Making Evil: The Science Behind Humanity’s Dark Side

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Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount. Do you see this inability to let people get close as a common human trait? For example, I think there are similar types of characters in your book, Union Atlantic, with the 21st-century hard-nosed power-hungry New Yorkers. This is an extraordinary book that defies classification. He doesn’t have a single pitch or argument to make, but it is a beautiful exploration of evil, not just of what motivates the perpetrators, but also about how we see the perpetrators. The question concerning the nature of evil is a longstanding one but I would go so far as to say that in this profound book, the philosopher Paul Kahn has gone a very long way in answering it. He argues that in our secular age we have given reason such a dominant place in our understanding of modern politics that we can only understand evil acts by individuals or nations as deficits of rationality. If the Hutus were simply rational, they wouldn’t have killed the Tutsis, and so forth. Thus, our response to what we see as evil takes an essentially pedagogical form. We first try therapy to increase the malefactor’s rational capacity, and when that fails, we turn to legal punishment. But this leaves us with no conceptual framework for distinguishing between the simply bad act and the evil one. In short, secularism has no explanation of evil.

As a philosopher I’m always surprised how little actual acts of real evil are discussed by philosophers. Philosophers frequently discuss thought experiments or hypothetical situations. Jonathan Glover, in his book Humanity, is exceptional in his level of specificity about real history. But on the whole philosophers shy away from the facts.What I found really interesting about the book, and why I put this on my list, is that he talks a lot about the fascination we have with these men, and in particular he talks about the moral issues we have when we struggle to understand them. One observation that he gives, which is very moving, is that these are nice guys: they are elderly Japanese men, they are very contrite about their actions, they’re often funny and gracious hosts, and interesting people to talk to. Dawes found himself liking many of them, and he talks about what that feels like. But he’s not in a place to forgive them—he wasn’t a victim, nothing was done to him. So how do we deal with this? He also talks more generally about the pornography of violence that draws us to atrocities—to the Holocaust, slavery, and so on. Jess has been charged with finding and terminating the creature who's assassinating Dark-Hunters. The last thing he expects to find is a human face behind the killings, but when that face bears a striking resemblance to the one who murdered him centuries ago, he knows something evil is going on. He also knows he's not the one who killed her parents. But Abigail refuses to believe the truth and is determined to see him dead once and for all. But how typical was Eichmann? He was the arch-bureaucrat, sitting in his office, deciding how many ‘pieces’ (i.e. people) would be transferred to Auschwitz, on which train, on which day. That’s at quite a distance from the sorts of cruelty that were actually going on face-to-face in the camps. His evil might have been more banal because it was largely done at a distance. When Terry is not "recreating" conversations between himself and police, himself and District Attorneys, or himself and other newspaper men, he is retyping prison letters from inside snitches.

Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow. The horror of the Holocaust, made freshly horrifying with a new dose of absurdity and head-slapping stupidity. This book destroyed me for weeks; it’s upsetting just writing a couple of sentences about it.” tomimber This new edition includes the fiftieth-anniversary fully corrected text setting and, for the first time, an extensive new index. In The Ultimate Evil we find a lot of such descriptions. But not only that, we find – if we do choose to believe in it – a whole theory about serial killers. Maury Terry, journalist, wrote this book originally in 1987 but it’s reprinted now with an introduction from Joshua Zeman. Joshua Zeman is a producer and director with several titles on his name that deal with urban legends and conspiracies. He calls The Ultimate Evil one of the most terrifying books he’s ever read.Delbanco rejects the attempt by contemporary social science to dismiss the notion of evil as primitive and unnecessary. He argues that the notion of evil continues to be a concept which remains a necessary part of our moral vocabulary. Terry offers an interesting and novel look on the Son Of Sam killings that terrorized America. He delivers the notion that Berkowitz did not in fact act alone, rather, he was merely a scapegoat to divert the attention away from what was apparently 'really going on'. Terry's theory is that a nation wide Satanic cult, with connections in the highest and widest places is responsible. He even goes on to identify the cult as an apparent off shoot of the Process church. Connections are then swiftly made to involve many other murderous crimes, including the Tate-La Bianca murders. It could indeed be true that there is a conspiracy involved in the Son Of Sam killings, but Terry's outrageous reasoning and step-by-step fact making doesn't prove a thing. Here is an example of how he finds the hidden meaning in a letter sent by Berkowitz to a journalist:

You’ve had to choose five books and we’ve gone down quite a dark road. I know you want to end by mentioning a few books that take a more optimistic line. It was an interesting experience to read The Ultimate Evil, made more interesting by all the different stories around the book and the author. Despite the bad rap the book gets from the skeptics - and the embracing of it by crazy fundies and crazy tin-foil hatters alike - Terry doesn't really focus hugely on so-called cults. While he refers to some (such as the notorious Process, the so-called Chingons, a cult centered around Yonkers, etc.) the book is more about dope than the Devil and if any cult is truly involved, it would appear to involve Scientology moreso than Satan. For Manne, misogyny is a belief that women should act a certain way towards men. When they don’t, violence and cruelty are often directed towards the women to punish them or to bring them in line. ”

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A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara is the worst book I have ever read. I found it both morally and intellectually offensive; morally offensive for the things it says about victimisation, mental illness, and suicide, intellectually offensive for being asked to believe the shoddy, contrived plot and world building.” sarahcl Card’s 2002 book is widely praised as a model account of a secular account of evil. She argues that evil actions are those which have a reasonably foreseeable intolerable harm coupled to culpable wrongdoing.

Manne’s proposal is that in cases of misogyny, it’s not that men don’t see women as people. It’s not that they lose control in some way. It’s rather that men are morally outraged. They expect things from women: they expect nurturance, they expect sex, they expect love, they expect care, and they get enraged when these expectations aren’t being met. So, for Manne, the husband who strangles his wife out of rage, it’s not that he doesn’t think of his wife as a person, it’s not that he’s lost control in some way; it’s rather that he is morally driven, he feels his wife has done something horribly wrong by not being a good wife and she deserves what’s coming to her. Think about the worst thing you have ever done. Something that you are probably ashamed of [...] Infidelity. Theft. Lying. Now imagine everyone knew about it. Judged you for it. [...] For our decisions we see the nuances, the circumstances, the difficulties. For others we often just see the outcome of their decisions. This leads us to define human beings, in all their complexity, by a single heinous term. Murderer. Rapist.”

Now that we told you the order for the Good and Evil books, don’t miss these series

Your final book is Kate Manne’s Down Girl, which does engage with specific real-life cases of the consequences of misogyny, many of which occur in the context of relationships. She’s not just interested in the abstract question of what misogyny is. She has a very interesting line on what misogyny is.