permalink

September 26, 2008

Dear Colleague:  

    A moral principle we all want to hold on to—and, indeed, unless we do we are likely to go mad—is this: Good follows good, evil follows evil. If we as individuals or as society do something truly good, we expect it to bear fruit in ways we anticipate, but also in ways we could not have foreseen, as an extra bonus. Something like this does in fact happen: good, on the whole, follows good. Evil, however, can work in a radically different way. Common sense tells us that if we do something truly bad, we can expect lasting evil as consequence. War, for example, should produce devastation, a more or less permanent blight on the landscape. It certainly shouldn't produce prosperity! We humans can hardly be expected to learn from our bad deeds if their consequence is—well, good.

    Well, then, what does history tell us? Consider Alexander the Great. What kind of a man was he? Was he "great"? And if "great," then in what sense, and did he earn it? Historian Brian Bosworth concludes that Alexander was indeed "great." He was supremely gifted at killing! "He spent much of his time killing and directing killing, and, arguably, killing was what he did best" (Alexander the Great: The Tragedy of Triumph). History books usually tell us that Alexander was a world conqueror and so of course he had to kill. But he also had a noble vision, which was to mingle peoples and cultures so that the "brotherhood of man" could become a reality. "Omelette," the wise say, "can't be made without breaking the egg." And that was what Alexander did. He made a delicious omelette, filled with ingredients never thrown together before. However, according to historian Richard Stoneman, delicious brotherhood was never in Alexander's mind. It simply came to pass. "The races did slowly and haphazardly, in Ptolemaic Egypt and the Seleucid East, begin to mingle; Greek in these areas did become a crucial lingua franca; Greek ideas and Greek sculpture did have a fundamental impact on early Buddhism; and in Alexandria, a genuine cross-fertilization of Jewish and Greek literature did take place" (Peter Green in his review of Richard Stoneman's "Alexander the Great", in The New Republic, 29 December 1997). Could these advances have happened without the prior militarism and world domination?

    Another illustration of this cruel irony is the establishment of the Mogol empire in the thirteenth century. The Mongols succeeded through a combination of organizational genius and ruthlessness. In the name of efficiency, they used the decimal system to build the army, units of which came in sizes of 10, 100, 1000, and 10,000. Genghis Khan swept through central and southwest Asia, laying waste vast swathes of the then civilized worlds. His killing of the populations was systematic, as was also the destruction of artifacts, artworks, and cities. Appalling! Yet, by the end of the thirteenth century, cities flourished again, thanks in part to the trade routes that the Mongols established and made safe. In Persia, the Mongol conquerors left high administration in the hands of talented locals: ethnic groups, formerly in enmity, worked and lived peacefully together to produce a sophisticated, cosmopolitan society. In China, the Mongols were suspicious of the Chinese and so gave high administrative posts to foreigners (e.g. Marco Polo). The result? With time on their hands, the Chinese elite produced admirable works of art and literature. (D. Morgan, The Mongols)

    So much good out of pure evil! God sure has a sense of humor. I hope he'll forgive me for not finding it funny.

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu