This essay was originally published on Splice Today.
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Do we really need a book defining evil? Most people, it seems, know evil well enough when they see it. Murder is evil. Torture is evil. Lying is evil and, as a direct consequence, politicians are evil. There are various caveats — some would argue that it’s not evil to murder an enemy combatant in wartime; others that waterboarding is not torture; still others that waterboarding Mark Thiessen is not torture; and still others that lying to your child about who delivered that Christmas present is not morally indecent.
The quibbles are important, but they don’t undermine the sense that we understand what evil is. Rather, they confirm that we do understand; these discussions about what is and is not an evil act are ones everyone can engage in; they’re not based in abstruse systems of knowledge like theoretical physics or sports talk radio. On the contrary, understanding evil is common sense — and one could even argue, with Kant, that it is what common sense is for. The moral law is the last thing we need to have explained to us; it’s what we know first, not what we circuitously arrive at. As Chesterton explains:
Reason and justice grip the remotest and the loneliest star. Look at those stars. Don’t they look as if they were single diamonds and sapphires? Well, you can imagine any mad botany or geology you please. Think of forests of adamant with leaves of brilliants. Think the moon is a blue moon, a single elephantine sapphire. But don’t fancy that all that frantic astronomy would make the smallest difference to the reason and justice of conduct. On plains of opal, under cliffs cut out of pearl, you would still find a notice-board, ‘Thou shalt not steal.’
Being a Marxist, Terry Eagleton would I assume agree with Chesterton, since Marx’s whole philosophy is based on moral revulsion occasioned by theft. No surprise then that Eagleton’s book On Evil begins with the argument that, “there are indeed evil acts and evil individuals.” Eagleton contrasts this viewpoint with that of “softhearted liberals,” who can’t bare to condemn anyone. He also contrasts it with the view of some “tough-minded Marxists”, who, he says, see moral questions as a “distraction from history and politics”, and therefore fail to understand that moral thought is part of political thought. Marx’s moral insight that capitalists are stealing from their workers is the basis of his politics; the identification of an individual evil is what provokes the desire for sweeping systemic change.
Or at least, that’s the argument you’d think a Marxist would make if he wanted to demonstrate that evil existed. Eagleton never quite goes there, though — perhaps because he’s more like those softhearted liberals and tough-minded Marxists than he wants to admit. For while he does argue that evil exists, most of the book is given over to showing that it is “rare.” For Eagleton, garden variety murder, rape, and pillage is not actually evil, but just what he calls “plain wickedness.” The difference is in motivation; plain wickedness is inspired by average everyday human emotions — greed, concupiscence, revenge. Actual evil, on the other hand, is inspired by nothing — by a pure desire for bad, a pure hatred of the good. If Dr. Doom attacks the Fantastic Four with a death ray because he wants to rule the world, that’s wickedness; if he does it because he just doesn’t like them, that’s evil. Or, to bring it down to a less fanciful level, to stick a pin on your mother’s chair in order to see her jump is evil; to shoot her in the fact to steal her pocketbook is just plain wickedness.
From a common sense perspective, there is a technical word for this distinction. That word is “fucking stupid.” Surely, Dr. Doom and his death ray are evil whether he acts out of super-hubris or super-dyspepsia, while shooting your mother in the face is evil even if you really need the money. And in fact, Eagleton himself seems to be aware that his evil/wickedness distinction leads him perilously close to nonsense. At least, he engages in a fair amount of backing and filling, lamely insisting that just because something is “evil” doesn’t mean that it’s worse than something which is simply “wicked.” Stalin and Mao murdered for an end, but that, as Eagleton acknowledges, makes little difference to their victims, who are still every bit as dead as if they’d been killed by Hitler.
Unsurprisingly for a Marxist, Eagleton is willing to grant the evilness of Hitler and even the evilness of fascists in general. The Holocaust, Eagleton argues, was absolutely pointless, “an orgy of extermination purely for the hell of it,” and therefore was purely evil.
