This, I think, is what makes the Nazi actions unique in the cultural history of the West. No regime before that had seriously, and consciously, applied industrial-scale methods to commit mass murder.

I still recall watching a dramatization of the Wannsee conference and sitting there, in mixed awe and horror as fourteen people sat around a table and, for all intents and purposes, acted like a working group of engineers and technicians.

They could have been me and thirteen other people talking about, I don't know, fixing a distillation column or something. Only they were fourteen people in charge of the various bureaucratic levers of power in Germany and its occupied lands and who were discussing how to rationalize and Mixmasterize (if you will pardon the word) a program of efficient mass murder.

They talked about train scheduling. Final destinations. "Evacuations". Et cetera.

Eerie. Very eerie.

The Soviets, by contrast, applied the simple brute force (as seems to be the ham-fisted Russian way) of lots of bullets, beatings, forced labor, and induced famine in order to follow Stalin's orders to commit mass murder.

Somehow we can understand these methods. They are used by military and police everywhere in the world to achieve the objectives of authoritarian governments. Who among us has not read of some mass execution by machine gun where a government's officials gave orders to "get rid" of troublesome opponents, or perhaps people whose only crime was to refuse to get off their land for a military base or something.

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the Spanish Inquisition

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There has been some interesting historical work done on the use of the Spanish inquisition by the English government of that time (Spain was England's greatest enemy). The basic idea is that the evils of the Inquisition were vastly exaggerated for the purposes of justifying England's foreign policy, use of privateers, and condemnation of "popery" within England. I believe the English historian Christopher Hill has written on this.

The best book, though, is "The American Indian in Western Legal Thought" by Robert Williams. There he convincingly develops the thesis that "the Spanish Inquisition" became a discourse in England because it was a way of disputing Spain's entitlement to the new world, and furthering England's competing claim.

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This, I think, is what makes the Nazi actions unique in the cultural history of the West. No regime before that had seriously, and consciously, applied industrial-scale methods to commit mass murder.

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This, I think, is what makes the Nazi actions unique in the cultural history of the West. No regime before that had seriously, and consciously, applied industrial-scale methods to commit mass murder.

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The term 'evil' enables the escaping from seeing this as a personal or collective failure, instead placing the understanding of this failure onto an abstracted non-reality. In other words, the term "evil" enables the diminunition of self-responsibility.

and i agree with nonesuch:

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That's why the early Christians put it all on Satan, and modern agnostics put it on Hitler. Or some other individual. Whatever and whoever Evil is, it's never us.

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exactly. Hitler had syphilis, Osama bin Laden is a "madman," etc. evil people are too often constructed as subhuman or even nonhuman, which is dangerous.

eddited becos i cant speel.

[ 24 April 2003: Message edited by: Mohamad Khan ]

I think one thing that really shocks people today is how the Nazis perverted the 20th century ideal of "progress," by using Henry Ford's assembly line - a method that created the very symbol of material success in our culture, the automobile - and used it for mass murder.

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Evil is a convenient term to dismiss self-aggrandizement (personal or collective) combined with a zeal which blinds one to the actuality of "the other", objectiying him instead. This a personal or collective failure to see the primary reality of interconnectedness and "oneness".

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He's normal; he just gets a little rowdy when drunk. She's normal; she just cheats on her old man once in a while. That CEO is normal: who wouldn't make a stupid relative VP, rather than a smart stranger? That politician is normal; of course he'll award lucrative contracts to his party supporters.

The stakes are raised, and the moral tone lowered, only a little bit every year.
It's not difficult to wean masses of people off honesty, kindness and fairness; you just have to make it profitable and fun.
We all know when we're doing the wrong thing, and we all know how to explain it away. And we're always surprised when a whole nation, doing a little wrong, day after day, turns into a boogy-man of history.

[ 25 April 2003: Message edited by: nonesuch ]

A simple explanation is the school kid who gets bullied, and comes home to take it out on a sibling, or the family pet. Ordinarily, the kid isn't like that, but he allowed the "evil" from the bully to effect his other contacts in society.

I think few of us are either "good" or "evil". I think we're conduits for either most of the time. If we're treated "good", we'll treat other people "good". If we're treated "evil", we'll treat other people in an evil manner.

It kinda squares with the "tit for tat" modeling and observations of human social intercourse.

That's why I try to be aware of what I call "evil", and at least try not to be a conduit for it. At the same time, I look for oportunities to be a force for "good".

