Evil
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Sometimes, it just seems the world has gone mad. At times like those, I write things like this, and hope it makes things better. So far it hasn’t.
I was in the process of preparing this for submission to Newsweek for their ‘My Turn’ section when the attack on the World Trade Center made the topic page one news everywhere. Submitting it suddenly seemed pointless….
- 8 September 2001
Another week, another killing spree, or so it seems.
In the early 1970s, when the world seemed rushing toward catastrophe, and the latest manifestation of the enveloping contagion was an epidemic of political airline hijackings, my father announced one day a simple and effective countermeasure: as soon as a hijacking was discovered, and before it was known who the hijackers were or what they wanted, dispatch an interceptor to blast the airliner out of the sky. Hard on the first one or two groups of passengers, no doubt, but the hijackings would stop.
It was, in its martial simplicity and clarity, an elegant solution, a rational trade of short-term pain for long-term security, born of a political culture increasingly willing, on either the right or the left, to sacrifice individuals for ‘the good of society’.
It was also, of course, inhumane to the point of absurdity – the equivalent of “destroying the village in order to save it” – but it did recognize a fundamental truth: excepting the few truly deranged, who act out a reality only they can perceive, predators hunt for profit. The profit may be financial or political or emotional, may be grand or petty, may accrue to an individual or to a clan or to an ideological movement, may be obvious, or may be inscrutable even to themselves. But it is profit that drives them, and the most effective way to minimize the toll of their victims is to remove the potential for gain.
These modern villains are no exception. They hunt because it brings them attention that otherwise seems to elude them. They hunt because it brings them power, not only over their victims but over an entire society suddenly helpless before their might. They hunt because….because we’ve promised that we will take notice; and worse, because we will make them immortal.
These are acts of vanity, ego unrestrained by ethics, and they mystify us. Greed we understand, and grievance. We condemn its consequences, but we understand its genesis, and understand how to tame it. But how do we understand this arrogant disregard for us? How do we tame an arrogance that denies significance to anything outside the self ? How do we tame evil?
And these acts are evil, if not as an actual metaphysical force, then at least as a moral classification – chaos not as a side-effect, not as a means, but as its own end. Not a breakdown in civility, but its utter absence, a vacuum into which reason, compassion, order – humanity itself – are sucked and dissipated.
How do we tame evil? To name it is a start. To perceive it as it is, unredeemable and alien, rather than as we wish it to be. To resist attempts to humanize it or rationalize it. And to deny it the power it seeks over us, the benefit it craves above all else: self-justification.
For just as greed demands payment, and grievance demands change, so evil demands attention. Good acts stand alone in silence, but evil must be heard. To deny it voice is to make it irrelevant.
But we don’t deny it voice. Indeed, in our quest for answers, in our quest for understanding – in our insistence on taking comfort in its explicable banality – we provide a rapt and credulous audience for its narcissistic rant. We demand motives, biography, grievances, failings, warning signs. What we never seem to demand, or offer, is simple, inarguable condemnation.
Ultimately we must confront what we have done to ourselves, to our culture, to our children, that inculcates – that permits – such a disconnection from every vestige of humanity. That is our only hope in the long-term. But in the short-term, here and now, the best we can do is to deny evil its relevance, not by ignoring it but by dismissing it as beneath contempt. Shut off the publicity engines of the press. Refuse to read the interviews with the perpetrators of such outrage. Condemn the professional apologists. Recognize and insist that the story is not about the villain, but about the victims.
And accept that there is no explanation for evil. No explanation is required, or even desirable, because there is no circumstance, no narrative, no grievance that could possibly provide even a modicum of justification. If there are insights into the human condition to be gleaned from examination of the perpetrators – and there may well be – they can and should be anonymous ones, deciphered by the psychologists and sociologists and criminologists quietly, thoughtfully, and far, far from public view.
© Copyright 2001, 2005, Augustus P. Lowell