Beyond Good and Evil

Add Dallin Morgan, 18, seen in this booking photo, was arrested with a fellow high school student on conspiracy charges after authorities uncovered a plot to use explosives during a school assembly.
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2012/01/27/utah-girl-credited-with-outing-school-bombing-plot/#ixzz1ks3vX3JZ

What do we make of these Utah school bombing suspects?  

They are the perfect transmitters of fantasies already extant in the culture.  As such there is nothing wrong with them.  They may in fact be harbingers of the future, a future in which each neuron, each node of the neural net, each individual, has only the binary response ‘yes’ or ‘no’ available to it.  And the bombing suspects are exemplars of ‘yes’.

Or alternatively, the only and last hope of humanism is a negative virtue, the hope of inhibition, the hope that a last, deconstructionist-proof morality emerges in the individual in an intricate understanding of what must be repressed even as it courses through the collective mind.

This is an old ethical idea—the individual versus the group, moral man versus immoral society.  That somehow the individual, stripped of all belief in positivity by the very triumph of positivity, must somehow construct an inhibitory ethical system equivalent to the discredited social code and able to endure the challenge implicit in the hypocritical ethics of security versus terror—when the giving of terror has become a secret virtue and value of the global monad.

Can an ethical culture be built out of the summation of individual firewalls?  Or rather would such a makeshift system lead only to the further contradiction of ethics?

And what of the idea that these are ‘unthinkable’ crimes, when in fact the adjective ‘unthinkable’ almost always means that the described crime is all too easily thought about?  ‘Unthinkable’ is a peculiar adjective, and odd inversion of positivity and positive morality, implying that evil, the worst of evil, the worst of crimes, are beyond even the thought of the good man or woman, beyond the imagination of the good man or woman.  Evil lies beyond the imagination of the good, and yet we always presume that the tempter must be resourceful enough to understand the good in order to tempt it, in order to seduce it, so we have the familiar problem of the good somehow being less imaginative than evil––being fundamentally stupid, stunned and uncomprehending at the prospect of evil. 

This is of course the model of the entire reaction to 9/11––we were stunned by this unthinkable act, by this unthinkable evil. Yet we’d staged very similar acts of terror as special effects in cinema many times in the past. And inflicted acts of terror of equivalent or far greater evil on others in the recent past.

So the question becomes: must good be ignorant of itself in order to be good?