It is just incredible that we have to begin here: Evil is not a Thing*. That apparently is a mystery to the incumbent and the nimrod Republican candidate, both of whom are leading the struggle to rid the world of evil, presumably about the time we get rid of mosquitoes and c. diff. We can’t bomb evil back to the stone age, we can’t waterboard it into confessing its crimes, we can’t extirpate it like a wart. But if it’s not a thing, what is evil?

As a part of speech, evil can be a noun, but the dictionary definitions are unusual in combining an act with a judgment. So we have this definition, “morally objectionable behavior”. The judgment describes the behavior, and thus defines the word. There isn’t anything in the word or its definition that sets up grounds for the moral judgment, so we have to look elsewhere. Let’s begin by acknowledging that we use the word evil to indicate all sorts of bad things, ranging from bad weather to misbehaving kids, and for some of us, chocolate. I’ll ignore those, and look at serious uses.

The original source of moral judgment is religion. Here is the King James Version of the story of Abraham and Isaac. In Fear and Trembling, Soren Kierkegaard makes us look this story in the face. He offers several suggestions for what Abraham might have been thinking, and how Abraham and Isaac might have reacted to the command of God. How could Abraham contemplate killing his son? How could Isaac ever love his father, knowing that Abraham was willing to kill him? How could either of them love the God who demanded this killing? How could Sarah live with Abraham, knowing he was willing to sacrifice her late-born and deeply loved son?

The story doesn’t translate to today. We know of stories of people who thought God was telling them to kill their kids, and did it, like Deanna Laney.

Laney admitted bashing her three children in the heads with rocks. She said God told her to do so.
….
Files [her defense attorney] said in court that Laney believed God had told her the world was going to end and "she had to get her house in order," which included killing her children."

The dilemma she faced is a terrible one for a mother," Files told the jury. "Does she follow what she believes to be God’s will, or does she turn her back on God?"

We hear of people who deny medical treatment to their kids because God demands it. And we punish those people. We either convict them, or we get a finding that they are insane, and we commit them, as with Deanna Laney. A fascinating take on this theme is the 1991 movie, The Rapture, starring Mimi Rogers as a sinner who experiences and accepts God’s call, except that she is not crazy, the rapture is at hand, and God really wanted her to kill her child, which she did. But she is so angry that she refuses to join the Almighty in heaven, opting to stay in limbo.

Each of these stories deals with the morally objectionable act of an individual. It is the Holocaust that stands as the definition of evil for organized groups of humans. It wasn’t just that they murdered millions. The Nazis created bureaucratic structures that organized apparently decent people to commit mass murder. Their systems, driven by their rhetoric, drove ordinary people to ignore their consciences, people who in saner times wouldn’t have dreamed of such crimes. Nazi leadership was, of course, depraved, but for me, their hideously “morally objectionable” act is that they suborned the conscience of others. They removed the religious and secular constraints that form the basis of decent societies, those hard-won moral rules that form the ground of social interaction. This is evil indeed.

Thinking about these stories, and this history, is painful. It isn’t enough to skim over the words, to treat them as if they were specimens in a jar of formaldehyde. We have to do what Kierkegaard did: we have to stare into the faces of the actors and the victims, and put ourselves in both positions before we start to think about them. We cannot rely on words, we have to make ourselves experience the emotional state of Abraham and Isaac, Deanna Lacey and her children, the wardens and guards of Auschwitz, and the Jews and Gypsies who died there. That response is personal to each of us. This is what I see.

I have this general idea in my mind of how the world works, how people behave. It works pretty well, I can frequently predict the behavior of other people, imagining how they will deal with some action I or someone else might take. When it doesn’t work, I make it a point to rethink the model and tweak it or even make a major revision. How does my model work in the face of these stories? Well, it doesn’t. I want an explanation, I need an explanation, I have to have a model that works, and mine doesn’t.

Religious people can look at the story of Abraham and fill the hole in the story: Abraham had faith in his God, and acted in reliance on that faith. His faith lies at the foundation of three major world religions. That explanation was enough for the rigid Soren Kierkegaard, and it’s enough for Abraham’s children.

But all of us, certainly including the most sincere believers, have to stop in front of the Holocaust. How can religious people explain to themselves the evil done to the People of the Covenant, their own ancestors in faith? It seems to me that what some religious people do is to anthropomorphize their moral judgment, and call it Evil, a noun, a thing just as real as the dagger of Abraham and the ovens of Auschwitz. Just as Faith fills the abyss in the story of Abraham, Evil explains the murder of conscience by the Nazis.

For non-religious people there is only an aching discontinuity. It is our key to understanding that we have reached the limits of our ability to understand the world and our place in it. We don’t fill the hole; we simply accept that this is beyond understanding. We recognize that there are things we cannot know. We admit our limits. We don’t create an out or an explanation.

For both groups there is this in common. Evil is not a material thing, and the solution cannot be a material thing. For the religious, faith is the solution, but faith, whether in the Almighty or the devil, is an immaterial thing. It is an attitude towards the universe. For the rest, the solution is humble acceptance, an attitude as well.

Which leaves us where we started: how in the world do Republicans plan to attack evil? Do they plan to bomb the devil?
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* This is the second in a series. The first is here.