[Paleopsych] Hedgehog: Charles T. Mathewes: Operationalizing Evil
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Charles T. Mathewes: Operationalizing Evil
The Hedgehog Review - Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture
http://etext.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-hh?specfile=/texts/english/modeng/journals/hh.o2w&act=text&offset=1044217&textreg=1&id=MatOper2-2
In "Operationlizing Evil," Charles T. Mathewes suggests that we
need to confront the doubts we have about the language of evil in
order more fully to incorporate that language into our moral
discourse. He outlines some of the things that we need the concept of
evil to do and addresses concerns that scholars have raised about our
very use of the term, defending it as both necessary and helpful in
our efforts to understand and act in our world.
Charles T. Mathewes is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies
at the University of Virginia. His book, Evil and the Augustinian
Tradition, will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2001.
"There is radical evil in the world," writes Susan Sontag in an
essay about Kosovo.[3]^1 And I judge that many of us, given some time
to reflect, would agree. But we live in a time that has done better at
formulating misgivings about the language of "radical evil" than at
exploring what follows from our acceptance of it. We lack an
operationalized concept of evil--a concept that has a unique purpose
in the discourse of society and is integral to the proper functioning
of that discourse. Our problem is that the doubts that we can, or
ought to, operationalize "evil" hold the field almost unopposed.
This essay aims to help us develop such an operationalized
concept of evil, by confronting some well-developed concerns about the
cultural imagination and language of evil. I want to see how far we
can go towards addressing those concerns and to see what that
achievement reveals to us about how we might go forward in employing
the concept of evil in understanding and living our private and public
lives. What do we gain in using this term? Conversely, what dangers
inhere in it? The dangers are real, but operationalizing "evil" helps
us transcend some fundamental difficulties vexing our discussions of
morality, moving us towards both a more sober assessment of moral
malformation and a more hopeful vision of our moral possibilities.
What Do We Need the Concept of "Evil" To Do?
If it is true that, as Andrew Delbanco puts it, "a gap has
opened up between our awareness of evil and the intellectual resources
we have for handling it,"[4]^2 then a good place to begin is by
attempting to sketch what it would mean for the word "evil" to
circulate in our intellectual economy as real currency and not
counterfeit tender. Because any attempt at definition might well
reflect more our own provincial antipathies than any useful adequation
of the manifold realities of wickedness, it is more useful not to try
to define evil, but rather to sketch a picture of what any useful
concept of evil must do for us.
A useful concept of evil will, I judge, capture two important
and essentially interrelated dimensions of wickedness and our
affective responses to it. First, it will acknowledge the inner
individual psychological dimension of evil. Much malice is rooted in
individual temptations towards wickedness and cruelty, sprung from old
psychological wounds or from malformed desire sets--what Augustinians
like myself call disordered loves. There is such a thing as villainy;
there are wicked individuals. But inner perversion cannot capture (not
straightforwardly, in any case) the whole scope of evil; there is a
second, sociopolitical dimension as well. As Hannah Arendt suggested,
individuals can do great evil and not necessarily be great villains
themselves. One lesson of the Third Reich was that humans can do
horrific things not simply out of a million individual spasms of
viciousness but out of a "banal" obedience to the norms of their
society--none of which exculpates, much less forgives, the
perpetrators, but simply sets the real nature of their flaws in
perspicuous light for us.[5]^3 We need a way of understanding evil's
reality when it doesn't tempt us, but "goes without saying" as the
social atmosphere we breathe. Evil does not occur in a vacuum; there
must be both a social context and an individual wicked-doer. A useful
concept of evil should capture both these psychological or "vertical"
and sociopolitical or "horizontal" dimensions of wickedness, if it is
to attempt to encompass the multitudinous phenomena understood to be
evil.
