Evil

Lance Morrow sets the stage on the subject of evil with his essay "Your Periodic Reminder That Evil Is Real" (click: Morrow, Evil Is Real), a subject we first discussed in our book club session some seventeen years ago with reference to his then-published “Evil: An Investigation.” Our discussion back then was but a dress rehearsal for the glimpse of the skull on display today.

Yet it seems like yesterday we struggled with such questions as: Can we even define evil or is it a case of we know it when we see it? How do we even know we can see it? Is it understandable only in terms of its duality with good? Lance Morrow offered a shortcut, maintaining it’s something (any) decent conscience, uncontaminated by ideology, knows what it’s looking at.

That ideological contamination qualification opens the way to a deeper analysis where a view of evil is refracted through the lens of a fundamentalist religion with its ideological celebration of death over life. The Middle East then begins to  look like a sanctioned murder-suicide situation – the only wrinkle being people not agreeing who is the murderer and who is the suicide.

In the long run, the entire region would appear destined to be uninhabitable. Talk me off the ledge if you see other possible outcomes without sounding under-informed. We had searched for allegory in that book club discussion some seventeen years ago with Ahab’s harpooners straggling on deck dressed as Hezbollah, as Hamas.

What is the right vocabulary with which to even discuss the meaning of morality in the context of such a culture that’s passed on like some DNA? The implications are horrific but may help to explain Israel’s current war footing that is so absolute the International Criminal Court is pursuing as a war crime. Really?, in self-defense of an existential threat? Besides, are war crimes even necessarily the same as evil?

Fundamentalist spasms aside, maybe evil is more simply described as anything which aggressively violates established norms, the natural order of things, particularly if it does so in a matter-of-fact sort of way. It’s the cannibal that joins the family picnic and calmly starts to eat the children. Hannah Arendt seized upon the very banality of evil with Eichmann’s bureaucratic specialty.

The Holocaust, of course, represents to many the ground zero when it comes to evil at the macro level. But what a disservice to that smorgasbord of gratuitous savagery: Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Ceausescu, Genghis Khan, Vlad the Impaler, if one wants to associate names to it. And then Stalin and MaoTse-tung wins hands down if one wants to track evil by numbers.

The question of evil becomes more complicated when the talk turns to moral equivalents and relativism. At the retail level, for example, some transgressions – pedophilia, for example – would seem to deserve the judgment of the absolute. But wait. Is it not true that many, if not most, pedophiles were themselves abused as children? That might mean they are both predator and victim of the same evil. Might some sort of cosmic cancellation be in order before final judgments are cast? Reference again Israel’s position on the world stage.

We might take an honest look at our own capacity for evil. Sure, you might assert, never have I engaged in anything that smacks of evil. That’s undoubtedly true but, by the same token, nor have you probably ever really been tested, whether individually or swept up in a truly fearful or otherwise impassioned society.

We are indeed fortunate to have this discussion while such matters are still an abstraction.