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The word “evil” doesn’t mean very, very bad. Stalin and Mao slaughtered millions of men and women, while Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, the so-called Moors murderers of the 1960s, killed only a handful of people; but it is tempting to speak of Brady and Hindley as evil, even though massacring millions is obviously a lot worse than murdering only a few. Evil is a special kind of badness. Dictators kill to further their corrupt political ends, whereas Brady and Hindley killed just for the hell of it. There was absolutely no point to their actions. They strangled little children simply for the obscene pleasure of the act of destruction. Or, in Freudian terms, they were in the terrifying grip of the death-drive.
Demons, as they are presented in myth and legend, aren’t opposed to this or that human value, but to value as such. Hell resounds with the yelps, sniggers, chortles and guffaws of those who mock the preposterous idea that human existence could have any meaning or worth. Like Shakespeare’s Iago, the devils itch to puncture this moral pomposity and show up human beings for the miserable waste of space that they are.
Evil, in other words, is a form of cynicism. What it finds intolerable isn’t this or that piece of the world, but Creation itself. Its mission is to return things to pure nothingness, and it reaps the kind of delight from this destructiveness that we see dimly reflected in a small child smashing up a toy. Destruction is an inverted form of creation, which brings into being a new entity known as nothingness. Since God has cornered the act of creation, the devil can only imitate this creativity by trying to break up God’s handiwork; but this means, to Satan’s eternal chagrin, that evil is dependent on good, and is always belated in relation to it.
There’s a long tradition for which evil is a kind of lack or absence. It may look frighteningly real, but it really springs from an incapacity for life.
The evil are the living dead, botched simulacra of authentic human existence. One such simulacrum walked among us fairly recently, known as Jimmy Savile. This isn’t necessarily to say that Savile was evil, but he was certainly a hole in the air. The point of the wig, shades, cigar, tracksuit and other appurtenances was to disguise the fact that there was nobody behind them. His eyes were dead and his geniality entirely bogus. He was devoid of talent, believed in nothing and had no relationships with other people because he was unable to love — which is to say, unable to be alive. He happened, however, to be a Roman Catholic by birth, and his charitable activities were probably an attempt to persuade St Peter that they sufficiently outweighed his crimes to allow him to squeeze into heaven.
When evil people feel agonised by the sickening void inside themselves, they try to fill it by annihilating others. Only in the act of destruction can they feel alive. Only by spreading their own nothingness around themselves can they hope to escape from it. Yet one can also view this from another perspective.
One reason why the evil detest human life is because it is messy. Evil is unnerved by the untidy and unfinished. Materiality is shapeless, mercurial stuff which seeps all over the place. The evil, however, are purists and disciples of order who find chaos unbearable, and who are therefore deeply hostile to the human body. Hitler couldn’t stand being touched. If he demonised Jews, it was partly because they signified this chaotic nothingness or non-being, which needed to be purged for the purity and orderliness of the German race to shine forth like some luminous work of art. And since the need for purity is absolute, this meant that not even a tiny scrap of nothingness was to be left around, which meant in turn that every Jew on earth had to be liquidated.
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“In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is…in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.”
Theodore Dalrymple
Those words definitely resonate after the covid tactics of the last year: “A society of emasculated liars is easy to control”
Exactly. Over the last year the UK and all western countries have become no different to the USSR etc in terms of the lies and propaganda churned out by the media and those in power. In fact, all the evidence seems to be that the Soviet tractor production statistics were more accurate than the various Covid tests.
An expert in Soviet-era Tractor production AND virology. Impressive!
Er, no Fraser, no-one in Government has admitted that. And I’m sure you are bright enough to understand the difference between the percentage of false positives and the percentage of positives that are false.
Have you a good analogy to help me to understand your point … ?
The mens rea?
Any test gives some false positives. Thus, if the infection rate is low enough, and that error rate is high enough, a number of the positive results will be false. That’s basic maths – it doesn’t invalidate testing in most conditions.
One of the men behind the present Agenda is Eugenicist Bill Gates who the “Fact” checkers suggest is a good man, and certainly not “evil”. . But Bill wants to “jab Genetically Modified Organisms into little kids arms”, make a profit on vaccines of twenty to one, wants everyone on the planet vaccinated, and threatens another pandemic while smirking with his wife. It’s all here:- from his own lips: https://ourtube.co.uk/watch/UIawpstyY9TbHFv
He also wants to shoot vast quantities of chalk into the atmosphere to affect the sun’s rays. However who is the more evil-him with his ideas or all the yes-men who he pays to try to enact them?