In addition to, and intricately related to, the psychological
and sociopolitical dimensions of evil, an operationalized concept of
evil must acknowledge evil as both internal and external to those who
use the word: the evil or temptation to evil within ourselves and the
evil with which we are confronted in others. We need a way of
understanding evil as individuals tempted towards wickedness, who must
acknowledge that temptation and refuse it; we also need a way of
understanding the evil which confronts us when other individuals do
horrifying things to which we must respond. It is not enough to speak
of evil as something outside of ourselves, we also need to acknowledge
our internal temptations to it. Likewise it is not enough to talk
about a singular "heart of darkness" on the one hand, or a demonic
perversion of the individual's basically good primitive desires by a
civilization's repressive perversities on the other; at least on the
surface level of explanation, we need both.
Should We Operationalize "Evil"?
Even though we noted the tasks that "evil" must perform, some
critics will not want us to use the term "evil" at all. And they have
their reasons, all rooted back, though in very different ways, to
Nietzsche's challenge to get "beyond good and evil" by more fully
inhabiting our natures (though it is part of those natures, on
Nietzsche's picture, to be in some sense "supra-natural," involved in
the self-overcoming of one's "natural" constraints). They see the
language of evil as a fundamentally moralistic language, one fostering
an essentially distanciated form of basically condemnatory judgment.
While they reveal some broader cultural tensions about the language of
evil, these criticisms are expressed and made plausible by flawed
assumptions about the nature of human moral agency, assumptions which
I will try to flush into the open and critique.
Some critics, looking at representations of evil in the cultural
imagination, argue that we have too tightly tied together evil and
otherness, so that we see in "the other," the alien, only things that
we fear. Mark Edmundson, for example, in his searching Nightmare on
Main Street: Angels, Sadomasochism, and the Culture of Gothic, argues
that our culture oscillates between a glib optimism of "facile
transcendence" and a frightened, pessimistic "gothic" foreboding.[6]^4
Edmundson thinks we should demystify our fear of others by defusing
their connections with the idea of evil and toss that idea into
history's dustbin of discarded words. We are much better off with a
more mundane vocabulary of social ills, one without any sense of
demonic power or presence in our lives. Were we to do this, we'd see
our problems for what they are--not insurmountable, but simply
requiring a lot of effort to overcome. We could, in the end, manage to
escape the revenge tragedy that is history, the endless cycle of
mourning and retribution, and be born fully into the present,
unconstrained by our pasts.[7]^5
Edmundson's worry is that we have so totally identified evil and
otherness that all externality, all that is strange, is evil to us.
But this position replicates in its own proposal the very activity it
aims to condemn: it seeks to "get over" the gothic fear of the outside
by putting this fear outside; it intends to overcome our externalizing
reaction by externalizing it. This is not so much a solution to the
problem as a further symptom of it. Rather than indulging in the thing
we are disparaging, it seems the wiser course to begin to resist it;
and we can do that not by expelling the language of evil from our
consciousness, but rather by more fully appropriating it, and
internalizing it, seeing its presence in our lives, fully
acknowledging, and not being terrified by, our capacity to do evil. In
other words, because we must accept Edmundson's acute diagnosis of our
problems, we should refuse his odd prescription. Unless we do so, we
will fall ever deeper into a "gothic" attitude towards evil--just
because the experience of evil, however rare it is for most of us,
remains stubbornly irreducible, in its phenomenological quiddity, to
anything but itself.
Edmundson errs in thinking that the problem is that we've gotten
only partially free from evil's grip and that we must struggle to get
completely free of it. Against Edmundson's account I would place Karen
Halttunen's Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic
Imagination. Halttunen provides a genealogy of the present "gothic"
morality that Edmundson identifies; but on her account, the root cause
of our gothic indigestion of the concept of evil lies not in "evilling
others," in identifying others as evil, but rather in "othering evil,"
in making it so totally foreign to our understanding of human nature.
