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VANDALS WITHOUT FACES
It's the morning of
September 19, & Susan and I are hurrying to finish the September
Moneychanger. Opening the morning's e-mail, we get a new virus
that incapacitates the computer. Someone will have to take the
computer down to Florence, Alabama, 45 minutes away, and wait hours
until it can be cleansed.
In August this also
happened. We got Msblaster and had to make the trip to Florence.
After that, one morning in a single e-mail download I got 49
versions of it sent to me.
PROGRESS
Now even at the risk of
sounding like a technological troglodyte, I must air the meditation
this experience has occasioned.
The virus phenomenon is
a purely modern phenomenon, spawned by the technology that
makes it possible. Even as the modern mind and way of thinking is
abstract, that is, divorced from bodily reality, so this evil
is purely abstract. It presents malice without knowledge,
hatred without object, vandals without faces. I would call them
"reptilian" for their cold-bloodedness, but they don't even have the
reptile's excuse of nature or hunger. Their destruction has no
object.
MALICE & HATRED
Malice -- evil will, in
plain English -- and hatred are at least understandable, if not
excusable. They are human. A person knows you, and develops a
distaste for you. You clash some way, and the distaste becomes a
dislike. Brooding over supposed injuries, dislike becomes ill will
and finally hatred. The object of hatred becomes the enemy. Then
he strikes you, because he knows you and hates you.
Every man understands
this. No explanation is needed, because we have all experienced it.
But what of the person
who hates men -- indeed, all mankind -- without even knowing
them? This is an abstract of hatred. It is pure hatred,
without any object. These vandals without faces don't hate me
because I am Franklin Sanders, or because I do any certain thing, or
even because I belong to any certain group or race or sex. They
hate me because I am, even though I am unknown to them. They
hate me because, all unknown & unfamiliar to them, I merely exist
out there, somewhere, as an impersonal, disembodied human statistic
at peace.
The vandals without
faces hate all mankind. Their evil is inhuman.
Even the enjoyment of
their vandalism is abstract. They don't desire to see the
wreckage with their own eyes. That it happens abstractly, in
virtual reality, out in unseen cyberspace suffices.
COVETING & ENVY
The Tenth Commandment
commands us not to covet, that is, not to entertain jealousy toward
our neighbour's property. Like all the other commandments, the
prohibitions of the Tenth Commandment also contain certain
positive duties. As God forbids us to covet our neighbour's
property, so he requires us to rejoice in his prosperity, and
to help further it in any way we can. The commandment requires us
to fully content ourselves with our own condition. Covetousness,
plainly, is the father of later and larger sins.
But coveting and envy
are not the same. Covetousness desires to own it yourself, to take
it from your neighbour, and to enjoy the use of it yourself, however
illegitimately. Here at least, covetousness at least has a real
object.
Envy, on the other hand,
does not desire to own or use the object it sees. Envy is baser.
Covetousness says, "I want what you have." Envy says, "If I can't
have it, nobody can, and certainly not you." It was envy that moved
the pretended mother before Solomon to agree that the child she
claimed should be split with a sword and divided between her and the
real mother. She preferred half a child dead and hers, to a whole
child live and not hers.
Covetousness does not
motivate the vandals without faces -- envy does. Their abstract
malice senses that someone, somewhere, might be engaged in work and
life with satisfaction and joy. That thought, that someone,
somewhere, might be happy and productive, so infuriates the vandals'
hearts with envy that they will spend enormous effort at enormous
risk to destroy that joy. Utterly joyless themselves, they
set out to destroy joy utterly.
SPAWNED BY TECHNOLOGY
This precise version of
wickedness which the virus vandals represent was spawned by the
modern world. Not merely does modern technology enable it to
exist, but only the abstractness of modern thought makes it
possible.
Reality, covered with
details and textures and smells and sweat, is unimportant to the
modern mind. Only the ideas which we distil or abstract from
reality are important. Men are not important, only
mankind.
But exactly this sort of
thinking dehumanises humanity.
Exactly this sort of
thinking made Stalin and Hitler and Mao Tse Tung possible. They
must kill millions of individual humans in a tidal wave of
blood in order to save mankind. The abstract goal of
communism or race justified the murder of real human beings.
Now the vandals without
faces have taken abstraction to new depths. Their hatred itself is
now abstract even from an object. They don't hate their victims
because they are bourgeois class enemies or racial inferiors -- they
hate them merely because they exist. They don't vandalise their
victims because they want to steal what they have, but to
make sure they don't have anything.
And if that, my
friends, is progress, I'll kiss your foot.
-- F. Sanders
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