Can evil be redeemed? Memory, by K.J. Parker (Book 3 in the Scavenger Trilogy)

 Let's wrap up my entirely superfluous analysis of K.J. Parker's Scavenger Trilogy with a useful, philosophical question.  Can evil be redeemed?  One needs a working definition of evil, and a working definition of redemption, but in any case, the question will be challenging.  Yet, when writing under the pseudonym of K.J. Parker, Tom Holt does not tend to offer uplifting messages.  Interesting ideas, but uplifting?  Not so much.  Consider, then, Memory, which concludes the tale of Poldarn, and his world, which ends his world, as foretold, and the meaning of evil.

The first book in the series follows an amnesiac, as he awakens in a ditch after a battle.  He awakens in a fantasy-ish world, and finds himself in the northern provinces of an empire facing periodic raids by mysterious people from elsewhere, while being torn apart by internal divisions and feuds.  Our amnesiac acquires the name, "Poldarn"-- the name of a god-- when the first person he meets (Copis/Xipho) tells him to play the role of that god as they go from town to town running a religious scam.  Eventually, after shenanigans and fights, Poldarn learns that he is one of the raiders, and they take him off to their far-away island.  Book 2 is a somewhat tedious affair, in which Poldarn tries and fails to reintegrate back into their society, and then returns to the empire when it all goes wrong.

Back to the empire.  Poldarn (real name, "Ciartan") mostly tries to hide out at a foundry in the middle of nowhere, but that doesn't work.  The new emperor-- Poldarn/Ciartan's father-in-law, Tazencius-- has commissioned the development of cannons from that very foundry, as a weapon against the raiders.  At the same time, Poldarn had been a member of a religious order-- the sword-monks-- which was wiped out by the raiders at the end of the first book, but some of their ranks are still around, and they're all converging on the cannon plan too.  The former head of the order wants to make sure no one gets cannons, so he has his agents working on that, and the sword-monks' main secret agent, "Monach," (translation:  "monk") is now leading a free company of mercenaries towards that camp, and all for control of the empire with the new secret weapons as the lynchpin.

The cannons are sabotaged, Poldarn flees down to the capital, Torcea, where he is offered his old position with his father-in-law and wife again, but more disaster ensues, and then the whole thing ends as we learn of the release of a plague which will wipe out who-knows-how-much of the empire, the raiders' civilization, and for all practical purposes, it's the end of the world, and the Poldarn mythology was always that Poldarn is the harbinger of the end, so call it the fulfillment of prophesy.

Evil.

At various points, characters discuss the question of the most evil man in the world.  Everyone gives the same answer.  "Feron Amathy," who is the leader of a mercenary army.  He is a ruthless, brutal, treacherous scumbag.  Yet, there are a few questions about Amathy, including his age.  Excuse me, but given the stories, how old is this guy?

Hint, hint, hint.

He's the Dread Pirate Roberts.

Also, for a while, Poldarn/Ciartan was Feron Amathy.

Remember, Poldarn was not a good guy, before he lost his memory.  He may have tried a little harder after the great bonking of the head and his attendant memory loss of fictional quality, but he was always a shit.  To have been Feron Amathy, for some run of the character, means that he was really bad.  Ciartan/Poldarn was installed as the new Feron Amathy at one point by Tazencius while scheming to take the throne, and you begin to see a sketch of evil.

Willingness to commit any atrocity in pursuit of a completely self-serving goal.  There is your model of evil.

Feron Amathy, one notes then, was not really a person, but a figurehead.  The Dread Pirate Roberts, as the fictionalization of evil, embodied by whomever acted the role for a time.  Tazencius?  Tazencius was true evil, because through intermediaries, like the constructed Feron Amathy, he would commit any atrocity in pursuit of a completely self-serving goal.

What of the person, Poldarn/Ciartan?  According to Tazencius, Poldarn/Ciartan was not true evil, and therein lay his problem.  How much destruction lay in his wake for his attempts to be not quite pure evil?  Whom did he betray for those moments of conscience?  And what happened as a result?  How much death?

But more importantly for our purposes, after the head-bonk, he really does have better intentions.  He does not exactly succeed, which was the point of my analysis of Book 2, Pattern, but he does try to be better.  Destruction follows anyway, in part because he does wrong anyway, not because he thinks in evil ways.  He merely does not know how to think in good ways.

And when he starts, what happens?  Is it just too late?

A few things have happened as a result of Poldarn's choices.  Tazencius is Emperor, and he's not a good guy.  We'll get back to his shifting intentions upon ascending to the throne, but he is not a good guy.  Yet we need to rewind the clock.  When Ciartan was a student at Deymason, studying to become a sword-monk, he was in the empire, essentially as a spy for his people, the raiders.  He was discovered by a fellow student, whom he then killed.

By spying, he caused death and destruction, but worse, not only did he directly murder a fellow student, he set off a chain of events.  Periodically throughout Memory, we meet a crazy, old lady.  She is kind and needy, and all that, and Poldarn charitably helps her as she tries to make her way to Torcea, the capital.  With her little wicker cage.

She was the mother of Poldarn's school chum, whom he killed for the discovery of his treachery.  She is seeking vengeance, spreading the plague through the empire, with the rats in that wicker cage.  Released into Torcea, that's it, that's all she wrote.

The deed was done when Ciartan killed the kid in school, and then, even Poldarn's attempts to do good, by helping the old lady, had the effect of spreading the plague, and destroying everything.

So consider.  By spying and killing a fellow student, did Ciartan simply commit wrongs that cannot be redeemed?

