On Evil

The devil is back. Donald Trump recently said of Hillary Clinton: “She’s the devil.” Intemperate maybe? President Obama described IS as “a brand of evil,” and David Cameron described IS as “an evil organization.” The devil as the personification of evil is not entirely new to the political lexicon. George W. Bush described three entire nations as “the axis of evil.” So here we go again.

We watch or listen to the news pretty much every day. It seems to be mostly bad. If it isn’t bad, even evil, it is not news. “If it bleeds, it leads” advise the editors. But the news does raise the question: What is evil? And a barrage of other questions about belief: Is there such a thing or force as evil? Or just bad deeds? Are there evil people? Or is everything relative? Just a point of view? Personally subjective, culturally relative and historically contingent, as the post-modernists say.

Some think that there is no evil, only evil (or maybe misguided) deeds. But if people commit evil deeds, one might consider them evil. But then, maybe they do good deeds too. So there are degrees of evil and goodness. Perhaps the good heart of a thimble or a glass or a bucket or a tanker. All goodness, sweetness and light – or the reverse. Are humans evil? Read Elie Wiesel’s Night, his memoir of life in concentration camps, or Primo Levi’s The Drowned and the Saved. There have been other genocides in the 20th century: the Armenian, the Ukrainian Holodomor, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Darfur, and Rwanda. And so many massacres and atrocities as the Rape of Nanking, Katyn Forest, Ponary, Unit 731, Lidice, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Srebenica, 9/11, Abu Ghraib, the Al-Antal campaign, Istanbul, Baghdad, and now Paris and Nice and (while writing) Quetta (64 killed). The dictators have killed millions: Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, Idi Amin, Bokassa, Saddam Hussein, Pinochet and more, and now Bashar al-Assad. Torture has been tolerated, but redefined as “enhanced interrogation techniques.” The terrorists include the KKK, the IRA, the FLQ, the PLO, the Red Brigade, the Baader-Meinhof gang, EOKA, some say Hamas, and now branches of the Taliban, al Qaeda and IS. For lists and descriptions of serial killers and mass murderers, check out Google (and Pearson for analysis). And now 65.3 million people are displaced, more than the total population of the U.K. (Time 1 Aug: 45). White collar criminals like Bernie Madoff contribute to widespread ruin also. The depths of human depravity defy understanding. As do the depths of human suffering.

Is evil intrinsic to human nature? Or like a weed, environmental? Or like the devil, extrinsic, an external power? That the devil is the cause, or a cause, of evil is a widespread belief from the Garden of Eden in the Old Testament to the temptations of Christ in the New. Satan and devils and jinns are mentioned frequently in the Koran. This idea of temptations was developed in C.S. Lewis’ wise and witty “The Screwtape Letters,” which purport to be letters of instruction to a young devil but are really, I think, a satire about how we deceive ourselves into justifying our own self-interested actions at other people’s expense. That was when people believed in right and wrong; but some pop singer now clamors “I don’t believe in right and wrong.” Solves that problem: no right or wrong, no good or bad, it’s all, like, whatever, dude, shrug.

Almost 60% of Americans believe in the devil, according to a 2013 YouGov poll, down from the almost 70% found by a 2011 Gallup poll. A clear majority therefore. Such a belief does explain evil, of course, as extrinsic, and might even deflect some blame from the self for evil actions, or inactions: sins of commission or omission. “The devil made me do it!” was the punchline of that great comedian, Flip Wilson.

Contrariwise, the loving God may also be thought by religious people to be the cause of evil, to try us or for God’s inscrutable will. The case study was the example of Job: a reminder that bad things happen to good people. Natural disasters may be dismissed as “acts of God.” What sort of God, one might wonder, as Elie Wiesel did. 63% of Americans believe in God, are “absolutely certain”, another 20% are ”fairly certain”, another 8% are not sure and only 9% do not, according to a PEW survey. Different gods, presumably, depending on the faith. And so much evil, pain and suffering is done in their name and in the competitive pursuit of the usual “goods”: lands, wealth, power – and happiness.

Belief in the evil eye is, according to Maloney (1976), the most prevalent belief in the world, even more than the monotheism of the three major, and amazingly incompatible, faiths. In this belief, humans have the very real power to inflict evil on others, not only by their deeds, but by a look. Evil is therefore intrinsic to humans. Evil is from the self, not the devil – or maybe both, but certainly in every human. Not a bright picture of humanity; but then the news of mass murders, rapes, honor killings, corruption, lies, serial killers, war… well, you get the picture, not bright.

