Take cover: evil is back
Published 11 February 2002
George Bush talks of the axis of evil, and Tony Blair peppers his speeches with the word. But what is evil in a society of unbelievers?
In our Godless age, we have, at least until recently, had little use for the word evil, preferring the language of rights and justice. We are more likely to describe a person or action as unjust or selfish, or perhaps brutal, than to call them evil - unless we are playing computer games. So, when the most powerful man in the world identifies an "axis of evil" (strangely, this is between Iran, Iraq and North Korea, but we must assume that President Bush's advisers on all things evil know what they are talking about) in his State of the Union address, it is shocking, yet also mysterious. Bush elucidated a little: "Evil is real and it must be opposed . . ." he said. "We have been called to a unique role in human events."
Talk of evil - "evil men", "these evildoers", "the forces of evil" and even "evil folk" - has peppered the language of politicians since 11 September. Usually, it is attached to Osama Bin Laden or the al-Qaeda network. Nor has it been merely a superlative, or an emphatic way of condemning the attack on the World Trade Center. As in Bush's recent address, the word has re-emerged as if it carries a precise meaning that we all understand and assent to.
We are even engaged in a war against evil. "Ours is a war against terrorism and evil," Bush announced after the World Trade Center attack, promising to "rid the world of the evildoers". The US secretary of state, Colin Powell, talked of seizing the terrorists "wherever they are in the world doing their evil deeds or plotting new evil deeds". In Britain, the Prime Minister, Tony Blair, pledged support to the US for the battle ahead, saying: "We will not rest until this evil is driven from our world." Kofi Annan, secretary-general of the United Nations, pledged the world's support for "a moral struggle to fight an evil that is anathema to all faiths".
The evil ones themselves had their own views. The Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, said that he would never accept the government that the UN was trying to put together for Afghanistan because it was made up of "evildoers": "We prefer death than to be a part of an evil government." He also claimed that "America has created the evil that is attacking it".
What, the rest of us might ask, are they talking about? Beyond world leaders and men and women of the cloth, you will not find many people who claim to know what evil means, particularly in Britain, where few of us have religious or metaphysical explanations to fall back on. If pressed, most of us would probably agree on a broad definition - that it referred only to human behaviour, and that to be evil, a person should have some understanding of having done wrong.
The Oxford English Dictionary does not add much to this, describing the adjective as now little-used except in literary English. Its various definitions make it clear that evil has most often been a vague word - as useful for describing a horse's lameness as a house of ill repute. As a noun, it has tended to be equally bland, once used as readily of innocent misfortunes and illnesses as to describe crimes and sins.
But it is no longer a bland word. Now, used by Bush or Mullah Omar, it is an invitation to identify an enemy. The "axis of evil" tells us nothing about, for example, the actions of the citizens of Iraq or Iran or North Korea (far less their relations with each other): it is merely an invitation to identify our enemies. By talking of them as "evil", we do not need to ask why they act as they do, feel outraged or oppressed, opt for suicidal terror rather than protest or political engagement. The questions to which we all need answers since 11 September fall off the agenda in the face of the description "evil". Evil simply demands opposition rather than analysis or understanding.
"Pure evil!" is useful shorthand for the tabloids in condemning acts of extreme violence or cruelty, notably in cases of child abuse or paedophilia, where we are repulsed by the behaviour - and are apparently reluctant to look for explanations (for example, in the perpetrator's psychopathology or social circumstance).
In media use at least, part of the notion of evil is that the agents are fully aware of their culpability. If a paedophile is described as evil, then it is implicit that he recognises that it is wrong to corrupt young children (even though clinical evidence suggests that few paedophiles ever do acknowledge this) and that he could have acted differently.
But then, children who murder - for instance, Mary Bell or the Jamie Bulger killers - have also been described as evil, as if we could explain how innocent children could do such things only by arguing that they are possessed by an evil force. At the same time, we agonise about whether they truly understood what they were doing.
None of this seems to apply to the al-Qaeda network. It is clearly part of the mindset of Bin Laden and his followers that they believe passionately in what they are doing - as, indeed, does Bush. Far from being aware of doing wrong, they are convinced they are doing right: they believe in their cause.
