The Anatomy of Evil

by Michael H. Stone

  In the biblical period (of both Testaments), people tended to live in small tribes, usually of around 150 people. A tribe, if it were not to be conquered by a larger tribe nearby, truly needed to be fruitful and multiply (so its sons outnumbered the sons of the would-be aggressor tribe). This meant that the laws and warnings against masturbation, prostitution, abortion, homosexuality, and adultery-all of which interfered with fertility or optimal child rearing-had a compelling rationale in those days." These activities endangered group survival, even individual survival (a conquered tribe might be slaughtered or enslaved). Practices that threatened reproductive success constitute violations of an evolutionary principle. For similar reasons infanticide and child sacrifice, as were practiced by the heathens, were abominations to the Israelites." Infanticide is still practiced or sanctioned in many parts of the world; it is not yet regarded as a crime universally. Incest is close to being universally regarded as wrong-stronger language is used in holy books ("an abomination," "evil")-but the punishment was much more severe in biblical times (death by burning or stoning) than now.

  The need for group survival underlies the importance of group cohesion. One way to ensure group cohesion is for the leaders of a community to insist on unity of values and beliefs. Ideally, each member of the group should be willing to do anything necessary to strengthen that unity-including to die defending the group's values or to destroy those who threaten the solidarity of the group's customs and beliefs. This accounts for the persecution of heresy in the situation where a new religion is taking shape while its membership is still small and vulnerable. In much of the developed world, heresy belongs to the moldy books of bygone times, when it was punished by expulsion (following excommu nication) if you were lucky; by death, if you were not. And that death might include being burned at the stake .21 Heresy was a very big evil, as it still is in certain parts of the world today. If the group was a national rather than a religious one, the comparable crime was dissidence, or simply being different from those accepted by the leader. Not to be an an in Nazi Germany, not to be a Communist in totalitarian Russia led to the same kinds of persecution, death penalty included, that once awaited heretics.

  The threat to the group from supposed witches led to their persecution and execution (often by the most cruel means) in times past. Here the threat lay in the supernatural powers people attributed to them. This meant that witches, even though few in number, could-according to people who believed in witchcraft-create havoc in the community.24 Now and then even in contemporary America there are a few people (mostly women) who profess to be witches, and others, not in great number, who fear their powers and regard them as evil handmaidens of the devil (in whom they also believe).

  We would like to think that as citizens of the twenty-first century we have outgrown the superstitions that led people to stigmatize, persecute, and all too often kill "outsiders" whom their communities saw as "evil." And we would like to think that whenever we use the word in our culture and in our day, it applies to those who are "really" evil and who would be properly labeled so for the rest of eternity. There should never be a time, for example, when child rape, serial killing, torture, wife bashing, and the like become acceptable. This is an understandable hope. Given the history of the world, however, I do not think it is a reasonable hope. Still less reasonable is the hope that the large-scale evils that unfold in times of war and conflict-where torture, mutilation, and enslavement suddenly seem "justifiable"-disappear from the earth. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse have yet to be unseated.

  GRADATIONS

  Susan Neiman's hesitation in drawing a line between the very bad and the evil stems in part, I suspect, from the inherent vagueness in how such phrases have been used in religious and philosophical texts. Codes of law, both in ancient times and modern, make many fine distinctionsgradations, if you will-between the bad, the very bad, and the extremely bad. But the law avoids the word evil, preferring a vocabulary that corresponds pretty closely to what the community might call evil: words like heinous and depraved. Side by side with "evil" in books and journals there is a similar set of strong words, such as fiendish, diabolical, monstrous, abominable, which also overlap quite closely with the public's use of "evil." At the very least, there have always been simple systems for placing unacceptable or "wrong" behaviors into categories such as misdemeanors and felonies. And then there are those felonies that are so serious as to amount to capital cases-or in places where the death penalty has been abolished, what used to be capital cases-for instance, treason and certain forms of murder. What the law identifies as an extreme felony the public often identifies as evil-but the connection isn't that close. An unintended murder during the course of an armed robbery might be spoken of as "terrible," whereas "evil" might be reserved for the rape and murder of a child or the murder of a kidnap victim. Two thousand years ago, the Talmudic triad of incest, murder, and taking the Lord's name in vain-all punishable by death-was set off against a host of lesser crimes, but all were called ra: a word that meant "bad" but could also mean "evil," for which there was no special word that set it apart from ra. There is a graded system in the Catholic Church in which sins are divided into "venial" (forgivable, minor ones) and "mortal." But the "mortal" list contains more than thirty examples. Some of these are, to modern attitudes, much less serious than others. Envy, drunkenness, and cowardice are not at the same level as defrauding, robbery, and murder. For whatever reason, rape, arson, and assault are not mentioned specifically. There is no easy way to draw a connection between our current notion of evil and the various mortal sins.

