Evil is as Evil Does 3
Evil is as Evil Does.
I have been recently accused of ‘evil’ on the basis of a writing an article (‘The case against Gilad Atzmon’) with which the accuser disagrees. The term evil is not one I would normally use, for it is so general and so generally misused, that it is of limited use in seriously describing or understanding anything. The user of the term, either consciously or unconsciously, colluded with this level of obscure generality since he or she did not supply any definition, nor comment on any specifics. However, despite this polemical deficiency let us welcome the introduction of this term into the debate and see how clear and relevant we can make it. A degree of clarity, may also provide the opportunity to indicate where, how and to whom the term could be rationally applied.
2008
First a definition. I shall consider evil as being applicable to three aspects of human behaviour; evil ideas, evil intent and evil actions. I shall further define evil actions along the same lines as the author John Kekes as the idea about, the proposal to, orthe action of, causing serious, excessive, malevolent physical harm to individuals.[1] I intend to only consider this from the point of view of the interaction of the human species, but I suggest that this definition can be extended to apply to similar human actions against other sentient life forms.
It is often considered that evil is a result of irrationality, ignorance or natural tendencies. However, I agree with Kekes, that serious, excessive and malevolent physical harm is frequently perpetrated by people who are also rational, knowledgeable and socially conditioned not to do harm to others. Although persuasion is often used, people are rarely compelled to do ‘excessive, malevolent physical harm’ to other human beings. It is mostly a choice - and a rational one at that! It is worth considering the results of the 1960, Milgram experiment in America in this context.
“The results as seen and felt in the laboratory are disturbing. They raise the possibility that human nature, or more specifically the kind of character produced in American democratic society, cannot be counted on to insulate its citizens from brutality and inhumane treatment at the direction of a malevolent authority. A substantial proportion of people do what they are told to do, irrespective of the content of the act and without limitations of conscience, so long as they perceive that the command comes from a legitimate authority. If, in this experiment, an anonymous experimenter can successfully command adults to subdue a fifty-year-old man and force on him painful electric shocks against his protests, one can only wonder what government with its vastly greater authority and prestige, can command of its subjects.” (S. Milgram. Quoted in ‘Encyclopedia of Genocide’. Ed. Israel W. Charney. Pub. ABC-CLIO. Volume 1, page 333.)
Well we certainly don’t have to wonder too much with all the examples which abound. Although the ‘electric shocks’ in this ‘experiment’ were not real but simulated, the people administering them in this experiment did not know this and assumed them to be real. In the terms we are now considering, they were prepared to cause excessive, malevolent physical harm’ to the victim even though in fact the experimenters ensured that they did not. The importance of this finding is that such social patterns as following inhumane orders (or suggestions) are not exclusive to any one section of the human species. Under modern conditions of hierarchical societies, with low (or contradictory) ethical standards, ordinary people, for little or no gain and with no fear or compulsion to prompt them are easily persuaded to do actions which can be defined as evil. That is to say for very many people, their moral and ethical education and its assimilation is so ambiguous, feeble or atrophied that very little is needed overcome any qualms about perpetrating evil as defined above. Their decision to do such acts are clearly influenced by their ideas, passions and the circumstances they find themselves in.
Kekes, for example, examines a number of case studies, from the Catholic massacre of the Cathars, through the Jacobin Terror, the Nazi Holocaust, the Manson Family atrocities, the Argentinian Military Junta torturers to the psychopathic activities in the USA, of one, John Allen. In considering the commonplace suggestion of irrationality or ignorance with regard to inhumane actions, Kekes argues, that these attempts to explain such evil do not however;
“….change the fact that the evildoers had reasons for their actions that they also had reasons against them. For they weighed their reasons and found that the evil-producing ones outweighed the others. All of them deliberated; they were all at least normally intelligent; they violated no rule of logic; they were not ignorant of the relevant facts; they considered alternatives and criticisms; and they all reached their decisions reflectively over a period of time. Of course, they ought not to have made the decisions they made, but as before, this is a moral claim about the use they made of their reasons, not a claim about their lack of reasons.” (J. Kekes ‘The roots of Evil’. Pub. Cornell Uni. Page 160.)
