(In de Marge, Jrg.8 1999 Nr.4, p.22-30)
HOW EVIL IS EVERYDAY EVIL?
A PLEA FOR A CONTRAVERSIAL NOTION
Baudelaire
wrote in the nineteenth century that it is the devils deepest desire to
convince us that he does not exist. According to many culture critics this
desire has almost been satisfied in our time; the devil has almost convinced
all people that he is nothing more than an illusion of times long past. They
speak metaphorically and mean to say that what has vanished is an awareness of
evil as an autonomously operating force.
But is this right? Many facts speak
against this view. It has been a cliché for a few decades now to speak of the
Dialectics of Enlightenment. Immediately after the Second World War the
devisers of this line of thought (H. Horkheimer and T.W. Adorno) already wrote
that the belief in Enlightenment, Knowledge and Progress radiated in triumphant
doom. And who noses about in sections Philosophy, Religion and Culture of
the better class of bookshop will find many books dealing with evil in one way
or another. They deal, for example, with the radical evil in human nature, but
also with the by no one explicable evil that manifested itself in the Shoah,
and that keeps on revealing itself in Rwanda, Bosnia, Sierra Leone, Kosovo,
Chechnya. The words manifest and reveal are crucial here. Because anyone
who reads the newspaper, watches television can witness evil revealing itself
over and over again. The media show hardly any reservation at all when it comes
to using the notion of evil. The British Culture Historian Peter Stanford
suggests that the notion of evil occurs much more often than we seem to think,
for example as a denotation of the atmosphere around sinister characters like
murderers, rapists and paedophiles. So, to the contrary it seems that there is
massive attention for evil in our culture.
However, it is attention for the horrors
of past times, if not for those happening far away or to people remote from the
realities of our daily lives. Great evil almost always appears to be
far-away evil, far in time and distance, far too in perception. There seems
to be hardly any attention for the more nearby, for the so-called small,
everyday evil. That is the kind of evil we consider to be part of life. One
could think about the certain measures of hypocrisy and formalism that are
needed to keep society going and of situations on which we so easily apply
clichés like One mans death is another mans breath. Here the view that evil
is not a reality to be taken seriously seems to hold.
I suspect that this is on the one hand
logical. Especially in social studies the lack of the notion of everyday evil
seems logical. On the other hand, I am also of the opinion that it might be
unwise to ignore the notion of everyday evil. It is indeed possible that
something that is logical may also be unwise. I will try to explain this in the
following. Let me first clarify the notions.
A
CONTROVERSIAL NOTION
Evil,
August already wrote, harms. Contemporary descriptions build on this view. It
is commonly agreed upon that evil is something which expresses itself in social
behaviour that robs innocent people of their humanity and consequently of their
integrity, dignity and honour.
With this description we choose from the
traditional classification of types of evil according to which people are both
the cause and the victim of evil. In this traditional classification of evil,
there are typically three categories: natural evil, moral evil and metaphysical
or religious evil. When it comes to natural evil we naturally think of
phenomena like earthquakes, storms, flooding, but also of epidemics and wasting
diseases, while with the last category we have to think of an impurity or
disturbance in the relationship of human beings to the core of all existing.
That relationship may be to ones deepest self, or to the core of existence, or
to the divine.
However, when we think more seriously,
the dividing-lines seem to fade. With regard to the traditional classification
we only have to ask ourselves the question to which category those natural
disasters belong that were more or less caused by people: landslides as a
result of deforestation, flooding as a result of environmental pollution or the
lung-cancer of a heavy smoker? Questions arise when addressing human behaviour
in the description of evil. In behaviour, for example, we can distinguish
between the actor (subject), the act itself and its effect. When we would try to
join this distinction together with the traditional classification of evil, we
can see how complex discussing the subject is going to be. For example, where
one person will speak of nature as source, the other may speak of man as
subject. In the last case we might in turn wonder if we have to understand
man in the sense of human nature or in the sense of the human being as an
empirically perceptible, moral being. And whereas one will connect evil to the
intentions of individuals, someone else will consider the effect; of the
humiliation and the suffering that has been caused.