She writes:
Modern Gothic horror was the characteristic response to evil in a
culture that provided no systematic intellectual explanation for
the problem. The Gothic view of evil at work in the cult of horror
was not an irrational reaction against an excess of Enlightenment
rationalism, but an indispensable corollary to it, which ultimately
served to protect the liberal view of human nature. The prevailing
concept of human nature as basically good, free, and self-governed
in the light of an innate moral sense, was protected from the
potential threat of major transgressions by the imaginative
creation of a monstrous moral alien, separated from the rest of
humankind by an impassable gulf.[8]^6
The othering of evil was not just an intellectual problem, but
was reflected in our institutions (such as the legal system and the
medical establishment) through the procedures they developed, largely
in the nineteenth century, to adjudicate their power, in which
criminals and those deemed mentally unfit were sent away, unseen and
outside the bounds of "rational" society.[9]^7
One way to resist both of these tendencies--to deem all others
evil and to deem evil as totally other and foreign--is more adequately
to digest and internalize the concept of evil through something like
the concept of sin. Reinhold Niebuhr captured the real pathos of our
situation when he pointed out that moderns err most basically by
ignoring this concept and so misrepresenting to themselves human
nature: "Both the majesty and the tragedy of human life exceed the
dimension within which modern culture seeks to comprehend human
existence."[10]^8
But in affirming this, we come face to face with a second set of
concerns, most lucidly voiced today by the philosopher Richard Rorty.
Rorty thinks requests like the one I am making, for a further
internalization of the concept of evil through the language of sin,
can actually end up crippling our ability to act. For Rorty, the
language of evil and sin is not primarily dangerous because it is
superstitious, but because it is disabling and morally paralyzing.
This is because the language of sin, as he understands it, is a
permanent stain on the soul of the offender: it suggests "that the
commission of certain acts ...is incompatible with further
self-respect."[11]^9 This makes the language socially as well as
psychologically inhibiting, and inhibiting of just the sort of
open-ended experimental attitude to life that Rorty thinks we good
pragmatists ought to have. To have to think that our experiments with
life may appear unforgivably morally horrifying from their other end,
so to speak, is already, for Rorty, to stifle the very sources of
moral energy that might help us move beyond the crimes and injustices
of the past and present. But that is what we condemn ourselves to do,
he thinks, if we permit the language of evil any real purchase on our
lives. We should instead think of evil as merely a failure of
imagination, an inability to reach as far as one hopes to reach. In
this picture, tragedy is possible, but it is hard to see just what
tragedy means, apart from a provisional break-down in the
system.[12]^10 According to Rorty, we ought studiously to avoid giving
evil anything approaching such a dramatic significance, for that can
only cause us to fear and distract us from the important world-and
self-building tasks at hand.
Well, it is true, and importantly so, that we have, at times, as
a culture and as individuals, approached the moral life with the wrong
sorts of moralistic questions, asking "how can I avoid blame in this
situation?" rather than "what is the most fruitful thing to do here?"
It is surely the case that such moralistic questions have paralyzed us
at points, and that the language of sin and evil is implicated in
these failures of nerve. But the misuse of language is not necessarily
a devastating condemnation of its proper use. And, properly used, the
language of sin and evil gives us resources Rorty's account notably
lacks.
Patricia Greenspan's excellent book Practical Guilt shows the
manifold and sophisticated ways in which something like a concept of
guilt can operate to stabilize or pin down our moral framework,
alongside (I would add) other concepts like regret, and possibly
remorse.[13]^11 Similar things can be said about sin. "Sin" helps us
resist the sort of smug self-righteousness that Rorty's work does
little to defuse (and indeed, I think, does much to promote). This
self-righteousness is in fact the idol we must keep free of moral
stain, because it suggests that we are, or ought to aim to be, morally
pure.[14]^12 Sin disputes this prescription vigorously: in its terms,
no one is righteous. But sin is not cynicism. It does not excuse
guilt, it only allows our moral energies not to be dispersed in a
wrong-headed quest for moral purity. It is enabling, not enervating;
to feel sinful is already not to despair, it is only to know that
one's hands are always already dirty, and what water we have to wash
them in is just as muddy. Thus, the language of sin can be profoundly
empowering in both our private lives and our public ones. Furthermore,
the very vagueness that renders it susceptible to misuse works to its
advantage in the unboundedness of its applicable range. It allows us
to understand and to act in a way more flexible, because more
ambiguous, than can any more local, "scientific" discourses, such as
biology or psycho-pharmacology. Indeed those languages (or, in Rorty's
helpful term, "vocabularies") are not really rivals of the language of
sin but rather of sin's more fine-grained sub-categories--that is, for
particular sorts of sins.
