The Rolling Stones and Philosophy_ It's Just a Thought Away - Luke Dick [113]
Here you are at a Stones concert and you want to capture the event in a photo. The stage is bright, fire and lights go off during each amazing chord as the Stones rock the crowd. When you think you see the “perfect moment,” you snap some pictures. But when you get back home, and your ears are buzzing, you might be disappointed about your pictures. Despite the bright neon lights on the stage, even the best photo is dark. You can’t even recognize any of The Stones and there are burned spots in the corner from where the lights were.
In today’s world, this problem is easily solved with technology. You edit your photos, add light or filters and now you can see the band and the stage much better. What may have been the worst photo of The Stones ever taken is now a great memento from a Stones concert. It’s the envy of all your friends on Facebook.
The salvation of your photos illustrates Augustine’s conception of good and evil. He doesn’t believe evil is some entity that exists as a polar-opposite to good: There’s no “good” side to the universe opposed to an “evil” one. Evil is instead merely an imperfection or lack of good, in the same way that the darkness of your photo was a lack of proper exposure. There was no real darkness on the stage when you took the photo (it was bright, you remember, because of all those lights); the camera just lacked the proper settings at that moment to capture the image you wanted.
Augustine believed that humans are like your camera. They often lack the proper lighting to see and capture the world right and to take the right actions. There’s no evil entity or Devil making the evil we sometimes see around us. The darkness exists in the photo because here the camera doesn’t have the “light-making” features that it ought to have. Evil comes about when something does not have the certain, perfect “good-making” features that it ought to have.
Who’s to Blame?
So maybe the Devil isn’t the cause when “bad things happen to good people”—but how can we explain the Holocaust? Assassinations? Wars? Again, let’s look to Augustine.
As a teenager, he and his friends decided to steal pears from another man’s tree. They didn’t need the pears—they already had plenty in their own homes and they weren’t hungry—but, as Augustine recalls, “it was the sin that sweetened” the pears. Stealing the pears with his friends was fun, and the fact that it was “forbidden” made it even sweeter. At no point does he mention the Devil, or even the presence of evil; rather, it was a choice “seeking no profit from wickedness but only to be wicked.” Evil is not some kind of force that controls us. It doesn’t come down from the sky and tell us to do its dirty work and steal pears. Evil comes about when there are choices in front us, good and bad, and we choose the bad. It’s not that we don’t know this is the “bad” choice, it’s that there is pleasure and thrill in doing what’s “forbidden.” The pleasure of defiance can trump any other moral duty.
Like Augustine claiming that evil is just a lack of good’s perfection, maybe Jagger is acknowledging the fact that not only do we all do evil, but humans do evil quite often. What is most alarming about Augustine and The Rolling Stones is that they both seem to be discussing the same problem even though the saint and the band exist centuries apart. We all know when we choose to do something wrong or wicked but regardless, we just don’t view it as a problem. This has been called ‘moral impotence’, the notion that although you know what’s right, you willingly choose what’s wrong. The best way to illustrate this is to think about your childhood when your parents would yell at you for missing your curfew, saying “You know what you were supposed to do…. Why didn’t you do it?” Human beings have never found a solution for this instinct to turn away