From this brief look into the ins and
outs of describing evil, it is plain that to common sense and the average
scientific sense, evil is a controversial term, as it shies away from any
precision. For this we do not even have to summon sentiments like an aversion
to christendommelijkheid or moralism, the usual prejudices when it comes to the
notion of evil. It can be tentatively concluded that it is not possible to draw
a watertight distinction between great evil and small everyday evil. A
description of evil that focuses on social behaviour that affects humanity
suggests a continuation of massive eruptions of evil as well as the small, more
or less normal and accepted instances of evil of everyday. There is a
difference of degree, which can of course in practice make a huge difference in
the lives of victims, although it is not possible to measure and determine
suffering as such. Now we can begin to understand that in practice there is a
more or less gradual transition from everyday to great evil. I will return
to this point at the end of this essay. Now I will concentrate on the fact that
the notion of evil is virtually absent from the social studies.
ONLY
LOGICAL?
Why
then does it seem logical that the notion of evil seems to be absent in social
studies? The answer is simple, if not unchallenged. In social studies one tends
to associate the notion of evil with the Christian tradition and religion! One
needs to keep in mind that it is exactly because of the secularisation of the
ideas concerning community relations that social studies were able to flourish.
This means among other things that these sciences were formed while and because
of parting with religiously determined views on society, which includes the
parting with the religiously tinted notion of evil. In the Gulbenkian-report
from 1996, a recent and authoritative paper on the latest changes in social
studies, it is considered rightly that the general aim of social studies is
the development of a systematic, secular (explicitly not religious!) knowledge
of social reality that has to be empirically checked and confirmed. The essence
of religion and together with that evil (for which religion offers salvation)
count as outside social reality.
As an aside, the fact that social studies
flourished while and because of the secularisation of the worldview does not
mean that all social scientists are non-believers. On the contrary, among them
are many who have deliberately chosen not to apply themselves to the essence
and truth of religion, but only to the study of purely secular manifestations
of religion; with the organisation, the customs, the routines and especially
the power struggle.
It is of the greatest importance to note
here that by thinking of evil as an inaccessible mystery, social studies are
not necessarily at variance with the Christian faith. According to Christian
faith, evil IS pre-eminently a mystery. To this day, August, mentioned above,
has formulated the definitive insight that evil is literally nothing. It is
not a positive quality, let alone a material one. It only exists as negation.
Contemporary philosophers and theologians draw the conclusion that evil is
something that cannot exist logically and ontologically, that may not exist
either, but that still as a working force asserts its influence. Exactly that
may for good reasons be called a mystery. It is not for nothing that evil
symbolises that which is dark, impure, black: something that when asserting its
powers, spreads insidiously and does not know a beginning nor end, but that
does manage to sweep away people in its destructive course. Once again, this
makes the notion of evil all the more controversial. And scholars, also those
in social studies, are not especially fond of mysteries on which their human
logic deadlocks. They do love puzzles; problems which carry the promise that
they are solvable.
Does this mean that scholars in social
studies do not occupy themselves with evil at all? On the contrary! Social
studies came forth out of the need to gather knowledge about social problems
that are a form of evil. To name a few of the problems that the fathers of
Social Studies dealt with: class struggle and exploitation (Marx), rising suicide
statistics and anomie (Durkheim), bureaucratisation and homogenisation of
modern life (Weber). The list for today would be endless. We may assume that
there are aspects of what society thinks of as evil, adhered to almost every
social event that is studied in social studies. Examples are: corruption, the
increase of unemployment figures, and the rise of fundamentalism.
However, the issue is that evil is often
interpreted in such a manner that if it is not de-explained, it is made
innocent, meaning: stripped of its controversial mystery-characterisation. This
usually happens because of the fact that evil is regarded as fulfilling a more
or less useful function in society. Another reason is that the problem is put
out to cultural anthropologists, who are specialised in witchcraft, oracles,
magic and suchlike. In the meantime, the functionalisation of evil is the most
important reason why this impossible, because unthinkable big word, is as
good as absent from science.
