An Essay About Evil

i do not know who this person is, but i think this is a damn neat essay. -squee

By LANCE MORROW

I think there should be a Dark Willard.

In the network's studio in New York City, Dark Willard

would recite the morning's evil report. The map of the world

behind him would be a multicolored Mercator projection. Some

parts of the earth, where the overnight good prevailed, would

glow with a bright transparency. But much of the map would be

speckled and blotched. Over Third World and First World, over

cities and plains and miserable islands would be smudges of

evil, ragged blights, storm systems of massacre or famine,

murders, black snows. Here and there, a genocide, a true abyss.

"Homo homini lupus," Dark Willard would remark. "That's

Latin, guys. Man is a wolf to man."

Dark Willard would report the natural evils -- the

outrages done by God and nature (the cyclone in Bangladesh, an

earthquake, the deaths by cancer). He would add up the moral

evils -- the horrors accomplished overnight by man and woman.

Anything new among the suffering Kurds? Among the Central

American death squads? New hackings in South Africa? Updating

on the father who set fire to his eight-year-old son? Or on

those boys accused of shotgunning their parents in Beverly Hills

to speed their inheritance of a $14 million estate? An

anniversary: two years already since Tiananmen Square.

The only depravity uncharted might be cannibalism, a last

frontier that fastidious man has mostly declined to explore.

Evil is a different sort of gourmet.

The oil fires over Kuwait would be evil made visible and

billowing. The evil turns the very air black and greasy. It

suffocates and blots out the sun.

The war in the gulf had an aspect of the high-tech

medieval. What Beelzebubs flew buzzing through the sky on the

tips of Scuds and smart bombs, making mischief and brimstone?

Each side demonized the other, as in every war: Gott mit Uns.

Saddam Hussein had George Bush down as the Evil One. George Bush

had Saddam down as Hitler. In most of the West, Hitler is the

20th century's term for Great Satan. After the war, quick and

obliterating, Hussein hardly seems worthy of the name of evil

anymore.

Is there more evil now, or less evil, than there was five

years ago, or five centuries?

The past couple of years has brought a windfall of

improvements in the world: the collapse of communism; the

dismantling of apartheid; the end of the cold war and the

nuclear menace, at least in its apocalyptic Big Power form.

State violence (in the style of Hitler, Stalin, Ceausescu)

seemed to be skulking off in disrepute. Francis Fukuyama, a

former U.S. State Department policy planner, even proclaimed

"the end of history." The West and democratic pluralism seemed

to have triumphed: satellites and computers and communications

and global business dissolved the old monoliths in much of the

world. Humankind could take satisfaction in all that progress

and even think for a moment, without cynicism, of Lucretius'

lovely line: "So, little by little, time brings out each several

thing into view, and reason raises it up into the shores of

light." But much of the world has grown simultaneously darker.

Each era gets its suitable evils. The end of the 20th

century is sorting out different styles of malignity. Evil has

been changing its priorities, its targets, its cast of

characters.

The first question to be asked, of course, is this: Does

evil exist? I know a man who thinks it does not. I know another

man who spent a year of his childhood in Auschwitz. I would

like to have the two of them talk together for an afternoon,

and see which one comes away persuaded by the other.

The man who does not believe in the existence of evil

knows all about the horrors of the world. He knows that humanity

is often vicious, violent, corrupt, atrocious. And that

nature's cruelties and caprices are beyond rational accounting:

Bangladesh does not deserve the curse that seems to hover over

it. But the man thinks that to describe all that as evil gives

evil too much power, too much status, that it confers on what

is merely rotten and tragic the prestige of the absolute. You

must not allow lower instincts and mere calamities to get

dressed up as a big idea and come to the table with their

betters and smoke cigars. Keep the metaphysics manageable: much

of what passes for evil (life in Beirut, for example) may be

just a nightmare of accidents. Or sheer stupidity, that

sovereign, unacknowledged force in the universe.

The man's deeper, unstated thought is that acknowledging

evil implies that Satan is coequal with God. Better not to open

that door. It leads into the old Manichaean heresy: the world

as battleground between the divine and the diabolical, the

outcome very much in doubt: "La prima luce," Dante's light of

creation, the brilliant ignition of God, against the satanic

negation, the candle snuffer. Those uncomfortable with the idea

of evil mean this: You don't say that the shadow has the same

stature as the light. If you speak of the Dark Lord, of the

"dark side of Sinai," do you foolishly empower darkness?

