Related articles and links |  1 of 4

Every day I pray, "Deliver us from evil." Yet I long for the vocabulary of evil to make a comeback and be restored to our common language.

My wife and I recently saw the movie Hotel Rwanda, a moving account of one man's moral growth, and how tragic events stretched him from narrow devotion to his immediate family to a principled love for all Rwandans—both Hutu and Tutsi.

The film recounted how both United States and United Nations spokespersons refused to call the 1994 Rwandan genocide by its right name, preferring instead to increase the distance between language and reality by saying "acts of genocide" had been committed. Such language shenanigans would be funny if they hadn't actually cost people their lives.

The language of diplomats and politicians is curious. It is often designed to insulate us from reality. In the December 2004 issue of International Relations, political scientist Farid Abdel-Nour pointed to the same phenomenon in discussions of international law and human rights. Too often, the vocabulary of international law is framed in terms of "inter-societal norms." San Diego State University's Abdel-Nour demonstrates the "obfuscation" of such talk by describing the September 11 attack on the World Trade Center as a violation of "the international norm prohibiting the targeting of civilians." It is an accurate description, but it hides the horror and the multiple dimensions of what happened.

What we need to recover, says Abdel-Nour, is the vocabulary of evil. To say that the September 11 attacks were evil may lack some analytical clarity (we can debate what evil means), but it compensates for that loss with absolute ethical clarity (we can agree on the horror).

Abdel-Nour is not the only scholar who sees the need to recover the language of evil. According to a February 8 story in The New York Times, some forensic psychiatrists are beginning to think that the predatory killers they examine are "not merely disturbed but evil. Evil in that their deliberate, habitual savagery defies any psychological explanation or attempt at treatment." This, of course, flies in the face of traditional psychiatry, which eschews all talk of evil as a way of avoiding "a dangerous slide from clinical to moral judgment that could put people on death row unnecessarily and obscure the understanding of violent criminals."

(Spare us, please, this reverse judgmentalism that assumes a well-greased slope between making moral assessments and killing innocent people. Every moralist I know wants at all costs to avoid putting people on death row unnecessarily.)

Like Abdel-Nour, these behavioral scientists complain that the vocabulary of evil lacks precision and analytical clarity. That's why New York University's Dr. Michael Welner is developing a scale to help him quantify depravity. And Columbia University's Dr. Michael Stone has compiled a 22-level hierarchy of evil. Whether or not you can measure evil, Stone says that using the language of evil may bring "one possible benefit," that is, "a more clear-eyed appreciation of who should be removed from society and not allowed back." Studies show that certain kinds of predatory criminals are more likely to kill and maim again. Talking about such people as "evil" would contribute to the public safety.

Public safety is only one reason for recovering the language of evil; here are three more.

First, unless we can use the language of evil, we will be unable to respond decisively and appropriately. That is the lesson of the Western world's refusing to call the Rwandan genocide by its right name. Reflecting on that failure, Abdel-Nour says that "when we try to squeeze the horrors for which the term genocide was invented into the normative framework of criminality, we necessarily hesitate, haggle, and deliberate with detachment."

next page... |  1 of 4

April 2005, Vol. 49, No. 4