Proof for the functional de-ordering of
the notion of evil and consequently the interpretation of evil as innocent, is
plentiful. We already come across this in the period when social studies did
not form a discipline at the universities as such, but when many individuals
were already searching for a systematic, secular knowledge of society. The
thought that a happy and good society is actually based on the vice of avarice
and other evil passions, seems to have been adopted from Bernard Mandeville
(1670-1733): private vices, public benefits!. This idea, even more beautifully put into words by the poet
Swinburne (1837-1909): the foundations of paradise are laid in hell - has to
this day a great attractions to those in the field of social studies.
This can easily be spotted in the so
often recognisable preference of social studies to reduce all too exalted
expressions of idealism to earthly and therefore evil interests. Obvious traces
of Mandevilles ideas are too be found in the works of for example Adam Smith,
but also in Karl Marx and certainly in the works of all the other
nineteenth-century thinkers, who consider strife - experienced in everyday life
as evil - a condition for or instrument of progress. Even to this very day we
find traces of Mandevilles thoughts, to take a few random examples: the
economist Friedrich Hayek and ethologists like Konrad Lorenz and Frans de Waal.
Although the two last mentioned study animal behaviour, they do give
suggestions for our interpretation of human behaviour. Lorenz, for example,
spoke of das
sogenannte Böse: aggression is not only an innate but necessary and useful
passion of animals and of human beings as it preserves the species. The word
sogenannt already speaks for itself: evil is not a mystery - no force that
although it cannot exist, nevertheless works - but a typical and useful
characteristic of living-together. Frans de Waal shows in his Van nature goed (Good by nature; 1996)
that aggressive, evil behaviour within a group of primates paradoxically
enough serves as the beginning of compassion, reciprocity and tolerance, of
examples of behaviour that people consider to be moral virtues. Now we have
arrived at a very complex de-explanation of evil: everyday evil as punishment
and exclusion; generally the heavy-handed maintaining of a hierarchy to which
people fall victim is so effective that it may become the moral standard within
certain groups. Next to the aforementioned scholars one could also think of the
many varieties of frustration and learning-theories within social studies.
These theories, however different, generally share the same view on evil,
namely that it is a product of social processes, for example: aggressive
energies that are generated by social discrimination and repression. However,
in learning evil is always stripped of its un-thinkable nature, of its
association with that dark mechanism that in spite of its non-existence, works
anyway.
In short, it can be concluded that it is
justified that the notion of evil is not part of social studies, at any rate
not of the basic theories and fundamental ideas with which an explanation is
sought for the examined social phenomena. This conclusion finds itself
supported by the lack of precision of the notion, the past of social studies
and the division of tasks within it, and with the actual functional explanation
of the functioning of evil in groups and individuals. This applies particularly
to everyday evil. You could compare it to dust, household dust for example: you
can see it, you can remove some of it by cleaning, but it will always be there.
A problem that is insoluble in principle is in an efficient problem-solving
environment not really interesting. In the meantime the example of household
dust also illustrates something else: if there is paid no attention to it
whatsoever, the situation becomes dangerous as the house becomes uninhabitable.
With this we have arrived at the final part of this essay.
BUT
NOT ALWAYS SENSIBLE
It
is perhaps not sensible to disregard the notion of evil, nor is it sensible to
lose sight of the events and the mechanisms the notion denotes. I see three
reasons for that.