This is a fairly standard way to distinguish the Holocaust from other competing genocides. And I have to say, I find the whole argument both ridiculous and borderline offensive. Despite Eagleton’s rather nervous caveats, it’s hard not to see this as an effort to rank horrors — “yes, well, you Cambodians suffered…but at least you didn’t suffer for no reason.” The truth is that the Nazi’s did have a reason for what they did — they thought Jews were subhuman and dangerous and deserved to die. Admittedly, it’s a bad reason — but, you now, there simply isn’t any good reason to deliberately kill millions of civilians. Which is why, if there’s a hell, Harry Truman is probably roasting away down there with Hitler and Pol Pot.
As Eagleton himself points out, almost no one engages in “wickedness for wickedness’s sake.” Kant, Eagleton says, didn’t even believe that such “radical” evil was possible. The only example of such unmotivated unpleasantness that Eagleton is really able to come up with is Shakespeare’s Iago. But, of course, Iago isn’t real. He is, instead, a caricature — a usurper portrayed with resolute lack of sympathy by a confirmed apologist for hierarchy. Shakespeare refuses to go into Iago’s hatred of his commanding officer for the same reason that George W. Bush avoided talking about Osama bin Laden’s motivations. You don’t air your enemy’s critique if you can help it.
Eagleton is usually very sensitive to ideology in literature, so the fact that he doesn’t mention Shakespeare’s (clear, oft-discussed, clearly relevant) royalist politics seems telling. Because, rather uncharacteristically, Eagleton’s project in this book is actually to get outside of ideology — to find a moral place untouched by politics and motivation. Iago’s pure, unmotivated, evil, serves as a contrast with the motivated wickedness of others — specifically, as it happens, with the wickedness of Osama bin Laden. Pure evil is rare and not very important — “not something we should lose too much sleep over,” as Eagleton says. But the accusation of pure evil is common, and that, Eagleton believes is what we really need to guard against.
The evil cannot be persuaded out of their destructive behaviour because there is no rationality behind what they do…. By contrast, it is theoretically possible to argue with those who use unscrupulous means to achieve rational or even admirable ends….To think otherwise is to imagine that Islamic terrorists, rather than being viciously wrong-headed, have no heads on their shoulders at all…. This is an irrational prejudice to rival their own, and one which can only make the situation worse.
I happen to agree with that — and also with Eagleton’s perceptive point that “you can condemn those who blow up little children in the name of Allah without assuming that there is no explanation for their outrageous behaviour.” But I don’t see why condemning them should stop short of saying, “blowing up little children — that’s evil.”
Eagleton’s objection to the use of “evil” to describe Islamic fundamentalists or Mao or bank robbers seems, in the end, more pragmatic than theological. The word evil, he says “is generally a way of bringing argument to an end, like a fist to the solar plexus.” Eagleton, for reasons which aren’t entirely clear (his Catholic upbringing? his own common sense?) doesn’t want to chuck the word entirely, but he does want to bracket it off. Evil does have “an intimate relation with everyday life,” he argues, but when it comes to defining what that relation is, he more or less punts, offering a laundry list in place of an actual mechanism. Envy, he says, is kind of like evil, schadenfreude is kind of like evil, Freud’s death drive is kind of like evil, and, hey, by the way, Adolf Eichmann looked like a bank clerk. Evil…it has something to do with us. But not much. Can we talk about something else please?
Such intellectual shilly-shallying is neither convincing nor particularly pleasant to watch. But I think there are moral as well as aesthetic objections to Eagleton’s project. As noted above, Eagleton argues that evil connects personal and political issues. It does more than that, though — it connects the personal, the political, and the theological. The reason evil is a conversation stopper, the reason it makes godless liberals and communists unhappy, is precisely because it’s about God. The difference between evil and plain wickedness is not that one is intended and the other is not. The difference is that one is condemned by the deity. Evil is not just bad; it’s sinful.
