Evil as a Question of Scale
Maria Melendez
I live next door to a sexual predator. He moved into the basement apartment of the house next to me this past August—three days after I’d moved in with my nine-year-old son and five-year-old daughter. Another of my new neighbors, who also has a five-year-old daughter, tipped me off. “Right next door?” I asked her. “Are you sure?”
“Cosmic perspective is the greatest gift that modern cosmology gives us. Every one of us is entitled to say, ‘I am what the expanding universe is doing here and now.’ Yet this gift of perspective is not so easy to integrate into daily life.” This little gem of philosophic understatement appears in The View from the Center of the Universe, a cosmology-for-the-rest-of-us book by University of California professors Joel R. Primack and Nancy Ellen Abrams. The book spreads a general tone of good cheer by asserting that, on the whole, a hopeful view of our place in a meaningful universe resonates better with current thinking in cosmology than does a despairing view of our insignificance in a vast, unresponsive Emptiness. This is good news for poets and other trackers of hidden connection. But the authors’ cautionary note about cosmic perspective being “not so easy to integrate into daily life” finds especial verification, for me, in the case of my neighbor.
On the one hand, Primack and Abrams remind readers that different laws apply to the universe at different scales of spacetime, while on the other hand they assert, in chorus with many of the world’s oldest religions, “Earth does reflect the cosmos.” With the latter claim in mind, it’s tempting to try and find a cosmic analogue for what we on earth consider evil behavior. In the “life cycles” of stars, for example, the search for cosmic reflection of our own experiences is rewarded by observable instances of birth, growth and death. Yet these categories of experience refer only to physical states and provide nothing in the way of mirroring our emotional or moral realities. If we take “evil” to mean “intentional, malicious disorder,” are there other scales of existence on which “evil action” can be said to exist or to serve as a useful concept? The simple answer would be a “no” predicated on the belief that human notions of morality don’t apply at scales outside the human. And yet—if the universe (or universes!) described by science today is to become deeply meaningful for us, oughtn’t it be detected and detectable through layers of meaning beyond “ooh” and “ah”? As a possible door into these layers of meaning, might there be ways to describe processes outside the human scale in ways that mirror not just our physical reality, but our emotional and moral realities as well?
I wanted him out. When I called my landlord to ask if he would give me the name of the people who owned the house next door, he said, “Do you know, we have three or four of them living right near us where we live? According to the law, these people are supposed to be reforming themselves and they have a right to live wherever they want.” He wouldn’t give me the number. Our big backyard is bordered by a three-foot-high chain-link fence, so there is barely a physical barrier, and no visual barrier, between our yard and the yard of the home where he lives. I see him out mowing the lawn every Sunday afternoon.
The various species of fear are all identifiably related by an inner feeling of constriction. There’s “fun fear,” when you’re hunching down in your seat, grabbing your sweetie and waiting to see who gets killed next on the big screen. Fear of rejection, which works like a dimmer switch on every aspect of your personality. The fear of danger to a loved one’s safety constricts, among other things, empathic ability—it shrinks our range of interest in others’ lives. The ideas of “community” and “home,” so beloved of the crowd I run with, don’t make room for notions of evil to cozy up inside them, much the way scientific notions of the universe make no room for the assignation of moral properties to events. The sex offenders registry website tells me this particular individual was convicted, at 37, of sexual abuse of a child.
If this were a work of literary fiction written in third-person point of view, perhaps this is the point when we’d learn something of my neighbor’s backstory. We’d see him damaged as a child, and these scenes would foster compassion. But this is my story, not somebody else’s art, and I could give a shit about this guy’s wounded inner child. The first few weeks after we moved here, fear ricocheted around my insides as the kids played in the yard, and I’d check and re-check the lock on our back door at night. But each day those little ones lived unassaulted was another slight recession of fear. It wasn’t that I necessarily felt safer; I just became more used to this kind of fear. Against the stress of adjusting to a new town, unpacking and worrying about the kids’ new school, the fear became background noise. Nevertheless, I continue to claim this fear as part of my view of my place in the world and I bring it in view from time to time like a hideous insect worthy of discussion for its potential to disgust.
