So Bad, it’s Good. Part 1: Metaphysical and Post Metaphysical Representations of Evil.

Hi, and welcome to Studious. I’m your host, Stuart Byers. Each week on Studious, we try and parse out life’s greatest riddles. We’ll tackle topics of particular interest to me, and hopefully to you the listener as well. If not, consider this one of those great podcasts to fall asleep to.

This week on Studious, we’ll be examining the concept of evil through a metaphysical lens. This will be the first part of my series on evil, considering eons of evil just can’t be summarily gleaned through a half hour podcast. Of particular note, we are gonna be primarily considering metaphysical evil through a Judeo-Christian lens. Feel free to do your own research if you’d like to consider this through other schools of thought.

Today, we will be of course examining the concept of good with our metaphysical evil, as it’s almost impossible to consider an antithesis without the other lying in direct opposition. However, our primary focus will be on the concept of evil. And why is that? Frankly, because evil is far more interesting.

I took a creative writing class this last time I went to college. Quick side note, when I was young, I failed tremendously at college, because four years seemed like an almost impossible stretch of time to obtain a degree. Instead, I spent a year in college, 7 years in the Air National Guard, a year in beauty school, 15 years behind the chair, 2 more years of community college, an additional 8 years of crafting cocktails, and 2 more years as an online undergrad. Long story short: be cool, stay in school.

So back to this creative writing class. So to illustrate the point of conflict in storytelling, we were asked to consider a family who things always went right for. The kids all got good grades, the family never had financial troubles, and the parents never argued. Every day went well for everyone. More to the point, this family’s story was the most boring story you could write.

Stories live for conflict. It’s what makes them interesting to us the audience. This shit goes back to our creation of language and our first tales shared around a campfire. The best tales regaled were those fraught with conflict and danger. 

This is perhaps the impetus of our fascination with evil. We perhaps have our own ideas about what makes something evil, but what if we break it down simply to those things lying in opposition to what is considered good? Obviously, evil lives on a spectrum, existing in various degrees considering our relation to the acts or the actors perpetrating it.

When I was around 9, I was introduced to a game called Dungeons and Dragons. My mother was informed by our church that it was quote: full of the devil. Pretty much anything that had magic or supernatural things that weren’t God inspired fell into this category. When my mother took me to see Gremlins at the Esquire Theater, she embarrassed me rather thoroughly when she made us not only leave halfway through the show, but also demanded a refund from the unsuspecting teen at the ticket counter. You may lovingly remember this time period as what was called the ”Satanic Panic” of the 80’s. I just remember missing out on lots of things that seemed bitchin’.

So back to D&D… in this progenitor to basically every videogame that people play nowadays, players were asked to create characters for gameplay. In addition to crafting attributes for the characters such as intelligence, strength, or charisma, one was tasked with choosing the character’s alignment. This was basically the character’s ethos, or guiding system. Once chosen, a character could not behave outside these parameters. There were two things to consider for alignment: their relation to morality and their relation to ethics. One axis considered good, neutral and evil, the other considered ideas of order: lawful, neutral and chaotic.

A lawfully good character couldn’t just rape a tavern wench or kill a surly barkeep. This would go against his entire ethos. Why would this even matter in a hypothetical game, you may be wondering. Well, I guess it’s to suspend our disbelief as players. The better game would trick us into buying into its reality. Considering we all are just stories, the stories we tell ourselves, and the stories we tell each other, this is what matters to us humans.

What would happen if you take a well established character and have them behave against alignment? It would rub the audience the wrong way. Not only would we be shocked, but mostly we’d be shooketh outside of our suspension of disbelief, and be forced to reckon with the notion that we are now considering a work of fiction that is written by some hack writer who doesn’t know how to play by the rules of storytelling.

Now we aren’t talking about an M. Night Shalaman twist here… whenever characters behave outside of their own conventions, storytellers are forced to reveal in some part the why behind the radical departure in their decision making processes. It’s like what we talked about in our conversation about free will. We the audience demand a “why” for our own ties to this concept of universal causality.

