Good and Evil at the Panto

When I was about eight years old I was taken to the pantomime.  I found it a troubling experience.

There was a Demon King, and a Good Fairy.  They were, of course, antagonists.  We booed the one and cheered the other. And in the end the Good Fairy won the day, and the hero and heroine were united, and all was well.  Except that, towards the end of the show, the Demon King and the Good Fairy were on stage together, and they sang a duet.  The gist of which was, each of them accepted that they could never entirely get rid of the other, and that in some sense both were necessary.  “A tiny drop of saintliness” sang the Good Fairy; “Not too much!” interjected the Demon King.  And then, in unison, “For both to flourish, there must be a pair!”

This was very perplexing to me, and disturbing.  All of my religious education had emphasised that the only thing to do with evil was to reject it, and that we should hope for a final, definitive victory of good over evil.  But here was a new set of ideas:  good and evil would be with us always; you could not get rid of either of them; indeed, without evil you wouldn’t be able to have goodness (and vice versa); and so what was called for was some kind of co-existence. 

I was brought up with a Fall theory of good and evil.  A good God had made a good world.  Some of God’s creatures then became evil, because they fell from their original state.  In the end, however, God would defeat the forces of evil.  In this worldview God (ultimate reality) is altogether good; evil only emerges at the level of contingent or created reality.  Good and evil, therefore, are not at all on the same level:  the former is how things really are, the latter is a sort of lie; the former will endure, the latter will not.

The world view that I was encountering for the first time in the pantomime was a Dualist theory of good and evil.  In this world view, neither good not evil has priority.  Each is woven into the fabric of things from the very beginning.  They fight, of course:  but nevertheless, ultimate reality is to be found in an overarching cosmic order in which they each play a part.

Both world views can make for good stories.  For instance, the Lord of the Rings is a Fall story: Sauron was not evil in the beginning, but became evil, being (in effect) a fallen angel.  Unsurprisingly, the story reflects its author’s Catholicism.  Star Wars, on the other hand, is Dualist.  The ultimate reality is the Force, and it has both a light and a dark side.  There is no suggestion that the Force started off being wholly light, and that something went wrong.  As far as we can tell, the light and the dark sides were there always.

There’s nothing to stop us enjoying both Lord of the Rings and Star Wars, despite their different cosmologies.  Where things can get a bit more problematic, however - and where practical questions can arise - is when it comes to your own capacity for evil.  How should you deal with this?  Should you expect to find evil within yourself?  Should you be aiming - either through your own willpower, or with external help - to weaken and ultimately eliminate it?  Or should you accept evil as an inescapable part of yourself, and declare an inner truce?

I encountered this dilemma in my early 30s, when I spent some time seeing a Jungian therapist.  I came across both the Jungian idea of the Shadow, and Jung’s theory of evil.  Put shortly, I found (and still found) the former very helpful, and I balked (and still balk) at the latter.  

The Shadow, as I understand it, stands for all of the aspects of yourself that you would prefer not to know about. It can certainly include capacities for evil of which you are not aware, but it can also include hidden abilities or capacities that would be of huge benefit to you and others, if only you could get access to them.  An unreasonable or disproportionate dislike for someone else may be an indication that you can see your Shadow in them.  The Shadow can turn up in dreams as threatening presences, or as “outsider” figures (beggars, tramps, convicts).  All of this seems to me a thoroughly fruitful basis for self-examination and self-understanding.  This kind of work is not necessarily self-indulgent or narcissistic:  it is tricky work, but done well it can be an act of kindness to other people, especially those with whom you are in close relationships.

In relation to evil, though, Jung is undoubtedly a Dualist.  His picture of God (see especially “Answer to Job”) is that God has both a light and a dark side.  His picture of the healthy human psyche is that it likewise encompasses both good and evil, and that to try to eliminate the evil in yourself is both impossible and unwise.

There’s an early Star Trek episode that could certainly be taken as illustrating this kind of Dualism at the level of the individual psyche. In “The Enemy Within” (series 1, episode 5) a transporter malfunction causes Captain Kirk to be split into a good and bad version of himself. Good Kirk turns out to be indecisive and therefore useless as a commanding officer; bad Kirk is a sociopathic sexual predator.  Eventually Kirk is reunited into a single being and resumes his command.

My problem with the Dualist way of reading this story, is that if the energies that would (under certain conditions) make you a sexual predator are integrated with the rest of your personality so as to make you a very effective commanding officer, then it is hard to see in what sense those energies are still evil.  And during my time in therapy I came to adopt a view that departed from Jung’s Dualism.  I saw evil as a consequence of splitting and disintegration within the human personality.  To the extent that the energies that had become split off could be reintegrated, then the result was not a balance between good and evil, but the cessation of evil.  On this basis, I arrived at a kind of compromise: I could work with Jung’s ideas about the Shadow, without accepting his Dualism.

Over the last few years I’ve been going to Quaker meetings, and as a result I have found myself reflecting on these themes once more.  The sustained intentional collective silence of the Quaker meeting is a medium in which you can become aware of memories, thoughts, desires, that you have hidden away and that are not to your credit.  Quakerism includes an encounter with the Shadow.  In the words of the first of the Advices and Queries, the light “shows us our darkness” as well as bringing us to to new life.

What are we to make of this dialectic of light and darkness?  There is a passage in Quaker Faith and Practice that I have found particularly helpful, and from which I have taken the title for this blog.  Anne Bidder (at §21.08) is quoted as follows:

We are all, yes, I believe, all a mixture of good and bad, and we are not always good at recognising in this magpie mixture what is bad and what is good. Our need is to accept ourselves as a whole, and offer that whole to God, leaving it to God ‘unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid’ to evaluate the good and bad in us. The glorious miracle is that, if we can do this, God can still use us, with all our faults and weaknesses, if we are willing to be used.

I very much like the idea of a “magpie mixture”.  I like the idea that our own judgments as to what is good and bad in ourselves are unreliable.  For instance, what we think of as a “good”aspect may be self-serving; what we think of as an “evil” aspect may be nothing more than healthy self-protection.  This scepticism about our own judgments can help us to avoid self-denigration or self-justification, and can move us away from experiencing ourselves as split or sundered.

One trap in relation to any kind of religious or spiritual practice is that we prepare ourselves for it by an inward process that it the equivalent of putting on our Sunday best.  We turn up wearing our holy face, armoured against anything that might change us.  We go forward on the basis of (what we think of as) our “good” side, presenting it confidently, secure in the sense that it doesn’t need mending.  And meantime (what we think of as) our “bad” side has been left at home, locked in the attic, and so has no prospect of ever being mended.  

Whereas in Quaker practice it seems to me that whatever we become aware of in ourselves (whether apparently good or bad) needs to be brought, without judgment, into the life of the meeting; brought into the silence, and into whatever it is that works among us and upon us within the silence.  Here is my working assumption: everything that we find within ourselves will be in need of transformation; but nothing will be incapable of being transformed.