Evil (pronounced ee-vuhl)
(1) Morally wrong or bad; immoral; wicked; morally
corrupt.
(2) Harmful; injurious (now rare).
(3) Marked or accompanied by misfortune (now rare;
mostly historic).
(4) Having harmful qualities; not good; worthless or
deleterious (obsolete).
Pre
900: From the Middle English evel, ivel & uvel (evil) from the Old English yfel, (bad, vicious, ill, wicked) from the Proto-Germanic ubilaz.
Related were the Saterland Frisian eeuwel,
the Dutch euvel, the Low German övel & the German übel; it was cognate with the Gothic ubils, the Old High German ubil, the German übel and the Middle Dutch evel
and the Irish variation abdal
(excessive). Root has long been thought
the primitive Indo-European hupélos
(diminutive of hwep) (treat badly)
which produced also the Hittite huwappi
(to mistreat, harass) and huwappa (evil,
badness) but an alternative view is a descent from upélos (evil; (literally "going over or beyond (acceptable limits)"))
from the primitive Indo-European upo,
up & eup (down, up, over). Evil is a noun & adjective (some do treat it as a verb), evilness is a noun and evilly an adverb; the noun plural is evils.
Evil
(the word) arrived early in English and endured. In Old English and all the early Teutonic
languages except the Scandinavian, it quickly became the most comprehensive
adjectival expression of disapproval, dislike or disparagement. Evil was the word Anglo-Saxons used to convey
some sense of the bad, cruel, unskillful, defective, harm, crime, misfortune or
disease. The meaning with which we’re
most familiar, "extreme moral wickedness" existed since Old English
but did not assume predominance until the eighteenth century. The
Latin phrase oculus malus was known
in Old English as eage yfel and
survives in Modern English as “evil eye”.
Evilchild is attested as an English surname from the thirteenth century
and Australian-born Air Chief Marshall Sir Douglas Evill (1892-1971) was head of the Royal Air Force (RAF) delegation to Washington during World War II (1939-1945). Despite
its utility, there’s probably no word in English with as many words of in the
same vein without any being actually synonymous.
Consider: destructive, hateful, vile, malicious, vicious, heinous, ugly,
bad, nefarious, villainous, corrupt, malefic, malevolent, hideous, wicked, harm, pain,
catastrophe, calamity, ill, sinful, iniquitous, depraved, vicious, corrupt,
base, iniquity & unrighteousness; all tend in the direction yet none quite matches the darkness of evil although malefic probably come close.
Hannah
Arendt and the banality of evil
The
word evil served English unambiguously and well for centuries and most, secular
and spiritual, knew that some people are just evil. It was in the later twentieth century, with
the sudden proliferation of psychologists, interior decorators, sociologists,
criminologists, social workers and basket weavers that an industry developed
exploring alternative explanations and causations for what had long been encapsulated
in the word evil. The output was uneven
but among the best remembered, certainly for its most evocative phrase, was in
the work of German-American philosopher and
political theorist Hannah Arendt (1906–1975). Arendt’s concern, given the scale of the holocaust was: "Can one do evil without being evil?"
Whether the leading Nazis were unusually (or even uniquely) evil or merely individuals who, through a combination of circumstances, came to do awful things has been a question which has for decades interested psychiatrists, political scientists and historians. Arendt attended the 1961 trial of Adolph Eichmann (1906-1962), the bureaucrat responsible for
transportation of millions of Jews and others to the death camps built to allow
the Nazis to commit the industrial-scale mass-murder of the final solution. Arendt thought Eichmann ordinary and bland, “neither
perverted nor sadistic” but instead “terrifyingly normal”, acting only as a
diligent civil servant interested in career advancement, his evil deeds done apparently
without ever an evil thought in his mind.
Her work was published as Eichmann
in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). The
work attracted controversy and perhaps that memorable phrase didn’t help. It captured the popular imagination and even
academic critics seemed seduced.
Arendt’s point, inter alia, was that nothing in Eichmann’s life or
character suggested that had it not been for the Nazis and the notion of
normality they constructed, he’d never have murdered even one person. The view has its flaws in that there’s much
documentation from the era to prove many Nazis, including Eichmann, knew what
they were doing was a monstrous crime so a discussion of whether Eichmann was
immoral or amoral and whether one implies evil while the other does not does, after Auschwitz,
seems a sterile argument.
Evil is where it’s found.