  Our word evil today does set apart the bad from the beyond-themerely-bad. The next chapter will also reflect my efforts to hold a magnifying glass, so to say, over the realm of the beyond-the-merely-bad, in hopes of finding meaningful differences within this otherwise blurry region of smudged-together "evils."

  TO DO EVIL IS HUMAN

  Before I offer you my working definition of evil, there are two ideas about evil that need to be put forward first, as a kind of prelude to this definition. First, I believe we can make a solid claim that evil applies only to human beings.'-' We reserve the word evil now for describing certain acts done by people who clearly intended to hurt or to kill others in an excruciatingly painful way. That pain might be physical or it might be emotional or mental, involving extreme humiliation as well. Either way, the perpetrator must have a knowledge of death and an awareness that his or her action might bring about the death of the victim. Another requirement for using the term evil is that the perpetrator be aware that the victim would suffer intensely, experience agony-the same as the perpetrator knows he would feel if the tables were turned and he were the victim of those same actions. But ours is the only species that has this kind of conscious awareness and imagination about death and suffering. Ordinarily, humans also have a sense of shame, which acts as a braking mechanism to prevent us from carrying our violent or vengeful fantasies into action.26 Some people who commit evil acts have a sense of shame, but in dire circumstances this sense of shame seems to go temporarily "off-line." In others who commit such acts, this sense of shame was never properly developed to begin with .17 As humans, we can also hate, which means we can think how much better life would be if the object of our hatred were put out of the way. Animals lack these qualities, so they are not capable of evil. The lion chasing after a gazelle, the cat pouncing on a mouse-they are prompted to do so for their supper. They do not hate the gazelle or the mouse, nor are they vividly aware that what they are about to do will bring about suffering and death to their victims. Actually, predatory animals like the cat family try for a coup de grace: one quick scrunching of the neck so that death comes instantly. Perhaps chimpanzees have the capacity to plot, singly or in groups, to kill other chimpanzees or even to bash them in ways that must hurt a great deal. I'm not so sure they experience shame or have the ability to mull over such actions way ahead of time and then to act "with malice aforethought," using our kind o
f elaborate language-to rape another chimp's mate and then bludgeon the rival with a tree branch. Even so, I am not ready to call this evil. In the same say, I know that a cat will sometimes seemingly tease a mouse it has captured, pouncing on it, letting it go for a second, pouncing on it again, until it finally does what it set out to do, which is to eat the mouse. This may look "sadistic" to us, as we imagine what people would call us if we behaved that way to someone else. But the cat is probably just engaging in a kind of practice-play, honing its skills the better to catch another mouse on another day. Without malice, without awareness of suffering and the finality of life, without shame or guilt: that is, without our uniquely human qualities.

  The second point I have already hinted at: people tend to agree closely about which acts are evil when committed by individuals in ordinary civilian life-that is, in peacetime. In times of group conflict, including war, there will be two sides-each thinking the other is "evil." It is sometimes very difficult to get around this subjectivity. We would like to think that some neutral observer could size up a situation, say, where Country A invaded Country B and committed atrocities against the citizens of B and declare that, viewed from the mountaintop, clearly the A-people involved in these acts were the evil aggressors. History often agrees with such a choice. There are no longer many people who endorse the goals of the Spanish Inquisition, claiming that its victims were the evil ones who got what they deserved. But wars, including the "asymmetric" wars of a terrorist group versus a strong country, that are going on in our own time may have as many supporters as detractors. Islamic extremists are as ready to praise 9/11 as we are to condemn it: our "hijackers" are their "shaheedis" (holy martyrs). The net effect of this subjectivity is that it will be easier and more convincing to create a scale for the gradations of evil in peacetime than for evil in times of war. Do I believe that the Nazi genocide was evil, the earlier Turkish genocide of the Armenians was evil, that Stalin's starvation of the Ukrainians and the millions he sent to the gulag were evils, that the Japanese Rape of Nanking and Mao's destruction of tens of millions of his own people in the Lao-Gai (Labor-Reform) camps were evils? Of course I do (and this is just the short list). But here is where it would be helpful to have a God that everyone looked up to and who periodically sent us memos to the effect of. "I have looked over the situation between the A-people and the B-people, and I am letting you all know that I consider the A-people to be the evil aggressors here and the B-people to be their victims. Signed, God." Alas, even the most devout members of any and all religions must ruefully acknowledge that we do not receive such final judgments. Instead we must often make do with the consolation that comes (within our lifetime, if we're lucky) from the consensus of respected historians. To do justice to this complicated topic-to analyze the kinds of evils perpetrated in wartime-would be beyond the scope of this book and would, in fact, warrant a book of its own.

