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asher553The Tree of Knowledge is a change in the level of moral decision-making, from "pleasant / painful" to "good / evil" in the abstract moral sense. To be able to choose good is also to be able to choose evil; it is also the capacity to choose a course of action wrongly believing it is good, or to convince ourselves we are doing "good". With the Tree of Knowledge came the capacity for shame, and with the capacity for shame comes the capacity for pride.
Before eating the fruit, Eve only understood "good" in the utilitarian sense of "good to eat". With the possibility of moral reasoning came the possibility of moral error. It is the source of both our potential for greatness and our capacity for depravity.
C.S. Lewis famously declared that "those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
The ability to declare what is "good" and "evil" is an attribute of the Divinity; by acquiring and exercising the faculty of moral judgment, mankind partakes of (or usurps) this Divine attribute, but without the Divine attribute of infallibility.
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Envy is the emotional component of competition; competition is the response to scarcity; scarcity is the basic fact of human existence. We are rightly commanded to guard against envy; but to do this effectively, we must understand where envy comes from.
It is certainly true that if my neighbor prospers, it need not be at my expense. But in a world where there is competition for scarce resources, "his gain means my loss" undoubtedly holds true often enough for it to shape our thinking and behavior.
Perceived scarcity - and therefore competition - may also exist for intangible resources: virtue, knowledge, love. Virtue is moral standing with God, or the respect and love of the community; virtue envy is the pernicious temptation to degrade another's moral standing in order to relieve our own insecurity. Knowledge may be either of practical value (useful techniques and skills), or prized for its own sake; thus the Fruit was "desirable for understanding". Scarcity of love may be either real or imagined, as when a child believes a parent favors another sibling; the name for love envy is jealousy.
Scarcity may be either natural, as in the case of mineral or agricultural resources, or imposed, as when a party lays claim to a resource and thereby seeks to restrict access to it. Scarcity was imposed by the Creator upon the Fruit and the knowledge it represented. Thus the Creator declares: "Behold, mankind is become as one of Us (virtue), knowing good and evil (knowledge)."
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In the first Foundation novel, Hari Seldon creates the Foundation as a repository for all scientific and technical knowledge. Later generations, under Hardin's rule, will leverage this knowledge against neighboring powers such as Anacreon - i.e. manipulating the scarcity of knowledge - to become a literal technocracy.
But Seldon himself calculatingly withheld from the Foundation the knowledge of psychohistory - his own specialty, which gave him the seemingly super-human ability to foresee and shape future events. This was done explicitly to ensure that the Foundation population would behave as predicted and not deviate from the Seldon Plan. That is, Seldon selectively imposed scarcity on this particular kind of knowledge - which we might fancifully call the "knowledge of good and evil" - in order to limit mankind's free will.
Before eating the fruit, Eve only understood "good" in the utilitarian sense of "good to eat". With the possibility of moral reasoning came the possibility of moral error. It is the source of both our potential for greatness and our capacity for depravity.
C.S. Lewis famously declared that "those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."
The ability to declare what is "good" and "evil" is an attribute of the Divinity; by acquiring and exercising the faculty of moral judgment, mankind partakes of (or usurps) this Divine attribute, but without the Divine attribute of infallibility.
--
Envy is the emotional component of competition; competition is the response to scarcity; scarcity is the basic fact of human existence. We are rightly commanded to guard against envy; but to do this effectively, we must understand where envy comes from.
It is certainly true that if my neighbor prospers, it need not be at my expense. But in a world where there is competition for scarce resources, "his gain means my loss" undoubtedly holds true often enough for it to shape our thinking and behavior.
Perceived scarcity - and therefore competition - may also exist for intangible resources: virtue, knowledge, love. Virtue is moral standing with God, or the respect and love of the community; virtue envy is the pernicious temptation to degrade another's moral standing in order to relieve our own insecurity. Knowledge may be either of practical value (useful techniques and skills), or prized for its own sake; thus the Fruit was "desirable for understanding". Scarcity of love may be either real or imagined, as when a child believes a parent favors another sibling; the name for love envy is jealousy.
Scarcity may be either natural, as in the case of mineral or agricultural resources, or imposed, as when a party lays claim to a resource and thereby seeks to restrict access to it. Scarcity was imposed by the Creator upon the Fruit and the knowledge it represented. Thus the Creator declares: "Behold, mankind is become as one of Us (virtue), knowing good and evil (knowledge)."
--
In the first Foundation novel, Hari Seldon creates the Foundation as a repository for all scientific and technical knowledge. Later generations, under Hardin's rule, will leverage this knowledge against neighboring powers such as Anacreon - i.e. manipulating the scarcity of knowledge - to become a literal technocracy.
But Seldon himself calculatingly withheld from the Foundation the knowledge of psychohistory - his own specialty, which gave him the seemingly super-human ability to foresee and shape future events. This was done explicitly to ensure that the Foundation population would behave as predicted and not deviate from the Seldon Plan. That is, Seldon selectively imposed scarcity on this particular kind of knowledge - which we might fancifully call the "knowledge of good and evil" - in order to limit mankind's free will.