Sin is about the relationship, not between man and man, but between man and God. Evil, then, suggests an offense against the divine; it’s a transcendent crime. As such, evil is not healable, or even really meliorable, by non-transcendent means. This is why it makes materialist Marxists who want to transform the world nervous.
But it’s also why it’s an important concept to grapple with for Marxists, and for everyone . Because if evil is about God, there are some important connotations. First, since evil is a sin against God, it’s not really something that human beings should be running around accusing each other of. It’s wrong to point to Osama Bin Laden or Hitler or Harry Truman and say, “he is evil” just as it was wrong for Job’s comforters to dismiss Job as a sinner who deserved his fate. As critic Bert Stabler put it in his commentary on the Job story, “no matter what shit the world serves us, we are at least ultimately immune from the judgment of our neighbors.” People can and should make moral choices and punish wrongdoing in this world, and they can even point out that, from our provisional, limited view, certain actions seem to have the stench of brimstone about them. But it’s not up to you or me to condemn our fellow sinners to hell.
In fact, there’s only one person in the whole wide world who you can know for certain is evil. That person is not Hitler, or Iago, or even Marc Thiessen. It’s you — or, rather, for me, it’s me. Evil isn’t rare. It’s speaking to you now. Greed, desire, hate, revenge — those aren’t separate from evil. They’re its familiar faces.
In C.S. Lewis’ Prerelandra, the hero, Ransom, is stranded at night on an island on another planet with the devil. Satan says, “Ransom.” To which Ransom replies, “What?” “Nothing,” says the devil. And then a few minutes later, “Ransom.” This goes on and on — “Ransom.” What?” “Nothing” — until Ransom finally manages to train himself not to reply.
On the one hand, Ransom’s small triumph here is just his. On the other, though, it’s part and parcel of his effort to beat the devil and save the planet. He has to learn to reject the evil sitting beside him if he is to find the strength to confront the evil in the world. Eagleton seems to believe that by semantically separating evil from regular experience we will make the wickedness around us easier to manage. To me, though, this seems misguided. If you’re going to deal with evil, it seems like you should call it by its name. It will certainly call you by yours.
Noah, you didn’t once mention the book’s title.
In theology, the problem of evil is vaster than evil of human agency (which is explained by free will). It concerns the enormous amount of suffering inherent to the world; the child with terminal cancer, for instance. Leibniz addressed this in his Theodicy, but not very convincingly.
Anyway, it’s another reason, perhaps, to shun the word evil. Torture is an evil, the bubonic plague is an evil.
Noah,
You begin your review by dismissing the need for a book defining evil, which colors your review at the start. You also seem dismissive of any fine-parsing of the concept of evil, so naturally Eagleton’s distinctions are going to appear inadequate. I notice you mention Eagleton’s Marxism several times in your review, but Eagleton has an equally strong interest in theology, and that seems to drive his interest in this topic. What is interesting about Eagleton is his reading of Catholicism and Marxism as complementary projects. This is an intriguing review, however; it made me want to learn more about the book.
Alex…whoops! The book is called “On Evil”. Guess I should put that in there….
I think evil needs to be reserved for humans (at least to my mind.) Suffering is a somewhat different problem. And it can’t really be convincingly addressed through logic; you have to go to Job and faith.
Teresa, I think it’s legitimate to question whether Eagleton’s approach — basically pedantic definition — is an especially useful approach.
Eagleton’s a Marxist; it’s the ground zero for everything he does. He’s also very engaged in theology, as you say. I’m a huge fan of his, and his interest in finding the common ground between marxism and religion is fascinating. I just don’t think it worked here as well as it might.
Are you more interested in Eagleton or in evil, Noah? If the latter, you might check out Joan Copjec’s anthology Radical Evil, which has essays by Copjec herself, Zizek, Zupancic, Salecl, etc. Evil was a trendy topic for awhile.