Both. In different ways.
I disagree. I am pretty sure Bill Gates and his yes-men think they are doing a good thing, as did Adolf and Comrade S. and Genghis Khan and so on, along with their numerous followers and admirers. You just don’t happen to like them, which is certainly a reasonable point of view, but not an inevitable one. If you try to define Evil rationally and as something outside your personal assemblage of values, you’ll just come up with a mishmash, as Mr. Eagleton has in this case (and many others; he seems to like mishmashes.). Notice in the present discussion that the notion is turned to yet more tribal rhetoric, as if the world weren’t already swimming in it. And of course the other tribes have theirs, and so forth ad infinitum/ad nauseam.
The deeply liberal state of Oregon so loves the power it has gained over the citizenry from Covid 19 (the Wuhan Virus to give it its proper name), that it proposes making mask wearing a permanent fixture of civic life.
Reminds me of Voltaire’s aphorism: “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
And they lurk everywhere. Consider Trump. The problem is that one person’s absurdity is another person’s gospel truth. That’s why some people get agitated and deride perfectly reasonable demands that slave traders should not be put on a pedestal as being politically correct or woke.
And they lurk everywhere. Consider Trump. The problem is that one person’s absurdity is another person’s gospel truth. That’s why some people get agitated and deride perfectly reasonable demands that traders who engaged in putting human beings in chains in order to sell as cheap/unpaid labour should not be put on a pedestal as being politically correct or woke.
God bless anyone who quotes Dalrymple – my #1 favourite writer. As a fellow physician, I doubly appreciate him.
Your comments are, to me at least, as valuable, entertaining and thought provoking as the original article.
So mass murder is evil unless done in the name of communism.
Then it’s just admin.
Thanks for clearing that up Comrade Eagleton.
He didn’t say that. “This needless to say, is not to claim that Stalin’s behaviour was less morally atrocious than Hitler’s. The former murdered far more people than the latter”.
He states Stalin was no less morally atrocious than Hitler and that he murdered more people. No attempt to excuse Stalin was made. I think the essay is an attempt to understand the differences between evil, acts of appalling cruelty carried out for self gratification and acts of appalling cruelty carried out ostensibly to achieve political aims. You might disagree that there are differences or with the examples he uses but at least he’s trying to understand morality in a post-religious context.
“trying to understand morality in a post-religious context” The folly of so many modern thinkers…
Not admin. Statistics.
I think the worst thing about the likes of H*tl*r and St*l*n is not the fact they personally killed anyone. The fear, that society doesn’t want to admit, is that they facilitated the evil present in society and us all by writing laws or reordering the moral foundation of their societies allowing for evil to manifest itself in otherwise peaceful societies. Don’t think for one minute that if you remove moral authority or the tools of law and order in the UK or the rest of Europe that the ‘civilised’ and genteel West won’t revert barbarism; it will. Remove the police fnrom society and something will replace the vacuum.
Police is not what repels evil. It is the force of mens’ souls that repels evil.
Remove the police, and vigilante groups will form to impose order – and arguably may do a better job. In the london riots a few years ago when the cops were too scared to do their jobs Asian and Turkish shopkeepers protected their properties with knives and sticks and the rioters stayed away.
Most ‘citizens’ now days are complete ‘Pu**i es and would leave it to war lords to control the mobs when the police give up. The evil Politicos in the West today are increasing crime intentionally, so they may keep the people afraid and helpless, and thus easier to control in the big picture.
This is my impression too. With the current lockdown regime going on in some countries, it won’t be long before lawful citizens are classified as criminals either.
‘Lawful citizens’ have been classified as criminals all over the world for over a year now.
Vigilante groups may form to impose order of a sort, but it will be to their own ideal, based on their own beliefs or desires, and those ideals may conflict badly with yours. My own experience of vigilantes is also that they frequently get the wrong end of the stick or go too far. A malicious rumour goes around on Facebook that X is a paedophile, and boom, that person is in fear of their life because of a lie or mistaken identity, as a mob collects outside their house, led by the biggest, loudest bullies in the area (who frequently turn out to be violent offenders themselves). The media are fond of hyping up police mistakes or incompetence, and heaven knows there have been a few lately, but plod usually bother investigating allegations, rather than simply believing unspecified rumours, and unlike vigilantes, they rarely dish out violent beatings or kill prisoners in the UK. Also, unlike vigilantes, the police tend to give the accused an opportunity to defend themselves in court. Even the most evil scumbag deserves that, in a civilized society.