Most human beings, not impeded by mental disability, have the capacity to think, propose and execute good or evil acts. Those who formulate evil ideas, propose their enactment or actually implement evil acts, as here defined, are frequently quite ordinary people. They are people, whose attachment, passionate or otherwise, to a certain idea or concern motivates them sufficiently to wish to do to others what they would invariably not wish upon themselves or their loved ones. They know the difference between right and wrong and therefore rationally calculate that it is in at least their own interests (and perhaps those of ‘their’ community) to promote or perpetrate acts of malevolent physical harm against others. These ‘interests’ may be of a perceived positive benefit (job promotion, gaining land or other forms of wealth) or the removal of a perceived negative outcome (the elimination of any serious opposition to their desires). It is also possible that in developing passionate responses to perceived benefits or threats of various types, such individuals fail to check whether their perceptions are real, emotionally distorted or purely imaginary. This passion and selective perception often drives them to go beyond what might actually be necessary to obtain the benefits or allay or remove any real or illusory fears. This latter factor is important to recognise for it is the excesses undertaken that expose not only the distortion of their own and others humanity but the real emotional level of the process taking place in the promotion of such ‘evils‘.
For the purposes of the present concern I wish to concentrate upon the evil done out of the fear of perceived negative threats, for this in part I suggest, is what motivated and drove the leaders and followers of such ideologies as Nazism, Bolshevism and Zionism. The Nazis promoted a fictional fear of Jewish racial and cultural contamination via a World Conspiracy from which, under the right conditions (ie total war), flowed the Holocaust.[2] The Bolsheviks promoted a fictional fear of Mensheviks, Kulaks and later Trotskyists‘, from which flowed Gulags, the ’harvests of sorrow’ show trials and assassinations. Even before the ‘Holocaust’, the pioneers of politicised Zionism promoted a fear of Judeophobia, which, although more justified, nevertheless not only resulted in the establishment of a Jewish state, but resulted in the Nakba (the murder and ethnic cleansing ‘Catastrophe‘) for the Palestinians in 1948. Yet it was not actually necessary for the Nazis to systematically murder millions of Jews, Slavs, handicapped, Gypsy’s or communists in order to conduct a war for ‘Lebenstraum’ against the Allies. Indeed it has been convincingly argued that this genocide detrimentally effected the Nazi war effort by overstretching the available resources. It was not necessary for Bolsheviks to imprison Mensheviks, Anarchists, murder Kulaks or assassinate Politburo members and military generals to effectively negate their influence. This too severely weakened the resistance of Soviet forces to repell the invasion by Hitler’s troops. It was also not necessary for Zionists to brutally colonise and ethnically cleanse Palestine in order to protect Jews from any future Judeophobia. In this case also, it has been argued by some Jews, that the Nakba and slow genocide of the Palestinians has in fact increased the Judeophobic opinions, particularly in the Middle East. In each of these cases the excesses have detrimentally effected the desired outcome. In each case the ‘fear’ (real or imagined) could have been removed or neutralised by means which were less inhumane, than those chosen. These examples indicate, and others could be cited, that on the one hand, a strong emotionally induced condition allied to an ‘ideology’ can also rationally motivate some people to go on to cause serious, excessive, malevolent physical harm. Whilst, on the other hand, a condition of emotional detachment by others can allow this harm to continue for long periods, without sufficient levels of condemnation or intervention.
However, it is not just an individual or collective mental state which allows the projection of evil ideas or more specifically their activation. It is also usually the case, as Kekes notes in his study, that any external (legal or social) factors causing emotional or physical barriers to such acts have also to become diminished for the perpetrators of evil ideas, proposals or actions to indulge their passionate ferocity. This reduction in external moral or legal pressures can occur through successful propaganda, the removal of legal constraints, the lack of enforcement of such constraints, or the collusion of large numbers in aiding the avoidance of detection. However, as the last noted point indicates, in the ideological justification and perpetration of large-scale evil (ie causing serious, excessive, malevolent, physical harm to individuals) it is also necessary for large numbers of people to condone, or fail to stand up against the promotion of such ideas or actively oppose the conduct of those perpetrating this type, duration and intensity of malevolent harm.
In this context Hannah Arendt’s concept of the ‘banality of evil’ is still applicable in the post-Second-World-War period. Banality in this sense refers to the individuals perpetrating evil not the evil actions themselves. That is to say that ordinary, normally decent people, can be stirred into action by religious or other ideological motives, or caught up in circumstances of social upheaval and state-led or other forms of organised brutality, and become voluntarily or under duress, located in a not too-uncomfortable position within a system of organised atrocity. This is the banality of modern organised forms of evil. Due to the extensive division of labour in modern society it is not the rare, disturbed, psychopathic or fervently passionate sectarian mentality which is exclusively required for large-scale genocide to occur. It is only required that ordinary citizens ‘fit in’ somewhere after the moral and physical opposition to such a development has been defeated and the process of ethnic or political genocidal-elimination begins. Processing records, manufacturing equipment, repairing vehicles, transporting cargo, maintaining the roads, baking bread, making clothes, etc., etc., all of which smooth the path of genocide and provision the direct perpetrators. Without this support the perpetrators could not sustain their grisly task.