Bush's attack on an "axis of evil" betrays his fear of looking too closely at reasons for the tragedy of 11 September. The incoherence of the particular "axis" matters little, because his is an appeal to the "good" American people. It was not a foreign policy statement, but a reminder of the perpetual war that "good" Americans must wage against evil. And if evil is an elusive concept, good has become so slippery that it barely communicates information at all. Philosophers from Plato to Iris Murdoch may have devoted their lives to debating the concept of good, but in everyday discourse it now does little more than express mild approval. The search for the good life - such as it is - means only the search for greater health, leisure and, most often, material possession. True, there has been a literary revival of epic struggles between good and evil: the filming of Lord of the Rings, for example, and the Whitbread Prize-winning His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman. But even in political rhetoric, moral debate plays a diminishing role.
What Bush is appealing to is a far cruder, fantasy literature personification of good - Superman v Lex Luthor. (As Gale Holland wrote last October on salon.com, the similarities between Luthor and the Bin Laden that the White House has created are many - from the never-specified reasons for Luthor's evil deeds, to his choice of symbolic landmark targets and the mysterious network he heads.)
This is the kind of obvious truth that was hard to point out in the first few weeks after 11 September, lest the search for reasons appear to justify the attacks. But as countries at war (albeit with illegal combatants), the US and Britain cannot shy away from talking about reasons and causes for ever. It is one thing for newspapers to appeal to their readers' baser instincts. It is quite another for politicians in the 21st century to have us believe that bombing civilians is ridding the world of evildoers. Nor should the strongest nation in the world justify inhumane treatment of untried prisoners of war on the grounds that it might be dealing with dangerous, evil men.
Few deny that the 11 September attacks were terrible events that threatened world security and demanded decisive action to disable the network responsible. But constant recourse to the language of evil risks frustrating that effort. It is our privilege to live in a scientific age and - New Age fads notwithstanding - we generally believe in cause and effect, rather than mysterious universal forces. If our politicians choose emotive slogans over reason, we have no chance of understanding why young Muslim men, including Britons and Americans, are prepared to die killing innocent civilians.
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.
Edmund Burke
It is a man's own mind, not his enemy or foe, that lures him to evil ways.
Buddha
There is one only good, namely knowledge, and one only evil, namely ignorance.
Socrates
We believe no evil 'til the evil's done.
Jean de la Fontaine
Welcome, evil, if thou comest alone.
Miguel de Cervantes
Don't let us make imaginary evils, when you know we have so many real ones to encounter.
Oliver Goldsmith
The wise man avoids evil by anticipating it.
Publilius Syrus
They that know no evil will suspect none.
Ben Jonson
I wish a woman, a sute, and an urinall befall him, who wisheth me any evil.
Torriano
Submit to the present evil, lest a greater one befall you.
Phaedrus
The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were . . . terrifyingly normal. . . It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lessons that this long lesson in human wickedness had taught us - the lesson of the fearsome. . . banality of evil.
Hannah Arendt
Evil is unspectacular and
always human,
And shares our bed and eats
at our own table.
W H Auden
Evil is done without effort, naturally, it is the working of fate; good is always the product of an art.
Charles Baudelaire
Whoever rewards evil for good,
Evil will not depart from his
house.
Proverbs 17, v 13
Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty.
Simone Weil
It is a sin to believe evil of others, but seldom a mistake.
H L Mencken
Of evil life cometh evil ending.
Anonymous
All human evil comes from this: man's being unable to sit still in a room.
Blaise Pascal
May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house.
George Carlin
Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untainted by evil.
E M Cioran
Evil is obvious only in retrospect.
Gloria Steinem
Evil be to him who evil thinks.
Edward III
One soweth and another reapeth is a verity that applies to evil as well as good.
George Eliot
There can be no existence of evil as a force to the healthy-minded individual.
William James
We must understand: all our evils flow from ourselves.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
There is hardly a man clever enough to recognise the full extent of the evil he does.
Francois, Duc de La Rochefoucauld
Nothing baffles the schemes of evil people so much as the calm composure of great souls.
Honore Gabriel Mirabeau
Evil is a moral entity and not a created one, an eternal and not a perishable entity: it existed before the world; it constituted the monstrous, the execrable being who was also to fashion such a hideous world. It will hence exist after the creatures which people this world.
Marquis de Sade
When choosing between two evils, I always like to try the one I've never tried before.
Mae West
One who condones evil is just as guilty as the one who perpetrates it.
Martin Luther King
The world is a dangerous place to live, not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don't do anything about evil.
Albert Einstein
Our war on terrorism has nothing to do with differences in faith. It has everything to do with people of all faiths coming together to condemn hate and evil and murder and prejudice.
President George W Bush
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