Hannah Arendt's relationship with Martin
Heidegger (1889–1976) began when she was a nineteen year old student of
philosophy and he her professor, married and aged thirty-six. Influential still in his contributions to
phenomenology and existentialism, he will forever be controversial because of
his brief flirtation with the Nazis, joining the party and taking an academic
appointment under Nazi favor. He
resigned from the post within a year and distanced himself from the party but,
despite expressing regrets in private, never publicly repented. His affair with the Jewish Arendt is perhaps
unremarkable because it pre-dated the Third Reich but what has always attracted
interest is that their friendship lasted the rest of their lives, documented in
their own words in a collection of their correspondence (Letters: 1925-1975, Hannah Arendt & Martin Heidegger (2003),
Ursula Ludz (Editor), Andrew Shields (Translator)). Cited sometimes as proof that feelings can
transcend politics (as if ever there was doubt), the half-century of letters
which track the course of a relationship which began as one of lovers and
evolved first into friendship and then intellectual congress. For those who wish to explore contradiction
and complexity in human affairs, it's a scintillating read. Arendt died in 1975, Heidegger surviving her
by some six months.
New York Post, November 1999.
In 1999, Rupert Murdoch’s (b 1931) tabloid the New York Post ran one of their on-line
polls, providing a list of the usual suspects, asking readers to rate the evil
to most evil, so to determine “The 25 most evil people of the last millennium”. The poll received 19184 responses which
revealed some “recency bias” (a cognitive bias that favors recent events over
historic ones) in that some US mass-murderers were rated worse than some with
more blood on their hands but most commented on was the stellar performance of
the two “write-ins”: Bill Clinton (b 1946; US president 1993-2001) & crooked
Hillary Clinton (b 1947; US secretary of state 2009-2013), the POTUS coming
second and the FLOTUS an impressive sixth, Mr Murdoch’s loyal readers rating
both more evil than Saddam Hussein (1937–2006; president of Iraq 1979-2003), Vlad
the Impaler (Vlad Dracula or Prince Vlad III of Wallachia (circa 1430-circa
1477); thrice Voivode of Wallachia 1448-circa 1477 or Ivan the Terrible (Ivan
IV Vasilyevich (1530–1584; Grand Prince of Moscow and all Russia 1533-1584
& Tsar of all Russia 1547-1584).
Lindsay
Lohan and her lawyer in court, Los Angeles, December 2011.
While fun
and presumably an indication of something, on-line polls should not be compared
with the opinion polls run by reputable universities or polling organizations,
their attraction for editors looking for click-bait being they’re essentially
free and provide a result, sometimes within a day, unlike conventional polls which can
cost thousands or even millions depending on the sample size and duration of
research. The central problem with on-line polls is that responders are self-selected rather than coming from
a cohort determined by a statistical method developed in the wake of the disastrously
inaccurate results of a poll “predicting” national voting intentions in the
1936 presidential election. The 1936 catchment had been skewered towards the upper-income
quartile by being restricted to those who answered domestic telephone connections,
the devices then rarely installed in lower-income households. A similar phenomenon of bias is evident in
the difference on-line responses to the familiar question: “Who won the presidential debate?”,
the divergent results revealing more about the demographic profiles of the
audiences of CBS, MSNBC, CNN, ABC & FoxNews than on-stage dynamics on-stage.
Especially
among academics in the social sciences, there are many who object to the
frequent, almost casual, use of “evil”, applied to figures as diverse as serial
killers and those who use the “wrong” pronoun.
Rightly on not, academics can find “complexity” in what appears simple
to most and don’t like “evil” because of the simple moral absolutism it
implies, the suggestion certain actions or individuals are inherently or
objectively wrong. Academics call this “an
over-simplification of complex ethical situations” and they prefer the nuances
of moral relativism, which holds that moral judgments can depend on cultural,
situational, or personal contexts. The
structuralist-behaviorists (a field still more inhabited than a first glance may
suggest) avoid the word because it so lends itself to being a “label” and the
argument is that labeling individuals as “evil” can be both an act of dehumanizing and something which reinforces a behavioral predilection, thereby justifying punitive
punishment rather than attempting rehabilitation. Politically, it’s argued, the “evil” label
permits authorities to ignore or even deny allegedly causative factors of behavior
such as poverty, mental illness, discrimination or prior trauma.
