I’ve fully realised now after always considering to be on the left in some degree that the great deception left wing thought has pulled off since it’s inception is that it cares about people. The fact is it cares about its ideology and nothing else. Whatever gets in its way must be destroyed. It’s morally bankrupt and always has been. It’s disgusting.
Or what is pretty much the same: it thinks of people in the abstract, as variables in its ideological calculus. Not real people, but ciphers.
I think you see this in the way they assume they are speaking for large numbers of people who they assume to have a single viewpoint. Or if they don’t it’s false consciousness, internalised misogyny or racism and the rest. It used to be the working class, now it’s women or people of colour. Remarkably quite a lot of them don’t even belong to the groups they claim to represent.
Indeed. Have you noticed how no one on the right wants anything to do with the far right but the entire left is cowed by the far left? Cowards, cry bullies and weaklings.
It’s obvious why the left supports Islamic terrorists. They believe the same things. Original sin, hereditary guilt, women should be quiet and do as they’re told, belief in paradise/utopia and that their ideology is the only way to get there and the whole world must submit, and anti semitic.
The Cottee article, to which your comment presumably speaks, discussed the moral repugnance of an avowedly left-wing thinker (Norman Geras) to these kinds of simplifications/reductions. To tar the whole political left as identarian apologists for terrorism, fundamentalism and every variety of self-indulgent wacko extremism reveals a woeful lack of knowledge of the former. A number of people who write for Unherd are on the left spectrum: Cottee, Terry Eagleton, Ralph Leonard and Thomas Fazi to name but some. All different thinkers with different politics, they would disagree about much. But none would conform to the caricature presented here. The fools who exalt in Hamas’ strike against Israel referred to by Cottee are NOT the part that represents the whole. The left has its own proud anti-authoritarian, democratic and humanistic tradition going back to the nineteenth centre, and represented by Morris, Cole, Serge, Orwell, Camus, Silone, Howe, Thompson and countless others including Geras.
Agreed. Which in many ways just shows a confusion of terms. The “far right” is just a label that leftists apply, but the “far right” are categorically the same as the far left in terms of how they operate – they just disagree on the details/goals of the far left. But both are willing to tyrannize, inflame, tear things down, and act with violence.
Not to mention there is an order of magnitude more far left people than far right people.
Or what is pretty much the same: it thinks of people in the abstract, as variables in its ideological calculus. Not real people, but ciphers.
Yes. It’s a form of OCD, an almost manic desire to tidy up the world, making sure that everyone and everything is correctly labelled and categorised, like butterflies in a lepidopterist’s cabinet.
That is how Left movements attract disgust; the pretence of caring makes you worse than if you were honest from the start about the limits of your concern for others.
I find myself in similar straits. Yes to all the above, with the additional “feature” that, for the heretic, the wrong-thinker, there be no redemption. That’s what I came to be nauseated by: it’s not a movement of the compassionate, more a club for argumentative narcissists, on the whole. Stand-outs such as Geras were ever a rarity and I fear they may now be extinct.
I think it was PJ O’Rourke who defined a liberal as somebody who “loves the crowd and treats their family like $h1t”. Seems a fair description, now I come to reconsider it.
If you put the idea of People over your any one person is able to be treated, you allow for great evil. Paul Johnson in Intellectuals described the dividing line as (the left) being able to think the People are idealized while being able to have no regard or even malice towards any person, while the alternative is (the pragmatist) being able to realize that People are at best a mixed bag and gratefully connecting with as many persons who you may find are surprisingly good.
Glyn R
6 months ago
There are many wrongs that can be attributed to the Israeli government but I agree that the callous disregard for the horrific massacre of innocent people by Hamas self-righteously displayed by tens of thousands in the UK has left me shocked to the core and very worried in deed. I was brought up to question the treatment of Palestinians but nothing prepared me for this.
Last edited 6 months ago by Glyn R
UnHerd Reader
6 months ago
Thank you, Simon. For putting this piece up today. Adele Geras
Margaret TC
6 months ago
‘in an Islamist utopia, progressive liberals would be the first to be cleansed from its dominion’ – yes, together with the homosexual and trans communities they claim to support. The contradictions of the ‘progressive’ ideologues need to be exposed!
Rita X Stafford
6 months ago
Once you walk away from the left, you see how obsessed it is with shameless, self proclaimed virtue, and doesn’t care to actually spend “quality” time with the people it professes to live and die for. And to paraphrase Donald Trump, ‘and some are very nice people.’ After 30 devoted years on the political and cultural left, I recovered my mind and never felt better, freer or more connected to my fellow human beings, which, imho, comes about through self restraint, not being afraid to be alone, and tempering resentment each time it rears its ugly head.
David Morley
6 months ago
What they emphatically are not, as Arendt had described Eichmann, is “thoughtless” with an “inability to think”. On the contrary, these Hamas murderers can and did think. And they had no doubt spent a lot of time wolfishly fantasising about how they would inflict maximum degradation on Jews. And they would have been able to entertain these demonic thoughts because they were raised in a culture that is saturated in a genocidal hatred toward Jews.
