The Mystery of Evil

I have never understood evil. Like everyone, I understand harm and suffering and readily deplore it inflicted on people who are innocent or vulnerable. I can understand violence when caused by competition for scarce resources impinging on the survival of the group or the individual. I can understand a misguided sense of so-called “virtuous” activism deriving from resentments whipped up by immoral people. I can understand stupidity and credulousness, however unpalatable. In Essay VI of his Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, empiricist philosopher David Hume thought that from a political standpoint, “every man ought to be supposed a knave.” But acting from “private interest” does not necessarily constitute a branch of evil. Evil in itself — or at any rate, what we call evil — has always seemed inexplicable.

The question continues to frustrate our most strenuous efforts at understanding. Nature, obviously, is not evil in any common acceptation of the term. There is no personal will behind the hurricanes, floods, earthquakes, droughts, and diseases that trouble humankind, no intent behind the feral reality that Lawrence Durrell in Monsieur, or The Prince of Darkness called “this munching universe” — unless we accept the Gnostic conception of nature as the Devil’s, or Cosmocrator’s, handiwork. In that understanding, evil is a flaw in the very origin of the cosmos, rather than in man’s disobedient will. For philosopher Immanuel Kant in Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, radical evil is a function of human nature, whatever it may be and however it came to be there. Or is evil a reified substance implanted in the soul of man by the Devil, creating a set of human proclivities that enable the Prince of Lies to work his will in the world? With every attempt to probe and reflect, the mystery of evil deepens and recedes.

Various contemporary authors have grappled with the question, with results that inevitably leave much to be desired. Lance Morrow in Evil: An Investigation stresses that “evil is the most powerful word in the language, and the most elusive.” Morrow focuses on the concept of “permissible evil,” which is somewhat beside the point in trying to come up with an absolutist definition. He goes on to argue that evil is “a part of the world’s energy…one half of a cosmic exchange.” It is what drives history forward and “makes things happen,” without which “history ceases, winds down [into] a sort of immobile paradise.” Indeed, “without evil, there is no time.” We are back in a prelapsarian Eden. But what evil is in its essence is not addressed.

In Evil and the Demonic, Paul Oppenheimer contends that evil may be understood as a form of empirical behavior that is also impersonal, “wreak[ing] havoc in an environment conducive to annihilation.” Evil is “a process…with nameable elements,” all morbid, which “point to the presence in the common human psyche of a demonic force, to a human capacity for demonization.” The term “demonic,” however, is used adjectively, implying nothing substantive, such as a veritable demon or some sort of entropic principle, behind it. Violence is inherent in the human mind, and certainly in the psychological makeup of those we regard as human monsters.

For M. Scott Peck in People of the Lie, we have not developed a “psychology of evil,” which escapes our cognitive nets, perhaps because we “fear the consequences,” that is, a psychology of evil may lead to the justification or acceptance of evil — as it has for Morrow. But again, this takes us no farther in explicating what Saint Augustine in City of God called the mysterium iniquitatis, deriving in part from a tortuous passage in Paul’s Second Epistle to the Thessalonians (2:7) concerning “the mystery of iniquity.”

Ernest Becker’s voluminous The Structure of Evil, a vast panoptic survey from a sociological perspective of the human quest for enlightenment, has more to do with establishing “a science of man as anthropodicy” than coming to terms with the concept and existence of evil in itself. (This is, be it said, a remarkable book, by one of my favorite writers.)

Perhaps most incisively, Cambridge scholar Terry Eagleton writes in On Evil that evil is unintelligible and pointless, an “abstract will to dominate and destroy [having] no relation to anything beyond itself, such as a cause.” In his estimation, evil is “a timeless condition rather than a matter of social circumstance…a purposeful action taken in the name of a condition which is not itself purposeful.” This is close to Thomas Aquinas’ enigmatic conception of evil, discussed in diverse sections of the Summa Theologiae, as an absence or privation of being, a lack inherent in the nature of the human person, a virtual emptiness in the core of the self. 

Related: Nice People Do a Lot of Damage

Clearly, the problem of evil continues to exercise and puzzle our best minds. Apart from the force of circumstances — war, grinding poverty, child abuse — or a biologically warped sensibility or cerebral deficiency, the existence of viciousness in a sentient and conscious being has always seemed gratuitous. 

Why, to take one example from many, would a person blessed with great wealth, every possible amenity and comfort, and a truly enviable life seek to wreak havoc and destruction upon the very society which enabled him to achieve the heights of material success, peer-prestige, and innumerable advantages denied to the great majority of ordinary people? Where is the need? Why would such a person find satisfaction, even pleasure, in sowing the seeds of chaos and misery — assuming, as indicated, it is not a form of madness, an expression of bad genes, or, say, a prionic misfolding in the neural pathways? There is a distinction between madness and evil, unless, of course, one believes that certain species of madness are the Devil’s work. (One recalls the famous classical phrase: Those whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.)

