Bent

Good Vs Good

Two angels were having an argument and after much deliberation were unable to come to a resolution. At last they decided to take the debate to the Godhead and seek their answer directly.

“Oh Father,” they said at last. “Answer this question for us, and settle the matter for we cannot decide. Who will get to Heaven first, the man that loves you or the man that hates you?”

God the Father thought for a long moment and then said at last, “The one that hates me, for he will think about me more often.”

A Hross. One of the three sentient species of Mars.

C.S. Lewis wrote a space trilogy. Allegedly on a bet with Tolkien the poor man. In retrospect Clive (the C in C.S. stands for Clive) really ought to have known that J.R.R. would’ve never followed through. Nothing against Tolkien mind you, he was just too busy. If I was similarly engrossed in the business of crafting my seventh variant of High-Elvish I doubt I’d have had time for much else either. Apparently though Lewis and Tolkien had made a gentlemen’s agreement that they would write a pair of novels together. Complementary pieces. Lewis was to write a story about Space and Tolkien a story about Time. Real shame it didn’t happen. A pair of companion pieces about Space-Time written by two of the 20th century’s greatest authors? Would have been glorious. But, as I said, Tolkien was much too busy fussing about orcs, and while he was waiting for J.R.R. to begin his Time saga, Lewis ended up writing not one but three novels about Space.

Well.

Such is the life of a 1900s British Academic I suppose. Dealing with the aloofness of one’s colleagues probably just came with the territory.

At any rate Lewis’s Space Trilogy is good and I highly recommend it. A fantastic entry into the golden era of Sci-Fi. All three of Lewis’s books were published before the end of World War 2 you see, and therefore do not suffer from the collapse of the imagination brought about by NASA. Back in Lewis’s day, people still thought there really might be other life in the universe. Not in a vague, ill-defined way, but real and very close. Like, other life on Mars or Venus. And not boring life either, like bacteria, which is all the Mars rovers seem to care about. No! In the 1930s people fantasized about exciting life. Alien peoples with alien languages and alien civilizations just one or two planets over. Today? Meh. NASA has informed us that the solar system is actually pretty dead apart from ourselves, which, is a bummer. In-solar system travel is at least feasible, if difficult. Traveling between stars seems like it might be a physical (and not merely technical) impossibility. If that’s the case then even if there is Life out there we might never find it, which is sort of depressing. Ah, but back in Lewis’s day you could imagine floating to Mars in the span of a couple of months and discovering an entirely new set of flora and fauna when you go there.

Fun times. Golden era Sci-Fi was really some of the best.

In any case, the Martians in Lewis’s story don’t have a word for “Bad.” Neither do they have words for things like “sinful”, “evil”, or “wicked.” When humanity arrives on Mars in Lewis’s book, the closest the Martians can come to such concepts is a word which roughly translates to “Bent.” In other words, on Mars there are no bad people. Only bent ones.

Important concept.

One which we’ve forgotten.

Contrary to the fashion of our era, which is to toss out all nuance regarding our rivals and to see everyone in strictly white or black, binary terms… most people aren’t actually Bad. They’re just… bent. A concept we used to understand more intuitively, when we used to say someone was “crooked” or “twisted.” Today, we are more apt to say that “Everyone I don’t like is a Nazi”, or, “Everyone on the other side is a Pedophile”, describing those we disagree with in the most extreme and evil terms. But Lewis, and his Martians, knew better. They knew that most people, even, and perhaps especially, the most dangerous and outwardly wicked people, were not actually bad all through. The fact that we can no longer see good within those we disagree with is itself a moral failing and indicative of our moment in history in which the logic of hierarchies, especially moral hierarchies, is unintelligible to us.

Consider:

There are a multitude of different values. Different virtues. Different things which are good. Self love, for example. What we might call today self-care and perhaps lump-in with self-esteem. Those are good things. Other good things are things like, being healthy, cleanliness, loving your neighbor, loving your family, taking care of your home, giving to charity, being considerate of others, telling the truth, following the rules, having a well rounded breakfast, listening to your conscience, being prudent with your finances, respecting your elders, being kind to strangers, and so on and so on and so on. And so, there are lots and lots of good things in the world, which is pretty great really, when you think about it, and I think most of us would agree that a well rounded, wholesome (e.g. holy, wholesome = whole = complete = holy) person would possess most or all of those good things.

Here’s the problem though.

What do we do when different good things appear to conflict?

For example, taking care of your kids is a good thing to do. So, also, are things like giving to a needy stranger and to charity. Now, what would happen if a mother cared so much about the needy poor that she gave away every penny she had to help them and left her own children malnourished and in rags?

Hardly seems like a good outcome, right?

And yet what she did, giving to the poor, is an objectively good and right thing.

So… where did she go wrong?

On the flip side, a woman that cared so much about her child that she never even thought to give a drop to charity because she wanted to use every dollar to purchase her baby the best organic wholewheat bread and the nicest pair of shoes… is likely to produce a spoiled brat.

Which is also not great.

And yet, again, what’s she’s doing, on the surface, seems fine. She’s taking care of her kid. What’s wrong with that?

It’s an issue of hierarchies.

To be a good person is not merely to pursue one or two good things. That, in actuality, tends to make you super evil, and the examples of this very thing happening are endless. Like, being mindful and prudent with your finances is good. Right? But… if that’s your sole focus… you tend to become a greedy asshole. Loving yourself and doing self-care is great. Yes? But if that becomes all you care about… then don’t you just become a selfish person? Don’t you self-love yourself out of the ability of loving anyone else? In like fashion, following the rules is usually the correct move. People that only do that though, and never heed their conscience when the rules become evil… well, they end up putting people in camps. Or going to the desert to shoot brown people. Or something.

Right?

Elevating one virtue, to the exclusion of all other virtues, is actually what makes you evil.

That’s actually **WHAT** Evil is. It’s not amorality. It’s twisted morality.

It’s Bent Morality.

Judas was perpetually concerned with the well-being of the poor.