To illustrate this concept, consider the beginning of the Marvel shark jumper: Avenger’s Endgame. I could spend an episode on how unsatisfying that movie was from a point of narrative logic, but for now let’s just focus on the First Avenger- Captain America.

Now in the story, there’s a bunch of time traveling and jumping around that defies logic, but we are sold it fast and furious, as to confuse the audience like a game of Three Card Monty. It’s whatevs… kinda infuriating, but I digress. Anywhoodle, Cap and company are quantum jumping around time, changing the past, and after they finish off big bad Thanos, they gotta go put shit back where they found it. So Steve Rogers has to go put back the whatever infinity stone they borrowed, but when he comes back, he’s now an old man. He shares with his friends that he’s sorry, but he went to go live a life with his main squeeze Peggy Carter, and after saving the universe, he felt he kinda deserved it.

So for dozens of movies and thousands of comics, Steve Rogers has existed as this mostly lawfully good character, but foremost, this selfless individual, risking everything he cares about in service to the greater good. Now I’m supposed to believe that Captain America is gonna spend his remaining days in seclusion from the rest of humanity to go play house? Consider this for a second: Captain America was frozen in ice during America’s Korean, Vietnam, and Iraqi conflicts. Now that he has a chance to affect these outcomes, he’s just gonna let millions of people die because he wants to do the jitterbug swing with Peg Carter? Sure, you could argue, “well, he can’t affect time, so he has to sit back.” Yeah, he wasn’t really considering that when he was galivanting about freely collecting infinity gems, now was he? Let’s assume he just doesn’t watch the news for 50 years. Trouble finds Steve Rogers. I’m supposed to believe he’s not gonna save someone from a tragic accident for 5 decades, revealing himself to the world? Think about it: 50 fucking years of sitting the sidelines. In what cinematic universe is this even a considerable reality?

Listen, people grow and evolve throughout time. They can behave unpredictably at times, but overall, even if a character learns and changes, they seldomly completely change their core values. It’s why most westerners fail at Buddhism. We’ll talk about cultural metrics in the future, but we all have these codes of behavior that have been ingrained in us through a lifetime, which is why assimilation is so difficult for most who are forced to do so. Western thought prizes rugged individuality, so collectivist teachings from the East are often harder to follow.

Wow, so this train of thought has really jumped the rails. We initially were talking about character alignments in Dungeons and Dragons. When I was a boy, my ideas about ethics were synonymous with morality. A good character was obviously lawful. Good people follow the rules, that is good behavior. Conversely, a truly evil character was chaotic, much like the Joker, just wanting to see it all burn. I didn’t have the life experience to see the difference between a Batman and Superman, a Han Solo and a Luke. I was being prepared to exist in society, so following the rules was constantly in the forefront of my teachings. Good people follow the rules.

Fast forward 2 decades and I’m back in community college taking Composition 1 for my third or fourth time. In my first essay, I took a controversial stance arguing the merits of cheating in school. I started by weaving a narrative around the cuttlefish, how this tricky little cephalopod could change its color and shape to secure mating rights, in a world where might usually makes right. It’s kinda fascinating, really. The smaller male cephalopod will wait until the larger male moves in to mate with the female. Cephalopods mate by the male releasing his sperm to the awaiting female underneath. In this case, the smaller, more cunning male morphs his body and changes his color to appear like a female. The larger male now thinks he’s hit a trifecta and welcomes the new arrival. Below and unawares, the female recognizes the smaller male for who he is and appreciates the display of intellectual prowess. The gender fluid male now releases his gender fluids, and the female eagerly accepts. It’s a rare occasion where cleverness supersedes strength in sexuality in the animal kingdom.

For the rest of the paper, I explored our reverence for tricksters. In Animist Religions, we have the Raven or Coyote. The Greeks have Prometheus; the Norse have Loki. Perhaps the most interesting thing they all share in common: the Trickster is often associated with creation. Prometheus brings fire to man, sparking an intellectual revolution. There’s a wisdom here being shared. Innovation requires us to shake things up and break previously held patterns and traditions. This is your standard outside the box thinking. 