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I think "evil" in terms of the Nazi's or the GOP is interesting, in that it shows that in the larger scale, all that they require to do their work isn't a broad coalition of "evil" people, but a broad coalition of "good" people turning a blind eye.

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And, when you attempt to look at this as an outsider, it's tempting to view "evil" or "good" as a living entity as it moves from one person or group to another.

While I don't believe they are entities, I can see how some people have come to believe they are.

[ 25 April 2003: Message edited by: Tommy_Paine ]

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It's just so much easier to personify evil, as someone or something 'out there', than to confront our own nature. Oddly enough, i believe Freud and technology have made it easier than ever, by allowing us to pretend that evil doesn't exist at all, or that it's an anomaly, an illness, an unusual response to environment - anything but the natural human attribute that it is.

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I think you're absolutely right here, nonesuch. We've always found ways to think about "evil" that make it something other than behaviour that every human has and every human is capable of displaying. Whether you go for the first century idea that evil is an internal demon, or you go for the 20th century idea that evil is an illness, you are still basically considering it foreign to human beings.

About as many as did back then is my guess.

If evil, like sin, is a part of our nature, then we can never be free of it's taint, no? Well, bollocks I say.

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If evil, like sin, is a part of our nature, then we can never be free of it's taint, no? Well, bollocks I say.

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In fact, evil and sin are both words we use to describe a part of our nature - yes, inherent; yes, ineradicable - that we've always been aware of. Always - even before we invented language. I know this, because all social animals are aware of the destructive side of their nature and set up rules of bahaviour to deal with it. They don't - and we shouldn't - try to breed it out or suppress it, because tha same violent and greedy impulses can be necessary to the survival of the group

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True Evil exceeds our inherent greed and violence to become something far more malevolent and destructive. It's a complex philosophical concept, it's a vast plan rationally executed (genocide, September 11, the conscious destruction of vast tracts of rainforest needed to regulate the planet's weather, etc.) that threatens our very existence, it is our base instinct multiplied exponentially by a brain large and complex enough to cause evil.

Lower animals are greedy, selfish and violent. We don't call them Evil. Or even evil. They don't have the intellect or intelligence of awareness for evil. We do.

If evil were inherent, then all animals would be inherently evil. Probably a few plants as well. Absurd.

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we should genetically tend through natural selection to achieve a point where the self-predatory nature is eliminated shouldn't we?

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[ 25 April 2003: Message edited by: Rebecca West ]

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True Evil exceeds our inherent greed and violence to become something far more malevolent and destructive.

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Evil is greed. It is from greed that springs all the other malevolent tendencys of humanity. It isn't a question of scale. Rape of one woman is no less evil than the rape of a nation. The Nazi's were just one of many examples of the insatiable human desire for more, and to destroy others to get it. Their industrial scale of murder is unremarkable in the sense that it wasn't a new thing. They learned from the example of "taming the savages" in the conquest of North America, from Columbus to Custer. What joins all these acts together is the rapacious greed of the perpetrators

From Saddam's palaces paid for by Iraqi blood to Ken Lay's Texas mansions paid for by his workers life savings, and from GMO grains with terminator genes to banning books on evolution, greed is the instigator of the foulest works of mankind.

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Evil, like sin, is a concept, a moral construct that describes a way of being or acting that is highly destructive, profoundly negative and counter to what benefits the species as a whole. It, in fact, goes against nature. So it cannot be said to be part of human nature or inherent in every human being.

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Evil and Sin - or evil and sin - are not things or entities or traits, or even social constructs: they are words. Just words. Some creature with a big enough brain to create language describes its observations. Of course the observations are subjective: "bad" is what hurts me; "good" is what helps me. When this clever creature realizes that certain of its own tendencies are harmful in certain situations, it names those tendencies "evil".

Greed is a word for excess acquisitiveness. Acquisitiveness is not bad by itself; it enables the individual and the group to collect materials for a better life. It only becomes bad (greed, a sin) when it begins to destroy the society. Violence is not bad; it enables the animal to hunt its food and defend itself against other predators. Violence only becomes bad when turned against one's own kind. Intelligence is not bad; it enables the animal to solve problems. It becomes bad when put into the service of internal predation. All of these names and descriptions take on more arbitrary meanings as the animal's brain develops and as its social organization grows more complex.

