It’s strange to think of evil getting an unduly bad rap, and yet it has. “We should be extremely suspicious of the post-attack rhetoric of evil, whose modern incarnation dates to the evening of September 11, 2001,” brilliant left-wing writer Meagan Day noted, astutely, on Twitter after commenters and politicians rushed to describe the Las Vegas slaughter as such. “Evil is morally urgent but structurally vague,” Day explained, and “Can be used to abdicate responsibility (weapons regulation) & grant special powers (wage war).”
Day is right to observe that the political use of evil, especially in the post 9–11 world, seems intentionally vague and directionless. If something or someone is simply evil, that line of reasoning goes, nothing can be done about them but total defeat; likewise, a good actor can hardly be faulted for whatever measures they take in the process: we’re dealing with evil, after all. President George W. Bush dubbed Iraq part of an “axis of evil” in order to pursue conflict in the region, and President Barack Obama linked the necessity of his drone policy with “the evil that lies in the hearts of some human beings.” In each case, the attribution of evil to nameless persons or governments describes little but justifies plenty.
But the trouble with contemporary political uses of evil isn’t the concept itself, but rather the intentional vagueness thrust upon it by an era without any well-defined theory of the good. Defined well and deployed clearly, evil is an illuminating concept with useful political punch, but it can’t function, either personally or politically, without a correspondingly useful theory of the good.
It’s easy to see why evil is often considered amorphous to the point of uselessness as a concept; it’s both applied so promiscuously and dishonestly as to drain it of meaning, and it genuinely has many expressions. But these difficulties (perhaps paradoxically) point to a fairly useful definition of evil — one proposed by the ancient Christian philosopher Augustine of Hippo, and advanced throughout the medieval period: evil isn’t any existing thing, but rather negation itself. Or, as contemporary author Terry Eagleton put it in his book on the subject: it is “supremely pointless,” the utter perversion of meaning, creation, existence. It is meaningless, destructive, chaotic nothingness.
It’s less abstract than it sounds — and it can actually help us shape up our understanding of the good. When people pointlessly destroy themselves and one another, that’s evil. When people inflict harm, rob one another of peace and create disorder, that’s evil. Suppose you grant me that: Now how, you’d rightly ask, do we make political use of that kind of definition?
We do so by recognizing that evil is a shadow that falls where good is negated. If we do evil when we turn away from our obligations to one another via acts of destruction, that implies we do good when we lean into those obligations. Leaving one another alone isn’t enough: It might get you out of the ‘evil’ zone, but it doesn’t get you into the ‘good’ zone. If evil is abandonment, indifference can’t be good, even if it’s somewhere closer to neutral.
Rather, defining acts as evil helps us imagine what the good really is. If mass killings are evil, which they are, then we don’t merely have an obligation to let each other be, but to actively support one another in living life — that is, to help others acquire and use the necessities of life, and to participate in society with them. In other words, the opposite of evil mass shootings isn’t the kind of atomized, lonely society we’re currently engaged in cultivating (at our own risk), but a society full of engagement, where we work to build programs, policies and cultural norms that promote life and quality of life.
by Elizabeth Bruenig, Medium | Read more:
Day is right to observe that the political use of evil, especially in the post 9–11 world, seems intentionally vague and directionless. If something or someone is simply evil, that line of reasoning goes, nothing can be done about them but total defeat; likewise, a good actor can hardly be faulted for whatever measures they take in the process: we’re dealing with evil, after all. President George W. Bush dubbed Iraq part of an “axis of evil” in order to pursue conflict in the region, and President Barack Obama linked the necessity of his drone policy with “the evil that lies in the hearts of some human beings.” In each case, the attribution of evil to nameless persons or governments describes little but justifies plenty.
But the trouble with contemporary political uses of evil isn’t the concept itself, but rather the intentional vagueness thrust upon it by an era without any well-defined theory of the good. Defined well and deployed clearly, evil is an illuminating concept with useful political punch, but it can’t function, either personally or politically, without a correspondingly useful theory of the good.It’s easy to see why evil is often considered amorphous to the point of uselessness as a concept; it’s both applied so promiscuously and dishonestly as to drain it of meaning, and it genuinely has many expressions. But these difficulties (perhaps paradoxically) point to a fairly useful definition of evil — one proposed by the ancient Christian philosopher Augustine of Hippo, and advanced throughout the medieval period: evil isn’t any existing thing, but rather negation itself. Or, as contemporary author Terry Eagleton put it in his book on the subject: it is “supremely pointless,” the utter perversion of meaning, creation, existence. It is meaningless, destructive, chaotic nothingness.
It’s less abstract than it sounds — and it can actually help us shape up our understanding of the good. When people pointlessly destroy themselves and one another, that’s evil. When people inflict harm, rob one another of peace and create disorder, that’s evil. Suppose you grant me that: Now how, you’d rightly ask, do we make political use of that kind of definition?
We do so by recognizing that evil is a shadow that falls where good is negated. If we do evil when we turn away from our obligations to one another via acts of destruction, that implies we do good when we lean into those obligations. Leaving one another alone isn’t enough: It might get you out of the ‘evil’ zone, but it doesn’t get you into the ‘good’ zone. If evil is abandonment, indifference can’t be good, even if it’s somewhere closer to neutral.
Rather, defining acts as evil helps us imagine what the good really is. If mass killings are evil, which they are, then we don’t merely have an obligation to let each other be, but to actively support one another in living life — that is, to help others acquire and use the necessities of life, and to participate in society with them. In other words, the opposite of evil mass shootings isn’t the kind of atomized, lonely society we’re currently engaged in cultivating (at our own risk), but a society full of engagement, where we work to build programs, policies and cultural norms that promote life and quality of life.
by Elizabeth Bruenig, Medium | Read more:
Image: A 15th century depiction of Satan, uncredited
