We're not quite sure what to make of evil. Such a weighty word, a seemingly obvious word, turbocharged with terror and booby-trapped with religious implications. We use it to describe unspeakable horror and then turn around and mock the very concept of it, packing on layers of irony: Evil. Wink-wink. Insert bloodcurdling laugh here.
There are those, such as essayist Andrew Delbanco, who argue that we, as Americans, have lost our belief in evil. We're too postmodern for it, too hip, too knowing. Too secular. Among those of us who don't subscribe to a particular set of religious beliefs, this may very well have been true.
Until Sept. 11, that is -- and the war in which we now find ourselves after the bombing of Afghanistan.
A lot of us seem to have resurrected evil, or at least the idea of it, whipping it around like the flags we now wave, tossing it back into our everyday speech. And this time we're not kidding.
If only we could agree on what it is.
Our president has become fond of the word, trotting it out like a set of huge shark jaws, reassuring us with grand promises: "Our responsibility to history is already clear -- to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil." Were it only so simple. Because glaring at us from across the other side of the divide is Osama bin Laden, declaring that "we must use punishment to keep your evil away from Muslims, Muslim women and children."
Them vs. Us. Good vs. Evil. There's nothing like witnessing a national horror to reduce us to our most primal instincts. But what is evil, exactly? The boogeyman? Satan? Our own worst inclinations? Is there such a thing as pure, absolute evil, a definition that we can all agree upon? Or is evil found in the eye of the beholder?
The dictionary isn't much help, neatly sidestepping the question by declaring that evil is "the quality of being morally bad or wrong; wickedness." But in a culture where, to paraphrase the Gloved One, bad is quite literally good, how can we find consensus on wicked? We'd like to think we know it when we see it. And no question about it: Watching the wholesale murder of 6,000 people on one crystalline day is about as bad as it gets.
Or at least we hope so.
So these days, some of us are asking ourselves difficult questions. It will be interesting to see how we reconcile our postmodern cynicism with this newfound awareness of evil. If, indeed, it does exist as a force outside ourselves.
After all, until recently, it was a word that those who fancied themselves sophisticates used ironically; it was too old-fashioned a concept to be taken seriously. Plug "evil" into the Google search engine, and the first item to pop up is the Web site "Bert Is Evil." Bert as in "Sesame Street's" Ernie and Bert. Bert in doctored-up photos "documenting" his inherent "evilness," from cavorting with Hitler to corrupting Ernie to whispering in the ear of O.J. Simpson.
Then there's "So You've Decided to Be Evil," an interactive site where you can generate your own evil plan, one that might include opening the Seven Seals or destroying monuments like the Eiffel Tower -- or the World Trade Center, as it happens.
The Onion, an online satirical newspaper, provides some insight into how we may reconcile our cultural cynicism with this newfound sense of moral outrage. In a recent edition, Sept. 11's hijacking terrorists are shocked to find themselves, not in paradise, but in Hell.
"According to Hell sources, the 19 eternally damned terrorists have struggled to understand why they have been subjected to soul-withering, infernal torture ever since their Sept. 11 arrival . . ."
To others, this sort of playfulness with sacred truths, and this sort of irony -- our whole way of life, actually -- is evil. If, for example, you are an extremist like bin Laden, and view the Western capitalist world as an evil force seducing good Muslims into a life of sin, then it stands to reason that you might want to stop it. And if you see the United States as supplying equally evil dictators with the tools to oppress good people, and that you are doing the work of Allah, then you'll really want to stop it. By any means necessary.
Says the University of Buffalo's Phillips Stevens, a cultural anthropologist specializing in religion and demonology: "If we can acknowledge the possibility that there were these kinds of convictions motivating the attacks, maybe we can suggest that evil is a cultural construction, not a moral absolute. And that's a disturbing thought."
Also disturbing is what's called "the problem of evil," a philosophic puzzle long bedeviling theologians in the Judeo-Christian tradition: Let's assume that God exists. God as in all-knowing. All-powerful. All good. How, then, could He -- or She -- have created evil?
Which brings us to a point of further confusion. Pose that question to a priest who has presided over nearly 60 exorcisms in the past five years, and this is what he will say:
"Evil doesn't exist."
This comes not only from Catholic doctrine but also from a man who says he has, on many an occasion, sat in the same room with the Devil, talked to him, coaxed him out of hiding and then banished him from the poor soul he'd been tormenting. According to the Rev. James LeBar, the New York Archdiocese's official exorcist, the Devil is for real, a fallen angel flitting around Earth without benefit of a body. When the Devil's around, LeBar says, he has a way of making his presence known: Things start moving around of their own accord. People levitate. Speak strange guttural languages. Spew all kinds of hate.
And usually, LeBar says, you have to invite him in.
But, evil, now that's different from Satan. Evil's not real. Evil, says LeBar, is "the absence of good," a concept that Saint Augustine explored.
"Evil exists in the actions of people, in the effects," LeBar says. "Sort of a virtual existence. Because people don't see the absence of good, they just see the stepping forward, the marching forward of the evil side of things."
Others, naturally, see things differently.
"We've got a built-in sense of the horror of evil and we react to it, even though the dominant educated elite deny it," says Jeffrey Russell, author of "The Prince of Darkness: Radical Evil and the Power of Good in History," and other works on evil. "We recognize it. And if we have any self-awareness, when we get angry, we recognize the evil impulse in ourselves.
