Friday, January 13, 2012

Good and Evil - There is No Moiety

We often speak of good and evil as if there exists a state of moiety between them.  Nothing could be further from the truth.

I thought on this this morning, while shoveling snow, after reading a post at Samizdata written by Brian Micklethwait titled Tactical wisdom from Mark Meckler wherein Brian comments on the case of Mark Meckler who had been arrested and charged with a firearm violation in New York after voluntarily turning in his handgun to “authorities” in an atttempt to comply with New York’s draconian gun laws.

Brian’s comments regarding the Meckler business opens as follows.

One of the more dispiriting processes I regularly notice in confrontations between Good and Evil is when Evil concedes that it has done something evil, and Good promptly turns round, in the spirit of fair play, and concedes something else evil. It’s like Good is a football team, and when it goes one-nil up, it feels that the fair thing to do is to give the other fellows a goal. To make a game of it. Or something.

So for, instance, if Evil concedes that, I don’t know, “socialism hasn’t turned out very well in practice”, Good, in a burst of bonhomie and generosity and brotherhood-of-manliness, concedes that socialism was a nice idea “in theory”.

No it wasn’t. An idea that turns out badly in practice is a bad idea. Especially if the badness was a predictable and predicted consequence of that bad idea.

Often, in circumstances like these, Evil even asks for an equalising goal.

Evil offers a paring of ideas - good twinned with evil, like socks emerging from the laundrette - as a package: “Ill concede that socialism has turned out badly in practice if you concede that socialism is a nice theory.”

The proper way to behave, if you are Good, and go one-nil up in an argument, is to press for a two-nil lead.

The proper response to going one-nil up in the above argument about the practice and theory of socialism is to say: “Socialism has indeed turned out badly in practice. Now, about this evil notion of yours that socialism is a nice theory. Let’s talk about that. And let’s you admit that you are wrong about that also. We told you you were wrong from the start, and we were right that you were wrong. We predicted that socialism would turn out badly in practice, on account of it being a bad theory. You pressed on. You were wrong. In theory as well as in practice.”

Like I say, press for two-nil.

Do not give evil, as Brian states, an equalizing goal, because there is no moiety between good and evil.  Ever.

Posted by John Venlet on 01/13 at 10:38 AM
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