Intelligence, Sanity, Good, and Evil

Posted on August 5, 2004 in Accountability Morals & Ethics War

An obstacle to getting much of anywhere when you face the bizarre convictions of the American population regarding just about anything –most recently the war in Iraq — is our belief that only stupid people get taken in by lies. Skeptic Michael Shermer is fond of noting that among MENSA members one finds many truly crackpot beliefs, shored up by their group identity as the “top 2% of intelligent minds in the country”.

If you tell a disciple of a fringe thinker that he or she demonstrates cultic thinking, you will usually be greeted with disbelief. Cults, he or she will insist, are for stupid people. “I am not a stupid person, therefore what I speak about is the New Age which has not yet been understood by you lesser lights. I am the cutting edge, the misunderstood one. In time Science will prove me right.”

Or maybe not.

Intelligence of the kind measured by MENSA examinations does not grant one command of critical thinking just as knowledge of the Bible, chapter and verse, does not necessarily make a good Christian or Jew or Muslim. Cleverness may be our own worst enemy when it comes to facing up to our deficiencies in thinking. An unchecked faith in our intelligence — just like an unchecked faith in anything — may be our own worst enemy. It is in the name of intelligence, I feel, that we make some of our greatest blunders.

Principal among these for me today is how we view Evil. Many smart people believe that Evil is something out there, a force in its own right. I hazard that evil doesn’t have a distinct identity but stands — like the Selfish Gene — as a metaphor for impulses that lead to harmful consequences for ourselves and others. From the perspective of Science and rational debate, we profit ourselves best by thinking in terms of Harm. From the perspective of morality, we become most effective in reducing our own collusion with others who act wickedly by recognizing that we, too, can wreak pain and deprivation on others.

I do not equate Evil with insanity or unreasonableness. I think the human mind is capable of making logical cases for nearly everything it sets out to do. When the Nazis moved to exterminate 16 million people in the camps, they proceeded logically and reasonably. They identified groups of people as a problem. When people become a problem, we see them like termites in the woodwork or rats in the attic: eradication follows.

And this kind of thought led to the Holocaust.

It is not for me, an untrained amateur, to diagnose George W. Bush as Carol Wolman MD did back in October of 2002. I think it profits us nothing to worry about Bush’s mental stability or whether he is a sociopath or a narcissist or working out an Oedipal conflict with his father because does explain why his team of advisers, prominent Democrats in Congress, and the American people went along with his plan to invade Iraq despite the absolute dearth of evidence for weapons of mass destruction. That, I feel is the question which deserves the most serious study in the years to come and the answer to that, I suspect, will sound much like what social scientists discovered about those who went along with Hitler during the Holocaust.

And, if we are brave and self-critical, we shall realize that stupidity played no role. I believe that if we were to survey MENSA members, we will find plenty of certifiably smart people who still think that there are weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. We will find people who have no outward evidences of debilitating mental illness who share in this belief. That should dismiss the notion for all time that these dangerous eccentricities arise from stupidity or insanity — if we are brave enough, even those of us who fought this war from the moment it was suggested, to face the fact that very little separates us in the way of intelligence or sanity from those who capitulated to the rhetoric of late 2002 and early 2003.

Opponents to the war shall be most effective by acknowledging that sane and smart people endorse perverse and counter-productive projects. Like alcoholics, they must confess their own struggles with the Beast of the Apocalypse — if you want a nice Western metaphor. Good hearted, stable, and intelligent people went along. They affirmed the president’s right to commit acts of evil against the Iraqi people and, even now that it has been shown that there were no stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and that our troops have done harm to the Iraqi people, they continue to find ways to justify the past.

Which psychologists have known for many years. Instead of admitting that we were wrong, we will try to make the wrong answer we formulated in the first place the right one. We will sanctify it. We will emblazon it as sacrifice and resort to optimism. Everyone of us does this at one time or another. But it remains possible to rise above it, to apply critical thinking to the facts and, as a balm for our hurt feelings — at our sense of betrayal by ourselves for not having seen these lies passed on by the Usurper in the White House — to forgive ourselves. True forgiveness demands of us not a redefinition of how we were right, but a departure from the ideas and actions which led us to grave wrongs.

I will go nowhere if I see myself as anything more than human when talking to human beings about how through our armed forces, we as a nation wreaked evil. The first thing to go must be this notion that people are wholly or partially evil. What must replace it is the understanding that anyone can commit acts of destruction or affirm them with good intentions. It’s time to separate the intentions from the results insofar that the goodness of the intentions does not erase the fact of the evil consequences. We must all realize that intelligence, sanity, and good intentions do not serve as hedges against state terrorism. Our optimism and our faith in these stand as the greatest barrier to our seeing our part in what continues to happen in the name of Liberty in Iraq and elsewhere. When we realize as Gandhi did that whether war “is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy” that the victims are no less dead or maimed, then we will find our consciences and curb the evil of which we as a society, a culture, and an aggregation of individuals can effect on the persons and property of others.

I, too, suffer from this because I, too, am human. But I know that it happens and that awareness of my humanity saves me from error much of the time.