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  • Cheating Doom: Evil and the Fine Art of Cultural Containment
  • Leslie Thiele (bio)
Fred Alford, What Evil Means to Us (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997)

In What Evil Means to Us, C. Fred Alford offers an account of how evil is experienced today and how this experience affects the way “evil” gets defined. He formulates this account primarily by way of an interpretive analysis of interview data. Alford conducted interviews with 40 “free informants,” who responded to advertisements placed in a campus and a local newspaper, 10 prison staff members, and 18 inmates, who participated in an ongoing group discussion session on the topic of evil. While his interviewees were self-selected, they nonetheless produced a relatively diverse demographic group. Alford was not interested in producing a representative sample. His exercise is hermeneutic rather than sociological. His intent is to extract the semantics and syntax of evil from the speech of informants.

For Alford, evil is about “the nothingness we dread ... the dread of boundlessness and all that goes with it — loss of self, loss of meaning, loss of history, and loss of connection to the world itself... Evil is an experience of dread. Doing evil is an attempt to evacuate this experience by inflicting it on others, making them feel dreadful by hurting them” (ix, 3). To experience evil is to experience being abandoned, being helpless, and being made to suffer. The experience of evil is the experience of “meaningless victimhood.” To do evil, it follows, is not simply to physically harm someone without sufficient cause. To do evil is to harm someone’s soul. This is the sort of harm that comes not simply from suffering but from needless suffering, from meaningless victimization. To do evil is to infect someone’s soul with the life-doubt and life-hate that humans are wont to generate in the face of cruelty. To do evil is to make it more difficult, or impossible, for someone else to love.

Yet evil cannot simply be equated with human cruelty, Alford observes. Evil is also experienced as a result of the vicissitudes of nature and the relatively anonymous tribulations of life. Meaningless suffering does not only occur at the hands of our fellow humans. Life is rich enough in suffering and short enough on justification to be experienced as evil from time to time. Indeed, human evil often issues in reaction to life’s anonymous cruelties. Much evil is perpetrated by individuals whose cruelty constitutes a psychic escape from their own victimization. Many find that doing evil takes the sting out of suffering evil.

Understood as the impulse for malevolent destruction that is born of a reactive victimhood, evil is endemic to the human condition. We are all victims from time to time, and we all lack the resources consistently to find meaning in our sufferings. Whether “banal” or not, evil is certainly no stranger to the human heart. That not cause for alarm. Not the impulse to evil, Alford insists, but the lack of the cultural means of its control is most worrisome. It is the job of culture to facilitate the expression and experience of evil symbolically, chiefly in narrative or visual form, and thus to preempt its more vicious displays. The abstract expression of evil, in other words, helps to contain its concrete manifestation. Culture allows us to symbolize our dread. With this symbolization at hand, we become less predisposed to inflict our dread upon others.

Dread, like victimhood, is an inevitable part of life. Were we incapable of dread, one might presume, we would also be incapable of wonder and awe. Humans, alone among the earth’s creatures, have been saddled with dread. But humans have also been uniquely endowed with the capacity to alleviate their dread by cultural means. Culture teaches us to symbolize our dread instead of exercising it upon the bodies and minds of fellow human beings. Education, here, is an act of sublimation.

Given that the impulse to evil is omnipresent, there is no acceptable alternative to its cultural containment. Alford suggests that culture can fail in its task of containing evil in one of two ways. First, a perverse culture can intensify rather than...

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