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Evil: whats in a word?

HENRIETTA L. MOORE
1 October 2013

What does it take to get someone to go into a shopping mall with an AK47 and mow
down random strangers? A failure of those acts of imagination that connect us to people
we have never known.

Margarethe Von Trottas new film on the philosopher Hannah Arendt is out, and suddenly
the banality of evil, the phrase she made so famous, is back in current usage. The tragic
events in Nairobi last week inevitably invoked more mention of evil. After the attack on
the Westgate shopping mall in the city by Al-Shabab militants protesting Kenyas
occupation of Somalia had come to its dreadful conclusion, the President of Kenya,
Uhuru Kenyatta, declared: Kenya has stared down evil and triumphed.

We all recognize that evil is a conundrum not only for moral philosophers, but for each of
us. What turns ordinary people into brutal killers? In her reflection on Adolf Eichmanns
trial for war crimes, Arendt argued: The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so
many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they
were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal
institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more
terrifying than all the atrocities put together. Evil is thus, she argued, not the preserve of
the psychopath, but an inherent capacity at once banal and terrifying.

Does this mean then that evil is just the manifestation of some moral imperfection in all of
us, perhaps the failure or the limit of human reason? The cries of pain and anguish heard
in Nairobi last week are heart wrenching in part because of their familiarity. They are sadly
recognizable from many other atrocities, all of which - in one way or another - seem to
be the legacy of 9/11. Arendts broader argument about Eichmann and his role in the
Holocaust was that while the deeds were monstrous, the doer was in fact quite ordinary
a bureaucrat carrying out a set of tasks, not through ideological conviction but through
uncritical and unthinking obedience.

For her, Eichmanns crime was non-thinking, something quite distinct from not-thinking.
Eichmann acted consciously, but operationalized the systematic extermination of others
through accepted routine in such a fashion that moral revulsion and critical judgement
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were never brought into play. His crime was to make the crime against humanity possible,
by normalizing it, by rationalizing the unthinkable.

Arendts arguments about Eichmann have been extensively criticized, but she does force
us to think again about the contours and limits of moral responsibility under dictatorships
and repressive systems of power more generally. The logic of her position is that we
should all have responsibility for thinking outside the limits of our social and political
circumstances, or that at the very least we should avoid uncritical acceptance of values,
policies, world views, in other words, non-thinking. But is this kind of moral and political
vigilance actually possible? Many citizens of Western Europe, for example, clearly feel
themselves to be living within morally acceptable political and social systems. The
democratic imperative, the ability to change the government, is the guarantee of such
protections.

Most of us are sure that we could never be an Adolf Eichmann, but Arendts point is that
there are Eichmanns everywhere. Not and she was very clear on this point that there is
a little bit of Eichmann in all of us, that all humans have the capacity for moral failure or
non-thinking, but that human situations and societies continue to throw up Eichmanns or
at least the potential for them.

For example, we have grown used in the west to thinking in a rather lazy way that al-
Shabaab militants or the wider set of diverse groups now labeled terrorists are
ideological fanatics who are brainwashed or trained up in camps or radicalized in some
way or other. But when we do this, what exactly do we have in mind - the idea that as a
result of indoctrination they are no longer capable of making moral judgements? If this is
the case then to what degree can we hold them morally responsible for their actions?
Their acts of terror and murderous destruction involving innocent and unconnected lives
are justified by a world view and/or sets of values that for them condone their actions,
legitimized in terms of old and specious arguments about means and ends.

I am not suggesting that there are useful comparisons to be drawn here between the
systematic extermination of millions under a brutal totalitarian state system and the highly
visible, deliberately random seeming attacks of radical groups around the world on
unsuspecting civilians. But there may be some value in reflecting on the problem of non-
thinking.

We tend now to use the word evil to refer to acts of intentional malevolence committed
by human beings. This is a secular understanding of evil set firmly within the human
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grasp and there is more than a little irony in the fact that it is so often applied to the acts
of those who claim to be defending a specific understanding of different religious faiths.
Faith here is often reduced quite unnecessarily into an absolute distinction between
world views and values.

Many reports on the Westgate attack mentioned that at the outset the attackers shouted
out that Muslims should identify themselves and leave the mall. In reality, many Muslims
were among the dead and injured and many more have been the victims of al-Shabaab
bombing attacks in Somalia. So in what sense are such attacks about differences of faith?

Evil is a conundrum for us because it is both devastating in its effects and seemingly
inexplicable in its origins. What does it take emotionally, experientially, rationally,
ideologically to get someone to go into a shopping mall with an AK47 and mow down
random strangers?

I think it requires more than Arendt suggests, more than non-thinking. I think it requires a
failure of the imagination, of those specific acts of imagination that connect us to people
we have never known. We perform these acts of imagination whenever we think about
any social unit to which we have commitments beyond our immediate family. We all
believe that we belong in significant ways and have allegiances to larger groupings,
whether communities of faith or nations or regions, class groupings, fraternity groups or
football clubs.

Of course, we will know many who are members of the groups to which we belong, but
many of our strongest allegiances are to social institutions most of whose members we
will never know. The Emirates sports stadium in London holds just over 60,000, but the
number of Arsenal football club fans worldwide is reported to top 100 million and that
may be an underestimate. These allegiances make us who we are, but they also attach us
to others and make us aware of their circumstances, values and world views. They are
what allows us to recognize and value what we share with others, and to recognize them
as people like us.

The term evil is perhaps a necessary one it is a way of setting limits to cruelty and
malevolence what the philosopher Peter Dews has so aptly termed desecrations of the
human. Yet to label something evil is also to cut off all debate: perhaps it is even
evidence in its own way of a failure of the imagination.

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This is because, as Dews points out, when we label something evil we cannot easily find
the terms on which we might punish or even forgive such an act. This inevitably seems to
drive courses of action based on retaliation or even elimination. Take US drone strikes
against targets in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia as an example. Figures are speculative but
reliable reports suggest that around 4,000 people have been killed by such strikes, many
of them civilians.

These attacks come without warning, and as many commentators have noted cannot be
justified under any definition of imminent threat to the United States. Terrorist leaders
are meant to be the target, but of those killed only around 300 of those killed could be so
classified. The rest are civilians, the so-called collateral damage.

Randomly killing innocent strangers whom you do not know and who do not share your
views sounds frighteningly familiar. What term might we use for that?


About the author
Henrietta L. Moore is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge.
Her work has developed a distinctive approach to the relationship between gender,
sexuality and subjectivity and the processes we usually gloss as globalisation. Recent work
has also focused on new technologies, virtual worlds and fantasy as generators of
personal and social change. The ethical imagination is explored in depth in her most
recent book Still Life: Hopes Desires and Satisfactions (Polity Press, 2011).

Source: http://www.opendemocracy.net/transformation/henrietta-l-moore/evil-
what%E2%80%99s-in-word. Accessed on July 3, 2014