Making Evil

The Science Behind Humanity’s Dark Side

Dr Julia Shaw

Canongate Books 2019 Hb, 320pp, £14.99, ind, ISBN 9781786891303

As the subtitle suggests, this journey into evil does not suppose anything supernatural is going on. For better or for worse, people are cause enough.

For Dr Julia Shaw, an academic who has written on false memories (The Memory Illusion, 2017), evil is an all-too-human condition, more feature than bug, and more common than we wish to think. Highly readable and disarmingly pleasant, given the subject matter, Shaw stresses that murder, terrorism, exploitation and other assorted human horrors are deeply complicated issues. Therefore, employing a tag like “evil” to describe them is too simple.

Shaw finds evil at play on individual and social levels, and dismantles its objectivity with the tools of neuroscience, psychology and evolutionary biology.

The book begins and ends with Adolf Hitler, first with a hypothetical reconstruction of the dictator’s brain, and later with a look at the social compliance aspects of Nazi ideology. In her investigations, Shaw gives an important and interesting twist to Arendt’s famous banality of evil concept, emphasising instead the normality of evil.

The case studies lead to the debatable conclusion that evil doesn’t actually exist. Or that it does, but functions more like a readymade label, a psychological shield to distance us from our own worst-case potentialities. It’s a tricky balancing act to both explain and explode your subject at once, but Shaw makes a good case – and a case for good.

Her call to stop dehumanising others and to question shortcuts in our understanding feels like a necessary, and timely, illumination of the dark. Making Evil is a quick read, but its effects are long-lasting.

Mike Pursley

★★★★★