Recent events have stirred in me some thoughts about evil.
For an atheist I spend a, probably unhealthy, amount of time thinking about theodicy. The below may also make it clear why I am comfortable using terms like evil and virtue from a non-religious perspective.
I think all of these have some truth to them (and all are problematic) – and I suspect we could point to examples of all of them, even just in the context of Ukraine. But some, I think, are easier for modernist, rationalist (decent?) people to get their heads around. Some are much less comfortable. This is endlessly fascinating to me.
We may think ourselves secure – but there it is, the dark shape at the door, it seeps through the floor like radon. There is no limit to the limits of our rational power. Evil is a Thing that can ignite, all by itself.
1. The ideal is the problem
Careless hurt is one thing – but to be really evil, you’ve got to be driven by morality (Nietzsche [i]). Evil just isn’t that pragmatic. Everyone essentially thinks they’re a good person, and most of the time are doing good.
The best ideas for carrying out evil acts are the ones that make people think they have right on their side; that they’re redressing an ancient grievance; or an emergency to root out the bad once and for all.
You don’t get lynched at random, but because of a (concocted) slight.
2. L’homme naît bon, c’est la société qui le corrompt.
Humans are shaped by their environment; conditioning counts, and evil begets evil. Focus on the conditions, not the individual.
Evil is a process in nature, one we can eradicate like smallpox. This is a rational solution, a tempting idea for technocrats of an optimistic bent.
3. L’homme ne naît jamais bon
Man’s aggressive instincts are innate and must be controlled by society (Freud); after all, to inflict cruelty is pleasurable (Nietzsche [ii]). In the state of nature, man’s life is nasty, brutish and short.
Evil is the result of the loss of controls of civil society against these powerful internal drives. This is a rational solution, a tempting idea for technocrats of a pessimistic bent.
4. The Banality of Evil
Evil is a workaday commonplace (Arendt). When he was a slave labourer in Auschwitz, didn’t Primo Levi work alongside a manager who never suspected a thing, even though he could see the smoke from the chimneys of the crematorium from his office window?
But then … Eichmann wasn’t really a dullard – we know now he was acting, pretending to be a “Kantian” as a deliberate ploy to get off the hook.
Arendt was Heidegger’s lover, and her banality was a cogent way of expressing his “alienation from Being [Dasein]”. Did either ever come to terms with Heidegger’s Nazi past?
5. The Evil of Banality (Nabokov)
Evil is indeed all around us – it seeps in through vulgarity, cliché, Poshlust‘, “dead things shamming life”, solipsism, lack of self-awareness, forgetfulness of the sovereignty of others and the individual.
You can smell the dictator’s foul breath as he shows off his chest, the torturer will get a sentimental gleam in his eye when he looks at a puppy.
Watch as Kadyrov – who delights in torturing captives personally – repeatedly fails to shoot a basketball (and then makes the crowd applaud anyway). Have a good laugh at him, for
Laughter is some chance little ape of truth astray in our world
Nabokov, Solus Rex
On this view, aesthetics is a highly moral affair:
JM: Which is the worst thing men do?
VN: To stink, to cheat, to torture.
JM: Which is the best?
VN: To be kind, to be proud, to be fearless.
Nabokov, Interview 1969
The two are mixed up all around us, a kaleidoscopic mixture – virtue is an aesthetic talent in choosing between them.
6. “Are we the baddies?”
We, who you call evil, don’t want to be good – we have inverted the table of values and transcended what it is to be (all too) human (Nietzsche [iii]).
Karl Ove Knausgaard, in his amazing humanistic reading of the early life of Hitler, describes this process as the founding of a death cult:
In language, morality, ethics and also aesthetics were perverted. The dehumanisation [of the Jews] took place in the language, in the name of the we, where morality too is found, and within only a very few years the voice of conscience in Germany went from Thou shalt not kill to its reverse, Thou Shalt kill.
To utter the word ‘death’ in the same language would be to say something other than the absence of life … for Nazism, which had pervaded all parts of the culture, was a death cult; to say ‘dead’ was not to say ‘nothing’, but to say sacrifice, fatherland, greatness, fervour, pride, courage. Death in the gas chambers was … the extermination of insects or vermin, something other than human … and how was it possible to refer to that death, which was without identity, without awakening the fluttering banners or the teeming rats that lay in the very word ‘death’.
Knausgaard, The End (2011)
See below, as Russian Lieutenant Colonel Timur Kurilkin is awarded a medal for “destroying 250 Nazis” by the head of the DNR, literally has the SS Totenkopf on his arm.
7. Emily Dickinson, de Sade of Amherst
You cannot put a Fire out — A Thing that can ignite Can go, itself, without a Fan — Upon the slowest Night — You cannot fold a Flood — And put it in a Drawer — Because the Winds would find it out — And tell your Cedar Floor —
Like beauty, madness, the sublime power of nature, sex, dreams – evil is a disruptive and inexplicable force that bursts through our everyday civilization and scatters us in its wake.
Its mode is power, humans are only its vehicle, and our flimsy constructions to keep it out are useless. Rationality is a poor joke in comparison.
We may think ourselves secure – but there it is, the dark shape at the door, it seeps through the floor like radon. There is no limit to the limits of our rational power. Evil is a Thing that can ignite, all by itself.
Educate ourselves; improve society; make rules; say “never again” – are spitting in the gale, it will be back. Words are not enough; it can only be fought against.