Playing With Evil

The best part of my time at university were the dorm room debates.

There was one heated exchange in particular that has stuck with me. It was between a newly-minted atheist and a self-described "follower of Christ." The atheist had provoked the devotee by saying, "I don't believe in God, but I do believe in Satan." His joke was that he could take the credit to himself when good things happened, but he liked having a scapegoat to blame for the bad.

Tempers flared. There were good and stupid points made on both sides. Us onlookers enjoyed it immensely, even as a few of us kept our heads down, you know, because of the potential for lightening bolts. The thing that stuck with me, however, was the question,"If you don't believe in the Bible, then what's to stop you from murdering people?"

It unsettled me. I had never had the urge to kill another person. I mean, aside from sibling rivalry wrestling matches, I'd never intentionally physically harmed another person. For the first time, I found myself asking Why? 

It wasn't the fear of God that stopped me if only because murder, in a real sense, had simply never crossed my mind. There was nothing to stop. Perhaps I'd just never found myself in a situation in which I was desperate enough or angry enough to have to be stopped. Whatever prevented me from killing to that point in my life came from a place that preceded conscious thought, let alone action. 

I had, of course, previous explored killing through my play. My toy soldiers killed one another in droves, usually ending in a single survivor left alone in his block fort, a nice metaphor for the ultimate futility of violence. Around the neighborhood we often played games that involved shooting one another, using our fingers as pistols or sticks as rifles. In these games we killed and were killed, deaths that lasted for the count of 10. In these games, dying was an art form, one we had learned from cowboy movies, many of us drawing it out comically, like Nick Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream.

But this was different. Were there really people, people I knew, people who lived with me as dorm neighbors, who were only prevented from murder, rape, and pillage because some words in a book -- even holy words in a sacred book -- commanded them not to? I found the whole idea alarming. 

I remember considering the kid who had asked the question with a question of my own. Am I really just a crisis of faith away from being murdered by this guy?

It was an idea that to this day causes me to be wary of anyone who seems overly adamant about their faith. I worry that they're really just trying to convince themselves. And if their faith is all that keeps them from murder and mayhem, then I definitely don't want to do or say anything to monkey with that, which is why I never argue religion with anyone. I don't want to risk being too persuasive.

The atheist responded, "I don't murder people because I don't want to spend the rest of my life in prison."

Well that was even worse. And this is why I'm equally cautious around people who are too adamant about law and order. Again, I worry they're just trying to convinced themselves.

The truth be told, I wasn't genuinely in fear for my life during this dorm room debate. I knew these guys. I felt safe with them. They weren't on the verge of murder. I understood that we were just playing with ideas in the same way that we had played with the ideas of death and killing as kids. 

But what about the people I didn't know? I mean, I'd recently read Crime and Punishment with its nihilistically murderous protagonist Rodion Raskolnakov. But he was a fictional character, the creation of Dostoyevsky's playful mind, a thought experiment to explore an idea. It hadn't occurred to me that there were real people like him out there contemplating and committing murder in cold blood simply because they found themselves beyond the laws of God or man.

The history of humanity is full of killing. As I wrote yesterday, our nation has been at war for most of my life. There are something like 50 murders in the US every day. But the place with the most murders is my own living room. It seems like half the shows offered by streaming services are some version of a murder mystery or police detective show, most of which start with a dead body. Again, these are fictional murderers, but still . . .

The long term historical trend is that murders have declined dramatically over time. Today's murder rate is something like 1 for every 100,000 people, while some estimates place the murder rate in Europe during medieval times between 10 and 110(!) per 100,000. 

Of course, we rightly fret over murderous violence today, even if it's low by historic standards. We worry that our faith isn't strong enough or that our laws aren't tough enough. We worry that our media is feeding our murderous urges, especially among young men. But what if we have it backwards.

What if those murder mysteries and detective shows are actually giving us an opportunity to explore this darkness, to play with it like we did as children or college students?

When we play, we are free to explore things and ideas from all sides, to consider, bloodlessly, what it's like to both kill and be killed. I often think of play as being the process of considering yet one more perspective. It's unsavory, of course, when we see children "blasting" one another. It's upsetting to think about young men debating murder outside the strictures of the laws of God or man. And it can be disturbing to see all that blood pooling up around the bodies of murder victims on our screens. But ultimately, I wonder if this is a big part of why, when you step far enough back to really look at the historic trends, we aren't killing one another nearly as often as we once did: we have more opportunities to play with it.

When children play, what we see often strikes us as anything but peaceful, but is it possible that it's play, not laws, that leads to peace?

Loris Malaguzzi, Maria Montessori, Rudolph Steiner, Paulo Freire, Lev Vygotsky, John Dewey, and most of the other foundational advocates for versions of play-based learning were all overtly focused on educating for peace. They understood that play is freedom and freedom leads us to explore all things, fully and courageously. When the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, "man is condemned to be free," he meant that we are ultimately "left alone, without excuse", without laws, and that if we are to have morals and values, if we are to know the difference between good and evil, it will come from what we make of ourselves.

As Natalia Ginzburg writes, "(I)n general I think we should be very cautious about promoting and providing rewards and punishments. Because life rarely has its rewards and punshments; usually sacrifices have no reward, and often evil deeds go unpunished, at times they are even richly rewarded with success and money. Therefore it is best that our children should know from infancy that good is not rewarded and the evil goes unpunished; yet they must love good and hate evil, and that it is not possible to give any logical explanation for this."

But play gives us an explanation, even if it can't be framed as logical. Laws are attempts to assert what is good and evil. But perhaps the way we come to know and live the difference is through play which is how we discover the fullest picture possible, one in which killing is out of the question and peace is the only reasonable way forward.

Play-based learning is educating for peace.

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