2 of 4

To "hesitate, haggle, and deliberate with detachment" is to miss the opportunity, the moment for action. Of course action must be considered, calibrated, and appropriate, but when the horrors of a new holocaust are revealed, action must not be delayed nor passion blunted.

In Unspeakable, his new book about evil (HarperSanFrancisco, 2005), sociologist and public intellectual Os Guinness tells the story of how seeing the aftermath of the Rwandan genocide drove Christian lawyer Gary Haugen to "switch careers and devote his life to fighting for justice for the oppressed." (Christianity Today also told Haugen's story in its August 1999 issue, which is available online to members of the CT Library.) Haugen was sent to Rwanda to direct the U.N. investigation of the genocide. The crystalline moment when insight gave birth to resolve arrived when he met two scarred and scared little girls who had survived the slaughter. Haugen went on to found the International Justice Mission, which has spent much of its time freeing the child sex slaves of Cambodia.

In 1999, Haugen told CT, "This is where you encounter the utter poverty of words. I walked away from that [Rwandan experience] mute." Modern society's refusal to talk about evil impoverishes us. Yet the effects of violence and abuse on children are some of the most persuasive evidence that any language short of the vocabulary of evil is bankrupt. And the impact of evil on children is one of the most powerful motivators to action.

Second, without the language of evil, we cannot be honest about ourselves. In the United States, the self-esteem movement has deluded us (though people from all cultures have convinced themselves of their primal innocence without the assistance of the self-help psychologists). As Haugen told CT, "Ordinary people have the capacity, with surprising ease, to become mass murderers. The people who did the hacking in Rwanda were average people. They had delivered themselves over to the power of evil that can make killing exhilarating and empowering."

Guinness warns against "the monster view of evil"—treating Stalin or Hitler or Pol Pot or Caligula as monsters who are unlike us. "The monster view of evil is dangerous," he writes, "because it simultaneously seduces and distances us. Often we have a strange fascination with wicked people, but through them we can also push evil away because 'we are not like them.'"

"To restrict evil to such men is to slip into the error of seeing it as an aberration, a rarity, an exception, as something well distanced from ourselves and perhaps also as a thing of the past. To think like that is to miss the real menace of evil here and now."

Journalists sometimes joke about how often newspaper accounts of serial killers include a predictably routine quote from the neighbors: "He seemed like such a normal person." But that is entirely the point. Evil is always present amidst the normal, often hiding itself from the self.

Abdel-Nour is also wary of notions of evil that only identify "the other" as evil. "The consequences of relying on this conception of evil when thinking about inter-societal affairs can be quite serious, leading one to target one's adversaries for eradication, rather than simply for defeat."

next page... |  2 of 4

share this page

April 2005, Vol. 49, No. 4