Demons in the 21st Century?
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THESE ARE EXCERPTS FROM A LONGER ARTICLE
The Demons Inhabiting G-d’s Universes
By
Jay B. Gaskill
Anyone who has been immersed in the human condition and has paid careful attention long enough eventually encounters real, existential bone chilling Evil. Some of us are inclined to deny or dismiss the encounter, often by substituting a medical term for a primary moral category. But real Evil can’t be medicalized.
For more than two decades, I was enmeshed in the criminal subpopulation, having confidential legal conversations with thousand of criminals (I do not exaggerate) of all ages, genders and gender preferences and in the process I saturated myself with the criminal subculture. I observed the criminal personality in all its manifold variations, emerging somehow undamaged. Most of the criminals I saw up close were broken, screwed up human beings, but they were not Evil in the extreme sense I now use the term.
Ordinary scoundrels are potentially loveable even when they are beyond reasonable hope of rehabilitation. But the Evil ones? Not so much. Forgive me, but I was charmed by the occasional epithet, usually shouted, “You sick f..k!” I’m still charmed because the miscreant who shouts it to another miscreant it reveals a sudden, unbidden moral epiphany. In street usage, “You sick f..k!”, translates to “You are one evil f..k!”, and it is not meant as a compliment. It is no accident that child molesters do poorly in the general prison population. As a group, they are the “sick f..ks”.
Real Evil always, always takes personal form. It is most chillingly recognized after one’s encounter with an evil saturated person has generated an unbidden and unwanted epiphany - “What the f..k was that?” Often the evil nature of the personality is well hidden; this makes the eventual discovery all the more unnerving.
Uncountable personal encounters over three decades of “field research” have demonstrated to my satisfaction that Evil is all too real, especially in its cold hearted, calculating form. Its continuing existence as a fact of the human condition should not be in doubt. Which means that, in some sense (and I write this from the perspective of a non-superstitious, scientifically educated mind), that demons are real.
Of course, the entire “demonic set” of questions presents troubling issues, especially to any 21st century scientifically trained mind. This is why, when the modern mind is confronted with an instance of committed intelligent malevolence in-person, medical terms are used. It is as if you discovered that a fatal malignancy was intelligent and trying to communicate with you. Naturally we moderns recoil in denial. But the issues that Evil in this sense presents to us are as old as the human condition....
This is how I prefer to pose the question:
What is the Reality and Relevance of the Demonic in a Natural Universe Produced by the Will/Design of a Divine Agency that is Morally Engaged in Creation?
As a bottom-up thinker, I suggest that our various theologies need to reflect the reality that Evil has been and continues to be incarnated in human form. That describes an existential and ontological threat to humanity. We need to deal with it, not deny it.
A “NOVEL” THEOLOGY
Years ago I formed a close friendship with “M”, a well traveled man with scientific training who is an authentic Christian Celtic mystic (this is a personal description, not a denomination). After we got to know each other, M (a Brit) recommended that I read the novels of the American fantasist, Terry Brooks. Most of Brooks’ novels (as of 2007 he had sold about 23 million copies) take place in a fictional world familiar to the readers of J R Tolkien.
But my attention was particularly drawn to a recent, stand-alone trilogy (“Running with Demon”, “Knight of the Word” and “Angel Fire East”). I finally got around to reading all three and was immediately drawn into a compelling narrative that takes place in the contemporary American Midwest. In these novels, demons appear as real creatures but they aren’t recognized by most of us. Appearing in various guises, they urge ordinary people to do terrible things at critical junctions that greatly amplify the scope of the damage. Over time, these shocking, inexplicable acts of evil begin to degrade the very fabric of the civil order that holds up moral civilization. Step by step, the demons bring us ever closer to a truly dreadful period of chaos and depravity for which Dark Age would be a euphemism. These stark images torment the dreams of the character who will become a “Knight of the Word”.
If one just subtracts the neo-Tolkienesque supernatural elements from these three novels, the malevolent quality of the terrible acts and the sinister urgings by the demon figures almost exactly mirror of day-to-day reality in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. In the real world, Evil acts as a toxin propagating through in the culture, where it is sometimes incarnated. History provides a horror catalogue of charismatic, Evil leaders who engineer horrendous results. Mr. Brooks’ three novels are describing the sinister undercurrents in the modern, postmodern culture.
MALOGENS, A FOOTNOTE
The urgings of the demons in the Terry Brooks trilogy echo the cultural influences I have called “malogens”. This is a term I coined when reporting about the demonic murder of the wife of a lawyer acquaintance of mine, a crime that was, in many ways, the perfect exemplar of a demonic killing where no one actually sees the creature. Here is what I wrote then:
The mark carved into Pamela Vitale’s body by her killer has been variously described as an “H” or as a “double T”, but both descriptions could easily depict the same thing. One correspondent has asked me whether the killer carved the “Cross of Lorraine” onto Ms. Vitale’s back. That emblem represents two crosses sharing the same center pole; and seen on edge, the symbol makes a credible “H”.
Only the killer knows what symbolism was actually intended. But it is clear enough that some symbolic meaning was meant – this mark was not the random gibberish of a drooling idiot, but the calculated sign of someone who was visiting the dark side.
