Starbucks Coffee, Beverly Hills
- Look at that: the whole bench along the wall is occupied with them.
- By 'them' you mean?
- Those in Beverly Hills who sleep nearby on the streets, or rather on the side walks. I almost ran over one this morning riding my bike here.
- Which one?
- Buried under layers of filthy blankets how do I know?
- This Starbucks is incredible. Across the street in the Peninsula hotel, just behind the cafe building is the Waldorf Astoria, two of the most expensive hotels in the city. Look at those guys getting out of their Maclaren super car, hundreds of thousands of dollars. This place stinks. But that won't stop this country's intrepid rich from stepping right into the miasma for their coffee.
- The indifference! I can't help the word evil from coming to mind. What about you?
- Does calling the rich evil explain anything?
- Good! Just what I wanted to talk to you about. If we want an explanation of the orbits of planets, we find one in a law of gravity. But if we want an explanation of how an object moves from one place to another, we rely on what we call energy, force, momentum, sorts of things which we have no explanation of.
- Explanation meaning we can tell a story in the form of general rule relating one thing to another at one place or another.
- Yes. So if I offer an explanation of the indifference of the rich to the massive misery around them, we place them in a certain orbit where they are subject to certain 'forces' of indocrination which convnices them that it's their own fault the misearable are miserable, it's good they are punished for their error so they are motivated to make corrections. And there, we have explained away their indifference. Or not?
- Don't you still want to call them evil?
- Absolutely! I do!
- So again: does calling the rich evil explain anything, anything more? more than suffering from the disease of pleonexia: Excessive or insatiable covetousness. From the Greek pleonektein (to be greedy), from pleion (more) + ekhein (have).
- I think it does. But...
- Go on.
- There's a paradox here. It seems possible to make the attribution of the word evil come and go, depending on how one looks at the world. Something like when we are in the presence of beauty see it, it gives us pleasure, it is seen as warrenting the attribution beautiful. Yet we can explain away the beauty by seeing instead regular relation, geometric forms, well functioning, losing thereby both pleasure and the consideration of the objects as beautiful. What if the same happens with evil? We see it, the evil in the object, we feel pain in the act of perception. Yet we can if we like shift our way of looking and lose both the sight of evil in the object and our pain felt in having the perception.
- How does that get us anywhere, claiming that how we explain is up to us, our own doing?
- It's rather obvious, isn't it?
- Not to me. Isn't it crazy, aren't we crazy, to be having this kind of conversation in this place, right in front of these people?
- You mean we're crazy to be pretending our ideas are important faced with the immensity of evil going on around us?
- Yes. Are we ridiculous in our self-importance?
- Maybe not. Think about the two kinds of explanation we've talked about. One stops short of satisfaction, leaving us with unexplainable force, in the case of the indifferent rich the pleanexia of the rich, forced upon them by capitalism, the stock market, family, advertising, movies, etc., etc. The other gives us a clear sight and corresponding strong feeling.
- But, I don't understand. If explanation is telling a story, where's the story in choosing to see ugliness when we don't have to?
- When we see evil as evil we are not seeing the regularity of law, and the resulting mystification of the force doing the application to the individual, but instead see evil, experiencing the perception as complete in itself and that reminds what it is to be a human being.
- The story is that the ugly, indifferent rich have made the wrong choice and by calling them evil we remind ourselves not to follow in their path?
- We explain to ourselves why we cannot follow in their path and why they wouldn't have us even if we could.
- We see their ugliness for what it is, evil.