Have they not been rendered, or rendered themselves, literally unable to think. Not thoughtless in the sense that Arendt described Eichmann, but thoughtless nontheless.
But you’ve exactly describedthe way in which Arendt describes both “thoughtless” and “normal” in her earlier essays on totalitarianism — a mode of emptied, “thoughtless” being produced in a society where it is only “power” and not some attempt to materialise a notion of the good that organises the scope of political action. I would say that she goes as far as to say that a man like Eichmann, produced by such a mob, can have no thoughts because he has no will because his subjectivity was never determined by his choices but was rather a kind of subjecthood ever produced by “power”; without it, he is a helpless man who cannot even conceive of himself.
Hannah Arendt is the last person who would support the revenge sought both sides.
Paul Beardsell
6 months ago
When one identifies the evil wrongdoings of one side that doesn’t make the other side the good side. One side can act better than the other side and still itself be evil. Objectively how does one measure the two sides up, if one wants to do that? Why not condemn both sides for their misdeeds? I think that’s the only honest way forward. But to many it’s as if Israel has never misbehaved, and to others it’s as if the Palestinians etc etc. Here at UnHerd and so many other places too, no one ever mentions the 250 (including 47 children) of Palestinians killed by Israelis in the West Bank alone this year, before the Hamas atrocity. [Please see I am not mincing my words about Hamas.] What concerns me now is the exchange rate, what is one Palestinian life worth measured in Israeli lives, and vice versa. Each side is not satisfied with the eye for an eye, they want more. I see the bloodthirsty barking for revenge both sides. Both sides hate. Some here too.
Leejon 0
3 months ago
Brilliantly said, as usual.
Steve Hall
6 months ago
Latest in a procession of poor Unherd articles about this murderous conflict. There’s such a proliferation of actual violence and so much atrocity propaganda flying about the place from both sides it’s impossible to apply the ethical and ontological certainty required to make ‘evil’ an appropriate term. As the BRICS expansion gathers momentum and global decoupling takes shape on the back of the energy transition, the situation on the Middle Eastern, Eastern European and the Far Eastern fault lines is complex and highly explosive. It’s never been more likely that at least some of the more significant Arab/Muslim nations will transcend their atavistic differences and forge economic and military alliances. Even if temporary, that would be a tectonic power-shift. China and Russia, now major suppliers of arms and tech, are refusing to condemn Hamas. Underneath the state propaganda, the US population is making isolationist noises. Geras wasn’t the best thinker, but he was good enough to see that future developments would put Israel – itself internally torn between liberal democracy and Zionist ethnostate with the latter currently in ascendence – in a dangerous situation. In a sane world, the UN would intervene to separate the Hamas and Likud lunatics. But that sane world was never established, despite some good intentions in the immediate aftermath of WWII. Sorry, but right and wrong are evenly distributed in all the current conflicts. If MAD holds sway we won’t annihilate ourselves, but anyone who has given the details of the fall of Mycenaean or Roman civilizations some thought will see the parallels – Dark Age ahead, I’m afraid.
This year before the recent Hamas atrocities 250 Palestinians (including 47 children) had been killed by Israelis in the West Bank alone. In response to the killing of 1400 by Hamas we now have thousands killed in Gaza by Israeli bombing and shelling. Most years more Palestinians are killed than Israelis. How do you want to measure relative evils here? By number of body bags? Sq.km of land stolen? BOTH sides are guilty of evil misdeeds. Relative evilness is hardly the point, but if you’re keeping score, what are you counting? I am not an apologist for Hamas, read what I write, but the idea that there are not two bad actors here is just false.
The Western reporting is for the most part not balanced. I note that no pictures of the 47 dead Palestinian children have appeared in the Western media.
Both sides are acting badly.
Ta, and I think the only takeaway insight from the comment sections is that Unherd has not attracted the balanced, heterodox readership it allegedly wanted. Or maybe it never did. Or maybe the silent readers who don’t comment are more balanced. Who knows? This is one reason why Dark Ages are called Dark. This time round it won’t be the lack of recorded commentary but complete overload – a dense, dark cloud of bullsh*t in which everyone misrecognises everything.
Nik Jewell
6 months ago
Dear me, the second article here about ‘evil’ in the past few days. As I explained in response to the last one, I avoid the use of the term and its cognates (‘demonic’ crept in here, too) because I am an atheist. There is no metaphysical force of ‘evil’ external to us.
Does ‘evil’ exist in some non-metaphysical sense, as the author suggests? Possibly, but only as an arbitrary label; we could use another word for it instead. But no, people use that word with all the metaphysical baggage it carries with it; whether the speaker recognises that or not, other people hear it differently.
Separately from that discussion, it bothers me that there is continuous smearing between protestors who legitimately care about what is happening to civilians in Gaza and (expletive deleted) people who celebrate the killing of Jews or the terrorism of Hamas. This is a blunt weapon. It has been used continuously to attack Kellie-Jay Keen and the ‘Let Women Speak’ events because a couple of far-right people attended. Protestors against lockdowns and other pandemic measures were continually attacked by the media, asserting a connection between the ‘far-right’ and ‘conspiracy theorists’, again sometimes based on attendees, when it turns out in retrospect that protestors had a genuine case, even if some of their reasoning was more intuition-based than reason-based. Nobody can control who turns up at a protest.
