The disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful … is the great and most universal cause of our moral sentiments. –Adam Smith * One recent summer afternoon I received an email from a British podcast production company concerning, they said, “a project in development involving modern manifestations of the concept of evil.” They had found my book on the subject helpful. Would I be open to a short conversation off the record? After having put the subject aside for most of two decades, I was about to begin work on this book, so we met on Zoom a few weeks later.
The serious young man asked if I’d heard about that case of cannibalism in Florida. My face fell, and I did not hide it. Cutting aid that will cost poor people’s lives in order to lower rich people’s taxes.” “That’s true,” he granted.
An ordinary man in an ordinary town killed a couple in their garage and was captured while eating their faces.” “Don’t you wonder how that could happen?” To call evil banal is to call it boring, and if it is boring, its appeal is limited. Few things are less erotic than a fungus. There was once a mass shooter who was found to have a brain tumor.
Maybe science will discover causes, since we aren’t going to find reasons. But I’m interested in the reasons for less spectacular cases.” “He said he was a werewolf. Did you ever read about the werewolf trials?
Like the witch trials in the Middle Ages?” We would always rather externalize evil than examine it. The first witch trial in Ireland took place in Kilkenny in 1324, but people who were suspected as sources of suffering have been murdered since prehistory. It’s a way both to explain suffering and to expiate it.
By portraying evil as something so outside the range of normal human behavior that most of us find it not just wrong but disgusting, we avoid hard questions about less gory crimes. Horror films and increasingly brutal crime stories reveal the very large market for the subject. There are cynical explanations for their commercial success: People are hardwired to enjoy watching cruelty, even if they’re too frightened to participate themselves.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