So did the Krays and the Mafia. But they were in some ways better than our government, they protected those who paid them. Our governments don’t care about those who pay for them.
Our ancestors used to build churches everywhere because they knew that a conscious effort, and a whole intellectual system, was what was needed to encourage the prevalence of good over evil. We have forgotten this important reality. This article is barren, because it is written by someone with no intellectual training in morality, religion or even philosophy. We meet evil people all the time, both face to face, and on TV and other media. Many of them are billed as our friends, or as people we should listen to and admire – like Jimmy Savile was. They are therefore hard to recognise for what they are – sources of evil. Attacking Iraq in 2003 was an evil act. We knew that then, and time has not altered the fact. We live in an evil world, with much good in it also, and we have to work much harder at promoting good and repelling evil.
Isn’t there a difference between people who do bad things and people or whole projects that are evil?
The medieval Church may have built many fine buildings but I suspect they were built: as a reminder that the Church was the most powerful institution in most people’s lives; to provide a way of using surplus income to provide employment to favoured artisans to provide further evidence of the power of The Church; to show who had control over eternal bliss or eternal damnation.
We live in an indifferent world where people do good, bad and indifferent things and where religion can have good bad or indifferent intentions and outcomes.
Your reasons are minor ones, compared to the much larger compulsion which must have been felt by our ancestors to build large, extremely expensive edifices to worship God, and to promote the common good.
Evil resides in people, and it’s people who start projects. In the case of Iraq in 2003, it was PM Blair who made sure that Britain’s support of the Iraq invasion went ahead So you could say that Blair was and is evil, and many people have said just that.
Blair was evil, and his migrations to socially engineer UK to be forever Labour by importing poverty was an evil act. (and failed because who fallowed him were not evil enough, just incompetent). But I disagree anout the Iraq war, and so we are at an impass, and recognising evil is difficult when it is hiding.
The Iraq invasion was, arguably, engineered by Iran to strengthen its position vis a vis Saudi Arabia – religious disagreement in other words – and the triumvirate of Blair (megalomania), Bush (ignorant) and Howard (amoral) fell for it at great cost and no gain. Sad, all of it then and subsequently.
Sanford’s earlier comment is outstanding scholarship.
So, Giles and Sanford, what is evil is just a matter of your personal political preferences.
I think we disagree about motive. Building glamorous and imposing buildings, as the ancient Egyptians did and as Trump did, is no guarantee of a wish to promote the common good.
Church-building in Britain is not the same as pyramid-building in Egypt, although I’m sure that the Egyptians thought they were promoting the common good when they interred their Pharoahs in vast structures. Nazis don’t think that Hitler was evil, but most other people do, so I suppose in a sense political preferences are a factor. But for society to survive and improve, there has to be some common agreement on what is good and what is evil, so I don’t think that your point is very significant.
Major church building projects in England stopped when the State confiscated its resources to neuter its political influence and because the King fancied the Church’s money. At that time 1 in 30 English males were clergymen of some sort. Kings build Palaces, Priests build Cathedrals. Both live off the Labour of others. Religion can be a force for good or bad depending on the morals of the people involved and not some inherent God given value system. A cursory look at the changing morals and values over time of any religion will tell you that.
Human society doesn’t have to survive and improve. Some of us would like it to, but if humans manage to destroy themselves, as they seem to eager to do, the Earth will sail on through eternity unperturbed, and perhaps hatch some further, hopefully less troubled species to reflect and contemplate its glories. You all and your querulous little tribes aren’t needed.
What is this nonsense Awaiting for Approval” to which my previous comment has been subjected? I assume that this is some kind of bot or computer-controlled mechanism, because my comment is in response to another comment, and is wholly unobjectionable. Please review your bot.
It’s the new system that replaced the ‘dearly beloved’ Disqus one. SGTM.
‘… the much larger compulsion which must have been felt by our ancestors to build large, extremely expensive edifices to worship God, and to promote the common good.’
Now they have the State, which seems to be about the same thing: large expensive edifices, enforcement of tribal values and superstitions — the ‘common good’. As long as the right tribe is in power, it’s great.
Much of what you say is true, but attacking Iraq was not evil, losing the peace was evil.
Here’s an interesting essay on Shakespeare’s most evil character, Aaron, and on evil itself:
Excerpt: “Aaron is the ideal, the goal of all the social engineering and propagandizing. Perpetually furious, blindly hateful, vengeful though not for any wrongs actually incurred, unmollified by opportunity or success, and obsessively focused on “tearing it down” while having no idea what to replace “it” with.