If you’re referring to the article which used both “evil” and “Evil” as terms of reference, i think you’re confusing the two. The latter is indeed a meaningless metaphysical-type construct which i pointed out in comments to that article; however, the concept of “an evil act” has some usefulness as a descriptor for that which lies within us, mainly buried beneath our layers of civilisational compliance with norms.
Having said that, it’s important not to become embroiled in conceptual analysis unless it serves a purpose in the face of those acts perpetrated by Hamas, which amply “demonstrate” what humans are capable of, without invoking demons.
It’s a fine point, but that could equally apply to many terms, depending on such factors as the previous experience of their use and context by the listener.
We shouldn’t refrain from using such terms, but should refrain from mis-using them.
It’s my choice not to use it, and I have explained why. Downvoting indicates that some think that indicates some moral deficiency on my part.
People can use whatever terms they want, but being chided for not using somebody else’s preferred language is another matter.
Labour looks likely to mandate speech ‘norms’, with up to 2 years in prison for misgendering somebody. Does anybody here want to see that?
The right-wing press is having a meltdown about the BBC not using ‘terrorist’. I use that term; I would prefer the BBC use it, but not that they should be mandated to do so.
My view is that the powerlessness people feel about the horror in Israel and Gaza leads them to attack each other and police each other’s language in order to somehow feel involved, that they are doing something for what they feel is right.
There was actually a piece written by John Simpson on the BBC the other day explaining why they’ve never used the word terrorist in their articles which actually changed my opinion on the matter. They’ve never used it for the IRA, the ANC, ISIS etc as it’s their attempt at neutrality as different groups can have different opinions so they’ve always the word militant instead. They only use the word terrorist for those convicted of terrorism charges.
I don’t think I believe that they didn’t use the word to describe the IRA. Whatever words they used, they had to apologise to Jerry Adams for their treatment of the organisation.
The BBC seem too have used the term ‘terrorist’ to discribe the shooting of two Swedes in Belgium recently. Did they know his name and thst he had/hadn’t been convicted of a terrorist act?
“being chided for not using somebody else’s preferred language is another matter”.
But you are chiding people for using their preferred language?
Your ‘dear me, here we go talking about evil again’ was bizarre to me. As if being an atheist precludes the concepts of goodness and evil?
People are capable of evil; I believe all people probably are, in certain circumstances. Most people are capable of goodness, even psychopaths.
Civilisation, and the rule of law, attempts to ‘bring out the best’ in humanity (by outlawing the worst) and our Western version is founded on Judeo Christian ethical principles.
People expressing their horror at terrorism in Israel is ‘doing something’. It is acknowledging evil, denouncing murder, rape and torture, mourning the loss of precious lives and valuing the ethical principles we try to live by.
It is, in short, trumpeting Western civilisation in the face of medieval (or whatever) barbarism. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Personally, I wish more people were doing it.
Funny you should say that, but I have witnessed some kind of demonic possession and, during that time, felt and heard a presence that can only be described as evil.
On a more mundane level the line between good and evil passes through us. It is not out there, but within. When we allow our pent-up rage and hatred to justify the slaughter the of innocents we have given ourselves over to evil.
We’ll have to differ on the existence of demonic possession.
Why is it important to insist that a particular term ‘evil’, one with metaphysical baggage and a long religious history, is the only word we can use for an aberrant psychopathological state?
Why get hung up on insisting that this word is used? We could use many words – ‘depraved’, ‘psychotic’, ‘abominable’, ‘atrocious’ etc. or a combination of them. We could use other words that don’t have the baggage attached to them, for ultimately, the reasons for this are rooted in our brain functioning.
I don’t care if you want to use ‘evil’, but I find it peculiar to publish two articles about why we must use this word, and then get angry when somebody doesn’t want to use it.
We could use many words – ‘depraved’, ‘psychotic’, ‘abominable’, ‘atrocious’ etc. or a combination of them.
“Evil” is a more effective and descriptive term precisely because of its “baggage”. Wordiness fosters/supports evasion.
I am an atheist, and whilst I see the problems you mentioned, I think ‘evil’ is a useful, even essential word to describe scenarios where people are motivated (consciously or unconsciously) to do vicious harm. It’s at the hard end of the sadism scale, and is a genuine psychological phenomena.
“I avoid the use of the term [evil] … because I am an atheist”
The belief in an extant evil is a spiritual, not a materialistic concept. It doesn’t make you smarter to be an atheist, it just means you have a strictly materialistic understanding of the universe. Fine.
I never said it made me smarter. I envy believers.
The first article was more rooted in a spiritual understanding of the word, this one more in material one. My point is that the two conceptions of the word are confused with one another in such a way that I avoid using it so that my words are less open to subjective reinterpretation.
I have no idea why people downvote thoughtful comments even if they disagree. I disagree with your first two paragraphs but wholly agree with your conclusion which is the meat of your argument.