The first has to do with the relationship
between social studies and the language and perception of the people the
social actors - those who are
studied. Social scientists should be able to use a language that on the one
hand meets the requirements of the scientific standards of their confreres in
other fields and that on the other hand can be communicated to people inside
their own field. Of course this does not mean that an academic article should
be written without the use of jargon. After all, in scientific usage
specialised knowledge is presupposed. However, an academic text should at least
after some adjustments convey its central purposes to non-academics without
detracting all too much from its scholarly nature. To put it differently: in
practice there will rarely exist a unity between on the one hand knowledge
demanding, methodologically well-founded specialised language of the social
scientist on the other hand everyday language. Ideally there should not be an
absolute gap between the two. To use some jargon: social-scientific insights
should be in keeping with the self-definition of the people. When we consider
the notion of evil then, we realise that it is simply not possible to ignore it
in everyday language and experience. Evil is a word that cannot be removed from
life. The same goes for the different things inherent to the workings of evil;
for example we cannot get rid of guilt and shame. For a long time these terms
were regarded useless, not being signs of healthy development of personality.
However, nowadays there seems to be some kind of rehabilitation for the
experiences that guilt and shame stand for. The thing is that a social science
that ignores the normative terms in the field and does not respect them in
scientific thought by making them seem innocent or by de-explaining them,
itself creates a gap with her clientele and exactly because of that misses the
opportunity to obtain better scientific results.
Only recently the social psychologist
Hans Boutelier made a couple of interesting remarks about this. ( in a
collection of short stories by people who have been confronted with evil
recorded by Colet van der Ven, Het Kwaad
(Evil), 1999). It concerns the studies on criminality. He establishes that it
is not common in social studies to make moral judgements in the study of
criminality. It almost always concerns itself with social roots, with questions
like which policy for controlling criminality is most successful, in short:
technical questions. This also turned out to be the case in the judicial
institutions and in youth work where he did research: the workers, mostly with
a background in social studies, avoided any moral interpretation of how these
youths ended up in institutions. Because of that those youths were not taken
seriously as evil-doers. To sum up: people with a background in social
studies who work as counsellors, researchers and advisers will have to show in
their scientific work that they do not
ignore the notion of evil by verharmlosen.
The second reason to take notice of the
notion of evil has to do with the range of the field. One needs to keep in mind
that people, who have an absolute belief in the human capacity to explain and
solve, do not even use the word. Now we have already seen that there are also
scholars in the field who do not use the notion of evil out of an awareness of
the inexplicable mystery. That is only one aspect. Another aspect is that it is
easy to grow convinced of evil as non-existent because it is common in
scientific circles to think in terms of functions. Put differently: a certain
tendency to a secular belief in the explicability of literally everything
(scientism) is conceivable. It is exactly because of that that the notion of
evil should at least be kept at the margins of science as a kind of signal, not
because the secular belief in the omnipotence of scientific thought might be
perceived as unchristian, but because
it is most unacademic! Within social-scientific thinking the notion of evil can
function as a signal: the understanding that there are limits to all kinds of
scientific knowledge should always be present. This also becomes clear when we
think of a possible interpretation of the popular belief in devils, witches,
magicians and other dark anti-figures. The gist of this interpretation is that
this kind of belief is exactly one of the ways in which it is possible to find
a solution to the problem that evil is nothing but works all the same. By
imagining evil as an anti-figure, it literally can be visualised mentally and
thereby understood partly. The image of the devil is a way, though hardly a
satisfying way, to get some kind of grip on evil. The history of the
relationship between science and belief in this respect is one of an almost
complete unmasking. After all, we know attribute evils like epilepsy,
lightning, psychosis, and political chaos to other causes than to the devil and
company. This is of course a cliché, but one with a most remarkable effect.
Because the understanding of a successful history of the exorcism of the devil
by advancing knowledge may lead to wetenschapsgeloof (religion of science).
This happens, proceeding from the unscientific thought that given that the
subject of evil, the devil, does not exist, evil cannot exist either. This
lures one into smothering the understanding that there are limits to the power
of explanation of the social scientific field.
The third reason not to lose the notion
of evil out of sight has to do with the growing insight in the fact that small,
everyday evil can actually contribute to the coming into being of great evil.
