Evil Ways

Evil Men (2013) by James Dawes should be a hard book to read. It is based on his interviews with Japanese war criminals, who confess the crimes they committed during the Second Sino-Japanese war. The details of these acts are hard to bear. But instead of turning away in disgust, the reader is drawn closer. This is not the gaze of the passer-by at the car accident, as Dawes worries it might be. Something deeper is at stake.

The scope of questions Dawes addresses is impressive. A list of a few: Why do people do horrific things to each other? How can they be stopped? Why do people do heroic things? How can more of these people be encouraged? How can we maintain faith in anything in a world of unbearable uncertainty, and even, of evil? What does “evil” mean, and if it exists, is it forgivable? But at the heart of the book is a question that is personal for Dawes and for the reader: what does it mean to write about atrocity, and what does it mean to read about it? Dawes asks, “What will happen when you read this book?”

Dawes worries that exposing his struggles in relation to the book and asking readers to reflect on their own relationship to the material is narcissistic. Instead, it is an act of unusual courage, a relentless refusal to allow himself or his readers to remain at a safe distance. There is no “view from nowhere” in Evil Men; Dawes himself is on the page, so is the reader. We are flung into the lives of war criminals, and before we know it, we are flung into the depths of ourselves.

Just when we think we must turn away, though, Dawes allows us respite. He frames his searing inquiry about evil and suffering with ideas gleaned from psychologists, sociologists, economists, anthropologists, political scientists, and philosophers. We read the explanations of biologists and the insights of poets.

Again and again, though, Dawes interrupts our theoretical journey with something that resists explanation. The experience of reading the book mirrors and even evokes the experience of writing it. The reader is tempted by the allure of explanation, only to be awakened as if from a dream by the stark words of perpetrators. Dawes leaves the excerpts of interviews bare on the page, surrounded, but not explained, by theory.

It is this “negative capability,” Dawes tells us, quoting Keats, at which he aims, and at which he excels. This bearing of uncertainty, this refusal of the refuge of answers is ultimately the only response he finds possible when confronting the murder of children, the rape of young girls.

The refusal of certainty can also be understood as its own ethical position, and one shared by many liberals chastened by the ideological bloodbaths of the twentieth century. The philosopher Simon Critchley endorsed this ethical stance in a recent New York Times article tellingly titled, “The Dangers of Certainty: A Lesson from Auschwitz” (2014). “When we think we have certainty,” Critchley warns, “when we aspire to the knowledge of the gods, then Auschwitz can happen and can repeat itself.” Dawes echoes this sentiment, noting the fanatical certainty of Nazi officers and, when they were younger, of the men he interviewed. The lesson is that belief is dangerous. A humbling uncertainty can save us from resurrecting the gas chambers.

But this brings us to a paradox, one more to add to those with which Dawes frames his book. Hannah Arendt suggests that it is the absence of real belief that leads us to do terrible things. She argues that, “evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be or do either evil or good.” Dawes quotes Arendt here, as well as on how perpetrators insulate themselves from the moral ramifications of violence. He says that he sometimes notices the war criminals he interviews retreating behind the unthinking, fixed phrases that Eichmann used to avoid facing the horror of his deeds. Such expressions are not of belief but...