The problem of evil

I study your resting face on the train
A powdered carapace. You are on standby
Soon, you will leave and be human again
Exercise judgment, laugh and cry.
We merge our dark clothes into the crowd
Our faces frozen, because to smile
Is to be human; it's not allowed
For each stretched minute, attenuated mile.
We work and rest, breathe easily or cough
Our lives are finite, for good or ill
Measured steps define our humanity.
We are human. The light goes on and off
There is no goodness in the surrendered will
Without ego, there is no morality.

Note: I was with my friend Corin in the pub last night. Over a few pints, as well as other matters, we were discussing why the Nazis had an affinity with Buddhism (counter-intuitive subject, but it’s true) and why sentimentality and violence go together. The Nazis were very sentimental about animals – Himmler could not abide the idea of cruelty to the creatures of the forest – the deer and wild boar.  I ventured that it is because under both fascism and Buddhism the will is surrendered, allowing evil to prosper. And I said “without ego there is no morality”. I know it’s controversial but I think that Buddhism lends itself to state immorality – look at Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge. This leads us to the problem of evil and to its Christian solution, which I don’t necessarily agree with, that God gave us freedom of choice so as to allow us to choose to be good. This implies that good only exists with reference to bad, just as light only exists in relation to darkness.

I thought, this morning, of the heavily made-up, London woman in her impractical clothes I had seen on the tube the previous day, travelling from Waterloo to Charring Cross, on the good old Northern Line. A minute on the Northern Line is equivalent to an hour above ground. Her face was a mask. On the tube, all of our faces are masks. Why? We surrender our humanity. But what if the train crashed? Some people would be frozen with terror. Some would help others; some just look after themselves. Humanity would break in – and morality. What if we lived forever and we were happy all the time? There would be no morality, but there would ne no need for morality because we would not need to make choices about apportioning wealth or sharing things out. The poem stems from the expression on the woman’s face.