Psychopathy does not seem to be well understood. Megalomania, OK; but the psyche of serial killers, not so much. Some suggest head injuries, i.e. brain damage, or psychic trauma like physical, mental or sexual abuse, or incompetent parenting: no love, no joy. Psychopaths seem unable to comprehend the emotions or feelings of others, they don’t care; they may even enjoy the pain and terror they inflict; but they are able to know right from wrong, and they plan their attacks carefully. Are they responsible for their actions? Juries found so in the case of (former Colonel) Russell Williams, who escalated very quickly from stealing women’s underwear in rural Ontario, to leaving clues when he did so, and inspiring fear (and keeping the press clippings), to rape and then to two sadistic murders, which he filmed. He was finally caught, but no-one seems to have understood how such a flawed person could have risen to such a high rank in the Canadian Air Force, to have piloted Queen Elizabeth, and been commander of Canada’s largest air base. So much evil and so many promotions. We do not understand evil very well.

We might not even WANT to understand evil. We might even try NOT to understand evil, for fear of contamination. It is too horrible to contemplate. But the crime novels and the violent TV programs, and especially the violent video games which must desensitize players to the painful, human reality of violence, seem to be, no, ARE, extremely attractive to huge audiences.

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Beyond all that, our stereotypes may deceive us. Dorothea Puente ran a boarding house in Sacramento. She was arrested in 1987 and convicted of killing eight men and women for their security benefits. The social worker involved never suspected this caring, charming lady who looked after the needy as she poisoned them, and she explained: “I was real naïve about evil. I kept it very distant from me.” Well, yes, but she was also naïve about women along the familiar dichotomy: men bad – women good; and also the stereotypes about age and appearance. She added: “Whether she was evil or not, I don’t know” (Pearson, 1997: 174-5).

It is not that evil people are mentally ill, sick. No. Morally ill perhaps. Evil people know what they are doing. Sick people do not, by definition. Schizophrenics may hear voices. They cannot distinguish hallucinations and delusions from reality, with occasionally disastrous consequences for themselves and others. Drugs, too, may distort reality. Sick people cannot help it. They are not in their right minds. They may not even know what they have done. Williams did. This was not illness but choice, decision and will.

The forensic anthropologist and best-selling novelist Kathy Reichs, who has seen the consequences of much violence, raised the question of evil in her first book, “Deja Dead”. Having almost stabbed a vicious serial killer to death, her protagonist forensic anthropologist, Temperance Brennan, asks her friend a detective, Lt. Ryan: “Can you do this day after day and not lose faith in the human species?” He replies: “From time to time the human species spawns predators that feed on those around them. They’re not the species. They’re mutations of the species” (1997:530-1). Given the role of genetic predispositions in so much behavior, I think he, or she, is probably right.

So perhaps what we think of as evil goes back to our evolutionary history. Humans survived by hunting and killing animals in order to survive, and occasionally other humans as territorial boundaries expanded. In his book Sociobiology (Abridged Edition ch. 11) E.O. Wilson favors a Darwinian sort of explanation for violence, reminding us that we are animals, lest we forget.

Sociologists argue more from contemporary than evolutionary causality emphasizing that socialization is critical, in home, school and community; and that the best predictor of criminality is a criminal parent, followed by large family, inept parenting, poverty etc. Though the family is often blamed when things go sideways, this is not always accurate. Russell had a normal family background: no indicators of his later monstrosity. Another example is the Bulger brothers. Billy became president of a university, Whitey a multiple murderer. One helped others, at some cost to himself, the other helped himself at huge costs to others. One left the world a better place, the other left it worse, littered with corpses. We may be animals, but we can choose.

De Sade discussed evil in his novels, which he thought of as the normal, Hobbesian real world. He practiced what he preached – which is why he spent so much of his life in prison.

The problem of evil has bedevilled (Sorry! But irresistible) thinkers for millennia. Plato and Aristotle worried about it, Paul thought the problem was his body and its impulses. Augustine reckoned it was original sin. So did Aquinas. More recently thinkers have become more secular, as mentioned above, but evil still generates books (and blogs). It is still mysterious. Possibly related to self-interest.

