Jeremy Spann

I signed up for the class "Good and Evil: an Interdisciplinary Study" because I figured that it would be a fluff course--most of the "meaty" courses are associated with a department such as Mathematics, but this was a Liberal Studies course, and in our university, Liberal Studies courses have a reputation of being vague and lacking rigor. Furthermore, the teacher is on the counseling staff, and Mr. Spann--he has a master's, not a doctorate--has a reputation for being really nice, kind, and considerate.

Was I in for a surprise. First of all, his reputation for being nice, kind, and considerate is well-founded. But he covers so much material in each class that it is hard to take notes. And yet he draws you into the subject with a passion that I had thought was reserved for, well, less academic things.

The first three weeks' classes were about "what is the difference between good and evil?" Being a devout churchgoer, I always had a fairly clear-cut idea of what good and evil are. Basically, anything that is obedient to the church is good, and anything that is disobedient is evil. By the time these three weeks were over, however, I discovered that I really didn't know the difference between good and evil! And that scared me.

After that, there were a few lectures on "Historical development of the concepts of good and evil." In this class I learned about how ancient civilizations had far different moral values than we do today. Basically all this stuff about tolerance and diversity that we believe today is, well, new. In the 19th century, some people thought that slavery was ordained by divine providence, and therefore, good. Just imagine what people thought 5,000 years ago!

Then there were a number of lectures and discussions about "good and evil in everyday life." Until now I had thought that evil was things like killing people or raping them. That is indeed evil. But did you know that everyday choices have moral content?

The meat of the course was the five or so weeks that were spent on "why some people choose good and others choose evil." Before I took the class, I thought that people choose evil because they seek pleasure instead of obeying the commandments. That is true to a certain extent. But I have never been faced with any real moral dilemmas in my life. In these classes, I learned about how the choices with the most serious moral consequences are in fact choices between different evils. Not between an obviously greater and an obviously lesser evil, but between two great evils, neither of which is obviously lesser--or in many cases, the one which appears to be lesser is in fact the greater. I learned about situations that lead to such choices, as well as the consequences of the choices made, and we debated the necessity of holding people accountable for these choices even when choosing good was not at all an option. In this series of classes, I also learned about the biological bases of evil. We had to read Wilson's Sociobiology, Peck's People of the Lie, and Golding's Lord of the Flies in their entirety.

The final part of the class was about "Implementation considerations." This was basically a discussion of how we can choose good over evil in our own lives, but also how we can influence others to do good and avoid evil. I learned that simply telling others what to do is not necessarily the best way to accomplish this--in fact, some who are evil choose to use this strategy to mask their own interior emptiness.

Overall, I say this course was the most informative that I've ever taken at this university. This is ironic, since I was, until then, a straight-A student and got a C+ in this class. In fact, this is the only class that I've gotten below a B+ in. And yet it is, by far, my favorite.