There are also the associative traditions of the word, the linkages to religion and the
supernatural an important part of the West’s cultural and literary inheritance
but not one universally treated as “intellectually
respectable”. Nihilists of course usually
ignore the notion of evil and to the post-modernists it was just another of
those “lazy” words which ascribed values of right & wrong which they knew were something wholly subjective, evil as context-dependent as anything else. Interestingly, in the language of the
polarized world of US politics, while the notional “right” (conservatives,
MAGA, some of what’s left of the Republican Party) tends to label the notional “left”
(liberals, progressives, the radical factions of the Democratic Party) as evil,
the left seems to depict their enemies (they’re no longer “opponents”) less as “evil” and more as “stupid”.
The POTUS & the Pope: Francis & Donald Trump (aka the lesser of two evils), the Vatican, May 2017.
Between the
pontificates of Pius XI (1857–1939; pope 1922-1939) and Francis (b 1936; pope since 2013), all that
seems to have changed in the Holy See’s world view is that civilization has
moved from being threatened by communism, homosexuality and Freemasony to being
menaced by Islam, homosexuality and Freemasony.
It therefore piqued the interest of journalists accompanying the pope on his recent 12-day
journey across Southeast Asia when they were told by a Vatican press secretary his
Holiness would, during the scheduled press conference, discuss the upcoming US
presidential election: duly, the scribes assembled in their places on the papal
plane. The pope didn’t explicitly tell people for whom they should vote nor
even make his preference obvious as Taylor Swift (b 1989) would in her endorsement
mobilizing the childless cat lady vote but he did speak in an oracular way, critiquing
both Kamala Harris (b 1964; US vice president since 2021) and Donald Trump (b
1946; US president 2017-2021) as “against life”, urging Catholic voters to choose
the “lesser of
two evils.” That would have
been a good prelude had he gone further but there he stopped: “One must choose
the lesser of two evils. Who is the lesser of two evils? That lady or that gentleman? I don’t know.”
Socks (1989-2009; FCOTUS (First Cat of the United States 1993-2001)) was Chelsea Clinton's (b 1980; FDOTUS (First Daughter of the United States)) cat. Cartoon by Pat Oliphant, 1996.
The
lesser of two evils: Australian-born US political cartoonist Pat Oliphant’s (b
1935) take on the campaign tactics of Bill Clinton (b 1946; US president 1993-2001) who was the
Democratic Party nominee in the 1996 US presidential election against
Republican Bob Dole (1923–2021). President
Clinton won by a wide margin which would have been more handsome still, had
there not been a third-party candidate.
Oliphant’s cartoons are now held in the collection of the National Library of Congress. It’s not unusual
for the task presented to voters in US presidential elections to be reduced to finding “the lesser of two evils”. In
1964 when the Democrats nominated Lyndon Johnson (LBJ, 1908–1973; US president
1963-1969) to run against the Republican's Barry Goldwater (1909–1998), the conclusion of
many was it was either “a crook or a kook”. On the day, the lesser of the two evils
proved to be crooked old Lyndon who won in a landslide over crazy old Barry.
Francis has
some history in criticizing Mr Trump’s handling of immigration but the tone of
his language has tended to suggest he’s more disturbed by politicians who
support the provision of abortion services although he did make clear he sees both issues in stark moral terms: “To send migrants away, to leave them wherever you want, to
leave them… it’s something terrible, there is evil there. To send away a child
from the womb of the mother is an assassination, because there is life. We must
speak about these things clearly.”
Francis has in the past labelled abortion a “plague” and a “crime”
akin to “mafia”
behavior, although he did resist suggestions the US bishops should deny Holy
Communion to “pro-choice” politicians (which would have included Joe Biden (b
1942; US president 2021-2025), conscious no doubt that accusations of being an “agent of foreign
interference” in the US electoral process would be of no benefit. Despite that, he didn’t seek to prevent the
bishops calling abortion is “our preeminent priority” in Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship, the 2024 edition of
their quadrennial document on voting. Some
20% of the US electorate describe themselves as Catholics, their vote in 2020
splitting 52/47% Biden/Trump but that was during the Roe v Wade (1973) era and abortion wasn’t quite the issue it's since become and a majority of the faith in the believe it should be available with only
around 10% absolutist right-to-lifers.
Analysts concluded Francis regards Mr Trump as less evil than Ms Harris and
will be pleased if his flock votes accordingly; while he refrained from being explicit,
he did conclude: “Not voting is ugly. It is not
good. You must vote.”