But, it seems pretty clear that human social interaction is based on "tit for tat". We can see it in every day life, and the computer models seem to verify what we see.

And, what we see is that organisms who co-operate with fellow co-operators seem to do well in the computer models. And, this seems to be born out in observation of human society.

Organisms in the models that never co-operate, always "taking" seem to do well at first, but eventually the 'natural selection' of the computer model weeds them out.

Altruistic organisms get weeded out even faster.

I tend to think our views of "evil" and "sin" are shaped by "tit for tat", and probably by things like kin selection, and to lesser degrees other behaviors that are 'hard wired'.

That doesn't make us inherantly evil or good; one of the things about being sentient is the ability to 'manually overide' instinctive behaviors if the current situation shows that behavior to be disadvantageous.

"Free will", if you like.

Some evolutionary psychologists liken giving into inherant behaviors that are situationally inappropriate to "sin".

So, if one subscribes to this, we have arrived where the religious philosophers had us all along-- that we are 'sinfull' and in constant need of repressing baser instincts.

I'm not sure I subscribe to this view point. I need a lot more understanding of it, to be honest.

....but if you help me with this, maybe I'll return the favour someday.....

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Organisms in the models that never co-operate, always "taking" seem to do well at first, but eventually the 'natural selection' of the computer model weeds them out.

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I suppose so, but if one applies a cultural (rather than biological) evolution model to this, and noting that cultural evolution is extremely rapid in terms of the biological evolution time scale, one has to ask why society isn't weeding out the "takers", a.k.a. people who exhibit unbounded greed, such as people in upper management who can command economic and in some cases political power, or even many conservative politicians who view their career as simply a way to raid the taxpayer piggy bank while making connections with private industry to command even more economic power than when they started, while commanding political power.

After all, we've seen this going on for over 20 years.

Yes, I know that prior to this we had a nearly 40-year run of social disapproval of precisely this "greed is good" attitude, backed up by a political system that worked a bit differently, but then one has to ask why the cultural shift in the first place? I don't know much about memes, but if you apply a meme analysis, what made the "meme" of greed is good more fit for survival in social consciousness than the "meme" of social cooperation and a levelling of the economic strata of society?

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one has to ask why society isn't weeding out the "takers",

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Afterthought.
The 1930-1970 (i'd go as far as '75) is interesting. The Russians had done some serious blood-letting a decade earlier. We didn't need to chop off any heads in N. America, because, having gone too far, many of the takers defenestrated without prompting and many more were neutralized, simply by losing their power. Then, there was a big enough melee, in Europe and points east, to satisfy that generation's craving for violence. In the last century, most of the organized violence - including that which benefits us materially - has taken place in other people's back yards (we've had lots of casual violence, though). Can't see that lasting indefinitely.

[ 26 April 2003: Message edited by: nonesuch ]

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Evil is in all of us, to various degrees. The evil in each of us is attracted to any powerful evil force, as by gravity.

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[ 28 April 2003: Message edited by: Rebecca West ]

Previously, I narrowed it down to the idea that Homo Sapiens Sapiens were the only species with a demostrated talent for self deception.

But now, I have to believe that out in the ocean there's at least a few hundred young male dolphins harassing an indifferent female, thinking to themselves "oh, yeah, she wants me, I can see it in her eyes."

And, it's been suggested that new dominant male lions, and other mamals, kill the offspring of the previous dominant male so that their offspring (made more likely now that the lioness' are not nursing, and come into heat) will have all the resources has also been documented, and this squares with our understanding of natural selection.

Or, given that this thread is about evil, we could say that humans are the only species who are aware of the fact that they are destroying themselves and who continue to do so. Or that we're the only ones who are willing to put our desire for capital gain before our own safety.

We're also the only species that has a global awareness. That's pretty cool.

[ 28 April 2003: Message edited by: dale cooper ]

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Evil (but we don't have to call it that; we can call it 'the destructive side of human nature', for short) is innate and iniradicable.

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This positing of all that is 'destructive' as 'evil' and all that is 'creative' as 'good' is highly problematic. Every 'creation' involves some destruction as such - unless it is ex nihilo. For instance, the creation of a human being actually involves the destruction of both the sperm and the egg as such. Their combining ceases their existence as two, making them one. Similarily, the growth of an embryo involves the decomposition (destruction) of nutrients and their (re)arrangement into new substance. If we apply this notion of destruction as evil and construction as good the simple act of eating and digestion, we would find that eating is itself evil insofar as it destroys plants and animals. But then we are confronted with a paradox - this destruction is 'construction' of human cell tissue.