This realisation finds its origin in the 60s, 70s and 80s, especially in the
debates centring on the Shoah. There are a good few historians and social
scientists who support the view that it is precisely everyday, banal evil
that made an important contribution to the Shoah. We have to think of banal
evil as a part of a strict bureaucracy or of the virtue of obedience to
professionals and government, of a technique without morality, of a medical
science that does not consider its own social consequences. Through such
phenomena, evil has been able to develop from small and everyday evil to great
evil, as far as the Shoah. Authors like Hannah Arendt, Zygmunt Bauman and
Christopher Browning have developed this insight. However, even if we do not
share the same view it is a very controversial matter we cannot escape
having to agree with them that the majority of the people who did not actually
bring about the great evil itself, still were indirectly entangled within that
great evil as a banker, postal worker, administrator, principal, policeman,
engine-driver, or fulfilled a role somewhere else in the network that made the
Shoah possible. We may not presuppose that those involved necessarily
co-operated consciously and willingly, driven by the evidently evil ideology of
Nazism or by evil intentions. People accepted only what we may call small,
everyday evil. People did their jobs, not infrequently would object to certain
aspects of that job the civil servant who had to register the confiscation of
goods, the policeman who had to guard a group of people but people generally
accepted the job for a variety of reasons: because other aspects of the job
were okay, because everybody did it, because they did not know the effect,
because they thought they did not have a choice. Still, they collaborated on
great evil.
Before this gives rise to
misunderstanding: this is not a plea for the admission of the notion of small
evil as an explanatory factor in social-scientific thinking. What is referred
to here is that from the understanding that small evil may lead to great
evil, social scientific thinking is stimulated to openly look for the causes of
a similar, at first sight inexplicable, event as the Shoah was and is. This
was also the intention of the British, of Polish descent social theorist
Zygmunt Bauman in his book about the Shoah. This book (Modernity and the Holocaust, 1989) is one great appeal to social
studies, departing from personal human sensitivity for the question as to how
small evil can become great evil, to search more extensively the different
manifestations and effects from that small, everyday evil.
Worthwhile to mention in this respect are
also two (in)famous social-psychological experiments: the Milgram experiment and the
Stanford Prison Experiment. Mid 1960s the social-psychologist Stanley
Milgram (Yale) searched for volunteers allegedly to help him in so-called
research into memory. However, in reality it was research into the extent to
which the volunteers were prepared to administer pain to a test subject. The
volunteers were asked to question a test subject, who in the first version of
the experiment was situated behind a screen. Then they were ordered by a
scientist in a white coat to administer the test subject current surges, which
were increasingly higher as the test person an actor in the plot answered
wrongly. The results were bewildering: 62,5 % of the volunteers was willing to
administer the practically lethal shocks of 435 and 450 volt. They did so while
they had been able to hear the actor/test-subjects scream and pray to be
relieved of the experiment at much lower voltages. The Stanford Prison Experiment took place in 1972. Three psychologists
selected 22 male students also on voluntary basis - of Stanford University.
The basement of the section Psychology
was to be equipped as a prison for two weeks, in which half of the testees were to be guards fitted out with
uniform, baton and house regulations -
and the other were to play the role of prisoners. There was not
scientist here to give orders, but after the sixth day the experiment had to be
broken off. It was unwarranted to continue as the humiliations the prisoners
were put through, the aggression of the guards towards them, the psychological
pressure and the threat of complete collapse was too great. Now we have to
remember that both experiments were already very controversial in those days.
Nowadays these experiments would paradoxically enough be morally questionable.
What can not be disputed though is that both experiments have settled in the
strong suspicion that in social interactions in which the actors are taught to
accept a certain degree of everyday evil , great evil can easily take root.
All of this does not mean that evil
should be incorporated in science as an explanatory factor. It does mean that
social scientists, departing from their sensitivity for
everyday-life-situations in which evil is encountered, should be stimulated to
do more in-depth research. In that sense, evil and especially everyday evil a
sensitizing concept for social studies. They do not become more ethical.
They also do not become more christianised, but the scholars in social
studies may become a bit more sensitive to what goes on in the field and with
that one may suspect become better scientists.
The English pages of the Bezinningscentrum (including other articles by Anton van Harskamp): English site
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