Letting Go of "Good and Evil"

When I was growing up, my playmates and I could not toss about an epithet so vile, humilating and revolting (and still not be punished for “out-and-out cussing”), as to call the hapless victim “black.” If the trespass were egregious enough, we might even tag the target of our attack “black as sin.” Heavy, self-hating rancor lingered in the air like a noxious odor. Fortunately, the black power, “black is beautiful” movement of the sixties, put an end to such esteem-damaging vilifications. But, I now realize something I could not possibly have known or understood as a child.

My African ancestors did not equate blackness with sin. They equated it with the richness of the fertile soil and the eternal mysteries of the cosmos. If anything paleness meant sickness and death. But even so, white and black were not enemies, battling it out in dualistic opposition. They were merely colors in the richly-hued spectrum of life.

As a historian, I can actually define the moment in time in which the African captives became transformed into Negro slaves. Their Americanization can be traced to the adoption of the dualistic ethical system of their captors. Western dualism describes a moral and ethical code that divides reality into two opposing camps, one of which is considered to be morally superior to the other. The forces of light are pitted in perpetual battle against the forces of darkness. The sacred combats the secular. The animate struggles against the tug of the inanimate. The mind attuned to one’s God nature wars with the animal tendencies of the body. This dualistic system of ordering the elements of the world trains its adherents to see life in terms of warring opposites. It differs in significant ways from the oriental concept of yin and yang, which also identifies the dual, masculine and feminine elements. But in this latter concept, the goal is to harmonize them rather than perceive of them as warring polarities.

In the world of my West African ancestors, the religious and secular were not split because all of life was sacred. The life force coursed through what westerners would term animate as well as inanimate objects, their differing characteristics emanating from a difference in degree of rhythmic vibration. However, by the nineteenth century, as the culture of the Negro slaves on southern plantations became Americanized and Christian, an interesting differentiation began to occur. Dancing, so integral to the spiritual traditions of the West African, was banned from Christian worship. The body and all its functions were deemed secular if not downright satanic, while the mind was considered to be the only appropriate instrument of Christian worship. Where once all African music had been sacred, a split could also be seen within Negro music. There were sacred songs, that is, “spirituals” reserved for Sundays, and work songs for the rest of the week.
Four thousand years ago, the ancient Zorastrians of Persia first delineated the ethical system in which I as a Black American woman found myself entrapped today. While the sacred teachings of the Persian Prophet Zarathushtra presented a sublime understanding of the tensions within human nature, a grossly over- simplified version of this dualism eventually seeped into early Christianity and remains with us today. The early Christian theologian Augustine of Hippo [354 A.D. - 430 A.D.], who had as a young man flirted with dualism, later came to warn the Church that moral dualism created within its adherents an adversarial interpretation of the world that strengthened rather than banished hatred and warfare. But Augustine’s warnings went unheeded, losing out to the sheer melodrama and simplistic convenience of the dualistic outlook.

So deeply imbedded is dualistic thinking in our contemporary culture that it becomes difficult for Americans to grasp how else to define “evil” other than in pitting the “forces of darkness” in perpetual battle with the “forces of light.” However, many Asian, early European and African cultures, including those of my West African ancestors, constructed societal ethics on the principles of balance and harmony rather than the dualistic warring of two opposing forces. Just as in modern ecology, a system in balance is one in which its diverse elements, and these are often more than two, co-exist symbiotically. It does not label certain phenomena of nature as intrinsically good, and others by their very nature evil. It simply seeks the appropriate balance, which allows for the healthy functioning of the system. Evil defines the dysfunction occurring in a system out of balance. Likewise within human social systems, when we strive for a healthy balance, among all the components of our lives, we achieve inner peace. When we attempt to discard, ignore or run away from elemental issues of human existence under the contrivance that there are only two factors battling it out, we invariably generate the evil we claim to be stamping out.

Yes, evil exists. Make no mistake about it. Murder, racism, rape, to name but a few disturbing examples, represent acts of evil. But they do so, not because our minds are closer to our God-nature and our bodies represent a gateway for Satan. Nor is it because sex is dirty. It is because sex becomes for the abuser an all-engulfing obsession, a profound distortion of harmony in the life of the abuser, which is then transferred into the lives of the victims.

Elegba, the trickster, is worshipped in many related forms throughout West Africa, the Caribbean and among practitioners of Louisiana Hoodoo. Elegba is not evil, in our western, dualistic sense of the word. Nor is he the devil. Elegba is purely and simply the trickster. Calamity is an opportunity for spiritual growth, a catalyst for change, a puzzle that can only be solved by growing emotionally and spiritually beyond the boundaries of one’s self-imposed intellectual and emotional prison. The concept of Elegba, the trickster, is most reflective of the Jungian psychological model, in which “evil” becomes those things humans do to themselves and others in order to avoid their own emotional or spiritual growth.

Different ethical systems encourage different forms of human behavior. A dualistic system encourages adversarial relationships, because it naturally breeds a “them” against “us” mentality. We invariably perceive ourselves as “good” and the other as “evil”. This devilish “other” must then be excised, amputated, killed. In so adversarial a system, it is sometimes an enormous challenge to find inner peace rather than merely moral outrage and “us” against “them” antagonisms.