At a dinner party a few years ago, a man who I didn’t know asked me about evil. Our conversation was lively, mostly interesting, and his question came without warning. Evil was, he explained, a subject that left him unsettled, a subject that he had wrestled with for years without resolution. I’m not aware of the specific characteristics of my face that invite abrupt questions about the divine, but perhaps, in retrospect, this was a party that I should have skipped.
Although he posed the question in a few different ways, examining it from different angles, at root his question was about the very existence of evil. He doubted, but also doubted his doubts, whether a person could be described as evil. It wasn’t so much that I minded the question—I rather like the grandiose, the theoretical—it was, instead, his stern tone that spoiled the conversation. He was tall, angular, a tad austere in a buttoned shirt and pressed pants, his sentences too exacting for the evening. I’m perfectly fine with any subject, however serious, however frivolous, as long as the tone remains insouciant. And if you do loathe small talk, this was a conversation for you—this was massive talk. Is there anything larger than a discussion of evil?
In what I can describe as both our first and last conversation, the man conceded the presence of evil acts, he saw plenty of evil in the world, even in his chosen profession of psychiatry, but he had a harder time labeling individuals with that term. It seemed too conclusive, too dramatic, too essentialist, in a way that was, to him, misguided. He worked in a hospital and I wondered at the time if he had witnessed something particularly horrific in recent days, an experience of evil that reached its claws into what should have been a tranquil weekend.
Eventually I asked him about the opposite extreme: does he ever describe people as good? Is there a quality of goodness that’s intrinsic to some people that’s loftier and more profound than what we expect in a typical life? Tricky problems, I find, are often worth exploring from an oblique angle, or even from the opposite direction, so that seemed a reasonable question. Without any hesitation, he gave an easy, affirmative answer, noting examples from his life. He had witnessed the good, the virtuous, the benevolent, people who possessed a quality that was akin to grace.
That response appeared to make the original question fairly straightforward. Nothing was left unsettled for me, because you can’t really toss around the word good unless you’re contrasting that concept with something else, just as the existence of the word heavy guarantees the existence of the word light, or the description of the color black invites the creation of the color white. Quibbling with the terms is fine—perhaps bad is the more natural antonym for good—but the point remains: you can’t have a single comparative term. Once you start playing with comparisons, with superlatives, you’ve created a spectrum, or your word loses its meaning.
At least he chewed on this point. He paused, tensed, told me that he considered it sensible, though not decisive. For a man that I had just met, it was peculiar to watch how his thoughts changed, the strain in his mind visible in the undulating creases on his face. Watching that strain made me begin to believe that he wasn’t as receptive to a solution as he claimed. I still believed that his expressed desire for a solution to this question felt genuine to him, yet it seemed to me that—instead of a reasonable, openminded search—he would continue to gather evidence until he reached the conclusion that he desired. His struggle wasn’t about whether evil existed. It wasn’t an academic inquiry about definitions. Nor about categorizations. From my impression of how he approached the question, he possessed his answer, he witnessed the answer in his life, but he still spent years repeating the question again and again and again because he didn’t like the conclusion that he couldn’t shake. And I can certainly relate to the necessity of ignoring conclusions that you find distasteful. Even after you’ve considered a question from enough angles, with enough granularity, you continue the debate—because you can’t force the evidence that you’ve gathered to conform to the conclusion that you seek.
I do wonder whether his profession prevented him from accepting the answer that arrived in his mind. To accept the presence of evil creates a bit of a problem if your profession involves assisting people that, in some cases, society loathes. Once there’s a category for the irredeemable, the lost, what’s the point of those hours? Waking up in the morning to toil amid people who suffer and who have caused other people to suffer becomes difficult to justify. But if you believe in change, in a potential for redemption—a belief that’s admirable, whether correct or not—then all is not lost, then your efforts aren’t futile. Although I also wonder if one definition of a good person is someone who is relentless about solutions even when failure is guaranteed.
Our conversation did come with a striking omission, an unacknowledged lacuna at the heart of our subject that both of us, living in similar environments and in the same country and in this century, were perfectly fine to ignore without comment: religion. Neither of us mentioned anything spiritual, or metaphysical, even though it is tricky to discuss evil without religious language. It was too nebulous, too foreign as a concept in our world—we didn’t possess that millenarian vocabulary, so we dismissed its potential, despite it being a common reference for nearly everybody who has struggled with this question throughout history. But if you are truly looking for answers, and you turn to history, to those we consider the wisest—which, incidentally, isn’t the worst plan—then you’re going to encounter theology, whether you turn to the conclusions of the most celebrated writers, philosophers, or, if you simply must, politicians. This is somehow remarkably easy to ignore while holding a wineglass and wondering when the food will be served in the twenty-first century—but it is worth knowing that this manner of thinking, these assumptions, are unique to our time.
I like how you asked the fellow about the opposite extreme—about good people. Seems that threw him for an intellectual loop. Our egos get in the way. Especially when engaged in intellectual conversations. We want to be right. To be smart. It's hard to tamp down our ego and remain open-minded. To acknowledge that we don't have all the answers.
Another, more romantic way of thinking about evil is as a privation—not necessarily the opposite of good, but the absence of it. Similar to how “cold” is not a substance in itself, but the lack of heat. Or perhaps an even better analogy when discussing good and evil: darkness as the absence of light. In this view, the concept of “irredeemable people” might be resolved.