A Material Problem
If you are a materialist, you should probably not make comments like “Things are not always as they appear.” This would be disingenuous. “What you see is what you get” is a central tenet of the naturalistic worldview.
The problem is how do you (as a die-hard materialist) explain things that you undeniably don’t see—but still get? The ‘mind’ is an obvious and often cited example. But I'm thinking of something a step further down the road. How do we explain lovely, evil people?
We glance at a good-looking person, and our gut feeling is that a loveable, well-developed animal stands before us. Think again. How do some of the planet’s most egocentric, underhanded specimens get off with being so gorgeous?
The obvious answer is to say that those who generated a smiling façade for their treachery fared best in the brute race of natural selection. But then we are confronted by the fact that those who can so countenance their evil are a slim majority. Not only do the beautiful and bad do well, but so do the ugly and bad—not to mention there are more of them, and they progress just as ‘beautifully’ in their badness.
We may as well say that the world should be peopled exclusively by the beautiful by now, since physical appeal is such a conferrer of benefit. But the facts don’t correspond. Evil people pop up everywhere, incarnated as both hunks and slobs, divas and ne’er-look-wells. Likewise the good.
If atoms and quarks are the fundamental reality, the world should be a much more straight-forward place.
Thursday, March 09, 2006
Beautiful Evil People
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6 comments:
I think that raises another question: Are evil people evil because they're beautiful, or beautiful because they're evil? Certainly there could be an argument that our idea of beauty is conveyed to us by culture and because our culture is the most dominant by means of many evil traits, we make beauty out to look like us. Therefore beauty becomes evil because evil says what beauty is. For instance, in the past Rubinesque women were considered beautiful because they were the wealthy, the powerful, the indolent. But somewhere along the line, thinning yourself down to the size of a wafer thin cracker became the new status symbol and those people became beautiful because they were the wealthy, the powerful, the indolent. So did they become wealthy, etc... because they were beautiful or did beauty start to look like them because they were wealthy, etc...
I hope that's clear as mud.
Let me see if I follow you, Will. You're asking of beauty causes evil, or if it's the other way around.
Is this a trick question?
The answer I will postulate is...neither. As you note, societal profiles for 'beautiful' have changed. But evil has always been an equal opportunity lender.
You want to cut a few corners, you cutie? Great! You want to cheat your way to the top, you monster? Excellent.
Evil is endemic to the human condition. That's what makes it a dilemma for the materialist. At least until we discover the 'evil' gene.
I am curious about what prompted this post. A personal experience with a beautiful bad person? Or did something general just pop into your mind?
There are beautiful good people (and I could site some examples from my life) and of course, beautiful bad people. Likewise, ugly good people and ugly bad people. Most of the time the surface has little to do with the core. Then there are the people who are beautiful because they spend more money on their appearance, sometimes they are nice, and sometimes they are not.
Then there are the people who are beautiful because they have been walking with Christ for the last 50 years. That is a kind of beauty you feel in your gut and it totally makes my day. Beautific.
"I am curious about what prompted this post..."
Not so much personal experience... More what provoked this was the thought that there's a discontinuity between physicality and personality that is hard to explain in a purely material universe. We run into ugly good people, beautiful evil people, and people whose appearance and character 'correspond.' There's no rhyme or reason to it, unless we acknowledge a spiritual reality at work behind the physical.
That's why I like your point, Camille. There's a beauty caused by walking with Christ that is both surprising and totally logical. But I don't think a materialist could account for it, any more than he could account for our proverbial 'beautiful evil person.'
Maybe I'll devote another post to my actual encounters with beautiful evil people. ;)
I stumbled on the "spiritual journey" blog through MIDNIGHT TIMES Magazine. "Leviathan's Fishhook" - by Ariel James - was very well done. I particularly liked "Sometimes in the night, I glimpse great lamps at sea, where no boats fare." You might want to check out the Spring "Vampire" edition, due out April 1, under the Midnight Times mantle.
As for "Beautiful Evil People", beyond personal life experience also reference such worthy tomes as Wm. March's THE BAD SEED, M. Scott Peck's PEOPLE OF THE LIE, Dr. Robert Hare's WITHOUT CONSCIENCE & Dr. Martha Stout's THE SOCIOPATH NEXT DOOR.
The profile for these characters is fairly standard - lethal charm and an essential shallowness associated with lack of emotional effect. Be careful if you ever encounter one. Because that is what we're talking about, isn't it?
All the other stuff about "beauty" etc, though poetic, is kind of beside the point. Beauty, after all, is something that just sort of happens, like the genetics of a rose or a Titian model. It comes and goes. Whereas the wicked you will always have with you.
The best,
J. Dawe
Thanks kindly, Mr. Dawe. I wonder if all authors grin when someone 'quotes their work.'
I'm currently working on a novel that will be similar in tone to Leviathan's Fishhook - if I can stop blogging long enough to actually work on it.
I'm intrigued by your beautiful evil bibliography. And you're right, beauty "just sort of happens." So does evil. I think there is an unanswered question though, about the strange marriage between the two. At least for a materialist.
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