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Religions over many centuries developed elaborate codifications of sin and evil. The Catholic Church, for example, identified Sins that Cry to Heaven for Vengeance, (oppression of the poor, widows and orphans, for example, or defrauding laborers of their wages), Sins Against the Holy Spirit, and so on, sins mortal and venial, virtues cardinal and sins deadly.
With the emergence of a new world will come a recodification of evils. Obviously offenses against the earth are coming to be thought of as evils in ways we would not have suspected a few years ago. The developed world, at ! least, is forming a consensus that will regard violence to the planet to be evil in the way we used to think of unorthodox sexual practices and partnerships as being outside the realm of accepted conduct.
A Frenchman named Jean Baudrillard recently wrote a book called The Transparency of Evil. We live, says Baudrillard, in a postorgiastic age, in which all liberations have been accomplished, all barriers torn down, all limits abolished. Baudrillard makes the (very French) case that evil, far from being undesirable, is necessary -- essential to maintaining the vitality of civilization. That suggests a refinement of an old argument favored by Romantics and 19th century anarchists like Bakunin, who said, "The urge for destruction is also a creative urge." It is not an argument I would try out on Elie Wiesel or on the mother of a political prisoner disappeared by the Argentine authorities.
And yet . . . and yet . . . evil has such perversities, or good has such resilience, that a powerful (if grotesque) case can be made that Adolf Hitler was the founding father of the state of Israel. Without Hitler, no Holocaust, without Holocaust, no Israel.
Scientists working with artificial intelligence have a fantasy -- who knows if it is more than that? -- that eventually all the contents of the human brain, a life, can be gradually emptied into a brilliant, nondecaying, stainless, deathless sort of robotic personoid. And when the transfer of all the vast and intricately nuanced matter of the mind and soul has been accomplished, the memories of the cells etched onto microchips, the human body, having been replicated in a better container, will be allowed to wither and die.
Will evil be transferred along with good and installed in the stainless personoid? Or can the scientists sift the soul through a kind of electronic cheesecloth and remove all the ancient evil traces, the reptilian brain, the lashing violence, the tribal hatred, the will to murder? Will the killer be strained out of the soul? Will the inheritance of Cain be left to wither and die with the human husk, the useless flesh?
If so, will grace and love, evil's enemies, wither too? The question goes back to the Garden. Does the good become meaningless in a world without evil? Do the angels depart along with the devils? If the stainless canister knows nothing of evil, will Mozart sound the same to it as gunfire?