Naughty But Nice
Musings on Good and Evil That
Lead to an Unanswered Question

1. On the One Hand…
Yes, we’re naughty. Humans are naughty. Sometimes, very naughty. Santa knows. Mommy and Daddy know. Certainly the major gods of most religions know. And the various systems—legal, penal, metaphysical, esthetic, psychological, anthropological—we’ve constructed to deal with, acknowledge, and even control our naughtiness are without number.

We all, in our heart of hearts, know of our naughtiness.

Given our penchant for self-aggrandizement and faced with a particularly bad run of naughtiness, the drama-queen in us comes out. Often what we see in others is, we think, not mere naughtiness. The bad guys, we readily decide, are not merely naughty. They are evil. Now and then, for instances of special malfeasance, we’ll even capitalize it: Evil.

To use an almost flippant, cute term like "naughty" is not to belittle our badness, nor to whitewash the enormous suffering we cause each other when the tough get going. I use the term to avoid the almost irresistible temptation that arises when we in our thinking scale way, way up to "Evil." The thought proceeds like this:

I know I’M not Evil but, my God, look at what xxx did, he/they surely are Evil.

Such thinking gets us nowhere, partly because such categorical judgments are wrong and partly because they allow me to pull out all the stops—damn the merciful, full speed ahead!—in responding to those who, I’ve decided, are Evil.

2. On the Other Hand…
We’re also nice. Sometimes very nice.

Here too, on special occasions or for really special people(s), we go right over the top and begin using terms like "god-like," "divinely inspired." In circumstances of great need we’ll even find one person through whom the deity in fact supposedly speaks directly to us. Rarest of all, we have been known to conjure with stories of God-as-man.

We know this, our niceness (though we’re very reluctant to acknowledge either the truth of it or that we know it is the case).

Our niceness, like a garden plant that doesn’t need tending, gets on all right by itself. Our naughtiness, because it does sometimes gets completely out of hand (war, greed, power), grabs and holds our attention, has in fact held it for as long as we’ve had attention to be held.

Knowing we’re naughty, we have across the millennia cast about for various ways of dealing with our built-in and often bloody behavioral errancy. For a long time kingship (or some form thereof) served us if not well then at least better than anything else we’d come up with. Slowly a different system of governance evolved, one of shared power and the rule of law not men.

3. So Here We Are
Now several centuries along, we can see that, while such a system works pretty well, it too is subject to abuse and misuse when the urge to naughtiness becomes especially strong.

What happens generally is we dress up Naughty, call it "Nice", and get on with whatever nasty (or naughty) business it is we’ve decided is the right thing to do.

What we’ve needed all along was a firm but understanding home-room teacher, or, given the complexity and diversity of the world, a bunch of firm but understanding home-room teachers. Out of whole cloth we’ve in fact created a number of such overseers, sometimes benevolent, sometimes extremely punitive, sometimes fickle, sometimes rigorously demanding. Being deities, such creatures are best-known by their often puzzling distance, absence, and general disinterest in things human.

Now and then, political, economic, and religious factors line up in such a way that one person is able to grasp regional reigns of power and enact his various naughtinesses on a large stage.

Events and technological advances created a situation after the end of World War II that produced growing affluence, which in turn led to more full stomachs which led to the well-known rising tide that lifts all ships.

The fact that fewer of us were hungry didn’t mean the naughtiness had gone away. For some decades shouts of "Evil, evil!" were hurled back and forth over the ideological wall of communism/capitalism.

When that wall fell, things briefly looked pretty good, naughtiness-wise.

Alas, three of the oldest home-room teachers were just waiting in the hall, their ancient, intolerant words ready for the shouting: My god is bigger, better, smarter, more powerful than your god!

Jehovah, Allah, and the Christian God (truly a match made in heaven) now have at each other daily and often without restraint in that patch of the planet known as the Holy Land.

The 20th century raised naughtiness to an unprecedented level: blood flowed from 200,000,000 bodies. Unable to bear shared responsibility, we decided we had hit the trifecta of personal misbehavior. We made all the trouble the fault of three bad guys (Stalin, Hitler, Mao) and even anointed one of them the very King of Evil.

Now we’re doing it again in a quarrel over ancient promises about desert land. One side makes George W. Bush Satan, with. they say. a whole nation of devil-helpers in the form of Israel. The other side makes Osama bin Laden Satan.

Where in this dangerous, bloody Gordian knot of naughtiness and suffering is nice? Nowhere. Everywhere you look, parading under the finest slogans on both sides, you see only naked self-interest and expediency dressed in the divine right of the violence of the fitfully wronged.