  Returning to the situation in peacetime, I will submit here a definition of evil that I think captures the essence of what people in everyday life-the final arbiters of what is meant by "evil"-see and experience before they spontaneously intone this dreaded word. Owing nothing to religious or philosophical teachings, the definition is purely pragmatic.

  A WORKING DEFINITION OF EVIL

  "Evil" is a word we apply to situations or specific acts that have the quality of horrifying or shocking whoever witnesses or hears about these acts. In today's parlance, the term is less commonly applied to the persons who are guilty of these acts. "Evil," in other words, is reserved for acts that are breathtakingly awful: breathtaking, because the degree of violence, suffering, or humiliation imposed so greatly exceeds what would be needed to express one's irritation or animosity or to subdue the victim.

  This element of excess is crucial to the customary use of the word evil. The root meaning of evil from its Anglo-Saxon origins (the word was then spelled yfel but pronounced the same way we do) was "over" or "beyond."28 To be categorized as evil, there must be a flagrant deviation from the standards of acceptable behavior within the community of the particular culture and time period. The deviation, that is, must be over and beyond what the ordinary people in the community could even envision as something another human being could ever do.

  Usually, though not always, evil acts are those preceded by intention or premeditation. This means there was usually malice aforethought: the contemplation of injuring-physically or psychologically-another person in a malign, "over-the-top" way. People will generally know more about the details of the evil act before they get to know something about the person responsible. And as far as the perpetrators go, the more clearly sane (in the legal sense of knowing right from wrong as opposed to being "crazy") they are, the more readily we will conclude that they or their acts were indeed evil. If we find out later on that the persons in question were insane29 or seriously mentally ill,30 we end up thinking their acts were evil but they themselves were not.

  We feel on surer ground in calling an act evil when it results in intense physical suffering, mutilation, or death. But certain nonviolent acts may also reach the level of excess and outrageousness that will call forth the response from people that those acts were evil.

  For a more concise definition we can try to get down to the very essence of evil. For an act to be evil

  1. it must be breathtakingly horrible;

  2. malice aforethought (evil intention) will usually precede the act;

  3. the degree of suffering inflicted will be wildly excessive;

  4. the nature of the act will appear incomprehensible, bewildering, beyond the imagination of ordinary people in the community.

  With regard to the first item, there will rarely be universal agreement within any given community or large group of people as to what is "breathtakingly horrible," but there will often be near-universal agreement if the act involves the kidnapping and torture of a child. Ironically, certain crimes amounting to less than murder will be experienced as more clearly evil than murder itself, because of the suffering involvedcoupled with our very human tendency to identify with the victim and to imagine how the crime would have affected us, had we been the victim. Here is an example to illustrate the point.

  Some years ago I interviewed a man who went to prison for having gone on a crime spree. Under the influence of methamphetamine and cocaine, he had become suspicious and hostile, thinking everyone was out to get him. In that frame of mind, he shot three men who had been working on the street. They had been repairing some electrical cables, while standing with their backs to him. One died, but of the two that lived, one was blinded in both eyes. He had just gotten married the week before. The sympathies with the jury during the ensuing trial-as with most people who became aware of the case-were particularly strong for the blinded man. The family of the dead man would mourn for him, of course, but in the fullness of time, they would make their peace with their loss and get on with their lives. But those who knew about the blinded man (with whom I spoke and sympathized) found themselves imagining what it would be like to live the next fifty years as that blinded man, less able than before to earn a good living and to take care of his wife-whom he would never again be able to see. He would be forced to live with the memory of how his life was turned upside down in an instant-thanks to the senseless violence of some "maniac." The journalists who wrote about the case-for the three days it still was "news" on the inner pages-also spoke of the evil in having blinded the bridegroom. Little was said about the murder victim.

  As a footnote to the definition I mentioned above, we can add that when people call a certain person "evil" (in contrast to calling certain acts evil), we imply that the person can be counted on to commit such acts habitually and often. Even so, it will only rarely be true that every moment of that person's waking day is spent doing evil acts. Some persons of this sort may turn out to have been unassuming and helpful neighbors or pleasant and innocuous-seeming coworkers who have led (as we eventually learn)-unsuspected and undetected for many yearsa
"secret life" devoted to the commission of evil acts.

  EVIL AS A TERM OF EMOTION

  When hearing the story of a particularly gruesome act (or having witnessed it), we will often respond by saying (often enough by gasping) That was evil! We are not putting forth some philosophical comment here. We are not reciting a chapter from the Good Book. We are expressing an emotion. Evil, in everyday speech, means something to the effect: "I feel a horror beyond my ability to understand, beyond my ability to put what I feel into words."

  The meaning of the word evil in everyday speech can be grasped most readily from the accounts in newspapers and in the biographies of those who have committed murder or other violent crimes. From these sources, we can look for common features in the crimes themselves and even in the people responsible for them. Here is a small sampling, culled from hundreds of examples in books and papers: