On Balance

I have been thinking about balance a lot lately. I consider myself a fairly balanced person, both physically and in temperament. I'm about as laid back as they come, and I tend to see the world from that perspective. Balancing all things against each other. For every joy, there will be a sorrow; for every pleasure, pain. Republicans and Democrats both mess up. What goes up, must come down. There is male and female. Every sunrise has a sunset. Balance is all over the place, but it seems most prominent at times in nature. A tree's roots dig as deep as its branches climb. Tides always come in and go out. Electricity has both a positive and a negative charge. Even at the very nature of the universe there is balance. For every particle in existence, there is an anti-particle. The prevalence of all this balance does not become truly troubling until one considers the presence of good and evil. Do they share in this balance? Are they equal?

Philosophers, theologians, writers, and movie makers have been fighting for years to discern whether human nature is inherently good or inherently evil. There seem to be good arguments either way, but the more I look at it, the more it seems to me that there are both. Everything humanity does has both good and evil applications. We invent a metal blade, and with it we harvest our grain, then kill fellow humans. We create languages, which help us to communicate, but also create divides between each other worth fighting wars over. We find ways of producing more food and better food, then eat until our weight kills us. We invent television and the internet, technological wonders that can inform, entertain, and aid human connection, but they are also vessels for violence, pornography and a further disattachment from other people than has ever before been known. The list could go on forever.

If good and evil are the opposite and opposed forces they seem to be here, what does that mean in the big picture? Were Taoism and Dualism right all along? Is this battle between good and evil not only equally matched and thus futile, but also a necessary balance for the maintenance of order in the world? Christianity would argue that God already has the victory over Satan and that evil cannot triumph, but a look at the world shows a whole lot of evil running rampant. How can this be justified? This is another of the classic questions.

I was not quite sure what to do with all of this until I started to change my conception of good and evil. I did not adopt a stance of relativism or anything of that nature. Rather, it was through reading the work of C. S. Lewis that I came to understand evil as not the opposite of good, but as a corruption, a twisting of good: a pursuit of good too long, too far, for too much of it, or in the wrong way. It is just like dark is not the opposite of light, rather it is the absence. Black is not the opposite of white, rather, a white surface reflects light, and a black surface does not. They are opposed, yes, but not opposites--not equals.

The final stroke against Dualism for me was when I realized that all of this balance in the world--the very balance that likely led to the ideas of Dualism--was good. Balance was a good thing. God created all of this balance "and it was good," but we humans with our tendency to corrupt everything try to make good and evil fit within an institution that is already good itself. It is a contradiction. But if God created this balance, than he is beyond it, outside of it, supreme to it. So we should not be surprised when he is able to triumph over evil. He is not fighting an opposite; he is light shining in a shadow.