Evil is as evil does – and it’s still doing it

None of this, obviously, adds up. But then nothing is absolute when it comes to evil. Not that this puts off Terry Eagleton. Having published more than 40 books, he has decided to tackle the subject in his latest treatise, On Evil.

Eagleton left Oxbridge several years ago. He lectures at NUI Galway in addition to other commitments at University of Notre Dame and Lancaster University.

Born in Salford, Manchester, in 1943, he’s been living in Ireland for almost 15 years, with his young family and second wife Willa Murphy, an American academic who lectures at the University of Ulster.

“I might say,” he ventures, “that having been in Cambridge and Oxford, essentially from the age of 18 to 56, I think I know something about evil.”

His study, a short 160-page essay, is as much about literature as philosophy. It ranges over a dozen or so literary texts, including ones from William Golding, Thomas Mann, Shakespeare, Graham Greene, Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman and, inevitably, Milton’s Paradise Lost.

He also lends a stage to Freud and Schopenhauer and references cases such as Jamie Bolger and the Moors murderers.

Unsurprisingly, the Holocaust is also a key touchstone. And, given his renowned Marxist credentials, there are nods to some lefty comrades.

“What’s robbing a bank,” he says, quoting Bertolt Brecht, “compared to founding one?”

“I wanted to look at the idea of evil, partly to find out why people find it such a glamorous and exotic and sexy idea,” he says.

“When I told my 12-year-old son I was writing a book on evil he said, ‘Wicked!’ That was rather typical of the attitudes to evil that I was trying to look at.

“Why is goodness so boring? Why does the devil have all the best tunes? I suppose I go on to say that over the centuries we’ve lost a sense of goodness as something which is creative and dynamic and fulfilling and positive. Goodness has become rather tedious. One thinks of prudence and chastity and temperance. I go on also to try and refute this by saying evil is a kind of deficiency, a kind of lack, a kind of incapability of being human. It’s not glamorous at all. Evil are in a sense the living dead.”

Of course, we associate death with evil on many levels. Murder is our most effective way of robbing God of his monopoly over human life. Indeed, mankind’s history is a catalogue of death and often needless despair.

Theodor Adorno felt human history has been a “permanent catastrophe”. Hegel was equally damning, regarding it as “the slaughter bench on which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of states, and the virtue of individuals have been sacrificed”.

Eagleton concurs, wondering aloud why politicians have failed so abysmally through the ages; he rubbishes Richard Dawkins’ notion in The God Delusion that we are becoming kinder and more civilised as a people. “Everybody wants progress but progress with a large ‘P’ turns into a kind of ideology,” says Eagleton. “It’s a doctrine, the sort of doctrine that Dawkins advances that the world is essentially getting better and will get better if only it wasn’t for religious superstition and other things that are holding it back.

“For people like Dawkins, who I think is a very old-style rationalist in this sense, there’s a kind of inner dynamic of history getting better. Where I think that’s a very old-fashioned view. That view lay in ruins on the battlefields of World War I. This man Dawkins who thinks he’s at the cutting edge in many ways in his arguments is actually very backward. He’s still pretty much a Victorian-Enlightenment rationalist. The image of the Enlightenment given by people like Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens is a very caricatured one – that the great Enlightenment values of science and civilisation and morality will prevail and it’s just a matter of them being blocked by things like religion.

“I think that’s far too facile and reductive a picture of what’s going on because one of the things about Enlightenment values like freedom is they do indeed bring freedom to some but they bring a lot of oppression to other people. These values are all double-edged.”

One of Eagleton’s central tenets is that most wickedness is institutional – one thinks of pollution and the criminal depletion of pension funds – and almost the result of “thoughtlessness”, as Hannah Arendt said of Adolf Eichmann’s crimes, the banal bureaucrat of the Nazi regime. As Eagleton says, the CIA agent who tortures may well be a good husband and father.

Whither humankind? Having dedicated his book to Henry Kissinger, Eagleton is uncertain.

“Who knows? There used to be the old socialist saying, ‘Socialism or barbarism’. If you don’t achieve socialism the result will be barbarism of one kind or another; maybe a resurgence of fascism. Of course there are so many new factors now. There’s a difference in seeing a future of incessant warfare and radicalism and American neo-conservatism and seeing a future in which what you might call evil emerges again.

“Evil has a slightly specialist quality to it. It doesn’t seem to have any purpose. Therefore in a curious sense, evil is non-political. It’s non-utilitarian. It destroys for the hell of it. It is a form of obscene enjoyment. It’s not really interested in political outcomes. Stalin and Mao destroyed for wicked but, as it were, rational purposes. Evil doesn’t have a rationality in that sense.”