Visualizing
Evil Text © Peter Brian Barry Artwork © Mike Mosher
Talking About Evil
Evil has a whiff of
fire and brimstone about it. Using the term—‘evil’—is bound to conjure up a class of images in the minds of at least many who hear it. For some, the term will invoke Hellish images of the sort that preachers like Jonathan Edwards put to use to put the fear of God in their congregation. Speaking of the fate of “wicked men,” Edwards tells us that The Wrath of God burns against them, their Damnation don’t slumber, the Pit is prepared, the Fire is made ready, the Furnace is now hot, ready to receive them, the Flames do now rage and glow. The glittering Sword is whet, and held over them, and the Pit hath opened her Mouth under them. If, for reasons unknown, we wanted to find evil, we need to go to where the devils and the damned reside, where sulfur pits burn hot and horrors await. So understood, evil is the stuff of supernatural horror and has its home in religion and mythology.
There are other images that talk of evil might evoke,
some of which will make evil seem cartoonish or merely an entertaining fiction. All too often, examples of evil characters from film and literature can seem like this. Snidley Whiplash is a somewhat dated example, the sort of evildoer who fiendishly twists his moustache as he ties the innocent Nell Fenwick to tracks, cackling all the while. But some of the portrayals of The Joker from the Batman universe suggest a similar character, one who lacks any obvious motivation for what he does but clearly relishes wreaking havoc as he wreaks it. Characters like Voldemort canon will surely be nominated as the embodiment of evil by a host of readers who grew upon on the Harry Potter series. Would any of these characters spring to mind if you were asked to describe what an evil person looks like? What about Ozzy Osbourne—a younger version, probably—biting the heads off bats and declaring himself the “Prince of Darkness”? Or someone more handsome and refined, neatly manicured and dressed in finery?
If that is how evil is to be understood—as having
a home in the supernatural or as cartoonish—then many will be bound to disregard evil as a historical afterthought, the sort of thing that our philosophical ancestors made a big deal about but that shouldn’t trouble us in the modern world who do not share their antediluvian worldview. Delbanco suggests that “We no longer have a conception of evil as a distributed entity with an ontological essence of its own.” In a similar vein, Susan Sontag holds that while “We have a sense of evil,” we no longer have “the religious or philosophical language to talk intelligently about evil.”
But however much the world has changed, evil is still with us. As the poet T. S. Eliot wrote:
The world turns and the world changes But one thing does not change However you disguise it, this one thing does not change The perpetual struggle of good and evil.
Evil is still with us, not
only because the modern world has not entirely abandoned the supernatural discourse of our philosophical ancestors. There is little reason to believe that we must resort to mythologizing evil in mythical ways if we are going to continue to speak of it. As Joseph Conrad suggests, “The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.� And sometimes, very many of us play an active role in bringing about the very worst kinds of wickedness. Indeed, there are some kinds of wickedness that could only be brought about by very many of us working in concert.
By any reasonable standard, genocide is evil. Defini-
tions vary and matters are often contentious, but the United Nations Genocide Convention defines genocide as "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group� giving a title to what Winston Churchill once called “a crime without a name.�
With that definition in place, the number of genocides that have taken place just in the 20th century is staggering and the body count truly shocking, even when we focus simply on the lowest reasonable estimates of the number of persons killed.
Holocaust scholars estimate that around 6,000,000
Jews and millions of gentiles were killed by the Nazis and their collaborators participating in the Final Solution. The number of participants is disputed: some estimates range from anywhere between 100,000 to 5,000,000. The phrase “Never again!� has come to be tied to responses to the Holocaust, most notably as the motto of the Jewish Defense League. The Holocaust is arguably not the first genocide; the Armenian genocide resulted in the deaths of at least 800,000 Armenians living in the Ottoman Empire, although Turkey continues to deny any genocide occurred and any numbers of native peoples were systematically executed by colonizers and settlers. But inarguably, it was not the last
The number of incidents widely regarded as genocides just after 1970 is astounding.
During most of 1971, “Operation Search Light” was
carried out in Bangladesh by the West Pakistan army and over ten months resulted in the deaths of between 500,000 and 3,000,000 Bengalis, mostly Hindus. .The east Timor Genocide resulted in the deaths of between 150,000 and 200,000 of the East Timorese people at the hands of the Indonesian government, somewhere between one-fifth and one third of the population of East Timor, over approximately twenty-five years between 1975 and a referendum for independence in 1999. Between 1975-1979, 1,7000,000 Cambodians died during the Cambodian genocide led by Pol Pot and carried out by the Khmer Rouge either through execution, forced labor in the “killing fields,” or starvation. In the early 1990s, The Bosnian Genocide resulted in the death of more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys and was preceded by an ethnic cleansing campaign that resulted in the systematic murder of 200,000 Muslims. 2,000,000 more became refugees. This list is not exhaustive.