The psychopaths and rabidly sectarian individuals, of course, are still needed to lead the armed contingents or wield the instruments of torture, but the ideology and the system allows for the placement of ordinary citizens within its structure. It also provides them not only with a conscience-repressing justification, but often a benefit for what is being done. This explains how Stalinism, Nazism, and the Argentinian Junta were able to function within and amid millions of citizens who directly or indirectly supported (or even remained aloof from) what was occurring in their name but who would not have initiated or maintained such activities by themselves. Incidentally, those who condone or fail to oppose evil ideas and actions are also ordinary people who know the difference between good and evil; right and wrong, but who rationally calculate that it is in their own and/or their groups short-term, medium-term or even long-term interests to support, condone, excuse the intention and actualisation of evil or to refuse to condemn or intervene when it occurs. In this regard, after a period of time, the situation in such societies can have the appearance of normality. On the surface people in such traumatised societies can become inured to the situation and repress their doubts, but underneath the façade, because they are human, they know what is happening is not right, it is not really normal human behaviour and it is not sustainable in the long term. At this point I will leave the reader to ponder on how much or how little of this description applies in the case of Israel.
This explanation and understanding of both the passion and rational motive for evil does not mean evil actions are excusable. Speaking of the evil characters he has analysed, Kekes acknowledges their passionate beliefs play a significant role;
“But passions did not prevent them foreseeing that their actions would cause serious harm. They all foresaw that, and many of them performed their actions precisely because they foresaw the serious harm they would cause. They believed - wrongly of course - that their actions were justifiable or excusable. ….Putting all this together, my account is that normally evildoers should be held morally responsible and liable to severe condemnation if they cause serious, excessive, malevolent harm and their actions have that as a readily foreseeable consequence.“ (J. Kekes ‘The roots of Evil’. Pub. Cornell Uni. Page 205.)
I would extend this moral condemnation to those who produce evil ideas and promote them with foresight as well as those who carry them out. However, it needs to be recognised that ideas do not directly cause serious, excessive and malevolent physical harm and so the level of condemnation required is not necessarily as high as those who perpetrate such actions. So if people say they are (or have been) merely following evil ideas or instructions I suggest that they in reality know their humanity should have rejected those ideas and actions. They also know that in a humane society condemnation for the perpetrators of the actual evil actions would also be followed by some humanely contrived punishment.
So to sum up so far. We have evil being expressed in the idea of, the promotion of, or the activity of causing serious, excessive, malevolent physical harm to other human beings. We can also conclude that evil actions, particularly those conducted on a large-scale are frequently undertaken in a reasoned manner with the perpetrators not only aware of the consequences of their actions but that often they have those consequences clearly in mind in undertaking those actions. This is because many of them, such as beatings, torture and assassination are deliberately designed to instill fear, passivity or co-operation. Passion or ideology may cause such perpetrators to lose sight of the real facts about their victims or encourage them to distort the facts (in order to rationalise their actions) but this self-censorship or self-deception does not excuse these acts .
Now anyone who has read my article with anything approaching a calm rational mentality will be unable to find anything which approaches evil intent, evil suggestions or evil thought. This assessment would be so for even-handed people even if they disagree with its analysis. So we can conclude that this accusation says more about the confusion or the motivation of the accuser than the ideas (and the absence of any harmful action) of the accused. However, we can reasonably conclude even more than this. From the above observations, we now have sufficient material to assess the merits or otherwise of anyone else accused of evil. Additionally, as indicated earlier, we also have the means to examine the case against Israel and the Zionists who support it, in order to explore whether their actions conform to the suggestion of evil prompted by my detractor.
