I LIKE HER AS A PERSON BUT. . . FER CRYIN’ OUT LOUD . . .
WHAT THE HELL IS SHE THINKING, WHAT CENTURY DOES SHE INHABIT?

To see how deeply the Spokesman’s head is up… well… you know… (in the clouds) here’s a recent column from medieval correspondent, Rebecca Nappi, who reports from the heart of darkest Rome, straight from the Vatican during a recent inquisition investigation.

My response, in all its glory, follows her column. As presented to the SR editorial board, my reply drew hostile fire. This is a long one, folks, so settle your britches and hang on… .

[Open quote.]
Evil reveals complexity of humanity

Rebecca Nappirebecca Nappi
The Spokesman-Review
March 2, 2005

In the summer of 1966, Richard Speck murdered eight nurses in Chicago. I was in sixth grade and read everything I could about it. I did the same a few years later when serial killer Ted Bundy surfaced in Seattle. But as an adult, I've lost my fascination with serial killers, because no one has figured out exactly what makes them tick. If we can't understand them, then everyone we love is vulnerable to their madness.

There's enough to worry about in this world, so I had no intention to read much about Dennis Rader of Kansas, the 59-year-old man suspected of murdering at least 10 people in the Wichita area. But then, in our Sunday story about him, one detail caught my attention.

The serial killer once wrote, "I can't stop it so the monster goes on and hurts me as well as society. It's a big complicated game my friend the monster play, putting victims number down, follow them, checking up on them, waiting in the dark, waiting, waiting."

Was this "monster" actually Satan? Read M. Scott Peck's latest book, "Glimpses of the Devil: A Psychiatrist's Personal Accounts of Possession, Exorcism, and Redemption," and you'll ponder the possibility. Peck's book, a swift seller at Amazon.com, is generating some fascinating buzz on spirituality Web sites.

The best explanation of evil I've encountered is in Peck's 1983 book, "People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil." In it, he says that at several points in people's lives, they face moral decisions.

Decide one way and innocent people suffer. Evil ensues. The child an adult brutally beats, for instance, will learn violence firsthand and possibly spread it. Evil escalates, Peck believes, when adults refuse to get help to change their harmful behavior.

"When I say that evil has to do with killing, I do not mean to restrict myself to corporeal murder," Peck writes. "Evil is also that which kills spirit. Evil is that force, residing either inside or outside of human beings, that seeks to kill life or liveliness. And goodness is its opposite. Goodness is that which promotes life and liveliness."

"People of the Lie" is not about Satan, though Peck briefly discusses two exorcisms he witnessed as a young psychiatrist. He always hoped to write more about the exorcisms before he died. Peck is in his late 60s now, and he has Parkinson's disease. He says "Glimpses of the Devil" will be his final book.

In it, Peck describes exorcisms he performed on two women, Jersey and Beccah. Neither woman seemed likely candidates for possession. Both had been religious. Both had families, education and intelligence. Both wished to be healed from what was considered mainstream mental illness.

Though Peck believes demonic possession is real, he also believes it is extremely rare. He concludes that the women chose to collude with their demonic freeloaders. And they also had to choose to kick them out. Jersey did. Beccah didn't.

The book, written in an almost clinical tone, is no "Exorcist." Still, it's scary as hell. Beccah, for instance, returned from vacations with shockingly deep suntans, because she always felt ice cold inside. The night I finished the book, I didn't sleep well.

The book stirs questions about the true nature of evil. If Rader is the serial killer, how could a devout Lutheran, a man married for 30 years, a father of two, a responsible professional, coldly murder so many people? At one point in the serial killer's life, he faced a choice. He could murder that first victim. Or he could seek help for the compulsion to do so. He allegedly chose to kill. Did the devil make him do it?

I wish it were that simple. But evil is a complex mystery. Every day, people make destiny-altering choices. They get drunk as skunks and drive that way, their children in the car with them. They abuse others, through words and deeds. They refuse psychological and spiritual help when needed and offered. They choose actions that crush the spirits of others, in small ways and in big.

And we're all capable of this kind of evil, no doubt about it. That might be the scariest thought of all.
[Close quote.]


Dear Editorial Board,

Rebecca Nappi’s muddled and uninformative essay on Wednesday about “evil” is a clear example of what I’ve been saying about the fact that no one on your paper represents a rational, useful and clear-eyed point of view on current events. She added nothing to anyone’s understanding of human behavior and so her column was a waste of everybody’s time.

I read a few of Peck’s earlier works, when he was still a bit more sensible, but he’s fallen off the edge now, so to speak. S. J. Gould did a good job of picking apart Peck’s theories of human behavior quite some time ago, and I wish I could recall which of Gould’s essays performed the vivisection so that I could recommend it to the Board.

Who cares whether we call an act “good”, “evil”, “cute”, “bad” or “criminal”? Labeling an act by any name yields not the slightest information of why the act appeared in the behavior repertoire of an individual human being. None whatsoever. Historically, labeling never stops an act from occurring again, never has, and it doesn’t really explain the behavior. If it did, the human race would have had only to experience one Hitler. So Rebecca’s column was just an exercise in futility and commiseration. She waved a soggy handkerchief at the problem of human behavior and turned her back on some potentially real answers.

I’ll cut to the conclusion that Rebecca should have arrived at: an appeal for more funding for the scientific research of evolutionary psychology and a genetic understanding of the real causes of human behavior. In those fields some real understanding of human behavior is already being uncovered. Over and over I’ve recommended to your august company some of the names of those books for your reading pleasure. However, none of the solid and useful information from those books seem to be getting into your paper.

Human behavior does not occur in the way that most under-educated Americans think it does. Really, to hear most people talk, you’d think that all the sensory data which bombards the human animal every second goes to some little room in the brain where sits a homunculus (or soul, armed or unarmed with moral imperatives) which reviews all the arriving data for its moral content then selects from a repertoire of action levers on the wall beside it and pulls one or another to achieve some moral purpose. You’d also think that two other creatures also inhabit this control room, one which tells the little homunculus to chose the good action lever and one which urges it to pull the other lever. If you listen to most babble and commiseration about human behavior, you’ll see that’s what underlies most people’s simplistic idea of how behavior erupts from the human psyche. Nothing could be farther from the truth. How stupid, uninformed and actually immoral in it’s callous disregard for the knowledge being developed that could eventually change human behavior to more constructive ends.

I’ve got a lot more to say about the hows and whys of human behavior, but why should I bother? No one listens down there anyhow and we get the same old religious nonsense to explain everything. I’ll once more recommend a book by a scholar in behavior: Stephen Pinker’s “The Blank Slate”. Then when you finish that book packed with information, look in its index for other books about the whole issue of the evolution of human consciousness and the solid information being developed about human behavior. Anything less on your Board’s part is criminal neglect of your job or, at least, dereliction of duty. I keep appealing to your duty to inform your readers rather than to stroke their ignorance.

Sincerely,

Geo

PS: Really, Rebecca, a Yale graduate, you should be ashamed of yourself for supporting such superstitious nonsense to explain human behavior. Could it be correct that George Bush was right when he said the admission of women into Yale was the downfall of that institution? Please don’t make Bush and Harvard’s current president right nor let us male supporters of feminism down. Show that you do have the ability to think scientifically. I’ll support you one hundred percent.
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“I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a break.” —Alexandre Dumas the Younger

“I’ll take the part of the rogue!” —George Thomas the Only. Now that Dad Senior’s dead.