"I don't rule out there actually being a Devil. It certainly doesn't do us a heck of a lot of good to concentrate on that. What does do us good is to try to get that spiritual awareness and wholeness that recognizes that evil exists in every person and try to deal with that. . . . It's always our choice to do good or to do evil. And most of us know the difference."
Most societies, Russell says, have had or have these basic concepts of good and evil: You don't murder, you don't rape, you don't commit incest, you don't steal.
From there, things get a little more complex.
Christians and Muslims, for example, see Hell as a place of eternal damnation; for some Jews, it's more of a holding place, a cosmic parking lot where souls wait until the end of time for the Messiah.
The Yoruba have two Heavens, one good, the other a vast desert where troubled souls are doomed to walk forever. However, Yoruba -- the West African antecedent of Voodoo, Santeria, Macumba and Candomble -- doesn't have a Devil in its pantheon, though Western missionaries mistakenly pinned that label on Elegba/Elegua, the trickster. Elegba, sometimes depicted as a skeleton wearing a top hat and a tux, is actually the god of ambivalence, the dandy standing at the crossroads between the material and spirit worlds.
Ambivalent gods are also reflected in the Hindu religion, which sees life's forces along a continuum, with good and evil coexisting on the same plane. A god, or goddess, can be both good and evil, such as Siva, who both creates and destroys, or Kali, the kindly goddess who can embrace you in one moment and then in the next, turn around and rip your heart out.
"It's a condition of the world that good and evil exist in a balance. Sometimes it swings back and forth," says David Life, co-founder of the Jivamukti Yoga Center in New York and one-time renunciate, or monk, in the Hindu tradition. He adds: "What is one person's evil is another person's good."
But then this leads to what's known among some Christians as the Manichaean heresy, which states that the universe is a constant battle between good and evil, both of them real. It also provokes accusations of moral relativism, which states that you can judge people only from their own point of view.
Not according to Chris Underation, pastor of the First Baptist Church in Hampton, N.H.: "The Bible makes it clear that evil is an absolute thing; it is not subjective. . . . The bottom line is that evil is easily distinguished by its nature -- bitter, envious, selfish. It brings disorder and other evil practices, such as feelings of hate, revenge and vengeance, which we're seeing in some of our nation today."
Indeed. One could argue that in the past, as a nation, we've strayed into the path of evil: The Middle Passage, where millions of Africans were hauled to America against their will under the most inhumane of circumstances; the annihilation of Native Americans. Then there's our convoluted relationship to those whom we deem evil: In the '80s, Reagan denounced the Soviet Union as the Evil Empire, and joined forces with Afghanis to fight it. Now, we're joining forces with the apparently reformed Russians to fight the now-evil Afghanistan-based Taliban.
Now that we're reacquainted with the notion of evil, we're not that comfortable with embracing its complexities. Freud, the secularist, grappled with notions of evil: Does evil spring up out of notions of thwarted desires? In other words, in classic pop culture serial murder fashion -- think Anthony Perkins in "Psycho" -- Mom didn't love me, so I'm going to make the whole world suffer. Or is evil an impulse that we recognize within ourselves and project onto the Other? We don't like ourselves, so we seek to kill that part of ourselves we recognize in others.
Perhaps it is as Joseph Conrad once said: "The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness."
We have no doubt that Hitler was evil: But what of those who were "just following orders" -- or those who stood and did nothing? Does evil wear a banal face, as Hannah Arendt asserted? Or is it glamorous, like the Rolling Stones singing "Sympathy for the Devil"? Is evil contagious when it lurks in groups? You look at smiling pictures of white Southerners in the '20s, partying around the hanging corpse of a black man, and you've got to wonder about evil and its power to infect.
Even trying to reduce it to the simplest of doctrines, defining, for example, evil as the willful causing of suffering upon sentient beings, you're heading into tricky territory. Think of the Jains of India who wear masks on their faces to prevent themselves from accidentally breathing in some poor, unwitting insect -- or microbe.
And then there's the question of capital punishment: If it's evil to kill, is it evil to kill someone who has killed and would kill again?
Last season, on "ER," the last episode ended with a patient having a heart attack. Dr. Mark Greene had defibrillators in his hands. The patient acknowledged that he's been on a killing spree, he's already killed a young mother. He delighted in doing it. Just before he was caught, the killer was on his way to Greene's house, where his wife and infant daughter were. Greene decided to let him die. He held the defibrillators in his hands, staring at the killer. The patient died knowing that a doctor let him die, and that no one would know that the doctor let him die.
Was that an act of evil?
Would you have done the same?
If, that is, he'd been coming for your family?
"Into each man's heart is woven both the serpent and the dove," says Alfred H. Guy Jr., director of the Hoffberger Center for Professional Ethics at the University of Baltimore. "We're both good and evil. Which one do we call upon, which one do we give exercise to? It's that choice of ours."
Maybe we'll figure it out. And maybe not.
Still, for all the frightening times in which we suddenly find ourselves living, the attack on America is not likely to signal the end of our existence. Just perhaps the way we've looked at it.
"I'm certainly not one to collapse and say, 'We're doomed, that's it, goodbye,' " says LeBar, the exorcist. "We've suffered through other great tragedies and survived. Plagues, disasters, earthquakes. We've managed to recover and I think we will recover from this, too."