Or, for that matter (as an atheist or agnostic would have

it), do such terms heedlessly empower the idea of God? God,

after all, does not enjoy universal diplomatic recognition.

Is it possible that evil is a problem that is more

intelligently addressed outside the religious context of God and

Satan? Perhaps. For some, that takes the drama out of the

discussion and dims it down to a paler shade of Unitarianism.

Evil, in whatever intellectual framework, is by definition a

monster. It has a strange coercive force: a temptation, a

mystery, a horrible charm. Shakespeare understood that perfectly

when he created Iago in his secular and motiveless malignity.

In 1939, as World War II began, Albert Camus wrote in his

notebook: "The reign of beasts has begun." In the past year or

two, the reign of beasts seemed to end, in some places anyway:

brilliant days, miraculous remissions. But as Jung thought,

different people inhabit different centuries. There are many

centuries still loose in the world today, banging against one

another. The war in the gulf was in part a collision of

different centuries and the cultural assumptions that those

centuries carry with them. Camus's beasts are still wandering

around in the desert and in the sometimes fierce nationalisms

reawakening in the Soviet Union. They are alive and vicious in

blood feuds from Northern Ireland to Sri Lanka.

Saddam Hussein raised atavistic questions about evil. But

the West has grown preoccupied by newer forms -- greed,

terrorism, drugs, AIDS, crime, child abuse, global pollution,

oil spills, acid rain. The fear of nuclear holocaust, which not

long ago was the nightmare at the center of the imagination, has

receded with amazing speed.

It is touching in this era, and rather strange, that

nature, even at its most destructive, has clean hands. Humankind

does not. For centuries nature's potential for evil, its

overpowering menace, made it an enemy to be subdued. Today, at

least in the developed world, nature is the vulnerable innocent.

The human is the enemy.

New forms of evil raise new moral questions. Who is to

blame for them? Are they natural evils -- that is, acts of God

and therefore his responsibility, or acts of the blind universe

and therefore no one's? Or are they moral evils, acts that men

and women must answer for?

Padrica Caine Hill, former bank teller, Washington mother

and wife, dresses her three children one morning, makes

breakfast for them, smokes some crack cocaine and lets the kids

watch cartoons. Then with a clothesline she strangles

eight-year-old Kristine and four-year-old Eric Jr. She tries to

strangle two-year-old Jennifer, but leaves the girl still

breathing softly on the floor. When the police come, Padrica

Hill says she loves her children. Why did she kill them? "I

don't know," she answers in apparently genuine bewilderment. "I

hadn't planned on it."

Who or what is responsible? The woman herself? She did

smoke the crack, but presumably the effect she anticipated was

a euphoric high, not the death of her children. The drug arrived

like Visigoths in her brain and destroyed the civilization

there, including the most powerful of human instincts, her

mother love. The crack itself? The dealer who sold the crack?

The others in the trade -- kingpins and mules who brought the

cocaine up from South America encased in condoms that they had

swallowed? The peasants in Colombia who grew the coca plants in

the first place?

The widening stain of responsibility for evil on a

constricting planet changes moral contexts. Microevil, the

murder of an individual child, becomes part of the

macroorganism: all the evils breathe the same air, they have the

same circulatory system. They pass through the arteries of the

world, from the peasant's coca plant in Colombia to the mother's

brain in Washington, thence to her fingers and the clothesline

that kills the children in the middle of morning cartoons.

Many writers have said that one of evil's higher

accomplishments has been to convince people that it does not

exist. Ivan Karamazov's bitter diabology was a bit different:

"If the devil doesn't exist, but man has created him, he has

created him in his own image and likeness." In a nightmare, Ivan

meets the devil, a character of oddly shabby gentility, who

mentions how cold it was in space, from which he lately came,

traveling in only an evening suit and open waistcoat. The devil

speaks of the game of village girls who persuade someone to lick

a frosted ax, to which of course the tongue sticks. The devil

wonders idly, "What would become of an ax in space?" It would

orbit there, "and the astronomers would calculate the rising and

setting of the ax." Dostoyevsky's devil was prescient, speaking

a century before bright metal began to fly up off the earth and

circle round it. There is something spookily splendid about evil

as an ax in space.

You must ask what evil would be if it did exist. What does

the word evil mean when people use it?