There’s an interview with Zupancic here, which defines evil as “the place of the lack of the Image,” which folks on this blog should appreciate.
I think the definitive statement on evil, at least in Western letters, is Dante’s Inferno. It’s very heavily rooted in Thomist/Aristotelian thought, and it accounts for what Eagleton considers both wicked and evil. It even presents it with a hierarchy. From the least bad to the worst: incontinence, violence, fraud, betrayal. And Dante regards all evil (or sin) as misdirected (and ultimately perverted) love.
Does Eagleton make an attempt to grapple with Dante’s views? He’s all but certainly familiar with the work.
Caro, I feel I am Catholic enough (as it were) to appreciate both evil and eagleton, and probably other words beginning with e as well. I’ll check out that Copjec book; that sounds great.
Robert, I’m sure Eagleton has read Dante enough to have it almost memorized. He doesn’t to my recollection (this essay is a few months old) talk about the Inferno a ton though.
You’re translating the inferno aren’t you?
Robert, your mention of Dante resonates all the more as I’m re-reading all of the Sayers translation, and am set to review the recent Chwast graphic novel adaptation for February.
Indeed, Dante established a hierarchy of sin, symbolised by the animals that threatened him in the first canto of ‘Inferno’.
The sins of the leopard– the most forgiveable– were those of incontinence– greed, lust.
The sins of the lion were those of passion– rage, murder.
The sins of the she-wolf were by far the most damnable: sins of the intellect, deliberate evil, such as betrayal.
Ethically, that still broadly works for me…
Alex, I read the Madelbaum years ago. Is the Sayers better? I enjoyed the Inferno but the Paradiso, especially, I found less engaging.
Noah, I usually like Eagleton, but this idea that Hitler’s evil but Stalin’s not is just ewwwwwwwwww to me.
I spend a lot of time with social welfare resources that address such evils from a pragmatic and non-religious perspective, and they can be pretty interesting. I think there’s a strong argument to be made that ‘well meaning’ intent can worsen the harm of an act. I’ve rarely seen SW use the term evil in the literature, but I’ve known several social welfare patrons who will label some kinds of actors evil. There’s also some interesting studies coming out about those who act purely for their own pleasure (I think what Eagleton is calling evil here), and how successful and functional some of that group can be and how they’re rather widespread, but may not perform what are traditionally evil acts (rape, murder, etc) but whose effects are extremely poisonous to society. (Sociopathic bosses, particularly.)
The Hitler evil/Stalin just bad thing is probably one of Eagleton’s low points in print.
I think Christianity (and probably other religions) has/have room for evil to be done in small ways as well as big ones. Most people don’t have the wherewithal to be HItler, after all; the majority of us have to make do with petty tyrannies and cruelties.
Noah–
Yep, I’m translating it and ultimately the entire Commedia. My translations of the first 22 cantos are up at Dante’s Divine Comedy. I’m working on the 23rd canto now.
Alex–
I agree; the three beasts are a terrific allegory for the three basic categories of sin/evil. (Dante essentially sees fraud and betrayal as two aspects of the same thing.)
Vom–
I can’t comment on the Sayers, but the Mandelbaum is as good an English translation as you’re likely to find. The Divine Comedy, like Goethe’s Faust, just doesn’t translate well into English. I’ve found it’s often a real challenge to convey the meaning of the lines in a way that doesn’t come off as goofy.
As for the Paradiso, you’d probably have just as hard a time if you were fluent in Italian and could read the original. Dante even begins the second canto with a warning to readers that, more than likely, they’ll be completely lost by what follows. I think most would agree the Comedy gets harder to follow as it goes; many people don’t even make it to the end of the Purgatorio. John Ciardi, who produced the most commercially successful English translation of the Comedy, once described the Paradiso as “that Heaven no one reads to.”