As humans, we are drawn to these chaotic characters. They bring the drama, and they bring it hard. Furthermore, we want to explore what happens when taboos are broken, from the safety of the narrative. So even though I naively equated order with good as a child, it goes without saying that our “evil” in narrative constantly questions that order. Evil plays by its own rules, and secretly we covet those powers of rebellion.

So much in the way we don’t want stories about the good family that lives a good life, (ugh, snoozefest, amiright!?!) we actively seek out narratives wrought with conflict and chaos. 

Which is why we are examining the narrative concept of evil here, as opposed to narrative concepts of good.

Fuck, that was a winded ass intro. Ready to tackle metaphysical evil now? Ok, let’s get started.

The term “evil” provides us with a loose construct that is not only slippery to define, but also highly relative both epistemologically, ontologically, and linguistically. If we derive meaning linguistically from words in their juxtaposition or context in relation to other words, so too can the term “evil” garner meaning in relation to the zeitgeist of the current human condition. Our greatest markers for this paradigm shift in our conceptualization of “evil” occur during man’s shift from a theological worldview to a secular one. Here, we will contrast the literary representations of evil from the metaphysical and post-metaphysical worldviews to better understand ontologically how the dichotomy of good and evil (or perceptions thereof) shape the human experience.

If we first examine evil through the Judeo-Christian lens, then we can assume that “evil” lies in direct opposition of God’s will, plan, or edicts. Another way to possibly view “evil” in a more generalized way is through the term “sin.” Quick side note: as I was practicing my Spanish on Duolingo the other day, I was using “sin” in Español to mean “without.” Una taza de café sin azucar. A cup of coffee without sugar. It got me thinking about its root in Latin, and wondering if “sin” is shorthand as being “without God.” You know what? I’m not even gonna look it up. Tell me if I’m right in the comments later.

These transgressions or “sins” made by man occur whenever man defies the laws set before him by God. Originally, God kept his law simple: do not eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. The same way that we cannot fault an animal for acting instinctually, not knowing the consequences of its actions, this early naïve state of man couldn’t transgress from God, because it didn’t knowingly break any commandments. Knowledge of the true nature of things, (good versus evil) could only be attained by consuming the fruit of the tree. Unlike modern law, ignorance of the law erred on the side of forgiveness; we hear this sentiment echoed in Christ’s plaintiff pleas on the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing,” (NIV, Luke. 23:24).

We may view this initial transgression in the garden as one of disobedience. Law is set forth and breaking of the law is “evil.” One could argue that all sin is an act of transgression of His laws. However, this first act of disobedience comes from another sin that factors in most of the biblical canon, that of giving in to temptation. From our modern viewpoint of “evil” acts, these sins originally committed by Adam and Eve might seem trivial or like imperceptible microaggressions towards God, but they provide the impetus of all “evil” or sin. The temptation is the driveor motivator of the action, and the action breaks the commandment of God. Conceptually, man originally viewed “evil” through this metaphysical lens, as acts not in keeping with His law. This is the nature of metaphysical evil, tangential in its relation to The Lawmaker and in keeping with His jurisprudence.

The Problem of Evil Argument is a secular criticism on the nature and necessity of “evil” from a theological perspective. We will eschew attempts to define “evil” per se, but for the purpose of this conversation, we will limit our notions to Marcus Singer’s contentions that “evil” be relegated to unnecessary suffering. “Evil” also takes on qualitative connotations, so other criticisms on “evil” being allowed by an omnibenevolent God come in the form of asking, “if evil exists in opposition for purposes of choice, (i.e., the parameters by which one is judged ultimately by the creator) then why so evil.” Another critique in the Problem of Evil Argument is that of natural evil, of which the byproduct of suffering due to nature, offers no moral guidance or act of free will. Both the logical and evidential problem of evil surmise that rationally given the evidence, that an omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, and omnibenevolent God cannot exist while “evil” endures. Critics proffer far too many cases of “unnecessary evil” that exist in the face of a benevolent father.