Evil means, first of all, a mystery, the mysterium

iniquitatis. We cannot know evil systematically or

scientifically. It is brutal or elusive, by turns vivid and

vague, horrible and subtle. We can know it poetically,

symbolically, historically, emotionally. We can know it by its

works. But evil is sly and bizarre. Hitler was a vegetarian. The

Marquis de Sade opposed capital punishment.

Evil is easier than good. Creativity is harder than

destructiveness. Dictators have leisure time for movies in their

private screening rooms. When Hitler was at Berchtesgaden, he

loved to see the neighborhood children and give them ice cream

and cake. Saddam Hussein patted little Stuart Lockwood's head

with avuncular menace and asked if he was getting enough

cornflakes and milk. Stalin for years conducted the Soviet

Union's business at rambling, sinister, alcoholic dinner parties

that began at 10 and ended at dawn. All his ministers attended,

marinating in vodka and terror. Sometimes one of them would be

taken away at first light by the NKVD, and never seen again.

Evil is the Bad elevated to the status of the

inexplicable. To understand is to forgive. Evil sometimes means

the thing we cannot understand, and cannot forgive. The

Steinberg case in New York City, in which a lawyer battered his

six-year-old foster daughter Lisa to death, is an example. Ivan

Karamazov speaks of a Russian nobleman who had his hounds tear

an eight-year-old boy to pieces in front of the boy's mother

because he threw a stone at one of the dogs. Karamazov asks the

bitter question that is at the heart of the mystery of evil,

"What have children to do with it, tell me, please?"

Evil is anyone outside the tribe. Evil works by

dehumanizing the Other. A perverse, efficient logic: identifying

others as evil justifies all further evil against them. A man

may kill a snake without compunction. The snake is an evil

thing, has evil designs, is a different order of being. Thus:

an "Aryan" could kill a Jew, could make an elaborate

bureaucratic program of killing Jews. Thus: white men could come

in the middle of the night in Mississippi and drag a black man

out and hang him.

Getting people to think in categories is one of the

techniques of evil. Marxist-Leninist zealots thought of "the

bourgeoisie," a category, a class, not the human beings, and it

is easy to exterminate a category, a class, a race, an alien

tribe. Mao's zealots in the Cultural Revolution, a vividly

brainless evil, destroyed China's intellectual classes for a

generation.

Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge sent to the killing fields all who

spoke French or wore glasses or had soft hands. The Khmer Rouge

aimed to cancel all previous history and begin at Year Zero.

Utopia, this century has learned the hard way, usually bears a

resemblance to hell. An evil chemistry turns the dream of

salvation into damnation.

Evil is the Bad hardened into the absolute. Good and evil

contend in every mind. Evil comes into its own when it crosses

a line and commits itself and hardens its heart, when it becomes

merciless, relentless.

William James said, "Evil is a disease." But it can be an

atrocious liberation, like the cap flying off a volcano. The

mind bursts forth to explore the black possibilities. Vietnam

taught many Americans about evil. Hasan i Sabbah, founder of a

warrior cult of Ismailis in the 11th century in Persia, gave

this instruction: "Nothing is true, everything is permitted."

It is a modern thought that both charmed and horrified William

Burroughs, the novelist and drug addict who like many in the

20th century somehow could not keep away from horror. During a

drunken party in Mexico in 1951, Burroughs undertook to play

William Tell, using a pistol to shoot a glass off his wife's

head. He put a bullet in her brain instead.

Evil is charismatic. A famous question: Why is Milton's

Satan in Paradise Lost so much more attractive, so much more

interesting, than God himself? The human mind romances the idea

of evil. It likes the doomed defiance. Satan and evil have many

faces, a flashy variety. Good has only one face. Evil can also

be attractive because it has to do with conquest and domination

and power. Evil has a perverse fascination that good somehow

does not. Evil is entertaining. Good, a sweeter medium, has a

way of boring people.

Evil is a word we use when we come to the limit of humane

comprehension. But we sometimes suspect that it is the core of

our true selves. In Young Goodman Brown, Nathaniel Hawthorne's

Everyman goes to a satanic meeting in a dark wood, and the devil

declares, "Evil is the nature of mankind. Welcome again, my

children, to the communion of your race."

Three propositions:

1) God is all powerful.

2) God is all good.

3) Terrible things happen.

