[ohanian]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('gg3', 'Y')ou close by saying "An evil person is one who derives gratification from evil acts. So what are evil acts? Acts by an evil person? Circular definition." It appears you didn't read the first paragraph of my two-paragraph statement you quoted immediately before your reply:

"Evil can be operationalized as actions which are cruel, which destroy knowledge, which are taken with indifference as to their consequences to others, or which cause regression of society from civilization toward barbarianism."

Those are evil acts. An evil person is someone who obtains gratification from performing those acts. Not circular.

[PenultimateManStanding]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('ohanian', '
')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '
') See how even your own definition can be twisted around and used as an excuse to paint you as an evil person.

[Specop_007]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('ohanian', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Specop_007', '
')I reiterate. Your playing word games. I know of no culture, past OR present, in which rape, theft or murder was considered "good" or was accepted. So thats evil in a universal sense. One could sum to, To do harm to your fellow man is evil. Thats pretty much been the general consensus throughout time.

[ohanian]

On Evil
Sunday 16 January 2005

Summary
Evil is a word that is enjoying a new lease of life courtesy of politics and, since Boxing Day, of the immense suffering and devastation wreaked by natural disaster.

Transcript
Here is an Encounter that ponders the difference between natural evil and moral evil, what religious traditions say about God’s responsibility for people’s experience of evil, and indeed whether evil as a concept belongs to philosophy or religion. This Encounter was first prompted by the rhetoric in the period leading up to the invasion of Iraq but it has bearing on some of the discussion in the aftermath of the tsunami. This week, as we hear stories of militant groups issuing warnings to foreign aid workers in Aceh, it’s appropriate that the program begins with a story from Indonesia told by historian Robert Cribb.

Robert Cribb On the evening of the 30th Sept 1965 there was a very ambiguous event in Jakarta. A number of generals were killed and a revolutionary council seized power. Now this coup was blamed on the Communist Party and during the following six months we think about half a million people were killed, most of them members of the Communist Party.

Margaret Coffey It’s remembered as a terrible time, that six months when evil was abroad in Indonesia. Where did it come from, who were its companions, what does it mean to speak here, of these events, as evil?

Robert Cribb The killings were worst in central and east Java, in Bali and in North Sumatra. The killings themselves were not especially brutal in the sense that we don’t find very much evidence of torture. What we do find is a callous desire to eliminate the Communist Party: members of the Party, people associated with the Party, were rounded up and were simply slaughtered – taken to ware houses where their throats were cut, taken to the edge of a river where their heads were cut off, sometimes shot by the Army.

Margaret Coffey Was it just the Army? Where does responsibility for evil lie, what can be done about it? What indeed is evil?

Karen Kilby I think it is actually rather tricky to define it too closely.

You start to say well sin and suffering, are those evils, and then what kind of suffering, if I have a headache, is that really an evil, when it turns into a migraine it affects my ability to take care of my children, is that an evil and so on. Questions of definition seem rather finicky and actually unnecessary towards getting at the problem.

Margaret Coffey To get at the problem, the way ahead is to tell a particular story - a testimony to ways evil can enter people’s lives. Our storyteller is historian, Robert Cribb.

Robert Cribb The Army was very keen to make the killings a mass event. They didn’t want to be seen as the sole exterminator of the Communists. We have quite a few stories of family members who were pressured to kill other family members, who were linked to the Communist Party, so that they themselves would carry guilt. There’s a lot of stories of people whose credentials as non-Communists were shaky and who were placed under enormous pressure to take part in the killings so that by spreading the guilt across society the Army was trying to create a broad coalition of people who would have to be on its side.

Having said that it wasn’t the work just of the Army. There were many people in Indonesian society who were itching to take out their frustrations. There were many people in Indonesian society who really wanted to destroy the Communist Party and they didn’t need the Army to tell them to do it.

Margaret Coffey Robert Cribb, returns again and again to the problem of evil, enacted in a particular place, during a particular time.

Robert Cribb I don’t have any direct political agenda in this research – I am not trying to show that the Army was evil, or that the Communists were evil or that the Muslims were evil. I suppose it sounds a little bit old-fashioned but I am basically interested in truth and in finding out what really took place, and I suppose in a broader sense I’m very much interested in the forces that drive people to do terrible things.