Jordan Peterson has an interesting point about how Metaphysical Biblical notions of Good and Evil seem to touch the Material World at a point because Christ can be described as the Logos. I’ve read enough of your posts to know that you’re effectively a Rational Empiricist. Those are allegedly two different strains of thought but if someone starts with strict adherence to Empirical principles and then rationalizes their findings with Humility, they will end up grounded in an extremely similar if not identical worldview to Christianity. By that I mean the idea that life is meaningful. That every individual matters but no individual is inherently more important than another and that all people are broken and searching for meaning. I find these to be fundamental truths that can be deduced with logic.
As a note, I’m aware of why Atheists/Materialists find Science incompatible with the Bible. I would just note that strict adherents of Christianity have made remarkable contributions to Science. I think the reason is because Christians believe God made the world so it could be understood. For instance, James Clerk Maxwell’s Electromagnetic Theory unified Physics. There would have been no Einstein without Maxwell’s equations. Gregor Mendel was a monk. Had the Soviets applied Mendelian Genetics instead of the Lamarckism of Acquired Traits, they would have avoided mass crop failures and the Holodomor.
Faith, Hope and Love can be seen as Utopian social constructs that promote stability. But they’re universal notions that prevent the world from collapsing into moral and cultural relativism. Thinkers like Voltaire said If there was no God, it would be necessary to invent him. This quote is seen as a rationalization of the God Myth to create stability. But, if God is a Myth, the specific Myth would still need to conform to the Correspondence Theory of Truth or else it would be a fad. I think that’s the reason Christianity has such staying power. It’s rational and actually conforms to “lived experience” unlike the Woke Theories that are just Gnostic Heresies that stand Christ upside down.
The Bible tells that if People don’t believe in God, they will create their own Golden Calf to worship. That’s what the Soviets did with the Proletarian Science and every society bows before some Transcendent principle. Its necessary to function. Everyone has Faith in something. This is not an attempt at persuasion. I just think if Scientific Humility is your principle than you’re going to find that a lot or your allies are Christian (and Orthodox Jews) for that matter.
Thank you for your thoughtful reply. Sort of; I am broadly Kantian, both metaphysically and morally.
For Kant, the noumenal (things in themselves) are unknowable, but we can have objective knowledge of the phenomenal world, which exists externally to our minds. (I have, however, little faith in much of what passes for science these days, but that is another matter.)
I’ve always found his views on religion – to an extent, God, freedom and immortality are to be found in the noumenal – both rather impenetrable and driven by cultural context. I think that he would have found Buddhism a better fit for his philosophy than Christianity, as do many others.
Nietzsche also informs my worldview. However, with the ‘death of God’ and the exhortation to go ‘beyond Good and Evil’, we ended up in the moral relativism you refer to, which couldn’t last. I broadly subscribe to Douglas Murray’s ‘Madness of Crowds’ theory, combined with Andrew Doyle’s ‘New Puritanism’. Many have now replaced Christianity with something that, in many ways, looks a bit like it, critical social justice. As Doyle argues, the difference is that the woke believe they are in possession of moral certainties; there is no humility.
So yes, we struggle to survive without meaning, and maybe we would have been better off sticking with Christianity, given how much it informs us (Peterson, Holland, others), but stripping it of the supernatural. Many of its ideas can be traced back to Mesopotamia; it was an evolution, not a revolution, and in that, I see that humans naturally develop a fairly consistent set of values, and we don’t need to see those as God-given. For Kant, then, the categorical imperative gives us a way of deriving how to act by virtue of our abilities as reasoning beings, and we broadly arrive at Christian values by doing so.
‘Evil’ then has a long history, but for me, it reflects a psychological and social idea that became reified by the supernatural elements of religion. Shorn of those, it works, but it remains my view that it is confused between that broadly psychological meaning and a religious one. I think the two articles this week reflect that beyond their rather judgmental nature.
One last thing, if I had more bandwidth, I would listen to Peterson’s biblical discussions and understand a little more of what you refer to because I am sure it is interesting. I’ve never gelled with the psychoanalytic tradition though.
Nik! Thanks for response. I have a ton to say but unfortunately no time the next few days. I’ll find u on another forum sometime and resume this discussion!
Why in the world do you think “evil” implies religious belief? Ditto for “demonic”. What the concepts represented by these words actually require is a sense of morality, that is, moral standards. Belief in God is optional.Avoiding the use of the terms is simply an unnecessary restriction of vocabulary. We benefit from concise, direct language and thus avoid the confusion and misunderstanding of heavily qualified and wordy language.
jane baker
6 months ago
Like those stupid Palestinians could ever have carried out such an effective and efficient atrocity without collusion.
jane baker
6 months ago
So just because you object to a situation being engineered to enable and justify genocide that makes you Evil. Good way to shut down any sort of discussion,conversation,debate, whatever word applies.
Free debate no longer exists – if it ever did. Now you have to show that you take sides and you take the side of the person who is paying.
On second thoughts, maybe free debate does exist – but in your own home away from prying ears.
In any situation where A is fighting/killing B, the winner of the debate is the one who knows the most history – and history can be bent out of shape to suit the argument.
