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Timebinder, v. 1, Issue 2, 1945
25
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and why he exists and what his purpose in life is, and above all he enjoys the comfortable assurance that nothing will possibly be able to stay the onward sweep of his Cause (human 'Progress'). ((My gosh, did I give any of the rest of you THAT impression? I certainly never meant to. If so, I'm sorry. -- EEE)). "Very good, as far as it goes, and more acceptable to me that most religions which, with the same aim of giving the individual a secure place in the world, offer unbelievable explanations on the level of sinless God creating sinful man to test whether sinful man sins or not, etc. The difficulty to me lies in that assumption you keep making when you say (for example) 'That great march, slow and painful though it seems while we are enduring it, has always been onward and upward -- and will so continue'. In a feeble way I have tried to order my thinking along more or less scientific lines, and I cannot justife to myself such a pure assumption as this. The issue is in doubt! That is the point on which I leave you, and it is interesting to see how this simple admission can strongly affect the current of ideas we are agreed on (man's slow rise from the jungle, etc.) "The realization of how doubtful the issue is awakens the fighting spirit, and sharpens my awareness of the existence of malignant evil in the world, evil which is not foredoomed to extinction, but may eventually triumph if it is not crushed and kept subdued. This is the basic reason why your advice to look to the good in people and close one's eyes as far as possible to the their evil qualities seems poor advice to me. In an ordered world of the future such as we envisage, we naturally would expect your advice to be followed as naturally as living itself, but in our present imperfect world, I think your idealism impractical. I do not mean that it is not excellent for your own character, I do not imply that you will not be widely loved for your generous nature. Quite the contrary. And I admit that your 'enlightened selfishness' of helping others is very fine. "What I do mean is that we idealists as a class, those of us who want to see mankind build the kind of future we have dreamed about, and are willing to make sacrifices to help bring it into being, cannot possibly afford to close our eyes to evil. We must judge our fellow men fairly, and not with generosity, because we cannot afford generosity in the precarious state of the world today. We simply must be able to recognize evil, so that we can oppose it. It's no good trying not to see it, for then we maybe overwhelmed by it. I'll give you an example: Chamberlain at Munich. He desperately tried to look for good in Hitler and place faith in Hitler's promises. He didn't care to look for evil, he didn't wish to judge Hitler dispassionately in the light of Hitler's past deeds and words. The result was that Hitler took him to the cleaners. The same could be said of innumerable great or insignificant good men who have taken beatings from unscrupulous and evil opponents. ((I never meant we didn't have to fight. -- E) "Therefore, I believe it is vital to apply critical judge- 21
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and why he exists and what his purpose in life is, and above all he enjoys the comfortable assurance that nothing will possibly be able to stay the onward sweep of his Cause (human 'Progress'). ((My gosh, did I give any of the rest of you THAT impression? I certainly never meant to. If so, I'm sorry. -- EEE)). "Very good, as far as it goes, and more acceptable to me that most religions which, with the same aim of giving the individual a secure place in the world, offer unbelievable explanations on the level of sinless God creating sinful man to test whether sinful man sins or not, etc. The difficulty to me lies in that assumption you keep making when you say (for example) 'That great march, slow and painful though it seems while we are enduring it, has always been onward and upward -- and will so continue'. In a feeble way I have tried to order my thinking along more or less scientific lines, and I cannot justife to myself such a pure assumption as this. The issue is in doubt! That is the point on which I leave you, and it is interesting to see how this simple admission can strongly affect the current of ideas we are agreed on (man's slow rise from the jungle, etc.) "The realization of how doubtful the issue is awakens the fighting spirit, and sharpens my awareness of the existence of malignant evil in the world, evil which is not foredoomed to extinction, but may eventually triumph if it is not crushed and kept subdued. This is the basic reason why your advice to look to the good in people and close one's eyes as far as possible to the their evil qualities seems poor advice to me. In an ordered world of the future such as we envisage, we naturally would expect your advice to be followed as naturally as living itself, but in our present imperfect world, I think your idealism impractical. I do not mean that it is not excellent for your own character, I do not imply that you will not be widely loved for your generous nature. Quite the contrary. And I admit that your 'enlightened selfishness' of helping others is very fine. "What I do mean is that we idealists as a class, those of us who want to see mankind build the kind of future we have dreamed about, and are willing to make sacrifices to help bring it into being, cannot possibly afford to close our eyes to evil. We must judge our fellow men fairly, and not with generosity, because we cannot afford generosity in the precarious state of the world today. We simply must be able to recognize evil, so that we can oppose it. It's no good trying not to see it, for then we maybe overwhelmed by it. I'll give you an example: Chamberlain at Munich. He desperately tried to look for good in Hitler and place faith in Hitler's promises. He didn't care to look for evil, he didn't wish to judge Hitler dispassionately in the light of Hitler's past deeds and words. The result was that Hitler took him to the cleaners. The same could be said of innumerable great or insignificant good men who have taken beatings from unscrupulous and evil opponents. ((I never meant we didn't have to fight. -- E) "Therefore, I believe it is vital to apply critical judge- 21
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