In recent times, the nature of evil—what it is, where it comes from, why it persists—has occupied a disturbingly large space in my mind. How could it not, I suppose, when everything appears to be in shambles, and everyone everywhere seems to be suffering in some way. A quick dip into the ever-turbulent currents of the news cycle and one gets the feeling that, in the words of Yeats, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed. Here and everywhere, the innocents are drowned, and the worst—often the people leading us—are unapologetically full of passionate intensity.
News these days mostly consists of images of death and dying—from the pandemic, from police operations, from extrajudicial killings, from simple hunger. Who can blame someone for echoing the sentiments of the embattled Job, the first to ask in the Bible if the God they worship was actually evil because he allows evil to persist in the world? Does it please God to inflict suffering, Job asked, and why was the earth given to the hands of the wicked if God were good? Ivan Fyodorovich from Dostoyevsky’s “The Brothers Karamazov,” seconding Job, even went as far as declaring that worshipping an omnipotent God who allows evil to exist is both unconscionable and downright unforgivable.
This inquiry into the nature of evil, the so-called problem of evil, has been buggering the faithful and theologians since time immemorial. All religious traditions have attempted to answer this in one way or another, using what philosophers call theodicies—tentative answers to the problem of evil, often a cop-out reassurance that God remains good, and evil comes not from God but from something or someone else: Apophis, Angra Mainyu, Satan, demons, and most recently, humans and our free will. For non-believers, the problem of evil becomes much more mundane: Evil exists not because of some divine or supernatural conception, but simply because of human actions.
While we can leave the theistic debate on evil to the theologians, the realities of today, so brimming with atrocities and suffering, call us to unpack the secular kind we see daily—the mass murder of the innocent, of children killed but rationalized as mere collateral damage, of indigenous people brutalized for simply fighting for their land. What is the face of evil but the man who goads his supporters to shoot everyone in their way dead, who orders his soldiers to aim for the genitals? Evil is probably also the everyday structural violence inflicted on those who sleep on the streets and go to bed without eating the entire day.
This year marks the 60th anniversary of arguably the most famous experiment in my home discipline. Even those not in the field will surely be familiar with the study of psychologist Stanley Milgram which demonstrated how people can commit atrocious acts because they were told to do so by an authority figure. It was also in 1961 that Adolf Eichmann, one of the main organizers of the Holocaust, was being tried for his crimes against humanity. Hannah Arendt, then a journalist covering the trial, was famously taken aback by Eichmann, whom she described as not at all the monster one would expect of a Nazi war criminal, but as someone “bland and merely dutiful to his job”—an observation that would greatly shape Arendt’s conception of the “banality” of evil.
Later psychologists like Roy Baumeister and Albert Bandura delved further into the psychological underpinnings of evil, conceptualizing how and why people can commit atrocities and live with it. The recurring conclusion in the writings of Arendt, Milgram, Baumeister, and Bandura, intuitive as it may be, is that evil people do not regard their actions as evil, no matter how objectively vile and vicious these may be. For people like Eichmann, they were merely following orders. For most, their actions are a necessary means to an end—with the words “national security” and “public interest” often casually thrown around.
Closer to home, the face of evil for many of us is probably donning camouflage or blue uniforms, the angels of death who come like shadows in the night to serve farcical arrest warrants then put bullets through the bodies of parents while their children cower in fear in the same room. Objectively evil, yes—but for them, what they do is justified, they were merely following orders, it is for public safety. At least, this is what I think they tell themselves so they can sleep at night. More recently, I am also starting to see the face of evil in all its banality in the technocrats who craft and prop up the policies that have so proven disastrous to people’s welfare.
Etiology demands that we go to the root causes of our collective maladies. I think the realm of fantasy offers a viable framework for analyzing the structural evil besetting our time. Or maybe this is just an excuse for me to insert my thoughts on “The Lord of the Rings,” which, these days, probably makes up half my personality. Here, understanding evil requires understanding the master commanding his foot soldiers, the Lord of the Rings himself.
The premise of Tolkien’s legendarium is simple: There is a lord—a dark lord—and there are rings. Sauron coveted power above all, so he forged a secret ring more powerful than the rest to gain control of Middle Earth. Domination and deceit are his hallmark, and his ring does not actually imbue anyone but himself with powers. The ring is merely a tool to magnify and enforce Sauron’s will, and it works by deceiving its wearer that they can wield the powers collated by Sauron. The quest for power is the overarching theme of “The Lord of the Rings.” But the underlying message is that the over-concentration of power in someone—or something—may inherently be evil in itself.
It should be noted that there is no actual physical description of Sauron. He exists in the entirety of the trilogy not in a corporeal form but only as a shapeless amalgamation of cruelty and malice, what Tolkien described in one of his letters as the personification of “a wholly evil will” who thought that, if the world were to bow down to his wisdom, all problems would be resolved. This, wrote Tolkien, has been the folly and failing of every human tyrant. And like all human tyrants, deceit was Sauron’s primary tool to gain followers—empty promises of riches, immortality, power, the prospect of a better society.
It does not take much thinking to see how Sauron’s playbook of evil is unfolding right before our very eyes. We, too, have a dark lord actively consolidating power, decimating all forces of opposition through violence and bloodshed. Deceit has also permeated all aspects of society: our democracy besieged by malicious and purposive disinformation peddled by the state.
Absurdity has seeped into the national discourse, and as Voltaire famously said, he who can make people believe in absurdity can also make them commit atrocities. Perhaps the most disturbing similarity is the persisting reality of our dark lord having a steady mass base of foot soldiers and followers who not only look away from the carnage but actively cheer them on. From all angles, these are dark times.
I know that merely thinking about the grave evil gripping our nation, let alone standing up to it, is already a daunting task in itself. The most famous line in the Lord of the Rings is Frodo expressing his frustration to Gandalf on being thrust into the struggle against Sauron: “I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo. “So do I,” replied Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” So must we decide like Frodo—hopefully, to also be brave. And like Frodo, I know that we will not be alone. ●
*Taken from Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring
The article was first published on March 21, 2021.