Self-interest (personal, economic, political) makes the world go round, as Adam Smith noted so long ago. But selfishness is problematic, and altruism is what makes the world a better place. Unfortunately the North American world might not be getting better; it might even be getting worse. Economic inequality is increasing (for once the economists agree, notably Stiglitz and Piketty). Our distrust of each other is increasing. The latest Gallup poll (August 3) indicates very low levels of satisfaction “with the way things are going” only 17% - mind you, levels have been rather low since 2013, only rising briefly to a high of 32%. The current low is blamed primarily on the recent police shootings and the reprisal shootings of police. Gallup had earlier asked: “From a list of American institutions, how much confidence do you have in each one?” Conflating the two options, “A great deal” and Quite a lot”, over 70% favor the military and over 60% favor small business; but under 10% have “A great deal of confidence” in such core institutions as banks, organized labor, newspapers and big business (Economist 30 July 2016:51). No mention of Congress. A recent poll shows majority unfavorable ratings of both principal Presidential candidates: 52% for Clinton and 62% for Trump, leading to speculation that voters will be choosing “the lesser of two evils.”(Torrance in Gallup Aug 3)

We have measures of almost everything from speed, even the speed of light (how did they measure that?), equality, transparency, suicide rates, mortality rates of all sorts, education levels – but not something so fundamental as evil. Crime rates, yes, but shoplifting or public drunkenness are not evil. Stupid, maybe, but not evil. Nor do we have measures of goodness and altruism. Both would be hard to measure, but not impossible, surely. This would be good. It could be done by companies. Delta’s flying the South Sudan athletes to the Olympics. Wonderful. Kudos! Volkswagen’s cheating on emissions: Bad.

But can a culture or a nation be defined as evil? (Yes, Bush did so! Erroneously, in my opinion, but I was not President) The U.N. documented over 1,000 cases of so-called honor killings in Pakistan last year. The most infamous has been the strangling of media star Qandeel Baloch by her brother in July 2016 (Economist 23 July). Such killings occur often also in India (and when I was there two dentists were found guilty, finally, after seven years, of killing their daughter and the servant whom they believed was her lover), Jordan, Afghanistan and elsewhere in Asia and the Middle East, and now in the diaspora: 10-12 in the U.K., 13 in the Netherlands and 27 in the U.S. (Time 1 Aug 2016). And a horrible case in Canada, where four women in the Shafia family were murdered in 2009; the murderers are now in prison. The murders were widely condemned by the Islamic community as un-Islamic. But such violence would be only one criterion. What about homicide rates? Or suicide rates? Or equality rates? Or gender equality rates? And tolerance rates, for racism, homophobia, sexism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia? Or some combination of these rates? We have a Freedom Index and a Transparency Index to start with. Would such an index of humanity / inhumanity help? It would be difficult, but surely not impossible, to weigh the various factors. (High, medium, low for a start). Certainly it would publicize the rankings and the criteria and, while it would be controversial, it might help.

Certainly love and joy, honor and glory, kindness and altruism, permeate Homo sapiens; but we have a problem. Evil persists. There are several theories of evil, from “there is no such thing” (maybe someone is misguided or stupid) to the devil, god, the body, original sin, personality, family socialization, and the evil eye to genetic or epigenetic mutation. It makes a difference how we understand evil, and who or what we blame: our selves or something else.

On the other hand, understanding evil may not be the problem. A host of thinkers of various stripes have basically argued that evil is the norm, and implicitly that goodness and altruism are the exception, and need to be explained. When asked to summarize his philosophy at Delphi, Bias, one of the seven sages of ancient Greece, wrote “most men are bad.” Heraclitus agreed. (De Crescenzo 1; 1-5, 50). Machiavelli agreed in “The Prince.” Hobbes described “the war of all against all.” De Sade wrote in detail about the real world of pain and suffering, not the ideal world, which is about what we SHOULD do, and how the good triumphs over evil. It does not. Count Masoch thought in similar terms: we are either the hammer or the anvil. Freud opined that “homo homini lupus” – man is a wolf to man. Even Darwin wrote about the survival of the fittest, not always by violence, true. He was writing about the evolution of creatures, but Herbert Spencer, from whom he borrowed the term, was writing about humans and nations, and advocating the benefits of wars. So, not surprisingly, in 2016, we are back to talking about evil and devils.

#SAVEHOMA

De Crescenzo, L. 1990. The History of Greek Philosophy. Vol 1. London: Pan.

Maloney, C. (ed.). 1976. The Evil Eye. New York: Columbia University Press.

Pearson, Patricia. 1997. When She was Bad. Violent Women and the Myth of Innocence. Toronto: Random House.