PGTS Journal Edition 0012
March, 2003

(Good vs Evil) vs (good vs evil)

Recently, on late-night television I finally caught up with Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula (made in 1992), staring Keanu Reeves, Winona Ryder and Anthony Hopkins. I had missed the film at the box office, even though I am quite a big fan of The Count. This induced me to write another article way outside my chosen area of speciality. This was an essay titled (Good vs Evil) vs (good vs evil)?. The reason for the typical programmers' use of parantheses is to emphasise that there may be differances between Evil (with a capital "E") and evil (with a small "e").

The last time I posted an article outside of my supposed area of speciality was on the anniversary of the 9/11 attack when two articles about the event were posted on this site. These were Oil, Religion and Fascism and 9/11 - the first anniversary. Both these articles arose from e-mail between myself and New England poet and historian, Dan Byrnes. This was an argument in which I tried to explain the event from a rational global economic point of view. Dan on the other hand took a metaphysical view that took into account the broad sweep of history and the religous archetypes.

I rejected the notion of a Clash of Civilizations. It seemed a depressingly deterministic view of our circumstances, and so the two articles were advocating different points of view. As I re-read the two of them if occurs to me that we may both be right. In which the case the prognosis is even more gloomy than I originally supposed.