Margaret Coffey Every mythology and every religion has its name for the monstrosity of evil – the Minotaur, Leviathan, Grendel, Satan …….

Sound Montage

Margaret Coffey In Indonesia they came for the Communists first.

Robert Cribb I’m not sure that there is any evidence or even any reason to suppose that the Army had decided well in advance that it was going to stage a massacre on this scale but once the coup had taken place and the opportunity arose to vilify the Communists, then they seized the opportunity to destroy their most important political enemy.

The perpetrators that I have talked to all have the stories that they tell which in a sense justify their perpetration – an army officer who during the period of the revolution against the Dutch came into a village which had been previously occupied by a Communist armed unit and he reported seeing three or four bodies impaled on bamboo stakes – left to die - and he said this is what the Communists are like. This was a powerful memory for him, something which to him seemed to justify all the terrible things that he had done to communists.

Margaret Coffey Here on Encounter, a profile of evil : Robert Cribb from the ANU is telling a story about what happened in Indonesia in 1965. You know how we speak of innocent victims, but the story demonstrates that evil has an uncanny way of denying innocence to the victim ….even to the observer. It implicates us, even as we speak of it.

Margaret Coffey You tell stories or you quote stories of people went very quietly to their deaths, who lined up to die?

Robert Cribb This is true. In Bali it was the case and in North Sumatra and for me these events are still something of a mystery. It’s tempting to use a straightforward cultural argument. In traditional Indonesian societies there was often a presumption that people who had lost were also morally wrong and that they should simply submit to their fate and allow themselves to be done away with. I don’t find that so convincing because I see it as a kind of cultural catchall. Indonesian power-holders, both official power-holders and people like gangsters, traditionally don’t kill on a large-scale, but they are very good at intimidation, they are very good at imposing a kind of …of terror, and the classic response in Indonesian societies to intimidation has been timidity. You behave like a wild animal which freezes when danger arises and I think that we can probably see this happening during the six months of the killings, that people hoped that by not fighting, by not responding, they would be spared, that they would make it clear they were frightened, that they were intimidated, that they were beaten, and that they would therefore survive .. but of course many of them didn’t.

Even though I have done it many times .. I still find it terribly difficult to start talking to people about those events because I never really know how they will really feel. Of course I never know what they are going to say and so I never know whether as a result of what they say I will start to think better or worse of them.

Margaret Coffey There’s a genealogy for evil that begins with myth – and proceeds to philosophy and theology. Philosopher Richard Kearney sorts out this family tree in his book Strangers, Gods and Monsters, beginning with the foundational mythic idea.

Richard Kearney Evil is basically part of the cosmos, so it is part of your fate or your destiny. If something evil happens as it did for example to Antigone or to Medea or to Oedipus in the great Greek tragedies, it is not their fault, they didn’t know -Oedipus didn’t know that Jocasta was his mother and that he was killing his father so there is a sense that evil is out there and it is something that is done to us, not something that we are responsible for. Now with Plato and Socrates and of course with the Judaeo-Christian bible there is a strong sense that we must move beyond that position, that we’re not responsible in any way for evil, it is just a twist of fortune or fate, to the idea that we are at least partially responsible for evil, so that in the Adam story, the Fall, they have a choice, to be like God or to remain as they are. And so the idea of evil as something for which human beings are morally culpable and answerable and responsible emerges at that level. So too with Socrates and Plato. It is better to suffer than to do evil says Socrates and that it is up to us to develop knowledge, knowledge is virtue says Socrates, to know thyself, to know your monsters, and to actually come to terms with them, because if you don’t you will continue going out there, waging your crusades, slaying the monster who will then return to slay you and the eternal circles and cycles of revenge killing and scapegoating and sacrificial blood-letting will continue.