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lWe can try to organize society in such a way as to discourage bad (selfish, short-sighted, counter-productive)behaviour.

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If you attack me and I defend myself (selfishness) is it evil? Furthermore, if my immediate goal is to get out of this chair (short-sighted) without dressing this 'getting up' in some Big Other, would my action (getting up) be evil? Lastly, I have already addressed (at least partially) the problematic of 'destructive vs. constructive' behaviour, and I think that 'counter-productive' is just 'destructive' hiding under another cloak. For instance, what appears to be 'counter-productive' from one point of view - the explosion of a building, say - could be said to be 'productive' from another: in this case it produces rubble. Moreover, it 'produces' space for another building, as in demolition work. In short, what your formula leaves us with is merely the ability to judge behaviour against some Big Other (God, goodness, morality, urban renewal) which is assumed in your argument. It doesn't actually help us determine what 'good' and 'evil' are.

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and encourage good (constructive, co-operative, fair) behaviour.

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If I co-operate with you to destroy someone else's home and life, is that 'good'? If I dole out suffering equally (fairly) to everyone, would that be 'good'? The problem is that you are using highly circular definitions: What is good? Construction, co-operation? What is Construction and co-operation? A form of good behaviour according to SOME STANDARD OF RATIONAL DECISION MAKING which includes in it the implicit assumption that 'construction' and 'co-operation' are good. In other words, what you are sidestepping is the whole issue of how to create and maintain a value system of 'good' and 'bad'. Is rationality enough? If so, it has to be explicitly spelled out why this is so.

[ 28 April 2003: Message edited by: Courage ]

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Many animals kill their own for a variety of reasons.

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Adult male Black Widows wander in search of females but do not feed or bite. Females may occassionally kill and eat a male after mating but this is more the exception than the rule.

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Cats and dogs kill prey for fun,

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[ 28 April 2003: Message edited by: clersal ]

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I can't think of any other animal that would willingly live in its own filth.

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Well, yeast for one, which is pretty cool if you like a merlot, or a nice shiraz from Chile.

As for self awareness, or sentience the approved check for this is to dab a bit of lipstick on the forehead of an animal, and give it access to a mirror.

If it tries to wipe it off while looking at itself in the mirror, behaviorists conclude the animal is self aware.

I think Chimps and Bonobos pass this test, and maybe Gorilla's, but not Orangutangs or dogs.

I think dolphins have passed an adapted test, but again my memory is hazy.

Carl Sagan used the spider to illustrate the idea that in it's tiny brain it has the ability to formulate a rather intricate plan when constructing a web.

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We're also the only species that has a global awareness. That's pretty cool.

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I'm not sure about that. Prior to ships with engines taking to the ocean, whales could communicate with eachother on opposite sides of the planet, or, so says Carl Sagan. That could have provided a keen global awareness.

This is something that we couldn't ever really know, short of interspecies telepathy.

For those interested in the emotional lives of animals, read "When Elephants Weep", it's got some interesting accounts and discussions, including an elephant trying for 3 hours to dislodge a baby rhinocerous from the mud, only to be chased away by it's mother and returning to try again. Altruism?

[ 29 April 2003: Message edited by: Trinitty ]

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I think dolphins have passed an adapted test, but again my memory is hazy.

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I believe they use a test involving a mirror or a video recording of the dolphin playing and they can somehow differentiate the dolphins response to itself in the mirror as opposed to how it responded to other dolphins.

I saw a really great documentary once on spiders and it was following two different types of spider: one made very organised webs with strict mathematical dimensions and the other made a chaotic hodge-podge web. One type's males would breed with the others females but not the other way around and they had specific mating dances which reflected their style of web. Something along those lines.

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whales could communicate with eachother on opposite sides of the planet

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Wow. I did not know that.

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Originally posted by nonesuch:
Courage, the snippets you quoted were used in a human social context, previously explored, as was the subjective nature of both language and morality. Shouldn't have to redefine every word in every post. I was okay with 'evil', but others objected to it, so i offered substitutes with no religious connotation. Anyway, i don't think 'creative' came into it.