An important part of Aaron’s character arc is that he has no exit strategy. Having had no goal beyond destruction, once it becomes clear that his scheming has produced the desired results (the royal house is crumbling, and Titus’ last remaining son Lucius has joined with the Goths to lead an assault on the city), Aaron decides to pick up and leave (a luxury the New York Times Aarons might have, but inner-city Aarons don’t). He grabs his baby, his “son and heir” (the product of his trysts with Tamora), and hits the road.
Unfortunately for him, he’s caught by Lucius and the Goths. Lucius declares that the Moor and his offspring will be killed, a rather understandable response considering that Aaron orchestrated the murder of his brothers, the rape and maiming of his sister, and the dismemberment of his father.
“Save the child,” Aaron implores. In exchange, Aaron offers to reveal all the evils he’s done, every underhanded deed, every plot. “Things that highly may advantage thee to hear.” But only if Lucius swears that the child will be unharmed.
And now we come to my favorite part of the play. Lucius says:
And Aaron essentially replies, indeed, an oath from me is worthless. But I know that you have a belief in morals and ethics. I know that if you give me your word, you’ll keep it,
.https://www.takimag.com/article/the-curse-of-aaron/
David Cole in Takimag is always worth reading. A very amusing guy, too.
This reminds me of some of the depiction of satan in C.S. Lewis’s Space trilogy. Senseless, and unimaginative, maiming frogs or continually interrupting another person just for the sake of it. Evil is shown as neither constructive nor stylish not intelligent, unless it needs to be to achieve it’s ends. Left to itself it’s just a big fat nothing. It’s one of the more disturbing things I’ve ever read.
That Trilogy, and especially the last, ‘That Hidious Strength’ are the most important books of the several thousand I have read. There is no better summing of evil, no more chilling and real, in any other book, put so well, with such great characters and setting and tale. The COLDness of evil is so true. In my weird life I have been much in remote nature and weird places and have seen much, and that inhuman coldness, that soullessness, I have seen that, and it is what is nudging our culture and society along to the ultimate evil dystopia.
At one point he associates order with the dissolution of evil, at another he associates Hitler’s brand of evil with an attempt to impose order (as you point out).
A kind of entropy, perhaps.
A Steppenwolf conclusion.
I agree. It starts uncertainly, dithers, then loses its way entirely, ultimately finishing on a non sequitur. Bizarre.
There are so many pressing issues, that are getting scant attention elsewhere, which could be aired and discussed on Unherd, which makes this article feel like a scandalous squandering of scare resource.
In the interests of full disclosure would the author please tell us:
It certainly seems to be a mind-expanding substance, though I am not sure that it has anything else to be said in its favoyr.
He is a ‘critic and literally theorist’, which tells you all you need to know. I would refer you to the book ‘Against Criticism’ by Iain McGilchrist.
The fact that the author of ‘Why Marx was Right’ has written this article is a good thing, and not to be criticised.
I don’t expect correct answers, should there be any, but do appreciate pertinent questions. A Marxist discussing evil and stressing individuality is a snowdrop after a long winter. Be glad.
It seems like we have a great hunger and thirst for evil, exaggerating it when it isn’t there. There are two points in this article that would suggest this. Firstly the small one: Medusa wasn’t evil. In the myth, she was made ugly and deadly by Athena as a “punishment” for being raped by Poseidon in Athena’s temple. Medusa then went to live in a cave to stay away from people so she wouldn’t harm them. It’s not her fault people kept wanting to come and kill her and got turned to stone. I’m not sure Dracula is really evil either, he needs blood to live. He’s just a predator, like a wolf. Lucy Westenra was a nice girl, until she got bitten. If a wolf eats your sheep, or even your child, it’s not evil, it’s just doing its carnivore thing.
On the second point, I am not convinced that Stalin did kill more people than Hitler. There is a tendency among academics to assume that somebody else’s estimate of the number of people killed by the Soviet government is an under-estimate and therefore one should increase the numbers. As an example, in Norman Davies’ “Vanished Kingdoms”, he states an estimated death toll at one camp in Belarus of around 400,000 people over the quarter century or so of Stalin’s rule. There were two sources given, one of which was a Daily Mail article by Davies himself, where he gave a slightly lower estimate, but the other source was lower still. The original number seemed suspiciously large and the difference between that and the evidence cited for it made me want to find out what was going on.