Robert Cribb The killings came at the end of guided democracy, which was Sukarno’s semi-authoritarian system of rule in Indonesia. It was a very strange system because on the one hand there was a public rhetoric of revolution, of leading Indonesia into a new era of prosperity but on the other hand there were deep political divisions between the Communist Party, the Army, the Muslims and other groups. Everyone was talking the rhetoric of revolution; everyone was using Sukarno’s ideology of Indonesian nationalism. People in the public knew that none of this was true; there was nothing that was being said in public that could really be relied upon. People spoke in formulaic terms and what they said had nothing to do with the reality that people could see around them every day – the reality of political conflict, the reality of terrible economic decline, shortages of food, shortages of clothing, breakdown in public transport and so forth. And as a result of that opacity in political life, that uncertainty, people were very much willing to believe rumours, to believe all sorts of rumours about what might be happening – what the Americans might be doing, what the Chinese might be doing, what the Army might be doing, what the Communists might be doing. What happened after that ambiguous coup in Jakarta in September 1965 was that suddenly people could start to think that the Communists were at fault, that the Communists were to blame for everything.

Margaret Coffey What you find occurring in Richard Kearney’s genealogy of evil - or in his account of the evolution of certain views of evil – is an increasing sense of the human factor.

Richard Kearney I’m not saying it is an inevitable progress, but what you get is an increasing sense of the anthropological or human element in evil so that when you come to let’s call it modernity you’ve got two basic responses. You’ve got someone like Leibnez and Hegel on the one hand who say well everything that happens in the world happens for a reason and it’s part of what they call a theodicy, that it’s really part of what they call the will of God, God is another word for absolute consciousness which works its way through history, so everything in history, everything that happens in the world, including the Lisbon earthquake, including genocides and holocausts and the torture of innocent children, is part of the will of God or if you want to secularise that, the will of the rules of reason. Evil in that sense is irresistible, it is even part of the Will of God, the will of reason and the will of nature. So Kant, on the other hand, came along on the other hand and said no we must make evil resistible. And while he acknowledged there was always an element of radical evil that would remain enigmatic and mysterious and inexplicable, nonetheless, the vast body of evil committed is something for which we are humanly responsible. We are responsible for the evil that we do.

Margaret Coffey Richard Kearney- and those two philosophical responses that came with modernity again: on the one hand, evil exists, it happens for a reason. In that sense, it is irresistible. Alternatively, evil is resistible, most of it. Most of it is our responsibility. Here is a philosopher who stands in that latter, Kantian, tradition. Susan Neiman has written a book about Evil in Modern Thought.

Susan Neiman I think people have needs to express clear judgments about right and wrong, which don’t need to be simple judgements and shouldn’t need be confused with them. Certainly I think we have become extremely uncertain of ourselves not only on particular moral judgements but about the right to make moral judgements at all and nevertheless I think every time we say that shouldn’t have happened, whether we’re talking about public crime – a war that shouldn’t have happened - or a private one, we are making a judgement about the difference between the way the world is and the way the world ought to be. This is a judgement that transcends questions of ethics and goes into metaphysics; it’s a judgment which is the place where philosophy begins and in that sense I think all of us begin as philosophers.

Margaret Coffey Susan Neiman. She tells the story of that Lisbon earthquake as a way of pinpointing the emergence of modern ideas about evil as well as explaining the continuity of traditional ideas about God’s mysterious ways.

Susan Neiman In 1755 the city of Lisbon, which at that point in time was one of the major world cities, a great port, had colonies and so on, was destroyed in about ten minutes by a combination of an earthquake, and then a tidal wave and a series of fires. In 1755 there was no major artillery, there were no serious bombs, nothing but an earthquake or possibly a volcano could cause that much death and destruction in that much time. Even after you remember this, it’s very hard to understand the degree of devastation that thinkers all across Europe felt about this event. People felt that, in Voltaire’s words, philosophy was now in vain. There was an enormous amount of conceptual misery. Now when one first hears that, one can have one of two reactions – gee they had it lucky, they could have their faith in the world shaken by something as trivial as an earthquake. That’s one direction one can go. The other direction that one can go is to say well they must have all been deeply religious and they were losing their faith in God and that’s in fact what the Lisbon earthquake is about. If you look at it just a little bit more carefully you see that that is not true at all. In fact traditional believers were rather happy about the earthquake because it showed that God’s ways were mysterious and that’s what they had always claimed. It was in fact the progressive people, the defenders of the enlightenment by and large, people who believed that human reason was increasingly in a position to understand the deepest facts about the world, it was those people who were truly shaken up by the earthquake. Now the solution that they found more or less was to let what had up to that time been called natural evils out of the equation and people turned their attention to moral evil, namely things that human beings commit with intention – let’s think about the sorts of evil for which we are responsible and which we can do something about and forget about everything else.