The question is whether or not Ciartan's acts were so wrong that even his attempts at good, his acts motivated by compassion and nobility, post head-bonk, can only bring about more evil.  How the plague would have spread without Poldarn's intervention is a counterfactual that we cannot examine, but through the effects of his actions, we can consider a moral perspective in which those acts do not redeem.  He did what he did, and indeed, what he did was not even motivated by evil in the same way as Tazencius.  Tazencius was willing to let as many citizens of the empire die as he thought would help him seize the throne, but Ciartan thought he was helping his own people.  See the moral ambiguity, at least from his perspective?  The lesser evil does more damage, and by the time Tazencius gets the throne, he decides that he actually has a responsibility to the empire, and he really does want to protect the citizens of the empire from the raiders and other threats at that point.

The lesser evil did the greater harm, and once done, there was no redemption for Ciartan/Poldarn.  Rather, his attempts to be better brought about the end.

Redemption is an interesting moral principle.  We all do wrong at some point.  What then?  Realistically, the most common reaction is to rationalize and hide the shame rather than take any moral responsibility.  Most people are moral cowards, which is different from being sociopaths, but not what I consider respectable.

Think honestly, and if it is easier, think about it in terms of what has been done to you rather than what you have done.  How many people have truly wronged you?  How many, unprompted, have then taken action to make amends?  Just getting people, with nothing real at stake, to admit that they have done anything wrong is like pulling teeth.  Add stakes and you know what happens.  People are moral cowards.

Turn that around, and question your own moral courage.  It is merely easier to see the point when you consider actions directed at you rather than your own actions.

Where lower-case c cynicism and capital-C Cynicism meet is the assessment of moral cowardice.  As I sniff the air like a kuon, I smell cravenness.

Yet most of us would like to believe in something like redemption.  I'm not a Christian, and really, the Christian notion of forgiveness has always struck me as too cheap, and a con.  Accept Jesus as your lord and savior, and some stuff, and your sins are forgiven?  Huh?  Interesting cosmology.  It has an appeal, if you a) understand yourself to be flawed, b) want a path to redemption, and c) don't see another one, but it just leaves so many questions, like, to repeat, huh?  It sounds too much like a huckster with a miracle product, half the price of everything else, which will make all your problems go away, with no side effects!

Act now, supplies are limited!

Nothing good comes cheap and easy.

Aristotle (OK, I'm on Aristotle again) described justice as balance between two parties.  An injustice is an imbalance, akin to deviation from the golden mean.  The way to rectify that, then, is to move back to a point of balance.  For Nicomachean Ethics, it is always the golden mean, and if you seek justice, balance, redemption, you have actions to take.  Virtue means the practice of virtue.  Action.

What if you cannot move back to a point of balance?  Consider murder.  Disclaimer and repetition of the joke I beat into the ground:  do not consider murder.  What of murder?  Can there be redemption for murder if redemption requires resetting the balance?  No, so what of Poldarn/Ciartan and the terrifying record of murders he committed and set in motion?

Poldarn/Ciartan is not the purest of evil, as Tazencius is, but he still cannot be redeemed, at least if we think of redemption in more substantive terms, such as Nicomachean terms rather than the more empty Christian terms.  Apologies to my Christian friends, but I just cannot buy that that's all you need to do.

What is redemption, then?  For Aristotle, moving from imbalance to balance sets things right.  Do that, and everything is square.

If you do it because a court makes you, are you redeemed?  Put it this way, if you cheat someone, or steal, the law may set things square, but if you then come to me, am I a fool to trust you?  Yes.

If you set things right to set your conscience right, am I a fool to trust you?  Not necessarily.  I might justifiably be leery, but if you sincerely sought redemption I might give provisional trust.  See the difference, and see the difference between forced restitution and redemption.

Applying that reasoning, is there anything that could ever make me trust a child molester?  An actual Nazi?  (Foolish children like to call the IDF "Nazis," but that is because our professoriate is filled with anti-Semitic liars and propagandists who brainwash them instead of teaching them.)

There are categories of crimes, categories of people I can never trust again.  Thus, there are categories for whom redemption, by any real meaning, will be impossible.  There is irredeemable evil.

At the individual level, one might apply caution, Bayesian principles, and maximize the simplicity of life by choosing to interact with those who are trustworthy, and when forced by circumstance to interact with those known to be untrustworthy, take precautions.  Yet, it is not my job to forgive you, and since I'm not a Christian, I don't believe in the guy who does.  However, the possibility of redemption is philosophically important, with the caveat that there is a point at which it ceases to be an option.  Why does it matter, if I won't trust you again?

Because virtue is what matters.  Like Seneca said, the vicious spend their lives either caught or running, and memento mori, we all die anyway, so live well in order to die well.  I cannot make you be decent, but the vicious are never happy.  No one cares what I think, but I prefer to remove myself from those whom I do not respect.  They are simply not my problem.  Here, I reject Seneca and Stoic principles, which teach a bunch of brotherhood-of-man stuff.  Sorry, not my brothers, and I am not their keeper.  Oh, wait.  That wasn't Stoicism.  Point being, Stoic principles on the brotherhood of man derive from a weird-ass cosmology beginning with Zeno and elaborated by Chrysippus in which the Stoic-Force binds the universe together, and the universe expands and collapses in magic fire and goes through cycles of repetition and where did they get this stuff?  Oh, they pulled it out of their Hellenistic, pre-Enlightenment asses.  You are free to believe as you choose.  If you believe in the Force, that's all you, my not-brother, that's all you.  As for redemption?  I'd like to think it's possible, but there is a point at which it ceases to be.

Gordian Knot, "Redemption's Way," from their self-titled album.  Marley would have been too obvious, and roughly 1/3 of all blues songs have the word, "evil" in the title.  Seans, Reinert & Malone were in a band called "Cynic" together, and if I could have used a Cynic track, I would have.  I'm not a metalhead, but Cynic?  Oh, yeah.