But it is in our self-understanding that the language of evil
has the most to teach us, because it suggests something about the
nature of our agency that we must heed. It suggests that we be very
mindful of what we do, that we be deliberate in our actions, because
we have a very important role to play in the sort of world we inhabit.
Too often we picture ourselves either wholly as ex nihilo choosers,
ontological shoppers with no real past to our actions and no permanent
affect on the future (our shopping is always a useless passion, a form
of existentialist nihilistic consumerism, Jean-Paul Sartre at the
Wal-Mart); or we picture ourselves as medicalized patients determined
by our pasts and slaves to our genes (as Jessica Rabbit says in Who
Framed Roger Rabbit?, "I'm not bad; I'm just drawn that way"), so
that, as Jean Bethke Elshtain has said, we don't believe in sins but
in syndromes. This effort to so basically de-moralize us, to
re-conceive the human "as a component with a stipulated function"
threatens to deprive humans of their inviolability, a move with
chilling consequences; as Andrew Delbanco puts it:
If it [i.e., the human] fails to perform properly, it is subject to
repair or disposal; but there is no real sense of blame
involved--no more than with a ball bearing or a hose that has gone
bad. We think in terms of adjusting the faulty part or, if it is
too far gone, of putting it away.[15]^13
But thinking about us as agents who have morally weighty choices
is, in this setting, a well-nigh revolutionary idea. It is a form of
respect, both for ourselves and others. So in a way the question of
whether we will operationalize the concept of evil is a question about
whether we want to keep thinking of ourselves, and our neighbors, as
worthy of that respect.
Conclusion
In thinking about operationalizing evil, we face less a problem
than a choice. We must choose whether or not we wish to affirm our
received view of the moral character of human existence, particularly
when we realize that it is premised upon a wager, the wager that we
are genuinely what we think we are: in some measure free, responsible
agents, capable of harming ourselves disastrously and doing so not out
of medical causality but just because we choose to do so.[16]^14 The
language of freedom and the language of evil are inextricably
intertwined in this way. Today, we fear that our agency is not what
this picture suggests. And this picture can be easily misperceived as
overly optimistic, even naive. I wouldn't want too thoroughly to
silence those fears; if we accept the wager on the usefulness of the
language of evil, we must remember that it is a wager, and cannot be
irrefutably proved to be true. This position is predicated on the
empirically refutable idea that human action can at times find no
determinant causal antecedents, and on the philosophically
controversial idea that this sort of indeterminism is of the essence
of human freedom. And these predications are invariably open to doubt.
It may be the case that this picture of freedom may need to go,
or that we ought actually to wish it gone. And it may be the case that
our culture's current tectonic drift away from an operationalized
language of evil is part of a larger transformation of our
self-understanding, which may have larger historical causes. Our
increasing incomprehension of evil may be due to our increasing
domesticity, our (happily) increasing willingness rather "to negotiate
differences than to take up arms to settle them,"[17]^15 so that our
domestication and increasing moral aphasia concerning "evil" go
hand-in-hand. But not everyone is becoming so domesticated, and I
strongly doubt that even total domesticity will warrant us jettisoning
this language entirely. Or it may be the case that our culture has
decided to refuse to live with evil and pain, has decided to deny
their presence in our lives and to seek to extirpate them entirely.
That seems unwise to me; we will always have suffering, and while we
should not stop seeking to reduce its reality and combat it, we have
no warrant to cease thinking about it because such thinking scares or
depresses us.
