The Nature of Evil

T he devil, so they say, has all the best tunes, and this seems to be the case when it comes to literature as well. Nobody would take a guided tour of Dante’s Paradiso if they could have one of the Inferno instead. Milton’s God sounds like a bureaucratic bore or constipated civil servant, while his Satan shimmers with mutinous life. Nobody would have an orange juice with Oliver Twist if they could have a beer with Fagin instead. So why is evil so sexy, and so profoundly glamorous? And why does virtue seem so boring? Why is it that when I told my thirteen-year-old son I was writing a book on evil, he replied “Wicked!”? One answer, I think, is that it is not virtue that is boring but a particular, very familiar conception of it. Think of Aristotle’s man of virtue, who lives more fully and richly than the vicious.ForAristotle,virtueissomethingyouhavetogetgoodat,likeplayingthetrombone or tolerating bores at sherry parties. Being a virtuous human being is a practice, like being a skilled diver or an accomplished tennis player; and those who are really brilliant at being human—what Christians call the saints—are the virtuosi of the moral sphere, the Pavarottis and Maradonas of virtue. Goodness in this Aristotelian view is a kind of prosperingintheprecariousaffairofbeinghuman—aprosperingwhich,ifSigmundFreud is to be believed, none of us manages particularly well. The wicked are those who haven’t developed the knack of fine living—those who botch the business, as you might make a mess of cooking an omelet or conducting a symphony orchestra. The wicked, then, are inept,crippled,deficientpeoplewhoneverreallygetthehangofhumanexistence.Theyare likepoorartistswhocan’tknockthemselvesintoshape.Whereasthegood,thevirtuous,are those who, like good artists, realize their powers, energies, and capacities to the full, in as diversea way aspossible. Andbecause of this,they are brimming with life and high spirits. With this model, to ask “Why be good?” as people began to later, would be as ridiculous as asking “Why enjoy a dark, foaming, full-bodied pint of Guinness?” or “Why should a clock keep good time?” Virtue is a kind of energy or exuberance, which is why it is sometimes thoughttohavesomethingtodowithGod.TosaythatGodisgoodisnottosaythatheisremarkablywell -behaved—mostChristiantheologianswouldnotseeGodasa“moral”being at all—but rather that he is an infinite abyss of self-delighting energy, which no doubt means that he must have a boundless sense of humor as well (he needs one). For Christian theology, God is that abundant, overflowing, ecstatic jouissance at the heart of us, which is closer to us than we are to ourselves (as the unconscious is closer to us than the ego), and which allows us to be free and to flourish. To be entirely without such abundant, selfdelighting life is to be evil; and this means that evil is not something positive but a kind of lack or defectiveness, a sort of nothingness or negativity, an inability to be truly alive. Evil maylooklively,seductive,andflamboyant,butthisisjusttheflashyshowitputsontocover up the hollowness at its heart. It is the paper-thinness of evil, its brittle unreality, which is most striking about it. 80 T I K K U N W W W. T I K K U N . O R G W I N T E R 2 0 1 1 The Nature of Evil by Terry Eagleton Considered by many to be the most influential British literary critic, Terry Eagleton has written more thanfortybooks,includingReason,FaithandRevolution(2009)andmostrecentlyOnEvil(2010).He iscurrentlyavisitingprofessorattheNationalUniversityofIreland,Galway. “Young people in the West these dayshavebecomeveryinterested in zombies and vampires,” the author writes. No wonderevilis attractive,ifvirtueisequated withtheseverityofa bureaucraticfatherGod. CREATIVE COMMONS/CHRISTOPHER S. PENN Whateverhappened,then,tothisancientnotionofgoodnessasexciting,energetic,and exhilarating,andevilasempty,boring,andbanal?Whydopeoplenowseethingstheother way around? One answer, at least in the West, is the gradual rise of the middle classes. As the middle classes came to exert their clammy grip on Western civilization, there was a gradual redefinition of virtue. Virtue now came to mean not energy and exuberance but prudence, thrift, meekness, chastity, temperance, long-headedness, industriousness, and soon.Nowonderpeopleprefervampires.Thesemaybeadmirablevirtues,buttheyarenot exactly exciting ones; and one effect of them is to make evil seem, by contrast, a lot more attractive,whichisexactlywhathappened.Virtuehadnowbecomeessentiallynegative.It was closely bound up with middle-class respectability. It had lost its...