What is Evil?
Review of Terry Eagleton's book On Evil
My wife and I once ran a course at Woodbrooke on responding to evil, in which painful experiences were lovingly shared. But three participants were dissatisfied. They wanted metaphysics: is evil real, or is it only a shadow, the absence of good? What is its power? Can it control us against our will? Terry Eagleton raises such questions, but never forgets that he is writing about real destruction and real suffering. Evil hurts.
His criticism of muddled thinking is incisive. If we say some people are naturally evil and cannot help it, then they are innocent – because they have no choice. (If a top security advisor was right in calling terrorists psychopaths, then ‘they should be nursed with tender care in psychiatric hospitals’ rather than handed over to torturers.) Alternatively, if social conditioning makes people evil, doesn’t that too remove responsibility? Terry Eagleton replies that people with damaging backgrounds can make moral choices. ‘It is hard to see the [German] SS as merely unfortunate… You can condemn those who blow up little children in the name of Allah without assuming there is no explanation for their outrageous behaviour.’ To understand is not always to forgive. ‘Historians [do not] seek to explain the rise of Hitler in order to make him more alluring.’ He attacks the idea that if we could see the whole pattern, we would find an acceptable place for evil in it. When philosophers say God is justified in allowing Hiroshima, Belsen, the Lisbon earthquake and the Black Death so that we can live in a real world, not a toy one, he comments, ‘It is hard to believe that anyone but an Oxbridge don could pen such a sentiment.’ He searches for an adequate definition of evil. He follows WH Auden in his essay on Iago in suggesting a dividing line between it and behaviour that is wrong but comprehensible, like a revenge killing. Iago plots compulsively with no adequate motive, choosing evil for its own sake (like the Moors murderers). And the Nazi regime created a massive government and industrial apparatus for a genocide that was, ultimately, senseless. He concludes that its rationale, unlike wickedness, is to attack goodness itself, and indeed everything that exists including the evildoer’s own self. Evil has a dreadful and self‑destructive purism that hates the messy beauty of life. It relates to Freud’s concept of a ‘death instinct’.
Pure goodness is as unusual as pure evil (we don’t really believe in Oliver Twist). This is because we are inescapably born into ‘a pre‑existent web of needs, interests and desires – an inextricable tangle to which the mere brute fact of our existence will contribute, and which will shape our identity to the core’. Original sin, in fact. ‘Our only hope is learning to fail better.’ He challenges the idea of something heroic or sublime in evil, in contrast to the ‘mediocrity’ of ordinary decent lies. It is at heart monotonous and banal – and ‘extremely rare’.
The book is more like a witty fireside conversation than a textbook, with tangential discussions on alcoholism, the Marxist good society, mediaeval theology and much besides. The instances of evil are mostly drawn from literature: William Golding, Graham Greene, Thomas Mann, Dostoyevsky and the darker works of Shakespeare. The advantage is our shared knowledge of these. But compared to factual examples, this interposes a double filter of interpretation: first the author’s understanding of the characters, and then Eagleton’s critique. But our interest is less in his conclusions than the enjoyable journey to reach them – and we can disagree as often as we want.
On Evil by Terry Eagleton. Yale University Press. ISBN: 978‑0300‑15106‑0. £18.99.