It took over an hour of my time, but I followed those sources back to their sources and eventually got back to the numbers that a researcher had gleaned from going through the NKVD archives in the 1990’s – I forget the exact number, but it was about 8,000 deaths in custody from all causes: executed, shot while escaping, died of “natural” causes etc. At every step, after that, you’d find an “estimate” that would increase the number, so the article with the 8,000 would be cited as evidence where the text said “fewer than 10,000”. That article would be cited in another article which would say “around 10,000”, then that would be cited in an article that would say “fewer than 15,000”, which would then be cited as evidence for “15,000”, which in turn would back up an estimate of “maybe as many as 20,000”. And so on, exaggeration upon estimate upon exaggeration until you get to Norman Davies’ 400,000.
This was a few years ago now, so maybe the estimate has increased since then. A note to future historians when making up their estimates, they might want to remember the population of the USSR at the time. To repurpose a famous quote: “There are two hundred million of us, you can’t hang us all”.
I think Dracula needed blood to live because he was evil – he wasn’t part of nature.
Yes, that’s why he had no reflection – nature didn’t recognise him as a properly existing thing. Likewise, the cross burned because God didn’t recognise him either.
It wasn’t his fault that he was the undead.A psychiatrist would have a field day- my client will only see me at night with no mirrors in the room , has a tendency to glide in through the window rather than use the stairs,bad dentistry on two frontal teeth,dislikes garlic etc
Ah, yes it was. He became undead because of the things he did and thought.
Alright I agree. In Milton’s Paradise Lost Satan was the brightest of the angels until he turned bad-so perhaps evil is an opposite to society’s norms?
There was something so very evil of the millions of Stalin deaths, that the innocent were given NO protection, that accusation was enough, and this shows an evil of vast depth. At least Na* ies has some criteria, and if you did not fit them, or could be shown to not, you could be spared from some kind of Nordic ‘fairness’, under Stalin this was not the case. And this brought total fear as horrors could be inflicted on any with absolutely zero justification. This means all under him lived in a constant state of terror and uncertainty, all were psychologically being tortured all the time.
No, I didn’t make notes and I don’t remember the details of the final source, because I did it for my own curiosity and it was a few years ago. The book is available on Kindle: Vanished Kingdoms: The History of Half-Forgotten Europe eBook: Davies, Norman: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store, if you don’t believe me and are confident in your beliefs, you can test them by doing the same as I did.
Without wanting to step into this fight, I’d suggest that Conquest’s ‘The Great Terror’ and ‘The Harvest of Sorrow’ are both worth reading too.
Only the nice ones.
Why argue with BC about this?
We all know that compared to Chairman Mao, both Stalin and Adolph were mere amateurs when it came to mass slaughter.
Interestingly from a purely professional point of view, almost unknown Ruanda triumphs over all three for the sheer speed and efficiency of its own Holocaust.*
However when was Black on Black of much interest?
* figures on request.
Mao had a very large country to work with. Pol Pot killed or exiled something like a quarter of its population, and the British got rid of half the population of Ireland.
You rely on Ovid as your source for Medusa. I would think Pindar more reliable, if not so gruesome.
Yes, but even if Hitler killed fewer people than Stalin, maybe Stalin was meaner about it. After all, he had a bigger mustache than Hitler.
If he’s a Marxist all he had to do to encounter evil was look in the mirror.
Strange that no one has mentioned Pol Pot. Maybe racism is behind it as in everything else these days.
Also two were heads of their country so are accountable for their actions. Savile has never been tried and I’m sure the author wouldn’t like students suddenly accusing him of things 50 years ago? I find Iago in Othello an example of an everyday sort of evil as he does wrong because he can.
Unherd, Why am I Awaiting for Approval???? I tried to do everything like spelling fas** sist and so on Why? The post cleared but then it got censored later – why? It was a well documented and reasoned post. Does some complaint censor us? That must be it, anyone can censor content I guess. Maybe you need to turst posters after some amount of posts, or you leave the agenda based to censer those they do not like.
An excellent demonstration of critical thought and writing!
I once heard a lecture by Terry Eagleton, and it was a bit like this article — very engaging because it was full of what sounded valuable aphorisms, penetrating witticisms and revealing comparisons. But at the end I walked away with the impression that it was an attempt at ego-massage, and was quite empty. And I found that entire experience rather frightening. Your comment goes a long way towards explaining that experience, as well as this article.
Yes! Thank you!
Enjoyable, thought provoking and didn’t mention woke once. More of this sort of thing, please. Would be great to see a response from Giles Fraser.
