OH CRAP, NOT "EVIL" AGAIN

In today's New York Times Magazine, Daphne Merkin flogs the tired old line that we disgusting modern sophisticates don't adequately appreciate the word "evil":

Fearful as some of us are about exhibiting a too-primitive and "demonizing" attitude -- the kind of macho Us-versus-Them, Axis-of-Evil line of thinking that has made Bush and Company figures of easy derision -- we have become increasingly tentative about assigning this stark designation.... Few of us would be hesitant to use the word to describe the genocidal regimes, for example, of Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot and Milosevic. But for the most part, we post-Manichaean postmodernists are more like Neville Chamberlain hoping to win over Hitler with a bit of coaxing than like Winston Churchill, who committed his country to fighting him. Given our a tradition of broad civil tolerance, it makes uneasy sense that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the half-buffoonish, half-demonic leader of Iran, was invited to speak at an ivy-towered bastion of learning, where he gave voice to his hate-mongering views.

Oh, give me a break.

You know what our problem with the word "evil" is -- or mine, at least? It's the fact that the word is no longer a noun or an adjective -- these days it's exclusively a rallying cry. The word is deployed by the likes of Bush and Reagan to get us to support policies that make us feel good, rather than the policies that might be most effective. These politicians know that if we get pumped up and feel hate, we'll respond to particular problems using emotion rather than reason -- and we'll be easy to manipulate.

I don't dislike the word "evil" because I'm a moral relativist. Recite the crimes of a child rapist, or a dictator who maintains a chain of torture chambers, and don't worry, I'll get it -- the facts speak for themselves; I don't need the word "evil" buzzing in my brain to make the judgment that the malefactor is a horrific individual. However, a recitation of the person's crimes still puts me in possession of my critical faculties. I can still recall that it's bad to have the rapist thrown to a pack of wild dogs without even the benefit of a trial (because a society that does that to criminals is well on its way to becoming becoming feral itself), and I still know that a war against the dictator may well be a cure that's far worse than the disease.

Use the word "evil," however, and the rapist or dictator becomes a primitive-brain monster I need to destroy in the most soul-satisfying way possible -- and if you're the one on the balcony leading the chants of "Evil! Evil!," I'm putty in your hands.

Sorry, but no thanks -- I don't want my interaction with my government to include Bacchic rituals of monsters' annihilation. We can talk all we want about whether evil exists, but the question of whether we should use the word evil comes down to precisely this.