Ahimsa

Free will and evil.

Small words with big implications. They're two of the biggest problems in philosophy and theology. Resolving them isn't easy. For millenia, priests have asked how we can have both an omnipotent, omniscient, and omi-everything-else-ient deity, whilst still maintaining Free Will for either It ot It's creations. And if one of It's other omni's is omnibenevolance - something every authentic tradition agrees on (though sometimes you have to hold 'em upside down and give them a bit of a shake to see it, as they they don't all use the same word for it) - well then, how do you account for a creation that contains within it so much pain and horror that it can as easily be a festering hell as a verdant heavan? The usual answer is that Evil occurs because all entities within creation excercise Free Will, and I think while that's not really far from the truth, though it doesn't really get us out of the woods because all of the Creators other attributes really seem to work against the whole 'Free Will' thing being anything but an illusion, an artifact of our impossibly narrow perspectives.

Traditonally, science has seen it a little differently. Evil isn't so much of a problem; in an inherently random universe, with a meaningless history that amounts to little more happenstance and an endless series of (un)fortunate accidents, it isn't really hard to see how what we call 'Evil' has come into the world. The tricky part is, again, Free Will, because the picture science generally paints with its metaphors is that of a world that reduces to the deterministic, mechanical operations of atoms and various subatomic particles. It's all a great and fantastically complex Machine, and Free Will is, again, an illusion, this time an epiphenomenon of minds that, for some reason, would go insane if they didn't believe in their own Free Will.

Well, okay. That's a bit of a strawman, I admit; the image of old science, hollowed out with age and the creeping toll of it's own contradictions. There is also New Science, a strange mixture of quantum mechanics and ecology, it's math a heady brew of cellular algorithms, fractal geometry, and nonlinear dynamics. It's still in it's infancy, and if we continue to call it science at the moment it is only because we do not have a better name for it. We will, though, because when it matures it will be as different from science today as science is from the Aristotelean academies of the Middle Ages.

But that's not our topic today. Today, we're talking about free will, and evil, and seeing if they have any relation to each other. Or, indeed, if they exist at all.

The astute amongst you may be scratching your heads around now, wondering why on earth the title of this post is 'Ahimsa', the Hindu concept of non-violence. There's a connection there, I promise, if only you're a little patient.

Free will exists, because it has to. At any moment, you have a choice. Right now, you could continue reading, go to another page, get up and go to the bathroom, go outside for a smoke, get back to thinking about how to go to Mars, or just about anything else. No, really, the choice is yours. In the next moment, you could be doing any of an uncountable number of things, and before that moment comes, there's no way of knowing just what that thing will be. Not for you or for anyone else.

As for much else in the macroscopic human realm, there's a quantum mechanical analogue here. The wavefunction of any subatomic particle will continue to evolve for however long it's wavefunction isn't being collapsed by observation (or measurement, or whatever else you want to call it); as it evolves, it ceases to be a definite point in space and probabilistically smears, occupying an infinite number of different positions simultaneously: some highly probably, some vanishingly improbable, but all, to one degree or another, possible. Once it's observed, it snaps into one or another of those myriad states, and it does so randomly. Neither an observer nor, one suspects, the particle knows what state it will occupy immediately after a measurement. Of course, physicists generally speak of the particle's wavefunction randomly 'collapsing' to a certain state, but we might as well impute a tiny fraction of consciousness to the particle, and state instead that the particle, itself, chooses.

Electrons with Free Will. Now isn't that a concept that turns everything on its head.

Free Will, you see, is inherent in the very structure of the laws of physics. It's there, right from the beginning, and it's there all the way up to the very top. As such, it's a very important, dare I say even Sacred, thing. There may be no principle more fundamental to the workings of the All.