The historical almanac of madness — whole societies swept up in preposterous fads, in war fever, or in what Mattias Desmet calls “mass formation psychosis” — is a lamentable fact whose vastness defies calculation. Such movements may be incited and led by people we might call evil, but this does not take us very far. I prefer to focus on a single, well-known, contemporary individual to simplify the issue. Anyone can add to a list that would make the telephone book look like a calendar entry.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about George Soros as a representative specimen of the presumably sociopathic genus. A totalitarian plutocrat, who as a youth collaborated with the Nazis and is proud of it (see his interview with Steve Kroft), Soros has dedicated his efforts to dismantling the nation in which his success had been assured, promoting unscrupulous attorneys-general in various states, bankrolling extremist guerilla groups, indoctrinating students, and subsidizing electoral machinations. His Open Society Foundations has engaged in the subversion of traditional norms and usages and produced turmoil and disruption on a national level. Matt Palumbo’s recent The Man Behind the Curtain: Inside the Secret Network of George Soros documents in meticulous detail the extent of Soros’ malign interventions in politics, civics, and finance with a view to destabilizing nation-states, particularly America. As Palumbo writes, Soros’ “lack of conscience” and political efforts are directed toward “creat[ing] the false reality needed to justify his political position.” His “gift” to the country is corruption, deceit, doctrinal malfeasance, and the broadcasting of division and hatred between citizens of a disintegrating America.

Continuing my simple thought experiment, on the other side of the moral ledger we have the Greek shipowner Panos Laskaridis who, like the coetaneous Soros, has amassed an immense fortune that ordinary people can only dream of. Yet the difference between Soros and Laskaridis could not be more stark. Laskaridis has donated from his ample fortune in order to benefit, solidify, and perpetuate the heritage and pride of his beloved country. He has built a prominent institution, the Laskaridis Foundation, in honor of Greece’s past triumphs, promoting, as his curator says in an interview with Peter Maneas, “civilization and Greek letters [via] historical libraries and education programs for schoolchildren.” The library features such celebrated muniments as the Nelson Letters and the first edition of Homer’s Odyssey from 1489. As Maneas sums up, Laskaridis “is a role model for those more fortunate in the world.”

Soros and Laskaridis are, for me, placeholder figures or “headers” in what we might think of as columnar antitheses comprising fortunate people who have thrived in life’s lottery, on the one side those who use their means and leisure for harm and social turbulence, and on the other, those who feel deeply the need to share their good fortune, to “give back,” as Laskaridis said. We may call the former class “evil” insofar as the misery they create appears to be unprovoked and groundless, especially when the “purpose” they affect is an opaque cover for something ulterior, an inexplicable viciousness for which there is no apparent necessity.

After much reading and some thinking, I still cannot adequately explain evil. I can understand and applaud the moral virtue of a Laskaridis, the quality of an advanced sensibility that recognizes the beauty, transience, and preciousness of life. But I cannot come to terms with the perverse inclinations of a man like Soros, a form of “motiveless malignity” — the great poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s phrase for Shakespeare’s Iago — actuated perhaps by envy or other psychological factors but transcending mere psychology in its fury, its rage against the fulness of being or, simply, its campaign against human happiness. 

This, as Eagleton observes, is what we call evil, “a leeching of life from others to fill an aching absence in oneself,” a motive of sorts, but not, pace Oppenheimer, a motive in any empirical or introspective sense. It seems wholly unfounded. For all I know, what we denominate as evil may indeed be a diabolical force, as John of Patmos envisioned it in Revelation. The mystery persists. The word “evil” operates as a semantic placebo, expressing our horror of certain macabre actions and events, or of the malevolent behavior of certain people, but it does not define the intrinsic nature of the thing itself, of how the hole in the self, Eagleton’s “abstract will,” or Aquinas’ interior void comes to be a faculty without content.

The propensity of the individual to gratuitously produce harm and suffering, to practice injustice, to lie with impunity, and to destroy others without a second thought is surely a commonplace “evil,” as we understand it, an enormity that is appallingly domestic, even “banal,” as Hannah Arendt proposed. Though according to Peg Birmingham in her exhaustive study of Arendt, “Arendt never wavers in her claim that extreme [or radical] evil is the systematic production of perfect superfluousness” (italics mine). Its origin as a motiveless iniquity remains beyond our grasp. 

Indeed, even if we believe in a malignant spirit called the Devil responsible for all manner of abomination, why would a supernatural and inconceivably powerful being feel compelled to provoke disasters? Where is his motive? These are depths we cannot plumb. The narrative of the Demon’s failed attempt at self-exaltation (Second Thessalonians 2:4) and resentment for being misprized and stripped of his dignity and elevation in heaven merely humanizes the Fiend, as does Milton, for all his majestic rhetoric, in Paradise Lost. Attributing aims, emotions, impulses, and passions habitual to human beings to a non-human actor is an obvious category error. We would have to assume that the Prince of Darkness is himself controlled by a pre-existent force.

Perhaps all we can say is that evil, ultimately, remains as irremediable as it is inscrutable. Evidence for its source is as hard to come by as a definition of its concrete or metaphysical structure. We may not understand or be able to conclusively account for it. We may use the word indiscriminately and without antecedent foundation. Nonetheless, we should make no mistake about it. Evil exists.