I’ve fully realised now after always considering to be on the left in some degree that the great deception left wing thought has pulled off since it’s inception is that it cares about people. The fact is it cares about its ideology and nothing else. Whatever gets in its way must be destroyed. It’s morally bankrupt and always has been. It’s disgusting.
Or what is pretty much the same: it thinks of people in the abstract, as variables in its ideological calculus. Not real people, but ciphers.
I think you see this in the way they assume they are speaking for large numbers of people who they assume to have a single viewpoint. Or if they don’t it’s false consciousness, internalised misogyny or racism and the rest. It used to be the working class, now it’s women or people of colour. Remarkably quite a lot of them don’t even belong to the groups they claim to represent.
Indeed. Have you noticed how no one on the right wants anything to do with the far right but the entire left is cowed by the far left? Cowards, cry bullies and weaklings.
It’s obvious why the left supports Islamic terrorists. They believe the same things. Original sin, hereditary guilt, women should be quiet and do as they’re told, belief in paradise/utopia and that their ideology is the only way to get there and the whole world must submit, and anti semitic.
The Cottee article, to which your comment presumably speaks, discussed the moral repugnance of an avowedly left-wing thinker (Norman Geras) to these kinds of simplifications/reductions. To tar the whole political left as identarian apologists for terrorism, fundamentalism and every variety of self-indulgent wacko extremism reveals a woeful lack of knowledge of the former. A number of people who write for Unherd are on the left spectrum: Cottee, Terry Eagleton, Ralph Leonard and Thomas Fazi to name but some. All different thinkers with different politics, they would disagree about much. But none would conform to the caricature presented here. The fools who exalt in Hamas’ strike against Israel referred to by Cottee are NOT the part that represents the whole. The left has its own proud anti-authoritarian, democratic and humanistic tradition going back to the nineteenth centre, and represented by Morris, Cole, Serge, Orwell, Camus, Silone, Howe, Thompson and countless others including Geras.
Perceptive observations – I quite agree. Maybe it’s the political left’s susceptibility to “purity spirals”. Maybe.
Agreed. Which in many ways just shows a confusion of terms. The “far right” is just a label that leftists apply, but the “far right” are categorically the same as the far left in terms of how they operate – they just disagree on the details/goals of the far left. But both are willing to tyrannize, inflame, tear things down, and act with violence.
Not to mention there is an order of magnitude more far left people than far right people.
Yes. It’s a form of OCD, an almost manic desire to tidy up the world, making sure that everyone and everything is correctly labelled and categorised, like butterflies in a lepidopterist’s cabinet.
Quite. Social micro-management.
That is how Left movements attract disgust; the pretence of caring makes you worse than if you were honest from the start about the limits of your concern for others.
I find myself in similar straits. Yes to all the above, with the additional “feature” that, for the heretic, the wrong-thinker, there be no redemption. That’s what I came to be nauseated by: it’s not a movement of the compassionate, more a club for argumentative narcissists, on the whole. Stand-outs such as Geras were ever a rarity and I fear they may now be extinct.
I think it was PJ O’Rourke who defined a liberal as somebody who “loves the crowd and treats their family like $h1t”. Seems a fair description, now I come to reconsider it.
If you put the idea of People over your any one person is able to be treated, you allow for great evil. Paul Johnson in Intellectuals described the dividing line as (the left) being able to think the People are idealized while being able to have no regard or even malice towards any person, while the alternative is (the pragmatist) being able to realize that People are at best a mixed bag and gratefully connecting with as many persons who you may find are surprisingly good.
There are many wrongs that can be attributed to the Israeli government but I agree that the callous disregard for the horrific massacre of innocent people by Hamas self-righteously displayed by tens of thousands in the UK has left me shocked to the core and very worried in deed. I was brought up to question the treatment of Palestinians but nothing prepared me for this.
Thank you, Simon. For putting this piece up today. Adele Geras
‘in an Islamist utopia, progressive liberals would be the first to be cleansed from its dominion’ – yes, together with the homosexual and trans communities they claim to support. The contradictions of the ‘progressive’ ideologues need to be exposed!
Once you walk away from the left, you see how obsessed it is with shameless, self proclaimed virtue, and doesn’t care to actually spend “quality” time with the people it professes to live and die for. And to paraphrase Donald Trump, ‘and some are very nice people.’ After 30 devoted years on the political and cultural left, I recovered my mind and never felt better, freer or more connected to my fellow human beings, which, imho, comes about through self restraint, not being afraid to be alone, and tempering resentment each time it rears its ugly head.
Have they not been rendered, or rendered themselves, literally unable to think. Not thoughtless in the sense that Arendt described Eichmann, but thoughtless nontheless.
But you’ve exactly described the way in which Arendt describes both “thoughtless” and “normal” in her earlier essays on totalitarianism — a mode of emptied, “thoughtless” being produced in a society where it is only “power” and not some attempt to materialise a notion of the good that organises the scope of political action. I would say that she goes as far as to say that a man like Eichmann, produced by such a mob, can have no thoughts because he has no will because his subjectivity was never determined by his choices but was rather a kind of subjecthood ever produced by “power”; without it, he is a helpless man who cannot even conceive of himself.