Margaret Coffey That is, until Auschwitz …..which taught us that people could commit very great evils, incomprehensibly evil deeds, even when they did not have explicitly evil intentions.

Susan Neiman In the case of Auschwitz I think people realised that given modern technology massive evil could be committed by people who didn’t necessarily set out to create the greatest numbers of deaths and so on but to simply go on with their jobs, get ahead with their careers, people whom one certainly doesn’t want to describe as good in any sense of the word, but people who were driven by normally bad intentions, simply the willingness to get along with their lives, careers and so on, but again that is a normal bad intention, it is not a demonic one.

People are responsible for the actions that they do, not for the way they feel about them.

Eichman was evil. That’s the form that evil takes in the 20th/21st century – it is one form that evil can take. You can be evil without having evil intentions.

Margaret Coffey When Robert Cribb goes in search of the truth in Indonesia, he encounters, he says, a pattern of responses.

Robert Cribb I’ve never had the feeling that I was talking to people who were afraid of their own strength of opinion, their own capacity to commit violence. I think never in any of my interviews have I had the feeling that people were struggling internally with the idea that violence might be a good thing or might not be a good thing. Either they took it for granted that killing the communists was appropriate at the time or they regretted it. There was no sense of an internal struggle over the appropriateness of violence.

The two most striking responses are that most people don’t want to talk about the killings. They may be willing to talk to me because I am an outsider, but they are particularly unwilling to tell their own family members. If children know what their parents have suffered, then in some respects those children become politically crippled in society because the burden of having to take revenge for those terrible things stands in the way of any kind of civilised relationship between those people and the heirs of those who did the killings. The other striking feature from the interviews has been a sense of fatalism, a sense that what happened was perhaps bound to happen and, well, we can’t do anything about it now, so we should also forget about it, we don’t need to know about what happened in the past in order to understand the present. We’re now in a new environment and what was fated to happen then is not relevant to today.

Margaret Coffey On Radio National this is Encounter – a reflection on evil first broadcast during the prelude to the invasion of Iraq. Richard Kearney gave an account of modernity’s two approaches to evil – one, in the tradition of Immanuel Kant, sheeting evil home to human responsibility; the other, assigning it some not yet understood role in a rational ordered whole. If you follow this latter approach, like Leibniz at the very beginning of the 18th century, and keep God in the picture, you will want to explain how it is logically possible to conceive of a God who is omniscient, omnipotent and perfectly good given the facts of evil we experience in this world. Leibniz opted to look abstractly at the world as a whole and to say that the existence of evil is somehow justified in some feature of that cosmic whole. From her Christian theological vantage point, Karen Kilby has been contemplating the philosophers on evil – contrasting it with Christian theology’s particular take on evil.

Karen Kilby Philosophers of religion have a very tidy intellectual problem: that you can set out a number of propositions - it’s easily presentable, it’s tidy, and then you propose various solutions to it and criticise them and so on. If you look back before the modern period it’s not the way things would have been normally be set up in Christian theology, that there is a distinct problem of evil designed so abstractly. For one thing the idea of God that the philosophers use rings a little bit strange to a theologian’s ears – a being with a certain number of attributes. Christian language tends to talk about God as the God of Yahweh who makes a covenant with Israel, the Father of Jesus Christ, the God who is known in a story, the God who is related to in particular ways, not a being with attributes. And again evil in traditional Christian theology comes up at various points when you are talking about other things, when you are talking about Creation or Providence, and then you face the fact that the world seems to have gone wrong in various ways and you discuss it in those concrete theological contexts rather than as a major abstract problem to be resolved. So it has never had until recently the prominence in Christian theology that it has been given by philosophers of religion.

Margaret Coffey You’re using “recentlyâ€