To be human--at least in any way which seems relevantly
continuous with our current humanity--is to be creatures for whom the
language of evil, or some functional equivalent thereof, must remain
viable. There are many thinkers today who wish to transform us into
something new, creatures who do not have the concept of evil available
to them; and the picture such thinkers paint, of agents and indeed of
a world without "evil," is by no means a wholly unattractive one. But
it is, I think, unreachable; and its attractions are outweighed by the
moral costs attendant upon it. The solution to our current
perplexities lies not in further weakening the grip of the concept of
"evil" upon us, but in the direction of improving our understanding
and use of it. For only by having a viable concept of evil can we hope
to make sense of the idea of goodness.
________________________
[18]^1 Susan Sontag, The New York Times Magazine (Sunday, May 9,
1999). ] [19]^2 Andrew Delbanco, The Death of Satan: How Americans
Have Lost the Sense of Evil (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
1995) 3. ] [20]^3 See Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report
on the Banality of Evil (New York: Viking, 1965). It is important to
note that, contrary to popular belief, Arendt's concept of "banality"
does not entail that anybody in Eichmann's position would have done
what he did; he was not ordinary, but "banal," and there is a
difference. Furthermore, we must not let the banality thesis blind us
to the possibility that sometimes genocide can involve the willful
violence of many thousands of individuals; see Philip Gourevich's We
Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With our Families:
Stories from Rwanda (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998). ]
[21]^4 Even critical theorists are not immune to this; according to
Edmundson, they "invite us to be afraid, but not, in general, to fight
back." See his Nightmare on Main Street: Angels, Sadomasochism, and
the Culture of Gothic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997)
62. ] [22]^5 See Edmundson, Nightmare on Main Street, 150-160, on the
outline of this liberatory program. ] [23]^6 Karen Halttunen, Murder
Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1998) 59; cf. 56, 239. ] [24]^7
Halttunen, Murder Most Foul, 240: "The Gothic narrative of the crime
of murder played a primary role in shaping the modern response to
criminal transgression, both mandating the social quarantining of
criminals in penitentiaries and mental hospitals, and reinforcing the
radical otherness of the criminal deviant on which that quarantining
rested." ] [25]^8 Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destiny of Man,
Volume I: Human Nature (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1941) 122.
] [26]^9 Richard Rorty, Achieving our Country: Leftist Thought in
Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1998) 32, 33. Rorty thinks the language of sin is anathema to "the
secular, antiauthoritarian vocabulary of shared social hope." ]
[27]^10 See Rorty, Achieving Our Country, 33. Rorty's theodicy of the
Gulag seems to me far too weak and consoling; he suggests that we come
to see such moral atrocities as part of a narrative "in which we
leftists, often with the best intentions, tricked ourselves, fooled
ourselves, outsmarted ourselves, yet gained a lot of useful
experience" (Truth and Progress [New York: Cambridge University Press,
1998] 241). Which means, after the Holocaust, that what we should do
is "pick ourselves up and try again" (175)! The idea that the basic
flaw is really a failure of moral energy is almost breathtaking in its
naiveté. ] [28]^11 Patricia Greenspan, Practical Guilt: Moral
Dilemmas, Emotions, and Social Norms (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1995). ] [29]^12 Indeed, perhaps the concept of sin can be
therapeutically useful, to illuminate the full complexity of
psychosis; on this, see A. A. Howespian's "Sin and Psychosis," 264-281
in Limning the Psyche: Explorations in Christian Psychology, ed.
Robert C. Roberts and Mark R. Talbot (Grand Rapids: William B.
Eerdmans, 1997). See also A. O. Rorty, "The Social and Political
Sources of Akrasia," in Ethics 107.4 (July 1997): 644-657. ] [30]^13
Delbanco, The Death of Satan, 12. ] [31]^14 My argument here is deeply
indebted to Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1989). ] [32]^15 Halttunen, Murder Most
Foul, 9. ]
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