March 07, 2003

Hoo-boy! That sure quieted things down.

I suppose I should warn people before busting out the Big Big Thinking. Not that it's all my Big Thinking, mind you; a lot of it is courtesy of my good dead friend Plotinus.

By way of explanation: it seems to me that, despite certain right-thinking folks being all a-tizzied over Bush's flagrant use of the word "evil," and despite the attempt by certain sign-carrying right-thinking folks to turn the tables on Herr Bush by calling him evil--sort of an I'm-rubber-you're-glue thing--what's not happening is a serious consideration of what evil might be. Thus, you have people who can seriously compare Dubya to Hitler and think that it's a moral stance worthy of consideration.

At a superficial level, evil is a provocative word. It's so packed full of implication that its use in earnest provokes a reaction from the listener. Either you think that there might be something to this "evil" business, and you recognize that the speaker has taken some sort of moral stance, or you think that "evil" is for simple people who believe in a great white-bearded man in the sky and have not been paying enough attention to the development of Continental philosophy over the course of the past century and a half. For many of those who have not deliberately adopted the uber-sophistication of moral relativism--or absorbed it via osmosis while attending college--evil is somewhat like pornography: they can't quite describe it, but they know it when they see it.

I, for one, have difficulty taking anyone who claims that the Bush administration is composed of "evil" people seriously. I tend to suspect that people who point to the Bush-Cheney Axis of Oil as evidence for said evil lack a certain moral seriousness, and are unable to distinguish between greed or unethical fiscal behavior and true evil. In short, I find that such people need a good smack in the head and, when we start digging up mass graves in Iraq, they should be sent there in hip waders and rubber gloves with a shovel to help out.

That being said, I also believe that one of the reasons such muddle-headed thinking about evil is even possible is because of the insular nature of our comfortable, wealthy society. For certain people, this nature has not led to the development of the higher, more nuanced ethical standard that they seem to believe they hold: instead, it has lowered the bar of evil. Evil used to mean starting a war that killed 60 million people and spending a large portion of that war deliberately attempting to turn an entire ethnicity into soot. These days, "evil" means practicing realpolitik, indulging in the same economic perquisites as the rest of the ruling class, and being insufficiently attentive to the executions of 140 death row inmates while you're a state governor. Are these issues to be ignored? No. Do they reflect poorly upon a person's character? Most assuredly. Do they indicate that a person is evil? Absolutely not.

I've been thinking about this issue for a long time, starting long before Bush ever took the oath of office. I believe that the assignation of evil to the realm of the the religiously daft and the unsophisticated is itself daft and unsophisticated. It does not serve our culture well. It certainly hasn't served European culture well at all: the birthplaces of mechanized warfare and industrialized execution are now strongholds of a shameful amorality that will not recognize the existence of evil and will countenance no meaningful effort to stop it.

So: over the next few weeks, I will be producing material that attempts to arrive at some kind of consideration of evil: what it is, how it works, how to recognize it, what to do about it...most of all, how to treat evil, as a moral concept, with the seriousness that it deserves.

There. Now I'm going to go have some wine that I am mildy ashamed I bought.

[Although...I suppose calling an old dishwasher "evil" sort of dumps a pile of wet socks on the whole "seriousness" thing...ah, fuggit. Waiter! More shameful vino! --IW]