Hannah Arendt is the last person who would support the revenge sought both sides.
When one identifies the evil wrongdoings of one side that doesn’t make the other side the good side. One side can act better than the other side and still itself be evil. Objectively how does one measure the two sides up, if one wants to do that? Why not condemn both sides for their misdeeds? I think that’s the only honest way forward. But to many it’s as if Israel has never misbehaved, and to others it’s as if the Palestinians etc etc. Here at UnHerd and so many other places too, no one ever mentions the 250 (including 47 children) of Palestinians killed by Israelis in the West Bank alone this year, before the Hamas atrocity. [Please see I am not mincing my words about Hamas.] What concerns me now is the exchange rate, what is one Palestinian life worth measured in Israeli lives, and vice versa. Each side is not satisfied with the eye for an eye, they want more. I see the bloodthirsty barking for revenge both sides. Both sides hate. Some here too.
Brilliantly said, as usual.
Latest in a procession of poor Unherd articles about this murderous conflict. There’s such a proliferation of actual violence and so much atrocity propaganda flying about the place from both sides it’s impossible to apply the ethical and ontological certainty required to make ‘evil’ an appropriate term. As the BRICS expansion gathers momentum and global decoupling takes shape on the back of the energy transition, the situation on the Middle Eastern, Eastern European and the Far Eastern fault lines is complex and highly explosive. It’s never been more likely that at least some of the more significant Arab/Muslim nations will transcend their atavistic differences and forge economic and military alliances. Even if temporary, that would be a tectonic power-shift. China and Russia, now major suppliers of arms and tech, are refusing to condemn Hamas. Underneath the state propaganda, the US population is making isolationist noises. Geras wasn’t the best thinker, but he was good enough to see that future developments would put Israel – itself internally torn between liberal democracy and Zionist ethnostate with the latter currently in ascendence – in a dangerous situation. In a sane world, the UN would intervene to separate the Hamas and Likud lunatics. But that sane world was never established, despite some good intentions in the immediate aftermath of WWII. Sorry, but right and wrong are evenly distributed in all the current conflicts. If MAD holds sway we won’t annihilate ourselves, but anyone who has given the details of the fall of Mycenaean or Roman civilizations some thought will see the parallels – Dark Age ahead, I’m afraid.
Interesting point
“Right and wrong are evenly distributed.” ? You must be out of your mind
This year before the recent Hamas atrocities 250 Palestinians (including 47 children) had been killed by Israelis in the West Bank alone. In response to the killing of 1400 by Hamas we now have thousands killed in Gaza by Israeli bombing and shelling. Most years more Palestinians are killed than Israelis. How do you want to measure relative evils here? By number of body bags? Sq.km of land stolen? BOTH sides are guilty of evil misdeeds. Relative evilness is hardly the point, but if you’re keeping score, what are you counting? I am not an apologist for Hamas, read what I write, but the idea that there are not two bad actors here is just false.
The Western reporting is for the most part not balanced. I note that no pictures of the 47 dead Palestinian children have appeared in the Western media.
Both sides are acting badly.
You’re down with me in on the naughty step for a great comment.
Ta, and I think the only takeaway insight from the comment sections is that Unherd has not attracted the balanced, heterodox readership it allegedly wanted. Or maybe it never did. Or maybe the silent readers who don’t comment are more balanced. Who knows? This is one reason why Dark Ages are called Dark. This time round it won’t be the lack of recorded commentary but complete overload – a dense, dark cloud of bullsh*t in which everyone misrecognises everything.
Dear me, the second article here about ‘evil’ in the past few days. As I explained in response to the last one, I avoid the use of the term and its cognates (‘demonic’ crept in here, too) because I am an atheist. There is no metaphysical force of ‘evil’ external to us.
Does ‘evil’ exist in some non-metaphysical sense, as the author suggests? Possibly, but only as an arbitrary label; we could use another word for it instead. But no, people use that word with all the metaphysical baggage it carries with it; whether the speaker recognises that or not, other people hear it differently.
Separately from that discussion, it bothers me that there is continuous smearing between protestors who legitimately care about what is happening to civilians in Gaza and (expletive deleted) people who celebrate the killing of Jews or the terrorism of Hamas. This is a blunt weapon. It has been used continuously to attack Kellie-Jay Keen and the ‘Let Women Speak’ events because a couple of far-right people attended. Protestors against lockdowns and other pandemic measures were continually attacked by the media, asserting a connection between the ‘far-right’ and ‘conspiracy theorists’, again sometimes based on attendees, when it turns out in retrospect that protestors had a genuine case, even if some of their reasoning was more intuition-based than reason-based. Nobody can control who turns up at a protest.
If you’re referring to the article which used both “evil” and “Evil” as terms of reference, i think you’re confusing the two. The latter is indeed a meaningless metaphysical-type construct which i pointed out in comments to that article; however, the concept of “an evil act” has some usefulness as a descriptor for that which lies within us, mainly buried beneath our layers of civilisational compliance with norms.