As the theologian and author Frederick Buechner has

written, the dilemma has always been this: you can match any two

of those propositions, but never match all three.

At the beginning of his Summa theologiae, Thomas Aquinas

admitted that the existence of evil is the best argument against

the existence of God.

Theologians have struggled for centuries with theodicy,

the problem of a good God and the existence of evil. Almost all

such exertions have been unconvincing. Augustine, speaking of

the struggle to understand evil, at last wrote fatalistically,

"Do not seek to know more than is appropriate." At the time of

the Black Death, William Langland wrote in Piers Plowman: "If

you want to know why God allowed the Devil to lead us astray .

. . then your eyes ought to be in your arse."

The historian Jeffrey Burton Russell asks, "What kind of

God is this? Any decent religion must face the question

squarely, and no answer is credible that cannot be given in the

presence of dying children." Can one propose a God who is partly

evil? Elie Wiesel, who was in Auschwitz as a child, suggests

that perhaps God has "retracted himself" in the matter of evil.

Wiesel has written, "God is in exile, but every individual, if

he strives hard enough, can redeem mankind, and even God

himself."

Perhaps evil is an immanence in the world, in the mind,

just as divinity is an immanence. But evil has performed

powerful works. Observes Russell: "It is true that there is evil

in each of us, but adding together even large numbers of

individual evils does not explain an Auschwitz, let alone the

destruction of the planet. Evil on this scale seems to be

qualitatively as well as quantitatively different. It is no

longer a personal but a transpersonal evil, arising from some

kind of collective unconscious. It is also possible that it is

beyond the transpersonal and is truly transcendent, an entity

outside as well as inside the human mind, an entity that would

exist even if there were no human race to imagine it." So here

evil rounds back again into its favored element, mystery.

Perhaps God has other things on his mind. Perhaps man is

to God as the animals of the earth are to man -- picturesque,

interesting and even nourishing. Man is, on the whole, a

catastrophe to the animals. Maybe God is a catastrophe to man

in the same way. Can it be that God visits evils upon the world

not out of perversity or a desire to harm, but because our

suffering is a byproduct of his needs? This could be one reason

why almost all theodicies have about them a pathetic quality and

seem sometimes undignified exertions of the mind.

An eerie scene at the beginning of the Book of Job, that

splendid treatise on the mysteries of evil, has God and Satan

talking to each other like sardonic gentlemen gamblers who have

met by chance at the racetrack at Saratoga. God seems to squint

warily at Satan, and asks, in effect, So, Satan, what have you

been doing with yourself? And Satan with a knowing swagger

replies, in effect, I've been around the world, here and there,

checking it out. Then God and Satan make a chillingly cynical

bet on just how much pain Job can endure before he cracks and

curses God.

Satan wanders. Evil is a seepage across borders, across

great distances. Herman Melville, in Moby Dick, wrote that a

colt in rural Vermont, if it smells a fresh buffalo robe (the

colt having no knowledge or experience of buffalo, which lived

on the plains) will "start, snort, and with bursting eyes paw

the ground in phrenzies of affright. Here thou beholdest even

in a dumb brute the instinct of the knowledge of the demonism

of the world."

Evil and good have probably been more or less constant

presences in the human heart, their proportions staying roughly

the same over the centuries. And perhaps the chief dark

categories have remained constant and familiar. The first time

that death appeared in the world, it was murder. Cain slew Abel.

"Two men," says Elie Wiesel, "and one of them became a killer."

The odds have presumably been fifty-fifty ever since. The Old

Testament is full of savageries that sound eerily contemporary.

(The British writer J.R. Ackerley once wrote to a friend, "I am

halfway through Genesis, and quite appalled by the disgraceful

behavior of all the characters involved, including God.")

Petrarch's rant against the papal court at Avignon in the

14th century sounds like a hyperbolic inventory of life in

certain neighborhoods of the late 20th century: "This is a sewer

to which all the filths of the universe come to be reunited.

Here people despise God, they adore money, they trample

underfoot both human laws and divine law. Everything here

breathes falsehood: the air, the earth, the houses, and above

all, the bedrooms."

Western thought since the Renaissance has considered that

the course of mankind was ascendant, up out of the shadow of

evil and superstition and unreason. Thomas Jefferson, a

brilliant creature of the Enlightenment, once wrote, "Barbarism

has . . . been receding before the steady step of amelioration;

and will in time, I trust, disappear from the earth."