One recent genocidal campaign is
notable, even by these standards, because of the remarkable combination of efficiency and brutality that marked it. In 1994, an airplane crash that resulted in the death of the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi proved to be the catalyst of already strained tensions between Rwandan Hutus and Tutsis, two rival ethnic tribes. The radio station Radio Télévision Libre des Mille Collines played an unusually enabling role as it was used by extremist Hutus to identify targets and justify the genocide: “Cut down the tall trees!” was one familiar imperative that was broadcast, alluding to the perceived fact that Tutsis were taller and foreshadowing the use of the machete was a primary weapon of war. “You are cockroaches! We will kill you!" voices from the radio announced, shadowing that “The graves are not yet full!” Over a period of just about 100 days, somewhere between 75,000 and 150,000 Rwandan Hutus participated in the slaughter of over somewhere between 500,000 and 1,000,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus. Hundreds of thousands of women were raped, another weapon of war.
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Mass killings that don’t quite qualify or are contro-
versially regarded as genocides deserve mention too: somewhere between 10,000 and 30,000 Argentinians were “disappeared” when armed forces took over the government in a coup, many of whom were tortured first; the “Great Leap Forward” of the People’s Republic of China led by Chairman Mao Zedong resulted in a famine that caused the deaths of anywhere between 18 million and 55 million; another man-made famine, the Holodomor, killed between 7 and 10 million Ukrainians alone while millions more died as a result of Soviet policy led by Josef Stalin.
Perhaps “We no longer believe in hell” as George Steiner suggested. But that might be for the simple reason that “We have created it here on earth.”
Some philosophers worry that
the term ‘evil’ is ripe for abuse and misuse and that, therefore, we should stop using it or otherwise purge it from our collective moral lexicon. For example, Philip Cole worries that “there are good moral and political reasons why we should do without” the concept of evil—that the very idea of evil obstructs our understanding of people and their actions, among other things. Similarly, in a book titled The Abuse of Evil: The Corruption of Politics and Religion since 9/11, Richard Bernstein complains that “today the appeal to evil is being used as a political tool to obscur complex issues, to block genuine thinking, and to stifle public discussion and debate.” It can’t really be denied that the term ‘evil’ is sometimes misused—say, as a way of demonizing one’s opponents or shutting down dialogue.
There are no shortage of examples. Here’s a good one. Alex Jones, radio show host and operator of websites catering to the extremist right-wing, is no stranger to conspiracy theories: he has promoted the theory that the United States government was involved in the 9/11 bombings and that Hilary Clinton played a role in a human trafficking operation targeting children that was run out of a New Jersey pizza parlor. Speaking of Hilary Clinton, Jones has suggested that she is “an abject, psychopathic, demon from Hell…” and that “People around her say she’s so dark now, and so evil, and so possessed that they are having nightmares, they’re freaking out. What could all this possibly be based on? “I’ve talked to people that are in protective details, they’re scared of her. And they say listen, she’s a frickin’ demon and she stinks and so does Obama. I go, like what? Sulfur. They smell like Hell.”
It can’t be denied that some people are going to be
pretty reckless in their use of terms like ‘evil’ but of course that’s true of most moralized language. And, there is a strong case to be made that we need terms like ‘evil’ in our moral vocabulary. As the philosopher Dan Haybron puts it: “call Hitler or the Holocaust evil… you are unlikely to arouse much disagreement. On the contrary: you will have better luck generating dissent if you refer to Hitler or the Holocaust merely as bad or wrong: “Hitler was a bad person, and what he did was wrong.” …such tepid language seems terribly inadequate to the moral gravity of this subject matter. Prefix your adjectives with as many “verys” as you like; you still fall short. Only ‘evil’, it seems, will do.”
In any case, it isn’t really all that likely that we are going to stop using the term ‘evil.’ For better or for worse, we are bound to continue to speak of evil—at least, of evil actions, evil people, evil states of affairs, evil events, evil policies, evil intent, and still more. If we’re going to keep using the term, then we may as well get clear about exactly what it is we are talking about when we’re talking about evil.
Former Justice of the Supreme Court
Potter Stewart famously remarked about "hard-core pornography" that while he might never be able to intelligibly define what it is, nonetheless “I know it when I see it.” Perhaps we can do better with evil.