Having said that, it’s important not to become embroiled in conceptual analysis unless it serves a purpose in the face of those acts perpetrated by Hamas, which amply “demonstrate” what humans are capable of, without invoking demons.
My point is that the term may not be confused by the speaker, but it has the potential to confuse the listener.
It’s a fine point, but that could equally apply to many terms, depending on such factors as the previous experience of their use and context by the listener.
We shouldn’t refrain from using such terms, but should refrain from mis-using them.
It’s my choice not to use it, and I have explained why. Downvoting indicates that some think that indicates some moral deficiency on my part.
People can use whatever terms they want, but being chided for not using somebody else’s preferred language is another matter.
Labour looks likely to mandate speech ‘norms’, with up to 2 years in prison for misgendering somebody. Does anybody here want to see that?
The right-wing press is having a meltdown about the BBC not using ‘terrorist’. I use that term; I would prefer the BBC use it, but not that they should be mandated to do so.
My view is that the powerlessness people feel about the horror in Israel and Gaza leads them to attack each other and police each other’s language in order to somehow feel involved, that they are doing something for what they feel is right.
There was actually a piece written by John Simpson on the BBC the other day explaining why they’ve never used the word terrorist in their articles which actually changed my opinion on the matter. They’ve never used it for the IRA, the ANC, ISIS etc as it’s their attempt at neutrality as different groups can have different opinions so they’ve always the word militant instead. They only use the word terrorist for those convicted of terrorism charges.
I don’t think I believe that they didn’t use the word to describe the IRA. Whatever words they used, they had to apologise to Jerry Adams for their treatment of the organisation.
The BBC seem too have used the term ‘terrorist’ to discribe the shooting of two Swedes in Belgium recently. Did they know his name and thst he had/hadn’t been convicted of a terrorist act?
You are being downvoted for going on about the metaphysical concept of evil when plainly it is in plain sight. A tin ear I think is the phrase
The metaphysical concept of evil is?
“being chided for not using somebody else’s preferred language is another matter”.
But you are chiding people for using their preferred language?
Your ‘dear me, here we go talking about evil again’ was bizarre to me. As if being an atheist precludes the concepts of goodness and evil?
People are capable of evil; I believe all people probably are, in certain circumstances. Most people are capable of goodness, even psychopaths.
Civilisation, and the rule of law, attempts to ‘bring out the best’ in humanity (by outlawing the worst) and our Western version is founded on Judeo Christian ethical principles.
People expressing their horror at terrorism in Israel is ‘doing something’. It is acknowledging evil, denouncing murder, rape and torture, mourning the loss of precious lives and valuing the ethical principles we try to live by.
It is, in short, trumpeting Western civilisation in the face of medieval (or whatever) barbarism. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Personally, I wish more people were doing it.
There is Evil in the world. I have faced it and fought it.
Are you an exorcist?
Funny you should say that, but I have witnessed some kind of demonic possession and, during that time, felt and heard a presence that can only be described as evil.
On a more mundane level the line between good and evil passes through us. It is not out there, but within. When we allow our pent-up rage and hatred to justify the slaughter the of innocents we have given ourselves over to evil.
You got it right the second time, using “evil” instead of “Evil”.
We’ll have to differ on the existence of demonic possession.
Why is it important to insist that a particular term ‘evil’, one with metaphysical baggage and a long religious history, is the only word we can use for an aberrant psychopathological state?
Why get hung up on insisting that this word is used? We could use many words – ‘depraved’, ‘psychotic’, ‘abominable’, ‘atrocious’ etc. or a combination of them. We could use other words that don’t have the baggage attached to them, for ultimately, the reasons for this are rooted in our brain functioning.
I don’t care if you want to use ‘evil’, but I find it peculiar to publish two articles about why we must use this word, and then get angry when somebody doesn’t want to use it.
“TIs the eye of childhood that fears a painted Devil….”
Evil, rather like God, has a way of asserting it’s reality whether you believe in it or not.
We could use many words – ‘depraved’, ‘psychotic’, ‘abominable’, ‘atrocious’ etc. or a combination of them.
“Evil” is a more effective and descriptive term precisely because of its “baggage”. Wordiness fosters/supports evasion.
I am an atheist, and whilst I see the problems you mentioned, I think ‘evil’ is a useful, even essential word to describe scenarios where people are motivated (consciously or unconsciously) to do vicious harm. It’s at the hard end of the sadism scale, and is a genuine psychological phenomena.
I agree on psychology, but see my reply to Julian above.
Phenomen
ooh you’re evil!
“I avoid the use of the term [evil] … because I am an atheist”
The belief in an extant evil is a spiritual, not a materialistic concept. It doesn’t make you smarter to be an atheist, it just means you have a strictly materialistic understanding of the universe. Fine.
I never said it made me smarter. I envy believers.
The first article was more rooted in a spiritual understanding of the word, this one more in material one. My point is that the two conceptions of the word are confused with one another in such a way that I avoid using it so that my words are less open to subjective reinterpretation.
I have no idea why people downvote thoughtful comments even if they disagree. I disagree with your first two paragraphs but wholly agree with your conclusion which is the meat of your argument.