Portraying goodness in art is a notoriously difficult thing to achieve. Dostoevsky tried this with Prince Myshkin in The Idiot and did a good job.
How about Metamorphosis by Kafka? The opposite, portraying the death of soul into misery and banality.
The banality of The Metamorphosis condemns the banality of the reader, not the author or the character. The character struggles heroically and finally goes under, and nobody cares because he’s too weird to are about. But he does live an authentic if awful life, whereas his banal witnesses don’t even have that to say for themselves.
Methinks thy description of the evil ones is a little too sympathetic to be acknowledged as objective. Get thee behind us.
There’s a big jump in this article from describing the void which evil people (supposedly) feel inside themselves, to turning the filling of this void into their motive. But Saville wasn’t Hitler, and Hitler wasn’t a moors murderer. They were all evil in their own way, and presumably motivated to evil in their own way. Hitler, at least, would have been able to give a clear account of his motivation.
That there is a moral void is clear – it’s what fails to stop these people acting in the way that they do. That they act in order to fill this void, that this is their motivation, is another step entirely.
and yet the connection is there. Psychopathy and Narcissism. That is what evil is in a nutshell. Psychopathy a complete lack of empathy for others. Other people are just to be used and manipulated when needed. Narcissism the need for recognition/power regardless of the cost to others.
In his memoirs, Richard Pipes wrote that he thought that Nazism could only have arisen in Germany, and not anywhere else. It represented a perversion of the German love of order and cleanliness. Going to extremes in other cultures makes one the butt of jokes, but German humour, as Mark Twain said, is no laughing matter. I am not sure how much Pipes’s analysis applies to Germany today, or even Germany in the 1930s, but he does put his finger on a real problem with human perceptions. It is great to want to have a neat and tidy house, a neat and tidy city and so forth, but human affairs are inevitably messy, and one must also be prepared to accept the mess and it helps if one can laugh at the problems that ensue. You certainly shouldn’t see eliminating human beings as the default option for ameliorating a messy situation. For a lot of social problems, it may be saner and wiser to just admit that there is no clean solution, and just muddle through as best we can.
I think the worst thing about the likes of Hitler and Stalin is not the fact they personally killed anyone. The fear, that society doesn’t want to admit, is that they facilitated the evil present in society and us all by writing laws or reordering the moral foundation of their societies allowing for evil to manifest itself in otherwise peaceful societies. Don’t think for one minute that if you remove moral authority or the tools of law and order in the UK or the rest of Europe that the ‘civilised’ and genteel West won’t revert barbarism; it will. Remove the police from society and something will replace the vacuum.
Terry Eagleton focuses on just one expression of evil which is essentially the absence of good. There is indeed a nihilism in evil which in itself is horrific, but to leave it there is inadequate.
I don’t believe we can understand the nature of evil unless we approach it theologically and biblically. Evil has its root in the supernatural realm with the decision of one of God’s Angels called Satan to rebel and disobey Him. Satan infected this World by persuading humanity to join him in his rebellion. Whether we take Genesis 3 literally or metaphorically it does, I believe, point to the truth about the origin of evil in our World.
Humanity expresses its disobedience to God through refusing to live in the light of His presence through prayer and worship and refusal to obey His laws. This is called sin and every human being is a sinner. But not every sinner is evil. Sin slips into evil when it seeps deeply into a stone-cold heart which is totally narcissistic and nihilistic. Then according to circumstances it can produce the serial killer, Savile, Hitler, Stalin etc. Sin also slips into evil when a person indulges in the occult. This is a conscious decision to enter into spiritual darkness through involvement in witchcraft, spiritualism and satanic worship etc. Involvement in these activities can produce people who have all the characteristics of evil such as selfishness,hatred,cruelty,total indifference to the suffering and needs of others – all to a very extreme degree.
Does Satan or the Devil exist as an objective being or is he a mythological personification of evil. I think the biblical revelation gives excellent insight into the truth that Satan is a very powerful, supernatural being whose sole aim is to destroy all that is good and of God including humanity. He works at the micro level seeking to deflect, discourage, divide, and destroy human life and relationships, especially our relationship with God. Jesus Himself had to face the attentions of Satan on at least one occasion. He also acts at the macro level creating wars, producing natural disasters and making bad situations much worse.
He knows however that under the Sovereign will and Power of God his days are numbered and there will be a time of reckoning, judgement and eternal punishment.
