11

No Free lunch: Take your Plaque like a man.

LECTURE 2
THE PROBLEMS OF GOOD AND EVIL
The problem today centers about coping with a nonsensical
world. Man must have order in life, for aesthetic reasons,
reasons of symmetry, for intellectual reasons (chaos is
unintelligible), and for practical reasons so we can plan.
In other words, there must be some kind of a moral economy
in which virtue is rewarded and evil is punished, or we come
to grief. When man sees no justice, he invents it – maybe
in the form of Hitler, maybe in the form of insanity. In
other words, I’ll sketch on the board the diagram of the first
drama critic, Aristotle. On the left I put good man and
under it bad man; and to the right good destiny and under it
bad destiny. A horizonal line from good destiny and good
man is a happy but not very newsworthy drama. The bad man,
the bad ends is justice; the northeast diagonal bad man, good
ends is an affront to our sensibilities; and the good man
(to the one half) to a bad end is the definition of tragedy.
It’s this tragedy that we talk about today in three pieces
of literature. The first, One Day in the Life of Ivan
Denisovich. Solzhenitsyn paints a picture in a prison that
is very familiar to me and others in the audience. It’s a
picture of stark physical circumstances and in some cases
brutality, but in the picture only two people I think need
to be identified today. First of all Ivan, who adjusts well