Prompted by a conversation with Joey and Jared and by seeing Jared’s draft notes of his synthesis paper, I decided to write, or at least to sketch out, one of my own. I haven’t written a long paper since the one I wrote on Meursault the Absurd for Maryanne Lyons many years ago. Spurred on by suggesting to a couple of students who’d been with me in English all year that they could also use a book from first semester, I thought I would see what kind of paper could be written synthesizing the ideas, concepts, and works from both semesters.
What the two courses have in common, of course, is philosophy. The second semester started with a look at evil in an individual and how it played out in a social context, and it rapidly evolved into looking at the role of morals in the individual and justice in society.
Consideration of evil inherently requires, as Derrida would say, consideration of good. Earlier in the course we looked at theodicy, from both religious and secular contexts (odd as the latter idea might seem).
I’ve also been reading some of Marilynne Robinson’s essays (courtesy of an introduction from Greg Han) and even incorporated one of them into the end-of-term readings. A piece on altruism in a more recent collection (Absence of Mind) suggested to me that perhaps a bigger issue than theodicy is the problem of why evil is as scarce as it is. As we pride ourselves on being rational decision-makers (or at least, so aspire to be), it must be harder to explain why selfishness is so (comparatively) mild in its implementation. Perhaps I should try to make that point more explicitly in some future course.