The comments in this thread appear to form two distinct camps. In the first there is a literate and informed engagement with what has actually been written, and in the other an already formed prejudice about anything that is appears to have a different take on things. I thought one of Unherd’s qualities was to provide for informed debate. Much of what I see below is a travesty of this.
As an Australian I have barely seen Saville’s shows, but the little I have seen of him has convinced me he pulled a massive fast one on the UK. The popularity of this odd looking freak completely eluded me.
Saville did a lot of good work for “charidee” – that’s all that’s required. He had a public face of meaning well…
I live 150 yards from Stoke Mandeville hospital. I’ve had lodgers that worked there. His activities were well known to a large number of people. Young trainee nurses (especially young looking ones) were told to make themselves scarce when Saville was on the premises. An ex of mine also worked there and said that the cafe he helped promote and open was called “Jimmy’s”. Everyone on site knew it as “Fiddlers”.
He got away with it because people saw the charity efforts and assumed he was just a bit weird but doing good work.
The real question here isn’t why Saville did what he did- it’s how he got away with it. How many people turned a blind eye? If so – why? What idiot let him have a room at Broadmoor so he could “stay the night”…? What were they thinking – if at all? The questions just keep coming…. I suspect many people don’t want to start answering them…
I can’t say I knew of his ‘activities’ but having met him a few times I thought he was as nutty as a fruit cake.
Same for a certain Australian wobble-board exponent, who was colloquially known as “the octopus” for his wandering hands.
I agree with the author’s initial point that evil has something to do with non-creation and nothingness. We should praise existence and create as best as we can. And we should counter impediments to that, including evil action. But should we try to understand evil? Is there anything to understand?
I think the author’s attempt to get to the bottom of it and understand Devil & Co in a comprehensive way is what makes the article “dithers, then loses its way … ultimately finishing on a non sequitur” (comment by John Smith). Never try to look the Devil in the eye, never accuse him of being the Devil. I guess, the one “similarity” to God is that he is what he is (as said to Moses).
Yes, it’s odd how non consensual sexual acts have attained such an important status as to be seriously comparable to mass murder.
I’m puzzled by the conceptual jump that makes Jews an expression of nothingness. There must be a missing premiss or two?
The author is stretching a point to make the argument. Very poor essay.
A salivating list of wrongdoers but not a peep from Eagleton about the evil of his other religion, Marxism.
Still making a living talking bollox though.
To paraphrase Animal Farm: 20 million dead in the USSR good, six million Jews dead in the concentration camps bad.
Not sure if this writer is incredibly clever or just simply confused. Either way I gave up half way through the article. Anyone who writes “Hitler, then, was engaged in the impossible project of trying to destroy nothingness”, cannot be taken seriously.
In this post (and, incidentally, all (or most) of the accompanying posts constituting Unherd’s Box Set on evil), is the assumption that evil is out there, someplace else, mostly to be found in someone else.
Yes – I think my point (above, below?) is similar.
a cynical point of view, if there ever was one.
Leopold of the Belgians?
Well, I didnt understand a word of that prof. Eagleton…how can evil be empty? Empty of what? Or j saville a void? So stalin IS less evil than Hitler- I should have known…
Interesting reflection. Many thanks.
It may be however that more than a simple anti-God, the enemy, Satan, the dark angel, takes that which already exists in creation and human nature and, through free human agency, bends it to the will of evil. A purely dualistic (and Marxist) view, although straightforward and often neat and tempting, tends to play right into the enemy’s hands, so to speak, by equating the power of Satan with that of God and denying human free will.
Although it is always ‘pride that cometh before the fall’, its clearly envy, that is the Devil’s chief sin. It has often been noted in Catholic theology that of the ‘seven deadly sins’ envy is the only ‘itch’ amongst them that – even in a worldly, temporary way – cannot be scratched. Scratching envy – unlike the others – gives no ‘relief’ here on earth, so to speak. He rebelled presumably because we (humans) were made. Although ‘prince of the Heavenly Host’ in the popular mind, the classic Christian teaching is that he was no ‘prince’ per se, but originally *our* ‘guardian angel’ (whether that means humanity, the Earth, solar system, Milky Way, etc. I don’t know).
The nature of the ‘twisting’ is often clear, the motivations less so, as he plays upon individual or collective human weakness and sins:
Moors murders, a twisted folie-a-deux ‘marriage’ bonded by a shared secret violence towards that which is young, pure and innocent. A close look at the childhood of one or both murderers there might be revealing.
