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The Problem of Violence & Universal Ambivalence

Human Universals is a book by Donald Brown, an American professor of anthropology (emeritus) who worked at the University of California, Santa Barbara. It was published by McGraw Hill in 1991. Brown says human universals, "comprise those features of culture, society, language, behavior, and psyche for which there are no known exception."

According to Brown, there are many universals common to all human societies. One of those universals is ambivalence. Ambivalence is having mixed feelings or contradictory ideas about something or someone. And this applies to no one and nothing as much as God and the devil

God of the Christian Bible, through a willingness to use violence and torture to punish and teach wayward sinners, therefore creates a universal problem for all of humanity, for which there is no possible solution. 

What's the problem? 

Well, every act of violence can always lend itself to interpretation, even by people who may be quite insane. Abraham's willingness to knife his own son to death out of obedience to a voice is no different than Jack Torrance trying to murder his son Danny Torrance with an ax for the same thing. Yet one is seen as a saint of virtue and the other as a serial killer for evil.

Assuming that the vast majority of people are not insane, as both Abraham and Jack Torrance appear to be, we still have the problem of being a species who are designed to exhibit mixed feelings about any act of injustice, violence, or "evil." 

This means that whenever there is an act of violence, or "evil," we can never know whether that act is the result of the devil or God, or the result of God allowing the devil to perform such an act. In addition to never being able to tell the difference between any given act of violence being from God or from the devil, we can also never know for sure whether such an act is to educate us of the nature of evil and the devil, or to punish us for angering God for our sins. 

This simple problem ensures all evil can always been seen as a virtue, just as much as it can always be seen as a vice. It just depends on your perspective on whether we should see the perpetrator as Abraham or Jack Torrance, and ourselves as either Isaac or Danny Torrance.

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