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Fine, they were used in a human social context. That doesn't negate the problems of the argument. If anything, when applied to a social context, the problem is even more murky: How exactly does one discern creative from destructive. Also, creative did come into it as it is implied by destructive. Destructive = evil, therefore, holding the opposition of evil and good, whatever is the opposite to destructive ought to be good, shouldn't it? That's logically cogent.

I'm not asking you to redefine every word in every post, I was simply following the implications of YOUR definitions, demonstrating that they lead to a paradox. What do you make of the paradox? is the real question.

As for 'religious connotations', even your 'social context' terminology is deeply related to what usually constitutes religious thinking. Your definitions rely - like religion relies on the Big Other 'God' - on a Big Other called 'Progress' or 'the Greater Good' or some other such thing. Again, shifting the argument into the social doesn't actually help us define what is evil or not any better than the religious side - it suffers from the same need to be inscribed into a Big Other which acts as the Ideal or Beacon against which all direction is measured. This move needs to be justified, otherwise we end up in just as much of a quagmire as with the 'religious connotations', it's just that people aren't used to thinking of their 'social thought' as simply more ideology of the same kind.

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Destructive = evil, therefore, holding the opposition of evil and good, whatever is the opposite to destructive ought to be good, shouldn't it? That's logically cogent.

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Nothing in the universe is inherently good or evil. The universe simply exists and functions. Nature simply exists and functions. They have no qualities, until somebody describes them.
Evil and Sin - or evil and sin - are not things or entities or traits, or even social constructs: they are words. Just words. Some creature with a big enough brain to create language describes its observations. Of course the observations are subjective: "bad" is what hurts me; "good" is what helps me. When this creature realizes that certain of its own tendencies are harmful in certain situations, it names those tendencies "evil"

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That was me, up-thread a ways, and it's as much of a definition as i'm prepared to give for this discussion. (Especially since no definition was required by the original question.) There is no Big Other. There is only the animal's perception of what behaviours help it to survive and avoid pain. For a gregarious animal with a long maturation period, a group of its own kind is essential to its survival; the individual and the group are interdependent. The balance between individual advantage and group welfare is always delicate, volatile; is always tested and corrected. The welfare of the group is insured by rules of social conduct; individual advantage is a result of strenght, luck and cunning.

See, both social organization - in all its variety - and religion - which is one of the many byproducts of human social organization - evolve out of the animal's awareness of its interdependencies.
This particular animal with a big brain is able to project and generalize more than any other (so far known). It invents more complex rules of conduct and breaks them more often than other species. I think, too, that the individual's awareness of its dependency tends to diminish, and internal predation tends to increase, proportionately to population growth. Possibly a means of population control? I don't know this; just theorizing.

[ 29 April 2003: Message edited by: nonesuch ]

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In truth, our leaders and propagandists know very well that liberal capitalism is an inegalitarian regime, unjust, and unacceptable for the vast majority of humanity. And they know too that our “democracy” is an illusion: Where is the power of the people? Where is the political power for third world peasants, the European working class, the poor everywhere? We live in a contradiction: a brutal state of affairs, profoundly inegalitarian–where all existence is evaluated in terms of money alone–is presented to us as ideal. To justify their conservatism, the partisans of the established order cannot really call it ideal or wonderful. So instead, they have decided to say that all the rest is horrible. Sure, they say, we may not live in a condition of perfect Goodness. But we’re lucky that we don’t live in a condition of Evil. Our democracy is not perfect. But it’s better than the bloody dictatorships. Capitalism is unjust. But it’s not criminal like Stalinism. We let millions of Africans die of AIDS, but we don’t make racist nationalist declarations like Milosevic. We kill Iraqis with our airplanes, but we don’t cut their throats with machetes like they do in Rwanda, etc.

That’s why the idea of Evil has become essential. No intellectual will actually defend the brutal power of money and the accompanying political disdain for the disenfranchised, or for manual laborers, but many agree to say that real Evil is elsewhere. Who indeed today would defend the Stalinist terror, the African genocides, the Latin American torturers? Nobody. It’s there that the consensus concerning Evil is decisive. Under the pretext of not accepting Evil, we end up making believe that we have, if not the Good, at least the best possible state of affairs—even if this best is not so great. The refrain of “human rights” is nothing other than the ideology of modern liberal capitalism: We won’t massacre you, we won’t torture you in caves, so keep quiet and worship the golden calf. As for those who don’t want to worship it, or who don’t believe in our superiority, there’s always the American army and its European minions to make them be quiet.

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