Now. Evil. Well, that's simple: Evil is whatever attempts to abridge Free Will. Whenever one entity tries to limit the free choice of another, it is engaging in an evil act. This can be overt - a mugging, a murder, a mob or a mass bombing - or it can be covert, as in advertising and propaganda, or any other form of lying. All lies are attempts to deny others of their free will by altering their perception of reality. This is manipulative evil. There's also coercive evil, which tries to make people do things through brute force, and preventative evil, which attempts to keep people from doing things. Regardless of what shape evil takes on, it is identifiable, always and everywhere, by one over-riding principle: it is that which attempts to weight choices, to make one entity choose A over B.

Hold on there! Am I really making such a sweeping statement? Surely there are times when it isn't evil to deny Free Will. For instance, what about when one is trying to prevent evil?

Here's the kicker, folks. Free Will is so fundamental a principle that even those who are doing and pursuing an Evil path are excercising their own Free Will, and Must be allowed their own Choice.

And that, my friends, is Ahimsa. Nonviolence. Not just being a Vegan anymore! (and since when has that ever been a viable ethical stance? What, just because they're plants it's okay to eat them? You think having a nervous system privileges animals when it comes to pain? Even cells sense. Hell, even electrons sense, and respond to that sense: they too can be repelled, and there you have the essence of fear and pain together. No, you don't get off that easy. You can't just change your menu to keep your conscience clean.)

Surely, though, it's right to intervene, to do what you can to stop evil-doers from harming others? That's what some of you are thinking, I'm sure. Others, who know it's right, jump right to pointing out the consequences of just letting evil people do as they please: looting, rioting, murder in the streets and anarchy in the countryside. In our society we have Rules, damnit! There are Laws here, and all must Obey, for if not it would be a Hobbesian nightmare, the war of all against all.

That way of thinking, right there, that's one of the greatest tricks Evil ever pulled on this planet. It's got the best of intentions, but what it fails to take into account is that when you fight evil, you feed it. Fighting fire with fire just feeds the fire. The aim of Evil is to abridge free will; when you fight it, you're first of all violating your own free will (because you're reacting instead of acting), while at the same time violating the free will of whoever is engaged in whatever particular evil du jour is being fought today. By definition you're engaging in evil. By fighting the monster, you become it.

Ahimsa is a very different path. It's one that says, sure, evil exists. And what of it? It is Evil's choice to be evil. And it is my choice to be ... however I am. One on the path of non-violence will of course not attack another, but that is just the beginning. Neither will they counterattack one who assaults them (which doesn't mean they will stick around to be hit!) True ahimsa, of course, is impossible in this world: merely by living, we unavoidably prey upon other creatures, for survival is impossible without it. It can only be followed to the degree that one refuses to violate another's free will.

This doesn't just mean not hitting people, and not hitting back. It means not attempting to pursuade people through lying or cajoling or any other way of manipulating; nor trying to restrain one person from doing something bad to himself, or to another.

It is not an easy path. When you see someone being beaten in an alleyway, it's natural to want to help. When the country's laws are lax on air pollution, it's only normal to want to campaign to change those laws. When your nation is invaded, or your family threatened, there is nothing more human than to throw one's life on the line to defend it.

Walk away from any of those struggles, and you risk being branded a coward, even if only inside your own heart.

But all of them violate ahimsa.

It's a difficult path, there's no question.

It's also a path of unexpected power. Witness the British leaving India: Ghandi wouldn't give them the time of day, a hundred million Indians saw him doing that and thought, hey, that's a good idea, and before you know it, the Raj is gone. Without a shot fired. For no other reason than that a large number of people decided not to believe in it anymore.

Ponder that. And look out at the world we live in, the Planetary Control Grid and everything else that has been wrought by our desire to fight evil. By fighting evil, we've become evil. The harder we fight, the stronger it becomes. And the stronger it gets, the harder we want to fight.

It's an ugly cycle. Until you grok it (and very few have, by this point, but have patience, they will) you're a rat on a wheel you don't even know exists. But once you do, that hard path of ahimsa starts to look a lot easier in comparison.