Deliver Ourselves from "Evil"

As much as I would like to believe that Robert Hariman knows, first, that God exists and, second, whether and when God intervenes, well, I just can't do it. More importantly, even if I could believe it (pistis can suggest, after all, belief, faith, and obeisance as well as persuasion), believing it gets me—gets us, alone here together—nowhere useful. For the purposes of this conversation, let's bracket epistemology. And let's bracket ontology. I've been writing about "evil" for several years now—I'll say more about why below—and, until I was invited into this august company, I had decided to stop trying to make claims about the effects of "evil" on public discourse. Almost immediately after each attempt, I'd be accused of arguing "that Hitler wasn't evil." So, to be clear: I'm not saying anything about whether Hitler was or was not "evil." Setting aside the ontology-epistemology pair, I ask us to operate for the nonce in the earth-bound intersection of contingency, pragmatics, rhetoric.

It was Charles Whitman—more specifically, his actions—that first prompted me to start writing about "evil" several years ago. Whitman, the original "bell tower boy," killed 14 people and injured more than 30 from the observation deck of the University of Texas Tower on August 1, 1966; the previous night he killed his wife and mother "to spare them the embarrassment." During the second semester that I taught "The UT Tower Shootings and Public Memory" at the University of Texas at Austin, Gary Lavergne published the first book-length study of Whitman, Sniper in the Tower. Despite impressive archival research, despite fairly careful historical contextualization, Lavergne's conclusion was a great disappointment to me and to the many students who read the book as part of the class. Despite convincing evidence that Whitman was abused physically and emotionally by his father, was traumatized by his experience as a Vietnam-era marine, was addicted to amphetamines and used other illegal and legal drugs routinely, was depressed, had a benign brain tumor at the base of his brain that might have further affected his mood, had a documented history of physically abusing his wife, and was deeply stressed by academic and economic pressures—all of these at once—Lavergne concludes that "Whitman did what he did because he was evil." End of argument.

The students and I saw Lavergne's conclusion as unhelpful for two reasons initially, and for a third reason later. First, as I've written about elsewhere, students learned from their own research in the course to look beyond the "cruel, cool anti-hero" that Whitman is portrayed as in popular and alternative media to the victims of his violence, people who had been largely forgotten in terms of institutional or public memories of the shootings and whose stories have only very recently begun to be told as the university begins to move beyond silence and repression about the shootings. Given the consequences of violence, students wanted to learn how violence might be prevented, and claims about "evil"—causal agents unknown, aetiology noumenal—are no help in deliberative questions, particularly when those questions are or should be public.

Second, one section of the course met during the spring semester of 1999, and one class meeting convened as news of the shootings at Columbine High School was breaking in the national media. Students immediately noticed that the student shooters were being denominated "evil" and wondered out loud—a wonder that was echoed as school shooting upon school shooting made the news in 1999 and 2000—how such claims helped address the causes of violence or the shared question of how to prevent it. (Kristen Hoerl has written about the use of "evil" and its consequences for public discourse after the Columbine shootings.)

Finally, during the fall semester of 1999—again, as I have written about elsewhere—the observation deck of the Tower was reopened to the public for the...