Facing It

THE PORNOGRAPHY OF POWER by Lionel Rubinoff. 239 pages. Quadrangle. $6.95.

Evil has fallen on bad days. In an age of H-bombs and death camps, its influence in the world has hardly diminished. But men's ways of thinking and talking about evil have altered. The fine old dramatic metaphors, from the Serpent in the Garden to Gustave Dore's sulfurous Lucifer, have lost their power to terrify. Yet modern substitutes are equally unsatisfying. Social scientists reduce evil to data. Intellectuals expose its banality. The public seems able to consider the demonic only in the harmless guise of Rosemary's Baby. Like nearly everything these days, evil clearly could do with a new image.

One man who is trying to help is Lionel Rubinoff, an associate professor of philosophy at Toronto's York University. For Rubinoff, the image of evil has never been farther away than the nearest mirror. That individual man is both the creator and perpetrator of evil is hardly a new idea, and Rubinoff acknowledges his indebtedness to thinkers from Plato to Sartre. It is, however, in the analysis of Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde that the assumption underlying The Pornography of Power is most readily grasped. Of Stevenson's portrayal of the ambivalence of human nature, Rubinoff writes: "Dr. Jekyll, the humanist, originally creates Mr. Hyde (in itself a thoroughly evil act) so that the forces of evil incarnated in a Hyde can be scientifically studied and eventually banished from the human psyche. So confident is Jekyll in the iron strength of his own virtue that he sincerely believes he can give birth to evil without being corrupted by it. Alas, the virtuous Jekyll is no match for the satanic Hyde: once the demon has been released, the angel seeks every excuse to descend himself into the depths of depravity."

Stumbling Blocks. Few men can comfortably contemplate the concept of the natural supremacy of evil over good in humanity. The Judaeo-Christian tradition eases the anguish by holding out the hope of salvation through the exercise of a semblance of free will in the worldly fight with the Devil's forces. What is an increasingly secular age to do with its knowledge that evil is an inextricable part of man's nature? Face it, says Rubinoff. Bring it out into the open.

Predictably, the process is not easy. Besides the individual's own natural shiftiness, Rubinoff argues, one of the great intellectual stumbling blocks to such self-knowledge is liberal humanism, a near-religion that obscures the truth about human nature by assuming that evil is to be found not in man but in social and political institutions, and preaching that they, and indeed man himself, are perfectible through the application of discipline and reason. With the aid of this and other rationalizations, modern man tends to repress the natural knowledge of evil and of his own demonic urges. The result is a search for substitute forms of gratification, which too often lead man not only to fantasies of power but to acts of violence. Through the psychology of self-justification, he compulsively seeks power, coveting it not for what it can accomplish but for its own sake. In short, power becomes pornographic.

The greatest evil in becoming addicted to such pornography, says Rubinoff, is that it stunts the growth of the imagination, the only instrument by which man can truly understand--and so live with--the despairing truth of his dual nature. As examples of how to use the creative imagination in facing up to evil, Rubinoff singles out Jean Genet and Norman Mailer. Much of their writing, he says, is essentially an effort to create positive values by confronting the negative and the irrational within themselves, living with it and turning it into art.

Like most programs for self-improvement, Rubinoff's ideas are easier to talk about than to apply. On one level, his book could encourage low-grade scatology as a form of secular salvation. On another, The Pornography of Power offers an esthetic substitute for religion, by which men less creative than Genet and Mailer must try to grope their way to self-knowledge with the aid of the artist's images of evil.

Basically, Rubinoff is a religious man. Instead of traditional godheads, he puts his faith in the curative potential of man's creative imagination. He finds support for it in the religious existentialism of Philosopher Martin Buber, who believed that man himself was a continuing act of self-creation. "Man's being created in the image of God," Buber wrote, "I grasped as deed, as becoming, as task." The difficulty and the challenge of this task, Rubinoff believes, is that man must remake himself and his world without outside help.

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