In the 20th century, Lucretius' shores of light vanished

like the coasts of Atlantis, carried under by terrible

convulsions. The ascendant civilizations (the Europeans,

Americans, Japanese) accomplished horrors that amounted to a

usurpation of the power of God over creation. The world in this

century went about a work of de-creation -- destroying its own

generations in World War I; attempting to extinguish the Jews

of Europe in the Holocaust, to destroy the Armenian people, the

Ukrainian kulaks and, much later, the Cambodians -- all the

reverberating genocides.

In any case, the 20th century shattered the lenses and

paradigms, the very mind, of reason. The universe went from

Newton's model to Einstein's, and beyond, into ab surdities even

more profound. An underlying assumption of proportion and

continuity in the world perished. The proportions between cause

and effect were skewed. A minuscule event (indeed, an atom)

could blossom into vast obliterations. Einstein said God does

not play dice with the world. But if there was order, either

scientific or moral, in God's universe, it became absurdly

inaccessible.

If evil is a constant presence in the human soul, it is

also true that there are more souls now than ever, and by that

logic both good and evil are rising on a Malthusian curve, or

at any rate both good and evil may be said to be increasing in

the world at the same rate as the population: 1.7% per annum.

The world is swinging on a hinge between two ages. The

prospect awakens, in the Western, secular mind, the idea that

all future outcomes, good or evil, are a human responsibility.

John Kennedy said in his Inaugural Address, "Here on earth,

God's work must surely be our own." When there will no longer

be any place to hide, it becomes important to identify the real

evils and not go chasing after false evils. It is possible that

people will even grow up on the subject of sex.

Religions over many centuries developed elaborate

codifications of sin and evil. The Catholic Church, for example,

identified Sins that Cry to Heaven for Vengeance, (oppression

of the poor, widows and orphans, for example, or defrauding

laborers of their wages), Sins Against the Holy Spirit, and so

on, sins mortal and venial, virtues cardinal and sins deadly.

With the emergence of a new world will come a

recodification of evils. Obviously offenses against the earth

are coming to be thought of as evils in ways we would not have

suspected a few years ago. The developed world, at least, is

forming a consensus that will regard violence to the planet to

be evil in the way we used to think of unorthodox sexual

practices and partnerships as being outside the realm of

accepted conduct.

A Frenchman named Jean Baudrillard recently wrote a book

called The Transparency of Evil. We live, says Baudrillard, in

a postorgiastic age, in which all liberations have been

accomplished, all barriers torn down, all limits abolished.

Baudrillard makes the (very French) case that evil, far from

being undesirable, is necessary -- essential to maintaining the

vitality of civilization. That suggests a refinement of an old

argument favored by Romantics and 19th century anarchists like

Bakunin, who said, "The urge for destruction is also a creative

urge." It is not an argument I would try out on Elie Wiesel or

on the mother of a political prisoner disappeared by the

Argentine authorities.

And yet . . . and yet . . . evil has such perversities, or

good has such resilience, that a powerful (if grotesque) case

can be made that Adolf Hitler was the founding father of the

state of Israel. Without Hitler, no Holocaust, without

Holocaust, no Israel.

Scientists working with artificial intelligence have a

fantasy -- who knows if it is more than that? -- that eventually

all the contents of the human brain, a life, can be gradually

emptied into a brilliant, nondecaying, stainless, deathless sort

of robot ic personoid. And when the transfer of all the vast and

intricately nuanced matter of the mind and soul has been

accomplished, the memories of the cells etched onto microchips,

the human body, having been replicated in a better container,

will be allowed to wither and die.

Will evil be transferred along with good and installed in

the stainless personoid? Or can the scientists sift the soul

through a kind of electronic cheesecloth and remove all the

ancient evil traces, the reptilian brain, the lashing violence,

the tribal hatred, the will to murder? Will the killer be

strained out of the soul? Will the inheritance of Cain be left

to wither and die with the human husk, the useless flesh?

If so, will grace and love, evil's enemies, wither too?

The question goes back to the Garden. Does the good become

meaningless in a world without evil? Do the angels depart along

with the devils? If the stainless canister knows nothing of

evil, will Mozart sound the same to it as gunfire?

Copyright (c) Time Inc. Magazine Company / Compact Publishing, Inc.