Evil, the Very Thing
In her cheeky rendition of the song “I Want to be Evil,” the singer Eartha Kitt expresses a remarkable change of heart. After explaining that she’s been good, having made a habit of petting small dogs and steering clear of drugs and alcohol, she is “tired of being pure and not chased” and longs to “go to the devil.” As the title of the song suggests, she wants to be evil. But the list of future crimes she is planning falls remarkably short of the mark. For example, she sings that “I want to be evil, I want to spit tacks/I want to be evil and cheat at jacks/I want to be wicked, I want to tell lies/I want to be mean and throw mud pies” and so forth.
Is that all there is to being evil? Cheating at jacks and
throwing mud pies is the handiwork of naughty children, not the sort of high crimes and havoc that we expect from someone who is evil nor the sort of stuff that happens during war or times of genocide. Surely someone who wanted to be evil—not just bad or nasty or mean, but evil—would set her sights on being a bit worse than this, wouldn’t she?
Then again, maybe not. We sometimes say that beauty
is “in the eye of the beholder.� Maybe evil could be like that? Maybe what I think is evil is different from what you think is evil? Or what we think is evil is different from what they think is evil. The founder of the Church of Satan, Anton Szandor LaVey, reports that when Christian missionaries warned some native peoples in Alaska of the horrors associated with an ecclesiastical description of Hell and its torment and blazing lake of fire, they enquired eagerly: "How do we get there?" Could evil too just be in the eye of the beholder?
LaVey seems to think so. In The Devil’s Notebook,
Lavey offers the following “Definition of Good and Evil: Good is what you like. Evil is what you don't like.” There is a philosophical tradition of relativism according to which ethics is a function of a particular perspective only. If what matters is the perspective of a particular cultural group, then we have cultural moral relativism. If what matters is the perspective of an individual person, then we have moral subjectivism. If either of these views is correct then whether an action is right or wrong, whether a person is good or bad, or, for that matter, evil, is just a matter of perspective.
But we don’t always think
and talk as though evil and ethics are just a matter of perspective. Lots of us think that genocide and rape and unapologetic cruelty are objectively bad, whatever a person’s perspective.
The philosopher and psychologist William James held that “The evil facts… are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life’s significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.” If there are “evil facts”—not just opinions, but facts¬—then evil is not just a matter of individual perspective or cultural tradition or whatever.
Sometimes we are told that the problem isn’t that
evil is just a matter of perspective. Sometimes we are told that the problem is that we can’t understand evil, that there is something about it that reaches beyond human understanding. In his book Evil: An Investigation, the author Lance Morrow contends that “It is part of the nature of evil that it is inexplicable,” something that is “felt rather than understood.” Indeed, Morrow concludes early on that “it is ultimately not possible to understand evil.” Despite several centuries of efforts dedicated to philosophical reflection on the subject, evil remains, we are told, part of the very essence of evil is that it is “elusive and indefinable.”
The thought that evil is inexplicable
or incomprehensibl or otherwise beyond our understanding is familiar enough. Evildoing can seem senseless. The motives of an evil person are probably elusive and we decent people will have difficulty understanding him. So with evil events like the Holocaust, perhaps. The Jewish philosopher Emil Fackenheim explains that “we confront in the Holocaust a world of horror. We cannot comprehend it but only comprehend its incomprehensibility.” Holocaust survivor and author Primo Levi seems to encourage refraining from trying to comprehend the Holcaust: “Perhaps one can- not, what is more one must not, understand what happened, becuse to understand is almost to justify.”
There is a danger too in regarding evil as inexplica-
ble or incomprehensible or otherwise beyond human understanding. The great Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard has one of his characters, Judge William, put things thusly: “Is the inexplicable explained by saying that it has occurred only once in the world? Or is not this the inexplicable, that it did occur? And has not this fact, that it did occur, the power to make everything inexplicable, even the most explicable events?� The inability to explain or otherwise understand evil can be philosophically paralyzing. It can cast doubt upon or outright ruin the prospects of understanding ourselves, our behavior, and the world we live in.
Worse, it encourages a dangerous sort of compla-
cency. While Primo Levi cautioned against trying too hard to understand the Holocaust, he nonetheless warns that “We cannot understand it, but we can and must understand from where it springs, and we must be on our guard. If understanding is impossible, knowing is imperative, because what happened could happen again.” Levi’s clarification is terribly important. It isn’t generally true that explaining something amounts to justifying it. Understanding that some plague has its origins in unsanitary slums is consistent with being committed to cleaning things up. Understanding that crime, or at least much of it, has its origins in poverty neither excuses nor justifies the criminal, although it does suggest a response if we are really committed to reducing crime and criminal behavior.
