The Taming Power of the Small

Excerpt

We are wont to vilify particularly egregious emergences of ignorance as evil. This allows us to assert categorically our own identification with goodness in contradistinction. It is a gross and ultimately unhelpful gloss, even if there are elements of truth in it. Both views, of others as evil and of ourselves as good, may be better characterized as ignorant. For both ignore the fundamental disease, the one that manifests in human beings when we fall prey to unawareness of the preciousness of life, and wantonly or witlessly harm others in seeking pleasure and power for ourselves. In the Old Testament, in Book of Psalms, evil is often referred to as “wickedness.” But perhaps a better rendering would be “heedlessness,”¹ an inattention to the full spectrum of the inner and outer landscape of our experience. This inattention allows us to artificially separate self from other, the “I” from the “Thou” in Martin Buber’s terminology, to desacralize the world and thus make it predicated on division, on artificial separation and boundaries, on mere mechanism. In doing so, we forget or never recognize a deeper underlying unity and integration that allows for greater possibility, for the emergence of new degrees of freedom and greater latitude in our maneuverability and conduct, both in our interior lives and within the vast diversity that is the world. …