Finding Evil
May 15, 2001

by Joe Sobran

     Evil is back. It has even made the cover of NEWSWEEK 
magazine, where it is given the face of Timothy McVeigh, 
in a photographic negative with the word "EVIL" 
superimposed on it. Inside the magazine are several 
articles asking how people become evil, with the 
inevitable quotation from the philosopher Hannah Arendt 
on "the banality of evil."

     Evil seems to be particularly associated with 
"right-wing" and "reactionary" causes. NEWSWEEK gives 
considerable space not only to McVeigh, but to Hitler and 
the Nazis, with briefer mentions of Stalin, Pol Pot, and 
the Unabomber. Satan, Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, Susan 
Smith, and Tony Soprano also provoke thumbnail 
meditations.

     The Deep Mystery NEWSWEEK tackles is how seemingly 
normal people like McVeigh can do such awful things. In 
an interview with Ed Bradley of 60 MINUTES, McVeigh 
wondered why he was decorated for killing people in Iraq 
who had done him no harm. That, according to our social 
norms, wasn't EVIL. It was heroism.

     The same is true of American pilots who bomb cities, 
as long as they do so in wars liberal opinion approves. 
The flying men who destroyed Dresden, Tokyo, and 
Hiroshima aren't singled out for censure; just the 
opposite. They are honored, or at least left alone. 
American presidents aren't EVIL when they casually bomb 
foreign countries, leaving scenes every bit as devastated 
as the Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

     Doctors who perform thousands of abortions, killing 
the innocent with their own hands, don't raise the 
alarmed question: "How can any man's conscience be so 
dead?" You won't see their faces on the covers of news 
magazines. Their killing meets liberal approval, and they 
are more likely to be treated as victims than as evil-
doers. In fact the liberal media don't even describe 
abortion as "killing."

     According to liberal ideology, which masquerades as 
etiquette, it would be "reactionary" -- and therefore 
highly impolite -- to call an abortionist EVIL.

     This politically skewed definition of "EVIL" 
trivializes the real problem of evil. True evil resides 
in every human will; we are all sinners. In most of us 
evil takes the form of little corruptions -- taking 
bribes, fornicating, neglecting our duties -- because we 
lack the audacity to do the kind of evil deeds that make 
headlines. McVeigh may differ from most of us chiefly in 
having the courage of his convictions, however 
misguidedly. "Of all the deterrents to temptation," Mark 
Twain observed, "the surest is cowardice."

     Christians are called to confront evil by 
introspection. St. Paul called himself the "chief of 
sinners" -- not because he did anything to rival the 
spectacular misdeeds of, say, the Emperor Nero, but for a 
deeper reason. He judged himself not against other men in 
the light of public opinion, but against the divine gaze 
into the recesses of his own heart. The saints don't 
think of themselves as saints, or as particularly better 
than other men. They are conscious of their own sins and 
their own capacity for evil.

     Nero merely had the earthly power to do with 
impunity what many others might have done in his place. 
As Nietzsche put it: "How often I have laughed at these 
weaklings who think they are virtuous because they have 
no claws!" There may be purer evil in the will of a child 
throwing a tantrum than in a bloody tyrant; but we can 
excuse or laugh at the child, because his rage is 
harmless. Yet he might annihilate the earth if he had the 
power.

     Those who believe that mankind is essentially good 
always find themselves having to account for the real 
evil of the world. And so, as the historian Herbert 
Butterfield observed, they generally wind up blaming a 
few monsters -- Hitlers and Stalins, in whom badness is 
inexplicably concentrated. It's far more realistic to 
suppose that these "monsters" are simply the culminations 
of the sins of countless lesser men who have enabled them 
to rise to positions of power.

     Blaming monsters for everything, especially if those 
monsters are our enemies, allows the rest of us to become 
morally complacent, even fanatical, believing ourselves 
virtuous merely for opposing them. We may then fail to 
see real evil in our own leaders -- and in ourselves.

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