We’ve had some fine comments so far on the basic question: just what is evil? Here are some highlights:
From class discussion: Evil can be perhaps be defined by scale/quality of and intention behind wrong-doing. I.e., actions on a massive scale (like genocide) and/or with a particularly vicious quality (torture, abuse) _and_ an expressly malicious intent (evil intended, in some sense, for its own sake) can be called evil.
Evil is simply the opposite of good and exists in a homeostatic/balanced relationship with good.
Evil is apathy.
Evil is a “singularity,” not a balance/imbalance with good.
Evil is the “inexcusable.”
Evil as a sickness.
Evil is hard to define, but we have to try…otherwise we go down a slippery slope: we contibute to losing hold of language itself.
A couple of quick comments of my own, to continue to push the conversation along.
We had a good discussion of Elie Wiesel’s Night last week. Though we could have spent a very long time working through this provocative text, we were successful, I think, in nailing down two significant ways that the book laments the evil perpetrated on the victims of the Holocaust: it decries their dehumanization and their loss of “faith” (just to put it simply). Indeed, the book gives us a terrifying portrayal of the way in which human nature degenerates, until in the end sons have turned against fathers…and Wiesel himself contemplates this horrible option. At the same time, the world’s moral/spiritual coherence is utterly shattered for Wiesel and his fellow victims. “Everything is permitted,” God hangs from the gallows, and Hitler is the only one who keeps his promises (playing on the foundational Jewish conceptualization of “covenant,” berith). Does Wiesel maintain some kind of faith, perhaps in the classic style of Job or Jacob (the wrestler), protesting and arguing against God? Or has he lost everything…except faith in one thing: the simple fact of survival?
On another note, we’ll be thinking more about the complex triad of perpetrator/victim/observer this week as we move into reflecting on 9/11 and its aftermath. I have recently watched two excellent films that get us thinking about the evil after the evil: how the victim can easily become the perpetrator. In Taxi to the Dark Side, a documentary about the road the U.S. went down after 9/11, leading to the abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. The documentary shows us how easy it was, with the tacit approval of the higher-ups, for average, upstanding American soldiers to become sadists. It also does a brilliant job of blowing apart the “ticking bomb” mythology, the hypothetical that was reinforced week after week on the Fox show 24 within which a terrorist is held in custody, and he knows where and when a catastrophic bomb blast will take place…and it’s imminent. Torture this person? Of course! So goes the corrosive logic of this extreme case…
The other film is In the Valley of Elah…but time is fleeting right now…so another entry will be forthcoming.