Ancient alchemists used this symbol to denote a powerful poison.
In Medieval France, certain conspirators against the regime used the symbol, as the “Cross of Lorraine”, a heraldic motif that depicted both the “arms of Christ” and the “arms of Satan”. Hence the “Satanic” overtones.
This event illuminates something much more serious than one more Charlie Mason cult. In this early 21st century cyber-culture, susceptible young men and women no longer have to fall into some sinister cult, or join some criminal cohort to become infected with evil. All sorts of bizarre and ultimately malevolent ideation, fantasies and dark power-ideologies are floating through our culture, just below of the radar of most adults.
These ideas act like an odorless and colorless toxic gas that primarily affects the emotionally, morally and intellectually vulnerable among us. Regrettably, that vulnerable population includes a disproportionate number of teenagers. And this presents the grave and growing problem for modern parents: In the current culture, those whose moral compasses have been damaged by the disempowerment of religious and other robust ethical traditions include more young people than ever before. This social problem will not soon go away.
Children and young “adults” are subjected to a seductive torrent of bizarre, unfiltered material, both emotionally and morally disturbing; it seethes through the culture and the adolescent sub-cultures like a computer virus. This toxic material is relatively harmless to those who are well rooted in the deep ethical traditions that have upheld humanity, but it is highly contagious to New Age addled juvenile minds. These are the malogens, the information-carried toxins (really they are moral pathogens); they saturate the internet; they are carried by computers, cell phones and personal contact wherever “modern” juveniles congregate.
The term malogens has been picked up, with attribution and my agreement, by a political scientist, Maria H Chang. Professor Chang is author of “Falun Gong: The End of Days” - Yale 2004. She has written about malogens in The New Oxford Review (Nov. 2008, “Looking into the Abyss”, May 2009 “Imperfect Possession”, among other pieces).
I concluded by analysis of the referenced Dyleski murder case with this:
From all accounts we also learned that Scott Dyleski was effectively disconnected from the great moral/ethical traditions that have sustained civil society, yet was strongly connected to an amoral and anti-moral subculture -- on the web and in elements of his surrounding self-chosen community.
Goth as superficial dress and style, aping the dark side like a group of teens on Halloween is not the issue. Dyleski’s version was the real thing, and that is why we must all now pay attention to the free floating malogens in our culture.
Evil is alive and well in the 21st Century…
WHY ARE THERE DEMONS IN G-D’S UNIVERSES?
In the developing moral universe framework, the existential and ontological demonic becomes a developmental side effect, an opportunistic pathogen of the mind and spirit that is necessarily allowed in any universe wherein the processes of creation can operate freely. As a matter of deep personal conviction, I believe that on the ultimate scale of things, creation trumps all.
WHY WE ARE CALLED TO ACTION
But ultimate optimism needs to be tempered with a sobering corrective: In this world, at this time, the risk that Evil can actually prevail cannot be eliminated, ignored or denied.
The technologies of ultra-large scale destruction have become linked with ultra-wide band information malogen portholes. More than any other time in our species brief history on the planet earth, malogens can reach and capture the receptive minds of intelligent people who in turn are able to amplify malevolence to heretofore unimaginable scales.
When the history of this brave new century is written, I believe that one of its earliest prophets will be the cyber-scientist, Bill Joy, who invented Java script, the computer language that knits our web communications together. His prophesies were first set out in powerful article written in early 2000 for WIRED. “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us” has never gone off-line or out of print. Here is the LINK: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html . This is a wide ranging discussion about the future of cyber and nano-technologies, their promise and dangers, but there is a sobering takeaway point for those of us who see the relevance and extreme danger represented by meta-Evil in its 21st century incarnations:
“Thus we have the possibility not just of weapons of mass destruction but of knowledge-enabled mass destruction (KMD), this destructiveness hugely amplified by the power of self-replication.
“I think it is no exaggeration to say we are on the cusp of the further perfection of extreme evil, an evil whose possibility spreads well beyond that which weapons of mass destruction bequeathed to the nation-states, on to a surprising and terrible empowerment of extreme individuals.”
The potential link-up of the demonic mindset with KMD’s is a transcendent threat to humanity. We face the ongoing prospect of emerging negative charismatic leaders who in turn can command the resources to ignite a series of catastrophic events that collectively could reduce civilization to something resembling the Terry Brooks nightmares I’ve just referenced.
Existential Evil must be resolutely, courageously and effectively opposed with practical, real world measures. The entire world sat by idly during the first holocausts of the 20th century. Never again...is more than a slogan. It is a survival imperative. The moral and physiological damage from a passive, pacific and ineffective response to the looming new holocausts in this century will empower ontological evil, possibly beyond our power to contain it. I do not exaggerate that the tendency to deny or dismiss existential and ontological Evil opens the doors wide to a local version of the End times.
Our personal “demon” inoculation lies in the maximum incarnation of the life affirming Creative Agency in each of us. The task before us is to take the life affirming, creation-affirming, theogenic ethos out of all sectarian limitations, well beyond the religious-secular boundary into the world at large. All morally aware men and women, secular and religious, need to accept the charge. If we are to get through the present century intact, people of good will everywhere need to enlist.
JBG
