In January my 20-year-old son will spend 10 days in Israel, his first visit to a foreign country other than Canada, one of the safer places in the world. He might have chosen a less dangerous destination but I understand his reasons for going. For him, the trip could prove life-changing, though I feel a flash of fear as I write those words and understand their ambiguities. Israel is a nation of 5.9 million surrounded by 292 million Arabs, most of whom don’t recognize their right to exist and many of whom wish to see them exterminated. None of this is new. For almost 60 years, Israel has been the target of inexplicable savagery. Until now these facts have resided comfortably in mental files labeled “History, “Anti-Semitism” and “Evil.” Like any reader of the news, I wince at the daily barbarism and move on to more important – that is, more self-centered -- matters. Suddenly, my son could turn into news.
On Sunday night, as though to torment myself, I read The Roots of Evil, by John Kekes, a philosophy professor retired from the state University of New York at Albany. His message, his moral anatomy of humanity, is astute, thorough and utterly lacking in comfort. As to basics:
“Part of what makes human actions evil, then, is that they cause serious harm and lack excuse.”
Evildoers, of course, will deny the truth of that final phrase because they, like all humans, possess a capacity for rationalization, and effortlessly justify their foulest acts. Evil is its own justification, just as virtue once was its own reward. We inhabit an age when psychology and politics, not individual volition, are the acceptable explanations for evil. Kekes will have none of it:
“Attributing evil to injustice, poverty, or a noxious ideology is thus to misunderstand it. For the deeper and prior question is why adverse social conditions exist. And the answer must be that they exist because of the evil tendencies of those who create them. It is evil that explains adverse social conditions rather than the other way around.
“If the roots of evil are psychological, not social, then changing social conditions cannot do more than close off a particular expression of evil. Unless the psychological causes are themselves changed, other ways of expressing evil will undoubtedly be found, since its particular expressions are incidental to the underlying motivation.”
This would have made sense to Shakespeare. When Macbeth sends thugs to murder Banquo, he has already convinced them their victim is the author of all their troubles. Macbeth is not crazy. His cunning is rivaled only by his savage ambition. The thugs need only encouragement, and Macbeth obliges with fictions of bitterness, self-pity and revenge. The second murderer, speaking for every frustrated little nobody, says:
“I am one, my liege,
Whom the vile blows and buffets of the world
Hath so incensed that I am reckless what
I do to spite the world.”
That’s the logic of suicide bombers, and it’s sufficient to get the job done. Evil is just that homely and unglamorous. Kekes, too, sheds light on evil with Shakespeare’s aid. Without comment, he cites Edmund’s great speech from King Lear, Act I, Scene II. I return the phrase Kekes elides:
“This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune [, -- often the surfeit of our own behavior, --] we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, the stars; as if we were villains by necessity, fools by compulsion, knaves, thieves, and treachers [OED: “A deceiver, a cheat; one who deceives by trickery; sometimes, a traitor.”] by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience to planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion of whoremaster man.”
Shakespeare, too, offers little comfort. All of us, potentially, are whoremasters, and when we have children we become vulnerable to them in ways previously unimaginable. Kekes’ final admonitory words are chilling: “…human motivation and the contingencies of life make evil a permanent threat to human well-being.”
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3 comments:
You are an awfully good writer, always with something interesting to say. Pretty impressive, day after day.
My son spent three weeks in Israel this past summer. We too were a bit worried as he was in Israel the summer before for the beginning of the war against Hezbollah. He and his group were up by Gallilee when the war started. They were within two miles of a rocket attack. He wasn't worried and didn't want to come home, but he and the other teens were overruled. In spite of the evil surrounding that tiny state, your son, will have a great time, and as you say, it could be life changing.
The talk of evil informing social conditions made me very uneasy, especially since your first example of evil was "292 million Arabs" who are at least partly responsible for "inexplicable savagery" against Israel. Your (indirect) allegation that the foundations of this culture succumbed to the temptations of evil due to some unexplained weakness of character, in contrast with us wonderful Westerners who have managed to fend off "evil" to establish the free society we have today, is just a little childish. In making this claim, you are discounting centuries of meddling and oppression perpetrated by Westerners in the Middle East, beginning with the Crusades and continuing today with the Oil Wars (both of which are arguably "evil", based on Kekes' definition: “Part of what makes human actions evil, then, is that they cause serious harm and lack excuse.”) as any cause for Arab adversity to a U.S. backed Israel, as well as discounting the anti-Arab Israeli savagery that we see today.
As for your MacBeth quote, when you discredit the mentality expressed by the second murderer by equating it only to suicide bombers, you are condemning the rallying cry of all oppressed people ever, some of whom include our founding fathers and the champions of liberty and social change throughout history.
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