Evil

Americans who speak of 9/11 tend to have in mind the destruction of the World Trade Center rather than the 9/11 almost 30 years earlier.

On that day in 1973, the United States violently overthrew the democratically elected government of Chile and installed in its place an odious dictator who went on to murder about as many people as died in the World Trade Center. It is curious that one does not hear more about this particular 9/11 on Fox News.

What happened on both occasions was a moral obscenity and wicked, but it was not, in a technical sense, evil. There is a distinction between evil and wickedness. It is wicked to destroy innocent people for one’s political ends, as Al Qaeda did that day in New York and the United States has done in Vietnam, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and countless other places around the world. For an act to be evil, however, means that the destruction must be done simply for the hell of it—for the sheer obscene pleasure of the thing, rather than for some functional end.

Evil is an assault on the meaning and value of human life. It takes a savage delight in annihilation, even if there is no point to it. For example, one of the most horrifying aspects of the Holocaust is that it served no practical military purpose. It was manically in excess of any strategic benefit. You do not need to murder six million people simply to create an ideological bogeyman.

The crimes of Stalin and Mao, by contrast, had some twisted logic to them. They were performed for a purpose. This is not to excuse them. In fact, Stalin and Mao were quite as wicked as Hitler since they, too, slaughtered a great many people. The distinction between evil and wickedness is one of kind, not degree. To kill one person for kicks—simply to fill the aching void inside oneself, which is the case with evil—is not as bad as to exterminate thousands of people for some political goal. Charles Manson is bad enough, but he is not as bad as Pol Pot.

What happened on both 9/11’s had a purpose. This is not to diminish the immorality of either event. To explain is not to exculpate. Historians who investigate the causes of Nazism are not out to let Hitler off the hook. Political commentators who study the emergence of the Irish Republican Army are not in cahoots with them. The IRA committed some appallingly wicked crimes, but its members were not psychopaths, as the British tabloid press liked to pretend. They had, and still have, clear political goals, however monstrous some of the means they have used to attain them.

Caricaturing your enemy as a psychopath simply ensures that you will never defeat him. How could you do so if you refuse to understand him? Besides, if the IRA’s members really are mentally deranged, then they are not responsible for what they have done, and the same would apply to Osama bin Laden. The press may have thought the IRA was devoid of all rationality, but British intelligence officials did not agree. They knew well enough that IRA actions made sense from the IRA’s own perspective. The same is true of American officials and Al Qaeda.

In the wake of the second 9/11, an American woman interviewed on television blamed the attacks on the perpetrators’ envy of Western freedom. The truth is that radical Islamists envy such freedom about as much as they secretly hanker to lounge around in Amsterdam cafes smoking dope and reading Simone de Beauvoir. Fundamentalist bigotry, however, is by no means confined to the Muslim world. While Americans stare anxiously at that part of the globe, they should spare a thought for the potentially murderous religious fanatics at their backs.

In the end, fundamentalism is the product of fear, not hatred. It is the ugly creed of those who feel sidelined by the brave new world of postmodernity and who know how to call attention to their passed-over presence only by shooting someone else through the head. We will not tackle that kind of atrocity by burning Muslim children in return. On the contrary, we shall only succeed in intensifying it a thousandfold, as well as erasing the moral distinction between ourselves and the terrorists to the point where we have nothing of value left to defend.

Terry Eagleton is a visiting professor at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of Why Marx Was Right (2011) and On Evil (2010), both published by Yale University Press.