Jordan Peterson has an interesting point about how Metaphysical Biblical notions of Good and Evil seem to touch the Material World at a point because Christ can be described as the Logos. I’ve read enough of your posts to know that you’re effectively a Rational Empiricist. Those are allegedly two different strains of thought but if someone starts with strict adherence to Empirical principles and then rationalizes their findings with Humility, they will end up grounded in an extremely similar if not identical worldview to Christianity. By that I mean the idea that life is meaningful. That every individual matters but no individual is inherently more important than another and that all people are broken and searching for meaning. I find these to be fundamental truths that can be deduced with logic.
As a note, I’m aware of why Atheists/Materialists find Science incompatible with the Bible. I would just note that strict adherents of Christianity have made remarkable contributions to Science. I think the reason is because Christians believe God made the world so it could be understood. For instance, James Clerk Maxwell’s Electromagnetic Theory unified Physics. There would have been no Einstein without Maxwell’s equations. Gregor Mendel was a monk. Had the Soviets applied Mendelian Genetics instead of the Lamarckism of Acquired Traits, they would have avoided mass crop failures and the Holodomor.
Faith, Hope and Love can be seen as Utopian social constructs that promote stability. But they’re universal notions that prevent the world from collapsing into moral and cultural relativism. Thinkers like Voltaire said If there was no God, it would be necessary to invent him. This quote is seen as a rationalization of the God Myth to create stability. But, if God is a Myth, the specific Myth would still need to conform to the Correspondence Theory of Truth or else it would be a fad. I think that’s the reason Christianity has such staying power. It’s rational and actually conforms to “lived experience” unlike the Woke Theories that are just Gnostic Heresies that stand Christ upside down.
The Bible tells that if People don’t believe in God, they will create their own Golden Calf to worship. That’s what the Soviets did with the Proletarian Science and every society bows before some Transcendent principle. Its necessary to function. Everyone has Faith in something. This is not an attempt at persuasion. I just think if Scientific Humility is your principle than you’re going to find that a lot or your allies are Christian (and Orthodox Jews) for that matter.
Thank you for your thoughtful reply. Sort of; I am broadly Kantian, both metaphysically and morally.
For Kant, the noumenal (things in themselves) are unknowable, but we can have objective knowledge of the phenomenal world, which exists externally to our minds. (I have, however, little faith in much of what passes for science these days, but that is another matter.)
I’ve always found his views on religion – to an extent, God, freedom and immortality are to be found in the noumenal – both rather impenetrable and driven by cultural context. I think that he would have found Buddhism a better fit for his philosophy than Christianity, as do many others.
Nietzsche also informs my worldview. However, with the ‘death of God’ and the exhortation to go ‘beyond Good and Evil’, we ended up in the moral relativism you refer to, which couldn’t last. I broadly subscribe to Douglas Murray’s ‘Madness of Crowds’ theory, combined with Andrew Doyle’s ‘New Puritanism’. Many have now replaced Christianity with something that, in many ways, looks a bit like it, critical social justice. As Doyle argues, the difference is that the woke believe they are in possession of moral certainties; there is no humility.
So yes, we struggle to survive without meaning, and maybe we would have been better off sticking with Christianity, given how much it informs us (Peterson, Holland, others), but stripping it of the supernatural. Many of its ideas can be traced back to Mesopotamia; it was an evolution, not a revolution, and in that, I see that humans naturally develop a fairly consistent set of values, and we don’t need to see those as God-given. For Kant, then, the categorical imperative gives us a way of deriving how to act by virtue of our abilities as reasoning beings, and we broadly arrive at Christian values by doing so.
‘Evil’ then has a long history, but for me, it reflects a psychological and social idea that became reified by the supernatural elements of religion. Shorn of those, it works, but it remains my view that it is confused between that broadly psychological meaning and a religious one. I think the two articles this week reflect that beyond their rather judgmental nature.
One last thing, if I had more bandwidth, I would listen to Peterson’s biblical discussions and understand a little more of what you refer to because I am sure it is interesting. I’ve never gelled with the psychoanalytic tradition though.
Nik! Thanks for response. I have a ton to say but unfortunately no time the next few days. I’ll find u on another forum sometime and resume this discussion!
Obfuscation is as bad as endorsement.
Why in the world do you think “evil” implies religious belief? Ditto for “demonic”. What the concepts represented by these words actually require is a sense of morality, that is, moral standards. Belief in God is optional.Avoiding the use of the terms is simply an unnecessary restriction of vocabulary. We benefit from concise, direct language and thus avoid the confusion and misunderstanding of heavily qualified and wordy language.
Like those stupid Palestinians could ever have carried out such an effective and efficient atrocity without collusion.
So just because you object to a situation being engineered to enable and justify genocide that makes you Evil. Good way to shut down any sort of discussion,conversation,debate, whatever word applies.
Free debate no longer exists – if it ever did. Now you have to show that you take sides and you take the side of the person who is paying.
On second thoughts, maybe free debate does exist – but in your own home away from prying ears.
In any situation where A is fighting/killing B, the winner of the debate is the one who knows the most history – and history can be bent out of shape to suit the argument.