Noah, three points:
1) It’s well-entrenched in theology/philosophy of religion (PoR) to call suffering “evil”, even when it’s not caused by humans. The “problem of evil” is primarily concerned with explaining the existence of suffering, not the existence of morally wrong actions
2) Many — probably the majority — of “analytic” philosophers of religion would disagree that you can’t solve the problem through reason. Granted, I think their theodicies are, one and all, full of shit, and obviously hobbled together to make themselves fell better about their theism (and, most of the time, their Christianity specifically). But it’s the mainstream position in PoR. You can read more about the problem of evil in the “analytic” tradition here — that article is unusual in being sceptical about proposed solutions. (Most PoR is written by religious partisans, for obvious reasons)
3) Contrariwise, I don’t know of many “analytic” ethicists who use the word “evil” to describe (perhaps a subset) of immoral actions. Virtue ethicists probably do, sometimes, but I think they’re full of shit, too.
And what do people think of Mark Musa’s free verse translation of the Commedia? That was the version I read, and it seemed fine to me…but that was, um, eighteen years ago.
Jones–
The Musa, Mandelbaum, John Sinclair, and Hollander-Hollander translations are all on about the same level: lucid and quite faithful, if not especially vibrant. John Ciardi’s is probably the most readable, although he takes a lot of liberties with the original text. Longfellow’s is all but impossible to read; unfortunately its public-domain status has also made it the most widely available. Robert Pinsky’s treatment of the Inferno is an interesting failure. My personal recommendation is the John Sinclair version.
Hey Jones. Yeah, I wasn’t saying, “this is what experts think.” I was saying that’s what I think.
I think suffering is a different problem than evil. And attempting to solve it through reason pretty much leaves you as one of Job’s “friends”, whom, one and all, God says are full of shit. Or at least that’s my read.
Well, the friends are wrong-headed, but I think God’s response from the whirlwind is even worse, one of the most repulsive passages in the Bible (not that there aren’t plenty of other contenders).
The editors of the Oxford Classics edition of the King James say that “For some this is the speech of a despotic tyrant: the abused and battered Job is belittled by a ranting deity incapable of facing up to the actual consequences of his own careless manipulation of Job’s life and unconscionable destruction of Job’s family.” That about sums it up for me. “Canst thou draw out leviathan with a hook”, indeed.
That said, there’s a very strong sociological pressure on professional philosophers of religion to at least pretend that their religious beliefs are based on reason, even if they’re quite obviously based on “faith”.
I definitely get where you’re coming from with Job. On the other hand…I also get what seems to be the point of Job, which is that you can’t judge God. The speech would be tyrannical if it were made by a human being, but it isn’t, which has to make a difference.
The extent to which God is humanized though makes it problematic; he’s an actual character, he speaks like a person…but the actual message of Job — that you can’t ascribe sin to tragedy, is hard to argue with, and is built on the same foundation, i.e., you can’t judge God.
Anyway…re faith. There’s a longstanding tradition of providing reasons for faith…and an equally longstanding tradition (within theology) of rejecting rational basis for theology as entirely missing the point.
O hai
Iz a smiel moar then a sigh
r do u go bed nite w no one
‘ice water run down ur chin’
don thk devle n details
but that is wear iz paradise
..^..
Robert: What’s the consensus on the HF Cary translation of Dante?
Suat–
I’d never heard of the Cary translation until you mentioned it, but after a cursory look at some passages online, I can tell why there doesn’t seem to have been a print edition published in the U.S. since the 1920s. It’s available now through Kindle and e-book editions, but I think the attraction of these are the Doré plates. The translation appears to have been the one used with Doré editions in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
As near as I can tell, Cary embroiders the text a good deal. I don’t like the pitch of it at all. The rhythms are very hyperbolic; it’s almost as if he were ringing a bell at the end of every line. Off the top of my head, I’d say his inspiration was Pope’s Iliad. I don’t think this style is appropriate to the Comedy. Dante’s approach to words is very direct and unfussy; he doesn’t filigree them like Cary does. The original sounds like a melody on a viola; Cary’s is very brass band.
