable. (p. 61)

… weighting refers to a process of unconsciously determining a degree of importance [what Whitehead called relevance] to some element of potential experience. Signing means determining whether a heavily weighted thing will be incorporated positively or negatively in experience and action [what Whitehead called positive or negative prehension in the process of concrescence]. Switching refers to a change in the direction of signing. (p. 62)

Denial is a negative signing of heavily weighted information. Another example, but in the realm of action, not perception: “For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing” (Romans 7:19). Here’s Carpenter:

… the object of my intention is first weighted unconsciously, in terms of its degree of pertinence to my personal hierarchy of unconscious intentions in the moment. If it is highly pertinent for my most regnant unconscious intention, it is weighted heavily. If it is weighted heavily, then it is signed either positively (as being congruent with my uppermost unconscious intention and my unfolding understanding of the situation) or negatively (as incongruent with those things). If it is unconsciously judged to be congruent with my intention and situation, the action tendency will be signed positively, and the physical process … will be set in motion toward the expression of my intended act. If it is judged to be incongruent with my dominant unconscious intention, the action tendency will be signed negatively and the physical process will be set in motion in some way contrary to my conscious wish. For example, … we see this with the alcoholic, who remembers that he must stop drinking as he opens a fresh bottle. Despite his conscious wish, his dominant unconscious intention to drink preempts the moment and suppresses the behavioral alternative of pushing the bottle away. (pp. 94-95)

The deepest evil is weighted strongly, and signed positively—to the extent that the alternative is either simply weighted as irrelevant, or weighted just as strongly (as a contrast) and signed negatively (thus producing an action contrary to the good). This is the awareness evil has of the good. It may not be able to see it and know it consciously, but it recognizes enough to aim its destructive tendencies in the right direction. (Again, evil corrupts the good—it doesn’t accidentally seek out fellow travelers in a blind search.)

In this schema is hidden the natural law. In our discussion, Grant noted the disagreements and uncertainties we have as humans regarding what exactly the natural might be. We may agree that it exists, but what is it, precisely?

In a natural law framework, our “personal hierarchy of unconscious intentions” is embedded within a more expansive hierarchy, at the top of which is teleology. “God’s will.” That will, or aim, is weighted in a particular way in any given situation. Whitehead believed that this is how God operates in the world. He provides the “initial aims” for everything—those intentions which would be in total harmony with God’s vision of the cosmic order. Because of our freedom, however, our own personal hierarchy can conflict with this initial aim. We can do what we want to, even to our own detriment and ultimate dissolution. We (and other beings, like x) can weight information and intentions strongly in the opposite direction, and sign them positively to make them manifest in the world.

And there is the key word: detriment. Damage. It turns out the natural law is staring us right in the face. Evil causes damage. It leaves scars. And those scars happen to turn up on brain scans. This is what I discussed in my article, where I concluded: “In short, psychobiological evil represents the primary earthly manifestation or agent of metaphysical evil.” This was the observation that stunned Lobaczewski. The acts that humanity considers evil are (almost?) always tied to some form of brain dysfunction, whether inherited/developmental, acquired by traumatic brain injury, or induced by psychological contagion and abuse. This “scientific” approach just so happens to correlate very strongly with our common understanding of the natural law, or morality.¹

One final thought. During the conversation, I cited unconscious awareness as the reason why salvation is possible. I think Carpenter shows how this is the case. Salvation requires metanoia, literally changing one’s mind. I mentioned Carpenter’s weighting and signing above, but not switching (changing the direction of signing, i.e. which intentions are actualized, and which perceptions brought to awareness). Basically, the purer and more consistent one’s intention, the less switching. “Something assigned less weight will be more subject to switching” (p. 28).

Put another way: the better you are, the more consistently you will be good. The worse you are, the more consistently you will be bad. And the more ambivalent and distractible you are, the more you will switch back and forth, averaging out to zero.² The question is how to switch from either ambivalence (fast, canceling-out switching) or strong evil to strong good (slow switching). Easy! It just involves changing one’s “dominant concerns” within the very depths of one’s being.³

Here’s how Carpenter describes people who are disposed to switch rapidly: “tend to approach situations cognitively and analytically, lack consistent purpose and motivation, take a detached-observer posture toward most situations, are chronically ambivalent, are cognitively disorganized, are highly distractible.” Hello, left brain. And those who switch slowly: “approach situations globally and holistically, are strongly and consistently purposive, engage themselves wholeheartedly in situations, are not overly self-doubting or uncertain, are well-integrated cognitively, are prone to hold focus purposively and not become distracted, are dissociative (when in certain states)” (p. 29). Hello, right brain!

Metanoia is switching. It involves shifting one’s inner eye towards the divine natural law. In order to do that, one’s existing hierarchy of values and intentions (one’s dominant mental structure) must be broken down. And this process is largely right-brained in nature.

I’ll leave readers to tease these last paragraphs out in the comments!

Now, if you haven’t yet, please…

and…

1. That’s not to say that identifiable damage will always correlate with evil, however. Like the phenomenon of blindness, it may be asymmetrical. There will be some for whom the damage is not enough to sway their will. So while perhaps all who do evil may show signs of damage, not all who show signs of damage will necessarily do evil. In fact, some people can do well enough without much of a brain at all.

2. This is coincidentally very close to Dabrowski’s primary integration, secondary integration, and unilevel disintegration…

3. …and here enters positive multilevel disintegration, i.e. the death experienced by the Apostle Paul.