The Book of Job pedagogically attempts to wrestle with the Problem of Evil from a central thesis: it is not man’s duty to understand the nature of evil or God’s plans, his duty first and foremost is subservience. Quick backstory for those of you unfamiliar with The Book of Job: So back in the day, Lucifer and God kinda seemed to hang out as frenemies, much like Archie and Reggie, or Brainy Smurf and basically any other Smurf. Like a plot seemingly derived from an old Twilight Zone episode, Satan makes a wager with God Almighty. God is sitting bragging about his servant Job, how faithful he is and how humble. Satan scoffs and asserts that Job is just in it for the swag. He’s got wealth, servants, the love of a good woman, adorable little niños. God has clearly blessed him. Would Job be so servile if he wasn’t so blessed? What would happen if he instead was cursed. So first God lets Satan send invaders to raid his lands and take his wealth. If that wasn’t enough, Satan then sends a storm in that kills Job’s children. Unswayed in his faith, Job perseveres. Satan then asks to add one more injury to insult, and plagues Job with a disease ridden maggot infestation of his flesh. Satan then sends 3 of Job’s friends to comfort him, and this is where the story begins…

Here from the onset, Job belabors his woes to his friends, not directly cursing God, but cursing the day he was born, for he sees nothing but futility in his torment. The friends kinda offer shitty friend advice, and it’s a lot of “Job, don’t say such things,” yada yada yada… He is continuously rebuked for his insolence, for his transgression is that of piety: Job has positioned himself as knowing better than the Creator of both physical and metaphysical reality. He then is meet by the creator himself. God then spends almost an equal fervor educating Job on his omnipotence, as Job spent lamenting his ills. The Problem of Evil Argument addressed in Job simplifies any long-winded rationalcritiques of benevolence versus “allowing evil to exist.” To sum up the thesis of Job, The Lord acts in mysterious ways; who are we to even attempt to fathom his designs?

The theological construct of evil doesn’t hinge upon definition or qualitative assessment. Humans can be forever mired in the details (for the devil is there). Thus, we see 2 times in Christianity in which God sets forth simple guidelines for man to follow: First, God sets one rule: do not eat from the tree. Second, his Son sets forth the Golden Rule: “do to others what you would have them do to you,” (NIV, Matthew. 7:12). The second clearly addresses notions of evil through an empathetic lens, but it’s in the first and Job in which we find our simplest and most reliable definition of “evil”: that which goes against God’s plan, desire, and will. This answers the question of the problem of evil: it doesn’t matter what is considered by Man to be objectifiable as necessary, for the entirety of design exists outside his purview. Man can simply not comprehend the will of God; therefore he can make no compunction what is or is not necessary. Furthermore, it is not man’s job to understand the mind of God, his only task is to obey His commands.

       This line of reasoning is the benchmark for what will be contrasted with the post-metaphysical representations of evil. If “evil” ceases to be described as what is necessary to a supernatural being, if reality fails to hinge upon the creation of a mysterious benefactor, then what role does “evil” play in the modern mind? Morality can be fleeting and fashionable, relying heavily on cultural precepts and societal constructs. “Evil” in the post-metaphysical worldview puts Man at the center of the universe, not God. Man, then becomes the center of how “evil” is to be perceived. We shift the focus back onto necessity and scale, the qualitative qualities of truly dark evil,scary dark evils. Whereas temptation (pride, hubris) was the motivator to act outside the will of the Creator, fear is the motivator to act within conventional morality. Mankind is then policed not by his fear of God (like Job); he is kept in line by fear of transgressing against popular opinion. These opinions define the cultures that adopt them.

       Conceptually, difference and other begin to define the nature of evil in the post-metaphysical world. This can be most readily observed in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. If one is to examine Dracula as a narrativethrough the lens of upholding Victorian values, then one must first consider othering as the means by which societies regulate behavior through the monster tale. If we consider Mandeville’s Travels, orientalism and exoticism created boundaries, the same way monsters on a sea faring map sought to control trade routes. This heightened sense of otheringnot only creates the “evil” from the opposition, but also makes for the values upheld by the foreigner to be part of said “evil.”