It is more readable than Longfellow’s; I’ll give it that.
Robert, thanks for the assessment! The main attraction of the Cary translation (apart from its historical importance? A Google search suggests that it was admired by Keats and Ruskin) must be that it’s dirt cheap. You can get the entire Divine Comedy for a pittance and in HC to boot (I can’t read this kind of poetry online). I guess this is a case of every generation having its own version/translation of Dante (or Homer or Tolstoy etc.).
The Dover books edition of Dore’s illustrations has Longfellow’s translation (which I haven’t read and you seem to despise).
A bit more research shows that Cary’s translation dates back to 1814. It seems it was the first complete English translation, so that may explain Keats’ and Ruskin’s praise. (Longfellow’s was the first U.S. one, and it was highly praised by William Dean Howells.) One has to admire the effort, and it’s hard to quibble about quality when there’s nothing to compare it to.
The notion of a historically important translation seems almost oxymoronic to me. In publishing terms, a translation is a necessary evil; the idea is that an approximation of the work in another language is better than none at all. Of course, one does have things like my project, but I openly acknowledge that it’s a self-indulgent exercise; the purpose is do the ultimate “close reading” of the text to sate my own interest.
A professor of mine liked to say that every generation needs its own translation to accomodate changes in the idiom and stylistic taste. This appears especially true of Dante; there seems to be a fairly well-hyped new version of the Inferno or the complete Comedy every decade. Although with Dante, I think the motivation may be that the latest translator sees his or her predecessors and thinks, “Gee, I think I can do better than that.” One finds one can’t. Translators generally end up thinking all English translations of Dante suck by definition. Among other things, it’s the greatest expression of the Italian language, and it can’t be separated from that without losing a great deal.
I’d be more generous towards the Longfellow translation if it weren’t so damned ubiquitous. His effort was admirably rigorous in its way; he adhered to the tyranny-of-the-line principle of translating poetry. The major problem is that his choice of words is so often abstruse and pretentious. I think the only reason one sees it around is that publishers of public-domain books can be pretty mercenary. They don’t care about readability; they just recognize that Longfellow’s name is a selling point other public-domain translations don’t have.
Wow, that’s great info Robert, thanks! Years ago, I got to hear Mandelbaum speak about translating (my undergrad used both his Virgil and his Dante). He was very passionate about the difficulties and the beauty of both works; I remember being struck by the lovely phrasing he used even in his talk. (Also that he dashed out for a smoke as soon as he was done.)
I don’t read Italian, but I do read Latin, and I found his Virgil pretty good, compared to the others, which all had less…mmm, heart? Beauty? Clarity? Poetry is so complicated anyway, it’s got to be a partially doomed project to put something into another language. I admire you for doing what you can. TBH, if I’m dead set on reading a work of poetry and I can’t read the original language, I’ll read two or three versions side by side. One for sound, one for clarity, and just kind of try to get to the feel. (Yes, I am an obsessive weird reader, what can I say.) Maybe I should try that with Dante next time I give it a go.
Robert, VOM– the Sayers translation (yes, by Dorothy ‘Lord Peter Wimsey’ Sayers) is not widely esteemed; it’s widely available because it’s the version published by Penguin Books. I enjoy it because she preserves the ‘terza rima’ scheme rigorously (well, slipping in the odd slant-rhyme), and because she varies well the tone of voice — in Dante this can range from the ectastic to the horrific to the comic and beyond.
My Italian is good enough for modern literature, so probably the best way for me to approach Dante would be a bi-lingual edition with a modern, literal crib rendering, preferably in French; I find I best enjoy translations from Spanish or Italian in French, and those from German or Danish or Swedish in English. Makes a sort of sense, if you think about it!