Working on the good sounds bland and sanctimonious (or, on the other hand, precious) - people seem either perplexed or embarrassed for me when I tell them. Or perhaps I come across as embarrassed already. I need a better approach! So I imagined bringing a PR consultant in. Perhaps my attempts to answer his questions can help explain what my book is about for you, too. If not, do let me know!!
What are you working on? I’m writing a book on the good and why nobody dares to talk about it anymore. Lots of people write about evil, which is important, but you get a lopsided view of the world if you have an elaborate account of evil and none of good. I’ve done a lot of work on evil myself—edited the only historical reader on the subject—and in this book I’m trying to tease out the understanding of the good implicit in some of the things we say about evil. You won't come to a full understanding of the good through evil, but some of the things people assert about evil suggest that a shared conception of good still exists (or is striven for), if indirectly. In a way I’m arguing that good is the “secret” of evil.
Why not just write about the good? I’m approaching good through discussions of evil for a number of reasons. Evil already matters to us, is a “problem.” I would like to get book published and even—such ambition—read! Further, I try to show that we find ourselves at a loss for words about the good for historical reasons—the worldviews, religious and metaphysical, in which the old theories of good are at home have been weakened if not destroyed by changes in knowledge and society in the last few centuries; in some ways the language of evil is all that’s left of these worldviews, at least on the surface. Finally, the picture of good which emerges from a study of what we say about evil is different from those which many past theorist of good came up with (in a word, ‘the problem of evil reveals the vulnerability of the good’) and provides new and sometimes critical perspectives on these earlier accounts. Many of them, I argue, take offense at the vulnerability of the good and imagine more perfect or truer goods which are not vulnerable. There may be invulnerable goods, but I argue that vulnerability—or openness to interaction—is an essential quality of the goods that matter to us.
Do you offer a definition of the good, then? Not really. (I'm not a philosopher or theologian, let alone a prophet, and I'm aware of too many different views across time and cultures. But exploring these differences and commonalities can still be useful.) The good, I argue, is by nature hard to talk about. Unlike evil, it doesn’t demand thought and indeed in some ways eludes it. Evil is at home in thought but we are at home in the good. Evil is something we (think we can adequately) understand and analyse in terms of causality and stories, but good needs other less linear genres, like music and poetry and ritual.
Why ‘the good’ instead of, say, ‘good things’ or ‘things people value as good’? Good question. First, good is not a thing—one of the reasons we have trouble talking intelligently about good is the consumer commodity economy in which we live and what happens to the concept of ‘goods’ in it. Commonplaces about its being better to give than to receive and stories like that of King Midas clue us in to the fact that good is not some thing you possess. Likewise talk of virtues is truer when we don’t think of these virtues as something people somehow possess. The language of participation is better than that of possession, if harder to understand; the language of response and relation are good words too, and the language of the feminist ethics of care.
The question of ‘good’ vs. ‘goods’ is a very interesting one. I’m arguing, against some classic theories of good, that good is plural and dynamic, but still want to hold on to the concept of a single ‘good’ because it seems to me that particular goods evoke a larger connectedness, point beyond themselves. Not to a single highest ineffable good (or not only to that) but to each other, to new combinations and harmonies.
That's still pretty vague... What’s it all got to do with religion, by the way? You are in religious studies, aren’t you? Indeed I am. I think my approach is very much shaped by the field of religious studies—I see religious ideas as part of complicated traditions of practice, ritual, narrative, and always as shaped by and shaping social and political orders. The idea of goods isn’t a religious idea, though on some definitions of religion it might be. If calling it religious makes it easier to take seriously, be my guest. My approach is shaped by a movement called ‘religious naturalism,’ roughly the idea that religious practices and ideas emerge naturally out of the life of human beings in community, history and nature—you don’t need to posit supernatural forces to account for them or their value. Faith in supernatural beings is compatible with religious naturalism, though not every kind of faith, but this is not part of my argument. I’m hoping that what I argue will make sense to secular readers as well as religious ones; it’s couched in the undogmatically secular lingua franca of the humanities.
And evil in all this? I certainly don’t mean to be saying ‘evils are terrible, yes, but look on the bright side, there’s all this good…’ If nothing else I hope to persuade people that they’ll understand and respond better to evil if they think about the good tool, whether they accept my proposals about good or not. But of course I hope they find something useful in my suggestions, and start to think in new ways about evil and good. And not just think, since the good need our care.