       As Victorian England approached the dawn of modernity, an existential crisis accompanied industrialization and this new post-metaphysical world in which they found themselves. Shelley’s Frankenstein launches a completely new realm of science fiction for audiences, for science begins to replace God in the cultural eye in terms of reason and explanation for reality. It should seem no coincidence that in the first tale of Sci-Fi, we find man playing God. As an age of mechanization approaches, man begins to dissect reality piecemeal to try and understand its workings through logic and reasoning. Through man’s circumvention of theological underpinnings, he becomes the god in his own universe. Man’s edicts and designs are now to be followed.

       Perhaps the format of Dracula is most telling here. We ingest the entire narrative through Victorian media. Letters and journals recall the tale given us, but most notedly what we would consider “professional” or “scholarly” journals kept by Dr. John Seward and Dr. Abraham Van Helsing. This style of narration uses an authority of tone and calculation of these learned men to sell us the pseudo-science of the supernatural, much in the way the modern comic book tentpole does. Remember that horseshit explanation of time travel in Endgame? Replace the two biggest swinging brains Dr. Seward and Van Helsing, with super nerds Bruce Banner and Tony Stark, and now we have faux gravitas.

As we encounter this old world of the fantastic, we now approach it through the cynicism and inquisition of the scientific method.

       We also witness with the abandonment of God an upsurge in the Victorian need to cling to a newfound morality that would live outside of the realm of the New Testament. These echoes are parroted today with a zealotic claim to “follow the science,” our new modern mantra to avail us against the woes of misinformation. Victorian values adhere to strong character, integrity, duty, and conviction. We see this throughout the tale even with the many proposals of Lucy Westenra (one can’t help to also notice how similar the surname is to Western and wonders if the character is to represent the attack on Western society and thought on the whole). Every correspondence through letter or telegraph highlights the extreme fibers of morality shared by all these characters in earnest for one another, a compelling sense of duty in crisis. 

By difference, Dracula takes the eponymous character and makes him an other in all respects: he’s Eastern, of a soon dying aristocracy, supernatural, (existing outside the confines of rational observation) and an unfathomable sadist. The latter may closely mirror man’s subconscious contempt for the chains held by a previous master. Could not the same observations be made about the whims an unfathomable creator? Is this just a further extension of man’s conflict with impersonal deities?

       One could ask, “Is the Western Experiment itself in crisis?” The tale begins with Harker’s travels from West to East. Even if science created a theological identity crisis in the western mind, one wasn’t bound to abandon the Christian god for a perceived eastern Muslim god. In the second paragraph, we are immediately reminded of the Ottoman and “Turkish Rule.” Count Dracula and the people on Harker’s journey to Transylvania are representative of this decent into the foreign and eastern, a transgression into darkness symbolically from the light of civilization. Harker notes, “It seems to me that the further east you go the more unpunctual are the trains. What ought they to be in China?” (Stoker, 4). With all the wards of the evil eye, and signs of the cross, it seems almost comical how Harker shrugs off the superstitious foreshadowing, as if we are in a bad satirical movie. Stoker’s tale pits the modern hubris of Harker against eastern magical thinking, only to find the real horror is not heeding the warnings of the metaphysical world we outgrew. All the attention to details of this decent into the East highlight the need to police the westerner against these physical but also cultural boundaries. 

       The character of Count Dracula establishes and preserves cultural identity through demonization. In Dracula, his “evil” is an unsatiated sadism that tortures his victims and robs them of life. Perhaps the most “evil” thing about his nature was that his consumption isn’t about survival, it’s about excess. Another sinister component is that unlike other predators, (save for members of the cat family) he enjoys playing with his meals. The way he slowly stalks his prey on the Demeter is perhaps one of the most terrifying parts of the novel. Stalking in the shadows, nowhere to run. He leaves no evidence of his crimes, making the unimaginable that much more terrifying, for it is fear of the unknown that terrorizes best. Our minds are terrific at filling in the gaps. By choosing deliberately to make his presence known to the last crew member, he’s not killing for pleasure or even sport at this point. He drives the man mad to the point of succumbing to the sea, jumping overboard. He’s taking pleasure from the power of striking fear and does so by also revealing himself creepily to the captain after. It’s the same reason why he doesn’t take Lucy outright, but slowly stalks her through the course of several evenings, making all their efforts seem futile, stealing what little hope they have of protecting her.