According to Amnesty International and the Israeli Information Centre for Human Rights (B’TSELEM) among many other sources, Israeli soldiers carry out beatings, torture, killing, house demolitions and collective punishments. All of these cause serious, excessive, malevolent physical harm to Palestinians, and occasionally to International Peace Activists. These activities, therefore, would come under the above definition of evil. Also according to pro-Israeli academics, the formation of the state of Israel was accompanied in 1948, by clearances of Palestinian villages along with murder, rape and torture (the Nakba) of Palestinian villagers. Thus according to the definition of evil above, measured alongside the testimony of those with direct knowledge and with access to archival evidence of the atrocities, the state of Israel was founded on - evil![3] Of course, this conclusion has already been reached by a number of Orthodox Jews, who arrived at it by a different (religious) route. In our case a rational consideration based upon humanist principles also arrives at the same conclusion, that is if we choose to use the term ‘evil’ and define it in the above way. So the actions of Israeli soldiers, interrogators and any others who cause serious, excessive, malevolent physical harm, according to the above definition can be described as perpetrators of evil actions and they can with justification be morally condemned and they rightly should be. However, the analysis of Hannah Arendt regarding the ‘banality of evil‘, along with the evidential testimony of the Nuremberg Trials, also allows us to comment upon those, who whilst not directly perpetrating the evil acts themselves, intellectually, organisationally, financially and morally support the perpetrators. As Hannah Arendt noted;
“The philistine’s retirement into private life, his single-minded devotion to matters of family and career was the last, and already degenerated, product of the bourgeoisie’s belief in the primacy of private interest. The philistine is the bourgeois isolated from his own class, the atomised individual who is produced by the breakdown of the bourgeois class itself. The mass man whom Himmler organised for the greatest mass crimes ever committed in history bore the features of the philistine rather than the mob man, and was the bourgeois who in the midst of the ruins of his world worried about nothing so much as his private security, was ready to sacrifice everything - belief, honour, dignity - on the slightest provocation.” (Hannah Arendt. ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’. Pub Harvest. Page 338.)
Those who Arendt classifies as ‘philistines’ and the ‘mob’, do not make up the entire population within societies which routinely commit atrocities with impunity, they are merely the more active and willing agents. Within a colonialist or imperialist society at war, on it’s own or another’s territory, other citizens (Arendt’s ‘mass man‘) can also be recruited voluntarily or otherwise. As noted above, once involved in state orchestrated atrocities, whether eagerly or reluctantly, the average person in whatever capacity, becomes an active or passive accomplice and a recipient of the benefits of the regime. In this way, even those sensitively aware of the systemic cruelty, and are perhaps privately ashamed, can be highly motivated to publicly excuse or defend the regime, whilst it is in power, as a way of avoiding a double condemnation - by the regime and those critics outside it. When the system at last collapses and the actions of its leaders and supporters are called into question, then the average person who was involved often reverses this defensive tactic and accuses the regime of inducing or forcing his or her evil thoughts, proposals or actions against their will. In this way the process of causing excessive, malevolent physical harm’ is projected away from the guilty and becomes the asserted fault of the ‘leader’ or the ‘ideology’ and not the responsibility of the perpetrators or their supporters. This was the outcome revealed by a majority of the defendants during the Nuremburg Trials, and professed in the memoirs of many ex-communist activists and sympathisers. ‘I was only following orders’ or ‘I did for the greater good of;- the fatherland - the motherland’ or even ‘to retrieve the promised land’.
So finally! In seriously considering the suggestion of evil intent, a notion introduced by my critic, it is only possible to conclude that those who rationally (or even partially) support Israel and its activities are, either committing, advocating, condoning or otherwise defending evil. That is to say the causing of serious, excessive, malevolent physical harm, against the Palestinians. This is why Zionists and their supporters (inside and outside) of Israel are condemned by humane people from whatever walk of life. Particularly by people who seriously think things through, who don’t smother or anaesthetise their consciences and who refuse to simply follow the suggestions of various so-called ‘legitimate’ authorities. It is to be hoped that such characteristics as serious thinking, universal moral and ethical standards and well tuned ‘crap detectors’ become more widespread in the years ahead, in order to increase the number of people prepared to stand up and condemn all kinds of evil. Particularly the serious, excessive, malevolent physical harm inflicted by people of ones own country, religion or ethnic group.
R. Ratcliffe. September 2008
[1] Indeed, Kekes’ book ‘The Roots of Evil’ comes closest to understanding the observations of Hannah Arendt concerning the ‘banality of evil’. (John Kekes ‘‘The Roots of Evil’ published by Cornell Paperbacks. 2005.)
[2] It is interesting to note that in the modern form of ‘total war’ in which all citizens are compulsory recruited, many things become possible that otherwise would not be permissible or acceptable. The emergency measures taken by the ‘legitimate authorities’ along with the deliberate propagation of a mentality of existential fear, require the normal infringements of civil liberties and factual veracity to be extended greatly. In this climate atrocities increase and are either covered up or justified as necessary for the successful outcome of the hostilities.
[3] This is not to imply that evil ( ie causing serious, excessive, malevolent physical harm), has not been perpetrated by Palestinian resistance fighters in their efforts to withstand the colonialist oppression by Israelis. However, it is normally the case that the instigators of the process of inflicting evil should receive the firmest condemnation. It is a regrettable fact that in the period of colonial and imperial expansions, the right of self-defence can also be taken to levels in excess of what is required to conduct that self-defence. This does not, however, equate the routine, state orchestrated causing of serious, excessive, malevolent physical harm inflicted by Israelis, with that of the Palestinian resistance.