Machen a day later

A day later, I’m still disappointed with Machen’s “The White People” qua literature. The girl’s notebook just goes on for far too long, and the vagueness is not of the kind that works for me, despite Lovecraft’s praise of it.

However, I find myself still chewing on Machen’s theory of good and evil. Instead of my trying to summarize it in detail, just go read the Prologue of “The White People” for yourself.

Machen’s basic idea sounds at first like hackneyed adolescent relativism… What we normally call good and evil are really just expressions of social benefit and nuisance. What saves this from being a mere cliché is that Machen actually has a concept of good and evil! They are simply at higher heights and deeper depths than events such as acts of generosity or murders. We can find these in the saint and the sinner, but a mere thief, adulterer, or murderer is working at too shallow a level to be considered a sinner.

Lovecraft, of course, finds the entire concept of sin in Machen to be a pointless distraction; Lovecraft’s cosmos, it is known, is fundamentally amoral. I wouldn’t go that far myself, and that’s why I find Machen’s conception to be somewhat serenity-inducing.

I was just reading about the trial of the wretched creature who threw his three children off the bridge in Alabama solely to cause anguish to his wife. Normally these sorts of stories trouble me profoundly, and I think the reason is that there always seems to be a shadowy evil force creeping into the actions and magnifying them, as if they represented visitations of a horrific power in the midst of everyday evil life.

But in this particular case, fresh from Machen’s speculations, I was picturing it differently… The vast majority of human acts are simply too shallow to be viewed as especially good or evil. Naturally we must avoid, discourage, and severely punish those who throw their small children from bridges. But do we need to go as far as calling these actions “evil”? Don’t misunderstand my point– I am not saying “who are we to judge?” (Which is merely another cliché.) For in fact I think we can and do judge all sorts of actions by others. I’m just saying that maybe Machen’s “Ambrose” character has a point, and the true evil lies much deeper than easily registerable criminal actions.

One of the side-effects of this shift in attitude would be to disempower the mere criminal as a fascinating figure of spiritual evil. It makes them look instead like pathetic rubbish to be disposed of or managed for the good of society as a whole. Good vs. evil, assuming such a duel exists (and I’m enough of a Platonist to think it does) is perhaps well out of Jeffrey Dahmer’s league. I find that reassuring somehow, since it strips the previous spiritual grandeur from anyone who happens to be perverse enough to butcher and cannibalize 25 people before being caught.

In fact, I used to have a certain fascination for serial killers. For all the despicable twistedness of their actions, they seemed as though they might provide a sort of lurid backlighting that would help reveal the depth of human possibility beneath all trivial surface actions. But Machen’s first few pages have succeeded in boring me a bit with criminals, for the first time in decades. Maybe criminals are really no more interesting than people who spell poorly, and maybe I’ll stop reading crime stories in the news for this very reason.

ghosts in the Phaedo

Shortly before his death in the Phaedo, Socrates gives a long account of what he has heard about various possible destinies of the soul after death. As he tells it, philosophers and the very religious can go directly to a higher plane or paradise. The others must go into one of two lakes. Average souls must be washed clean of their memories prior to reincarnation, while the evil and highly evil souls go into a lake of fire, with some allowed a chance of being freed someday and the others not.

But perhaps the quirkiest feature of this model is the Socratic doctrine of ghosts. These are souls that must haunt the upper world for a certain period of time before proceeding underground to one of the lakes. What makes it quirky is that those souls become ghosts that have an excess of pleasure during their lives.

In the Western tradition, ghosts usually emerge from traumatized, abused, or unfulfilled souls– murder victims, jilted lovers, etc.

But creaking floorboards in the middle of the night (as I have in this old and classy apartment, which does look like the setting for a ghost film) would have a much more harmless meaning if you thought they were merely the souls of gluttons and ribalds looking either for more good times or for penance. Which would you rather have in your house– the ghost of Bluebird, or the ghost of Casanova?