Michael Welner, an M.D. and forensic psychiatrist at New York University’s School of Medicine, is developing a Depravity Standard. He means to establish a scale by which crimes can be evaluated by level of depravity, as an aid to judges and juries. For a real “only in America” cyber experience, point your browser to https://depravityscale.org, where you’ll read Dr. Welner’s earnest assertion that “your perspectives on depraved crime should be included in the Depravity Standard.” For 15 minutes, you can participate in his online survey, the results of which will purportedly contribute to the development of this citizen-shaped depravity-measuring tool.
After learning about Welner’s research, I tried contextualizing my neighbor’s crime with other heinous acts. According to my neighbor’s criminal record, he’s no (alleged) O.J. Simpson. He’s no Pol Pot. I picture him bearing his crime modestly up the ladder of judgment, coming to rest somewhere in the lower third of the Scale of the World’s Evils, and this comforts me, a little. Then again, an intellectual sense of scale isn’t much of an emotional coping tool when we consider the possibility of violence against those most vulnerable in our care. Depravityscale.org takes pains to note that the Depravity Standard will evaluate crimes, not people. Not so my gut. In the rapid-fire, pre-rational realm of judgment known as “parental instinct,” it’s HIM I see as an epicenter of actual and potential evil, because of the shock waves of violence that childhood sexual abuse can send throughout a victim’s life. I have male friends who’ve been abused and never speak of it. I know it by the silence between their forks and knives. Between their right hand and their left. Between their eyes, the silence sits like a target. I know women molested as girls who speak of wanting to rip their own past right out of them, and who have to admit that nothing can accomplish this, short of suicide.
My neighbor is a miracle. Only, mind you, by his relationship to chance, and he shares this relationship with both the lowliest anaerobic microbe and the mightiest blue whale. According to some tenets in modern cosmology, it’s vastly unlikely that any of us, any of this at all, should have emerged in the first place from that wildest of frontiers, the universe’s originary void. To me, these odds indicate that we all carry our share of miraculousness with us. This is not unlike the Quaker notion that there is “that of God” in everyone or a Zen view of reality in which everything is Buddha. Katagiri Roshi, a late abbot of the Minnesota Zen Meditation Center, extended the implications of this view by writing, “Even though you don’t like monsters, still there is some reason why they exist. Everything is entitled to live in the world in peace and harmony beyond our judgment.” These Zen and Quaker spiritual guideposts get translated into the secular notion of “embracing community” in the philosophies of many thinkers and writers dear to me.
But frankly, I don’t feel up to it. When it comes to living next door to a convicted sex offender, I have little interest in evaluating my fellow community member’s worth and value. The idea of accepting this worth without evaluation or scale yields that familiar, fearful constriction in my middle. Similarly, the idea of acknowledging that what he did has a role in shaping the universe, which of course, it does, feels too close to excusing it, to saying that because it “fits,” it was “right.” This view elides into a kind of ecology of behavior, in which sexual abuse has its own universal telos, the way ecology celebrates the producers and the decomposers alike because they both serve a purpose. He was, as environmental philosophers say, a “good of his kind.” His role was to violate a girl, and this niche he filled. As much as it seems related to the kind of spiritual openness called for by Katagiri Roshi, such an amoral view of humanity’s role in the universe really sticks in my craw. It erases scales on which we weigh the value or destructiveness of actions.
In The View from the Center of the Universe, Primack and Abrams steer away from an “it’s all good” view of human behavior by pointing out that a great many potential outcomes depend on our individual and collective behavior. The implication here is that because so much depends on our every gesture and interaction with each other and the world around us, we should hold our notions of right and beauty and goodness all the dearer. The unpredictable outcomes of our actions multiply exponentially and echo through time, as in the creation and storage of radioactive waste. As in the practicing of violence on children. Primack and Abrams note how, “ironically, the future...of the entire universe may be predictable because it depends on so few factors (the most uncertain of which is the nature of dark energy),” whereas human phenomena are “often impossible to predict because small actions can sometimes have enormous consequences.” And our human-scaled counterpart to the mysteries of dark energy is our varied propensity for care and destruction, in that it is the most uncertain factor in human phenomena.
Now we’re back on meaningful ground, where what we do matters deeply in both emotional and temporal ways. But still, I feel there’s room for us to work on a missing metaphorical link, some new set of stories that will toggle between the human scale and that of the universe. How do we, on the one hand, acknowledge everything as true to the nature of the universe at this place and time, because it is the universe at this place and time, while still holding on to our sense of moral orderliness, which helps us decide how the universe should be happening in this particular place and time?