Jenifer’s Shelter Island Journal: Necessary evil

The number of grandparents who have taken one or more grandchildren to see some iteration of “Wicked”— the original Broadway show, the recent revival, or at least one of the two mega-movies, “Wicked” and/or “Wicked for Good” — must be legion. The Wicked franchise is a re-telling-with-a-twist of the classic children’s book, “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” written by L. Frank Baum some 125 years ago.

The twist, of course, in the “Wicked” version, is that the protagonist, Elphaba, who is the presumably despicable Wicked Witch of the West, turns out to be — though still green — courageous and heroic, with a lot more moral clarity than her childhood friend, Glinda, the supposedly good witch.  Toward the end of “Wicked for Good,” having been consistently thwarted in her attempt to perform good deeds by the evil powers-that-be, a frustrated Elphaba declares to Glinda, “I have to be wicked so you can be good.”

In this day and age, not to mention season, when the very concepts of “good and evil” seem obscured by a dense fog of confusion and ambiguity, there are a couple of reasons to examine this topic, beyond the fact that, as a grandparent, I have been with my younger grandchildren for three out of four of “Wicked’s” iterations. The first reason being that the essential question “Wicked” poses — Can good only exist in contrast to evil? — is worthy of consideration by all us, young and old. The second reason being that I’m submitting this column on the eve of my birthday, and, in observance of it I’m allowing myself a favorite pastime, wading around in the shallows of the mysterious ocean of philosophy.

O.K., so these wildly popular “Wicked” movies, being seen by countless millions of kids around the world from six through well, certainly 79, make the case that evil is definitely necessary for good to exist. Thomas Aquinas, however, the 13th-century Italian priest whose writings have influenced centuries of philosophers and theologians, would take the opposite view. He said, “Good can exist without evil, whereas evil cannot exist without good.” One way or another, a comparison is implied, as well as the need to measure the degree of good and evil on each side and in each case. 

A visit to the website gotquestions.com provided the following: “The phrase ‘necessary evil’ is often used in parallel with sayings such as ‘the ends justify the means,’ ‘for the greater good,’ or ‘the lesser of two evils.’ The expression implies certain immoralities are warranted by the situation … the phrase can have some validity depending on how it is understood. The difference hinges on how one defines the terms involved.”

Another perspective on the nature of good and evil was rooted in the teachings of Plato and is described, in part, in this wikipedia.com article: “The absence of good (Latin: privatio boni), also known as the privation theory of evil, is a theological and philosophical doctrine that evil, unlike good, is insubstantial, so that thinking of it as an entity is misleading. Instead, evil is rather the absence or lack (‘privation’), of good. This also means that everything that exists is good, insofar as it exists; and is also sometimes stated as that evil ought to be regarded as nothing, or as something non-existent … It is often associated with a version of the problem of evil: if some things in the world were to be admitted to be evil, this could be taken to reflect badly on the creator of the world, who would then be difficult to admit to be completely good …”

Uh, oh — the “creator of the world” opens up a whole new can of metaphysical worms regarding higher powers and supreme beings, etc., with questions like, “Can good exist without a belief in a god?” which, thankfully, we don’t have the word allotment to deal with here, but it does beg the question: Would Scrooge, for instance, ever have been rehabilitated without that lugubrious visitation from Jacob Marley? Though it’s never stated, Marley surely didn’t volunteer to drag those ghostly chains around. He was condemned to do so by a vastly greater entity. In this case was it fear that engendered good? Must we always require the threat of some kind of punishment in order to do the right thing?

I know, I know — 10 tons worth of big questions in a tiny 800-word column. And because we’re human, with all of us 90% identical in most ways to one another, with an infinite variety of differences shoved into the remaining 10%, there will never be universal answers, but you can bet, old or young, we all ask ourselves those big universal questions at some point. At least we should. 

I guarantee AI won’t … Happy Birthday to me.