The suggestion that evil is something beyond our
understanding might also have the unwelcome result of suggesting that evil must be something fantastical, something remarkable, something utterly foreign to the more familiar aspects of our world that we seem to be able to understand reasonably well. But this result runs counter to the fact that the perpetrators of many evils are other human beings as are the agents of evildoing. The poet W. H. Auden implicitly cautions against mythologizing here when he reminds us that “Evil is always unspectacular and always human,/ And shares our bed and eats at our own table.�
The philosopher Su-
san Neiman puts things properly when she claims that “To claim that evil is comprehensible in principle is not to claim that any instance of it is transparent. It is rather to deny that supernatural forces, divine or demonic, are required to account for it. It is also to say that while natural processes are responsible for evil, natural processes can be used to avoid it.�
How, then, can we begin to understand evil? It might
help to consider the very word, ‘evil’, itself as well as its origins. Oxford Dictionaries first offer a definition of ‘evil’ understood as an adjective, defining it as “Profoundly immoral and wicked.” Not just somewhat immoral and wicked, but profoundly so. Similarly, the primary definition of ‘evil’ as a noun defines it as “Profound immorality and wickedness, especially when regarded as a supernatural force.”
The reference to supernatural forces here brings the scent of brimstone back in, but here too, evil is understood as being a profound kind of immorality and wickedness as distinguished from the ordinary or slight varieties of immorality we are also all-too-well acquainted with.
It might also matter that ‘evil’ has its origins in the
Germanic family of languages. It continues to bear at least a slight phonetic resemblance to the Old English term ‘yfel’ as well as the Dutch term ‘euvel’ and the German ‘übel’—although German also includes the term ‘böse’ which might better track the sense of ‘evil’ that is relevant here.‘Evil’ has its etymology in Teutonic words meaning “exceeding due measure” or “overstepping proper limits” and that too seems relevant. There are lots of us who do bad things, even knowingly and deliberately so. Few of us would explain our own wrongdoing or ourselves as evil. As the philosopher Peter Dews puts things, the term ‘evil’ is most properly limited to describe l’injustifiable— the unjustifiable, or, that which absolutely should not be.
Understood in this more interesting sense, the term
‘evil’ is wrongly regarded as being synonymous with ‘bad’ or ‘badness.’ That which is evil is emphatically not merely bad. Rather, it is that which exceeds due measure and oversteps proper limits, beyond even the measure and limits of mere badness. In this vein, the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas suggests that “Evil is an excess in its very quiddity.” Similarly, Morrow, who previously suggested that we cannot understand evil nonetheless suggests that the ‘evil,’ the term, “has the quality of ne plus ultra [the highest point]: Where do you go from there?” Recall, that Hitler, for example, is weirdly under-described as being “bad” or even “very, very bad.” Sometimes, nothing but ‘evil’ will do.
We are now in a position to explain what is so odd
about tying being evil to cheating at jacks and throwing mud pies. Actions like that are wrong, but they fall well short of being profoundly immoral, for example. Similarly, someone inclined to act like that is naughty but she could be much, much worse. In short, the sort of thing that Eartha Kitt is typically interested in when she sings “I want to be evil” isn’t really evil at all. Far from it. There is a kind of excess that hasn’t yet been reached. It is that sort of excess that is really tied up with evil, at least in the most interesting sense of the word. Even if evil has something to do with that which is profoundly immoral, what we use the word ‘evil’ to refer to might vary. Neiman suggests that in the 18th century, ‘evil’ was largely used to refer to both acts of human cruelty and instances of human suffering. Call evil of this first sort moral evil—that is, the sort of evil that human beings are responsible for. Call evil of this second sort natural evil—that is, the sort of evil that human beings are not responsible for but occur naturally.
The Problem of Evil
Again, it was the problem of evil that dominated re-
flection on evil during the Enlightment. That problem persists, but another problem has come to present itself. If ‘evil’ referred to moral evil and natural evil in the 18th century, during the 20th century, Neiman suggests, ‘evil’ came to refer to something else: the “absolute wrongdoing that leaves no room for account or explanation.”
This problem of evil is
closer to what the philosopher Peter Kivy calls “the secular problem of evil”—that is, the problem of understanding how human beings could engage in unmotivated malice, spontaneous antipathy, and unprovoked hostility. This is the evil of the Holocaust and the Gulag and the Killing Fields where the malice, antipathy, and hostility that is on display wildly and vastly exceeds the normal sorts of aggression or competition or dislike that we are familiar with and understand. But we are forced to face up to the secular problem of evil in other places as well.
Psychology and Evil • Eichmann here? New kind of criminal? • Milgram Experiments • Stanford Prison Experiments • Freud • Jung
Nietzsche on Evil
Politics and Evil