On Evil by Terry Eagleton
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Interpretive Responsibility

On Evil is largely a literary analysis of the issue of bad behaviour. Eagleton ranges from that expert on the evil psyche, William Golding, and other modern novelists, to Freud and Shakespeare, to the 19th century philosophers of evil, Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard, to the biblical books of St. Paul and Job. This might all seem a tad academic and disconnected from what most people consider everyday life. But it isn’t. The clue to his intention lies even before the text. Eagleton dedicates this book to Henry Kissinger, certainly a contender for one of the top ten spots as evil leader in the 20th century. This alone proved for me sufficient enticement to read it, and perhaps even to understand it.

Let me make the issue of evil prosaic in the extreme, because it is just that. It annoys me that many of the ‘reviews’ on GR consist of either a synopsis of what an author has to say, or a mere statement of opinion without interesting reasons (‘I just didn’t like the characters’, ‘it wasn’t what I expected,’ ‘it wasn’t as good as his last book’, etc.). For me, the only thing interesting about someone else’s opinion is their reason for holding it. This reason is the interpretive key, not just in their reading of the book, but also of my reading of them.

There are better and worse reasons for not just reading but for doing anything at all (or for that matter doing nothing). Ultimately, what we mean by evil is having an inadequate reason for doing something. Homicide in defence of one’s family is not the same as the murder of a defenceless child. A reason is an interpretive criterion. We see things differently for different reasons. This includes the world of events not just books.

So, in a sense, evil is not just banal, as Hannah Arendt claimed, it is also trivial in the sense that it consists of an act performed for an inadequate, or trivial, reason. This is not to say that power, money, or reputation, for example, are trivial objectives. The consequent status involved in an action may be enormous. It is the reason itself, the standard to be applied to the action and not its result, on which the evaluation of evil must take place.

The assessment of evil and its gradations (or for that matter the good as the opposite of evil), therefore, requires a scale of ‘reasonableness.’ Such a scale can be a complex business. To commit a country to war in order to protect the national honour is pretty trivial to me; but all might not agree. To do the same thing for the purpose of promoting one’s political standing, or to demonstrate one’s ability to ‘take the tough decisions’ I think would be universally considered evil, however. That is, these latter criteria for action are substantially lower down the scale of reasonableness than even that of national honour.

According to my theory, evil exists not just in the actions and decisions influencing the ‘big events’ in the world but also in the most common, routine, and unremarkable events - perhaps like writing a book review. Evil exists most often when reasons don’t even need to be given and therefore are merely assumed to be acceptable. ‘I just thought it was a good idea at the time’ has nil moral content. But so does ‘the book just didn’t come up to my expectations.’ What was the idea at the time? What we’re the kinds of expectations in play? Without knowing these, there is a prima facie case that evil is involved.

I think Eagleton agrees with me (or I with him, I’ve been reading his books for a long time). When he says, “It is not so much the past that shapes us as the past as we (consciously or unconsciously) interpret it,” he is implying personal responsibility for the only thing we really have a choice about in life, namely the reason for doing anything. He goes on to define the meaning of responsibility in a way that makes sense to me: “To be responsible is not to be bereft of social influences, but to relate to such influences in a particular way.”

This mode of relating is really a matter of comparing possible reasons to each other and making a judgment about their relative value public. This is the nature of what is commonly called ethics. Ethics is not some fixed code, like the Ten Commandments (or the other more than 400 mitzvah or divine directives of the Bible). The world is simply too changeable for any code to remain useful, much less credible. Ethics is the consideration and establishment of reasonable behaviour. Ethics define what constitutes a relatively good reason for an action, and inversely a relatively bad reason, that is to say, evil.

So then, the matter of Henry Kissinger: Eagleton points out that “Pure autonomy is a dream of evil.” Autonomy is the freedom to act without reason, to hide reason, to define reason without content, and to insist on this freedom when confronted by opposing reason. This last is the apotheosis of evil. It is a freedom at which Kissinger was a master.

“Moral thought is not an alternative to political thought,” insists Eagleton. I would go further: Political thought is the only meaningful way moral thought can be expressed. To make reason articulate and public is necessarily to make it political. This applies in science as much as it does in national government. The difference is that scientists are expected to argue about what constitutes a good reason while politicians avoid anything that deviates from an established party line.

Kissinger was the incarnation of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, the maniacal presidential advisor whose only authentic reason for acting was revenge on the human race which had failed to recognise his genius. Like Trump, almost everything Kissinger said or did was meant to promote the cause of Kissinger. He took no responsibility for this and continuously pointed to factual necessity for his actions. He called this Realpolitik (others called it expediency) and used it to justify the overthrow of the democratic government of Chile, the genocidal war in Bangladesh, the dirty war in Argentina, and the bombing of Cambodia among many other actions.

Kissinger, like Trump, is an embodiment of the American Dream, the quest for infinite freedom, that is to say an ability to act without ethical constraint. These are what Eagleton calls “overreachers,” people who refuse to acknowledge their finiteness and fallibility. They aspire to be gods. And they can only achieve this by abandoning ethical reason, which involves hiding true intention and ignoring criticism that presents alternative criteria of action.

These aspiring gods are known by a specific behaviour: They never acknowledge guilt. They always claim they acted for the best reasons and that these remain the best reasons. They are, in short, ethically incorrigible. They claim both an absence of psychological neurosis and the lack of theological original sin, as if they were self-made and of different stuff than the rest of humanity. Their egoism is, for them, a cardinal virtue.

Eagleton approves Schopenhauer’s definition of evil as “motivated by a need to obtain relief from the inner torment of what he called the Will; and this relief was to be gained by inflicting that torment on others. In psychoanalytic terms, evil is thus a form of projection.” Evil people ‘get their retaliation in first.’ Trump demonstrates as much on a daily basis; Kissinger was less noisy but employed ruthless projection on a larger scale. Trump, like Eichmann, is stupidly evil; Kissinger is intelligently evil.

It was Noam Chomsky who remarked that it isn’t ethically necessary for intellectuals to speak the truth to power, because power already knows the truth. Power already knows that it lies about its motivations. Power knows that its status depends on keeping its criteria for action secret. And power will reject any interpretation of its reason except its own. Thus it is necessary for the rest of us to needle power continuously by speaking the truth to each other. Even if it’s only about books.

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