Saville, similar in ways, perversity but with the added kick of ‘I’m too big to fail and can get away with it.’ Of a piece with ‘I’m friends with all the ‘important’ people’. Pervert, class obsession, envy and resentment.
It’s noticeable that as with the west coast of US (Seattle to California) a lot of the ‘big’ English murderers of the 20th c came from northern England (!?)
Hitler and Stalin were both ‘religious’ fanatics, following heresies. Indeed, one was a reactive heresy of the other It’s interesting though that Hitler (apparently) never saw and had no interest in what was happening in the camps, when he had others to do the dirty work for him. Stalin took an active part apparently in individual tortures and murders. This suggests Stalin was in it for power, but Hitler ‘genuinely’ believed in his ‘faith’. A scary thought. The human motivations are clear, German national ‘humiliation’, genuine fear of Marxism, the ‘need’ for a scapegoat, etc.
An interesting question might be, why did the evil one want to obliterate Israel at that point in history, why then, why there?
The lure of Satanism within the Radical Left might explain the desire to exterminate undesirable others…..
Radical left-wing political ideas had been spread by the American Revolution of 1765–83 and the French Revolution of 1789–99, and the figure of Satan, who was interpreted as having rebelled against the tyranny imposed by God, was an appealing one for many of the radical leftists of the period.[97] For them, Satan was “a symbol for the struggle against tyranny, injustice, and oppression… a mythical figure of rebellion for an age of revolutions, a larger-than-life individual for an age of individualism, a free thinker in an age struggling for free thought”.[92] The French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who was a staunch critic of Christianity, embraced Satan as a symbol of liberty in several of his writings.[98] Another prominent 19th century anarchist, the Russian Mikhail Bakunin, similarly described the figure of Satan as “the eternal rebel, the first freethinker and the emancipator of worlds” in his book God and the State.[99] These ideas likely inspired the American feminist activist Moses Harman to name his anarchist periodical Lucifer the Lightbearer.[100] The idea of this “Leftist Satan” declined during the twentieth century,[100] although it was used on occasion by authorities within the Soviet Union, who portrayed Satan as a symbol of freedom and equality.[101]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satanism
A disjointed article, less perhaps that the sum of its parts, but some interesting aspects; especially that a Marxist might consider evil to exist outside the dialectic, as something personal, psychological, spiritual even.
I’m audiobooking my way through Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet series. Weston, and thing that overwhelms Weston in Perelanda, sum up evil, ready to dig up a weed if there is nothing more worthwhile.
JF
Surely evil is now best embodied in the modern EU?
Russell said of DH Lawrence that ‘ he is incapable of what is called thinking’. The above is reminiscent of the author’s notorious defence of theism in The Guardian a few years back, which elicited universal derision.
If this writer has a message then it’s lost among his dreadfully disjointed writing.
A copy editor might help us find out if he actually has anything to say.
At one point he associates order with the dissolution of evil, at another he associates H*tl*r’s brand of evil with an attempt to impose order (as you point out).
Study some evolutionary psychology if you want to understand why humans behave the way they do. It’s not complicated. Then you wouldn’t have to make stuff up.
I dunno man. I give brain scans to monkeys for the american government. I really do. So my psychological credentials are pretty strong. I’m not religious but I love thinking about what evil is. Might I gently suggest to you that that if you cannot relate to this, maybe nothing serious has really happened to you in your life, or if it has, that you arent the kind of person who thinks terribly deeply about things.
Also “it’s not complicated” ??
Ot course it is. That’s why there is so much to say. We will never truly understand human psychology in evolutionary terms. This is not because it didnt evolve. It’s because so many selection pressures operated simultaneously for so long. And we have no direct access to them. They can’t be inferred from the present. So we are left with the necessity of describing the human condition through metaphor and art.
You might think that unfortunate. I do not.
I’d say that understanding why human beings do the things they do is incredibly complicated once you get past basic survival impulses.
Well said.
Yes, I agree with Colin, evolutionary psychology certainly has it’s value but it will only take you so far on this, the greatest moral question.
We have free will, the knowledge of good and evil and of our own suffering and ultimate mortality. No excuses, we are responsible. That’s the brilliantly encapsulated message of the Fall, that’s what makes us human.
‘One reason why the evil detest human life is because it is messy.’
Did that touch a nerve?
Don’t, most of it is a stretch. None of it is fact. It might seem sound depending on preconceptions but it is no different from mere opinion.
Excellent post, perfectly demonstrates the banality of secular humanism and how it sperads evil by its lack of good, or belief in good and evil, by using cod psychology to replace soul and religion.