Evil

The word “evil” makes secularists uncomfortable due the word’s association with sin. “Sin” connotes a cosmic origin, a notion they don’t accept. Friedrich Nietzsche specifically rejected the term “evil” on these grounds in Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (Jenseits von Gut und Böse: Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft), a book I found illuminating in my youth. He was perfectly OK with “good and bad,” which connote an entirely human origin: in his view the only origin a system of ethics can have. Freudian psychology and 20^th century existentialist philosophy reinforced this view among intellectuals and academics. They still recognized various behaviors as socially unacceptable or even horrifying, but regarded judgments about them to be subjective, relative, and situational. After all, normally kind and honorable people can be capable of the most appalling acts in the context of war (especially civil war) or mob excitement. This relativistic view faced challenges as the century wore on.

In the 1960s the crime rate in the West – and particularly the United States – spiked and continued to rise for decades. Although the violent crime rate in the US actually has dropped back substantially in the past 20 years, it is still well above what it was in 1959; furthermore, crimes of particularly callous natures are far more common than 60 years ago. Accordingly, the term evil began to make a comeback in the 1990s when it became clear that no other term applies to some people. They commit heinous acts (in peacetime and without mob incitement) entirely of their own accord because they choose to. Because they like to. The term re-emerged not only in professional circles but in the popular culture; the 1993 movie Kalifornia, for example, brings a moral relativist (David Duchovny) face to face with a homicidal psychopath (Brad Pitt). In the 2000s criminal psychologist and medical doctor Michael H. Stone devised a 22-level Scale of Evil. The reader might have encountered the TV series Most Evil, hosted by Stone who employed the scale in various accounts of crimes and criminals.

Michael H. Stone collaborated with Gary Brucato, PhD, for their 2019 book The New Evil.  In the introduction they write, “By ‘evil’ we are not referring to spiritually sinful or societally forbidden acts, per se...Rather, we refer to the types of actions that virtually anyone, regardless of faith, time, or place, would find unspeakably horrible and utterly depraved.” Such acts, they say, “are generally preceded by malice aforethought or premeditation, inflict wildly excessive degrees of suffering, and would be considered altogether incomprehensible to the average individual.” Most of the book consists of mind-numbing accounts of abduction, torture, dismemberment, cannibalism and more. There are accounts of serial killers motivated by material gain, perverse pleasure, or deep-seated anger.

All this is very depressing, but what is “new” about it? In absolute terms, not much. Most of the crimes have precedent in historical literature. However, the frequency is new. Stone and Brucato believe that the culture reached a tipping point around 1965; societal forces that previously restrained narcissistic psychopaths fell away. They detail many of the changes (more fatherless males, for example) that correlate with crime. Further, they note that there are some categories of crime today that scarcely existed before. School shootings, for example, simply didn’t happen before 1965. To be sure, there were murders at school, but they weren’t random and the location scarcely mattered; they were one-on-one affairs motivated by jealousy, or humiliation, or revenge that might have happened anywhere. There were no random killings. That’s a modern phenomenon.

Stone and Brucato don’t really offer a solution. Indeed, it would be surprising if they had one. In their less than satisfying final chapter, they do, however, note the importance of recognizing “the danger of a culture that is gradually becoming more coarse, uninhibited, amoral, and selfish.” They also re-emphasize personal will, choice, and self-control: “This growing tendency to blame outside forces is, in fact, a hallmark of narcissism, now encountered on a sweeping societal scale.” They express hope that after “a period of terrible growing pains” Western culture, without giving up the social gains of the past half century, can evolve past the “new evil.”

The New Evil is worth a read, though be aware that the litany of gruesome and perverse crimes filling nearly 500 pages can be truly stomach-churning. Some of us have learned the hard way that there are people in the world who think so differently from the rest of us that it is hard for normal people to comprehend it. This applies not just to the sadistic torturers who occupy so much of this book, but to non-lethal but still callous con artists who bankrupt “friends” without hesitation or twinge. The New Evil tells us they are out there. It is good to be forewarned.

Ike and Tina Turner – Evil Man