On God: An Uncommon Conversation by Norman Mailer, Michael Lennon Read Free Book Online Page A

are stronger than we are: “Oh, God, here comes that awful compulsion starting up again,” whatever it is—some impulse we consider unworthy of ourselves or too risky for our adventurous capacities or opposed too magnetically to our spiritual inclinations.
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    In
Advertisements for Myself,
you take sides. You say that humankind is roughly more good than evil.
    No. That was my assumption about the faith some of us have in democracy, our belief that it will work because there’s more good than bad in us as a human multitude. That still remains to be proven.
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    Still, if we are roughly more good than evil, wouldn’t that signal the ultimate victory of good?
    There is no guarantee. This is an existential question—which is to say, a not-yet-determined answer. To say “existential” means you are in the midst of an activity to which you cannot see the result. Rather, you are living in the midst of an intense question. I think existentialism can only be understood in that manner.
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    It becomes more and more clear to me all the time why courage must be the cardinal virtue in your cosmic scheme. If the forces of good are brave, strong, and daring, then there’s a chance that evil will be defeated. Would the pacifism of a Gandhi or a Martin Luther King play into the Devil’s hands, then? Would He applaud its use?
    Everything plays into the Devil’s hands. We live in an immensely complicated mesh of cause and effect. I can make an argument for Gandhi and against him—that’s no problem. One can also take either side for some great general: pro-Napoleon, let’s say, or anti-Napoleon. Gandhi, finally, was a man of significant courage. He did something no one else had ever done before. So in that sense, he was searching for the answer to the same question I’m searching for, but at a much higher and much more dangerous level: Are we more good than bad?
    In India, the answer that came back to him before he died was that we may be more bad than good. The immense riots as he came to power—those events had to be a spiritual disaster for him. So I certainly don’t sneer at Gandhi, nor would I wish to systematize him by declaring, “Oh, he brought on so much that was bad because he advocated passivity.” After all, his kind of passivity demanded huge courage. And discipline. Heroic passivity. One of the things we might do well to begin to try to understand as humans will be our future need to reconstruct the essential energy contained in oxymorons. Certain oxymorons are absurdities—so many, indeed, that we feel free to dismiss all of them by saying, “It’s an oxymoron.” But there are a few that are vital and valuable. One of them is “heroic passivity.” There, one’s experience must serve as the arbiter. There can be heroic passivity, or quasi-heroic passivity. The latter can be a disaster. And we’ve all seen that: stubborn, frantic passivity—certain pacifists we’d like to throw down the stairs.
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    What came first in your scheme of things? Belief in courage as the cardinal virtue? Or does your vision of the divided universe require courage to be the cardinal virtue?
    I would rather go back to God’s experience as He or She was creating the flora and fauna of existence, all those incredible biological experiments that went on over millions of years. Plus, most crucially, the percipience gathered from the failures. Think of the excitement of God when the dinosaur came into being, the immense excitement that He had something pretty big and pretty formidable. Then it proved too big—badly designed. The record of bad design in evolution is also there, could stuff the shelves of many a library. Yet what became obvious was that animals who had courage—or those plants that had a