As it is so it does

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, philosophy, evil

"Evil is as evil does." Isn't that the proverb? Not according to Terry Eagleton in On Evil. In this small, but wide-ranging book, he draws upon literature, theology, philosophy and contemporary history and culture to examine a phenomenon so many would think outmoded, even passé, and certainly not a fit subject for polite discourse.

Fully half the book draws upon fiction, for it is in fiction that our understanding as a human people is tested and either confirmed or found wanting. William Golding has examined evil in all its viciousness and banality over a long career, most notably with Lord of the Flies. The discussion begins with the anti-character Pincher Martin by Golding, and Milton's Mephistopheles in Paradise Lost is a necessary stop along the way, of course, but the author returns most often to the tragedies of William Shakespeare, particularly Macbeth and Othello.

Taking Iago of Othello as prototypical in the English oeuvre, Eagleton concludes that true evil is purposeless, destructive for the sake of destruction, and as causeless as God. This is ironic, as his own Marxism is the most atheistic of ideologies. But he's just getting warmed up. His second section examines philosophical and theological treatments, from theodicy to the nihilism of Schopenhauer.

Freud is brought in as having identified the evil in any of us with the death drive (most of us know it by the term death wish), that longing for nothingness, that existential angst that threatens to overcome us when we realize we can't have it all. Turned inward, it leads to suicide; turned outward, it leads to mass murder, or at least petty mayhem of all sorts. In most of us, subjugated and denied, it results in the dragging, enervating depression that dogs our days in "the rat race."

He starts to go seriously awry when he restricts his discussion of religious philosophy to two viewpoints: Roman Catholicism and "Moral Majority" puritanism. Both are rooted in asceticism, which is fundamentally not Biblical; Jesus said, "I came that they may have Life, and have it abundantly." But he cannot see beyond the crucifix, claiming that "Christian belief is that God achieves supreme self-expression in a tortured human body." (p 67) Now that is evil! Yet it is entirely expectable in a Marxist.

Strangely, he gets around to the "abundant life" statement, using it to support his contention of the purposelessness of evil, writing that the evil "are those who are deficient in the art of living." (p 128) Coming in a chapter titled "Obscene Enjoyment", that is so trite it beggars belief. The elephant strove and delivered a mouse. By the time the final chapter comes around, he has almost defined evil out of existence. When Jesus said, "Father forgive them, for they don't know what they are doing," it was not a general statement, but Eagleton takes it to be. Stephen echoed it while being stoned, "Let not this sin be held to their charge," accurately naming the sin while praying for its forgiveness. It was still a sin. What made these murders evil was that they were thought righteous by those doing them.

Here we come to the crux of the matter for me. The author uses Jesus' statement to say that, because the purpose was thought to be noble, the crucifiers of Jesus (and the stoners of Stephen by extension) "are perhaps not beyond the pale." But now he is painted into a corner, stating immediately afterward that "Stalin and Mao murdered for what they was as an honorable end, and if they are not beyond the moral pale then it is hard to know who is." (p 145) I agree with half of this statement; those two monsters are most certainly evil, even the epitome of it. But the first half? Ha! They claimed their purposes were noble, but clearly did not believe it, as even a cursory understanding of their more private utterances will attest. They did not care; good or evil were alike to them.

Thus, by the example of Mao and Stalin, and indeed Hitler, and in contradistinction to the author's thesis, we find that the evil are purposeful, often very purposeful. The banality of evil so often remarked upon is not in them, it is in the armies of lesser people "doing their job" at the behest of purposeful, powerful but uncaring leaders. It is in the clerks and laborers, the fillers of forms and diggers of mass graves, the makers of nerve gas or Uzis who go home to play with their children. But there is no banality about a Josef Stalin, none whatever. He knows what he is about, and it is all about him: his power, his image, his comfort, his country, his political system.

That archetypical Evil One, Lucifer, with his seven "I will" statements in Isaiah 14, says to God in effect, "I don't like the way you are running the Universe, so I will take over." This, the basis of Nietzsche's will to power, is the root of evil (and to calm a quibble, the "love of money" is "a root of all kinds of evils", not as the KJV translates it "the root of all evil"). To take over God's work is evil; to cooperate with God in His work is good. The rest doesn't matter.