Even if the western world moves past theology and Judeo-Christian values, it still observes Christ as a template for morality, and his edict of the Golden Rule a valuable wisdom. Dracula represents an antithesis to Christ, which is why he is to be combatted with holy water and crucifixes. Dracula ignores the precepts of the Golden Rule, creating a wake of destruction that follows him wherever he goes. His station as an aristocrat affords him the luxury to roam wherever he sees fit. He is policed by no boundaries, only the consecrated earth of his homeland. It’s this direct tie to the East of which Dracula draws his strength. Dracula’s “evil” is personified by everything about his character which draws him in opposition of Western thought.

       This post-metaphysical evil can only be battled with rational, Western thought. We see the male characters strengthening their positions against Count Dracula by sharing their findings of scientific inquiry. Fighting “evil” is characterized by fighting the “darkness” that is lying in opposition to enlightenment or knowledge. It turns the precepts of Judaism on its head. Our salvation is to be found in what was once our demise. It is this crossroads of where the natural meets with the preternatural, the old world with the new, that we find Dracula both challenging and upholding Victorian values. It reflects our cultural angst in which colonization and commerce broadens the empire on the way to globalization. While eschewing the “unnatural,” (in this case: lordship and dominion of an eternal caste aristocracy) we still seek to favor the traditional institutions of the church with powerful symbols of the crucifix warding against the supernatural, as well as the institutions of marriage that Harker fights his captor to return to. His stake in the Count represents his stake in that institution, and the conscious choice to uphold it. Our cultural anxiety has us clinging to sacred, superstitious, and traditional values, all while trying to ascertain this newfound position in the power vacuum created by abandoning God.

So, this is the post-metaphysical era. In 1882, Frederick Nietzsche proclaims, “God is Dead.” 15 years later, in 1897 Dracula is published, capturing the zeitgeist of the times. In another 15 years, we will have our first World War, and we will see the end of the Ottoman Empire. What will become of “evil” then? One only needs to wait another 15 years to see the rise of Adolf Hitler. It’s kinda crazy to think of Hitler being a boy of nine or should I say, NEIN! When Dracula comes out. He is appointed leader of the Nazi party in 1921, a year before Nosferatu is released. None of this particularly means anything, it’s just interesting to think of where things are juxtaposed in our timeline.

So, to sum it all up: Metaphysical evil was anything existing outside of God’s plans. Post-Metaphysical, Man replaces God as the center of the universe, and now evil is judged by man’s rubric. Next week, we will examine evil through the existential lens… rather curiously, our cultural apprehensions in Dracula hinged upon the East and the Ottomans, who just so happened to partner with Germany in World War 1, which will set the stage for Existential Evil next week. Now it gets me thinking about the occult and my own childhood growing up watching Raiders of the Lost Ark. I wonder if all that metaphysical shit that Hitler was into figures into our conversation. Was his aversion to the Jews part of the cultural admonishment for previously held notions or traditions, or reflexive of a supposed adherence to nationalistic dogma?

Let’s put a pin in that for now. I’ll see you next week and thank you for listening to Studious.

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Quick Afterthought: remember back earlier in this episode when I was talking about cuttlefish in relation to the controversial stance I took on supporting cheating in school? I went back to finish my degree recently and no one does that anymore. Not cheating, I’m sure they do that plenty. My daughter says they’re going in hard trying to find kids who used chatGPT to write their essays. No, what I mean is, that no one takes controversial stances in school anymore. We are raising a generation of cowards. Like our evil characters, I was taught to bring the drama with my writing. Arguing easy, acceptable points is hardly an argument at all. We need to raise generations who don’t idly accept things the way they are. It is their job as youth to question things. A society that is afraid to speak up and readily accepts censorship is prime to accept whatever dogma is fed them. If you don’t believe me, look at Germany circa 1930. Jesus, all roads just lead back to Hitler, don’t they? See you next time, on Studious.