I might have written about this before and I’m sorry if I’m repeating myself.
I can’t stand hearing about “evil.” Osama bin Laden is evil. The virginia Tech shooter is evil. Doctors who perform abortions are evil. What does evil even mean? Doesn’t it mean amoral without reason? It means even more than that. Horrible without reason. Horrible to be horrible. The Virginia Tech guy wasn’t disturbed or upset, he was evil. Terrorists do the things they do because they’re evil and evil people hurt others. What a silly, reductionist way of thinking about the world. It’s not even silly, it’s destructive.
The problem is that outside of action movies “evil” is at best nonsense. It doesn’t describe anything. Evil is just something that evil people are. Evil people do evil things. You define the word by using the word. It’s nonsense. This is all well and good for comic books, but in the real world it moves past benign nonsense and becomes dangerous.
When we call the Virginia Tech shooter and bin Ladin evil we get nowhere. We pass them off as some sort of inscrutable enemy. There’s nothing to understand beyond their evil and therefore there’s nothing to do but fight them and hate them. We need not ask why the US has a higher rate of mass shooting than other nations because the Virginia Tech shooter is evil. We only ask whether we should have recognized his evil, not whether there’s something we might change about our society. We don’t need to try and fix Iraq, we just need to stop the evil insurgents and sectarian militias.
What a stupid way to think about the world. We’re too lazy and afraid of what we might uncover if we try and understand the world, so we just give things empty labels and call it a day.
