Separating out evil is everyone’s responsibility
The news is filled with stories that shock us. Our community struggles to come to terms with racism and police brutality, murder and acts of hate. We use the word “evil” more and more: Politicians evil. Murderers evil. Decisionmakers evil.
Butevilisaspecific and powerful word, meaning so much more than “bad” or “wrong.”
In the past, our ancestors dealt with horrific things that they—likeus— struggled to understand. They found their explanation for awful things in the existence of evil. Colonial America had its share of killing: child-child murders, mother-child murders and spousal killings, and serial killing. We didn’t invent any of that. But what was different was how the community explained those acts to itself.
Historian Karen Halttunen in her book, “Murder Most Foul,” wrote about murder in the 18th century, and what happened to murderers.
Public executions at that time included a sermon. The execution sermon was a talk about sin and redemption. That’s why people attended. The murderer was not treated as a monster but as a fallen member of the community. The evil, expressed by the killer, was not presumed to be anything other than that which existed within each person. Now, with all of our forensic studies and social-science perspectives, we may be missing something that our ancestors recognized. They struggled less because they found their explanation in the existence of evil.
By the 19th century, God and Satan had begun to recede in our social consciousness. That wasn’t all bad. Our separation and fairness doctrines were enabled by that shift. But it did mean that evil acts couldn’t be explained the same way. However, we still needed explanations, so we began to position murderers as very different from us. They had to become aliens and monsters.
At some level each of us knows something about evil. “Evil is unspectacular and always human,” wrote poet W. H. Auden, “and shares our bed and eats at our own table.”
Psychiatrist Carl Jung wrote about our “Shadow” — the part of us that we don’t want to see — the evil that does lurk in us. No, most of us have not plotted a violent crime, but maybe we have wished for a touch of revenge or hoped that karma would speed up for certain people.
The psychoanalyst Thomas Szasz wrote, “We say that killing is ‘unimaginable’ but that’s not true; murder is the most imaginable crime ... That is why we had to make killing a taboo.” When we are scared — just as so many of us are now because of things outside of our control — we manage our fear by reading about or watching what is taboo but also possible. This is why true crime stories and murder mysteries are so popular. That is our 18th-century petticoat showing. Seeing the evil in someone else reassures us it couldn’t be in ourselves.
Like our forbears we still look to anointed people to make sense of murder. But, now instead of clergy delivering spiritual reassurance, we turn to secular experts. Our contemporary execution sermon doesn’t come from the pulpit but from our cultural “clergy”: news analysts, defense attorneys and best-selling social workers.
Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn wrote: “If only there were evil people somewhere committing evil deeds and we could separate them from us and destroy them, but the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”
What our 18th-century forbears satisfied with theology we try to answer with psychology. But the answer lies somewhere in-between, and somewhere within us.