Evil, Vengeance, and the Just Rule of Law

Wendy C. Hamblet

Spinoza refers to the “monstrous Turks;” George W. Bush speaks of “axes of evil.” Religions preach about the devil, and of the evils of mundane desires. Popular media treat of brutal Muslim traditions. It is curious that these images—evil, monstrousness, inhumanity, beastliness—have crept again into public discourse since they are archaic in origin, resurrecting a mythological vision of the world. This paper composes a philosophical experiment that considers the popular assumption of the existence of something people call “evil” (and its varied derivatives). I consider the phenomenon of “evil,” and then consider what, if anything, of value the term adds to a discussion of the nature of the human condition or to a deeper and more valid understanding of human agency. We shall see that these explanatory goals fail to be served by the myth of evil, but that extreme victim=-centered language triggers vengeance in place of the justice that might deliver a peaceful world.

1. A Phenomenology of Evil

Evil is a mythological image, set in what is commonly called a “religious” worldview, i.e. a view of the world as the setting for grand narratives of cosmic forces (good and evil) played out across the epochs of historical time. The mythological explanatory model provides a common foundation for most religious communities, even the religion of “atheism,” because its stark imagery erects clear boundaries that simplify life in the human community, by starkly dividing what is prescribed from what is prohibited, what is loved by the god from what is not, and what complies from what transgresses the lawful boundaries of human practice and divinely-ordained justice. Evil occurs as the protagonist in the mythological narrative, unordered, undisciplined, unreasonable, incomprehensible, not merely from within a peculiar worldview, but by human cognitive powers.

Few human groups find the world entirely free from evil. This phrasing highlights the fact that evil is not a mere invention of a human mind but composes a phenomenon of human experience. The fact that people “find evil” signals that evil comes to appearance, is manifest, in a lived experience, which is different from claiming an objective empirical proof of the existence of evil. Evil describes an experience of the world; it describes how the world feels to a subject.

We cannot question the truth of the phenomenon of evil. Phenomenology does not engage in questions of empirical or representational truth. What is true for a subject is taken simply and naively as true, by the phenomenologist. To raise the question of veracity of experience is to think against the grain of phenomenological study. Edmund Husserl, the father of phenomenology, does not oppose phenomenological truth to some other more “real truth” gleaned through the objective attitude of the scientist. Rather, Husserl insists that there is nothing but the phenomenon; subjects have no access to the world except through their experiences of phenomena. This is true of the victim no less than the scientist. So the phenomenologist puts aside questions of truth or falsity, and simply listens naively to the experience to see what it can tell us about the way that human lives are lived.

Evil presents a compelling challenge to phenomenological study: evil composes the human experience of the inhumanity of another human being. The phenomenon comes to appearance as always already distinguished by a difference in ontological status, as distinctly another kind of being, an other to human being. Further, the ontological status of the object is ambiguous in its relation to the human. On the one hand, the evil phenomenon is less than the human, lower on the ontological scale and lower in moral worth, since ontological scales compose always morally significant rankings and orderings of beings. Concomitantly, however, the evil phenomenon is also experienced as greater than the human, something more than human power can contain, something more than human understanding can fathom.

The “greater than” quality inherent in the phenomenon of evil maintains in two capacities: what is evil is generally experienced as great in potency and great in malevolence. It is the “greater while lesser” (than the human) aspect of the phenomenon which is baffling to the human mind, and that evokes a response of horror. The respondent struggles to make sense of the horrifying by associating it with known horrors, other phenomena that make us feel powerlessness and loathing: disease, contamination, insidiousness, malignancy, like a cancer masquerading as healthy tissue but infecting, consuming, undermining, and destroying good health. Since “greater than” implies power and since exercising power is generally a pleasant experience, the responding subject further assumes that the evil agent takes pleasure in, or at least is indifferent to, the suffering it causes in others.

Phenomena are not timeless, as Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel has demonstrated; they are historically and socially determined.  Often, as the experience evolves over time, the subject comes to see that what appeared as “true” is empirically contradicted. The phenomenon evolves to a higher truth, Hegel would say. Ultimately the experience of great potency and malevolence shows itself as grossly exaggerated. The heightened initial response to the phenomenon of evil often gives way to a more measured and rational response to the object of perception. A child comes to see, with the light of day, that the monster in the closet that caused his night terrors is simply a shadow of his hockey shirt. The strange neighbor lurking about in the garden at night loses his fearsomeness when we learn that he has a passion for night-blooming orchids.

Evil is a phenomenological occurrence, an experience that is lived within a certain worldview. That worldview is one of fear and horror, a worldview configured necessarily by ignorance, since the problem of evil arises in response to fearsome things we do not understand. A phenomenon is experienced as real and true in its moment and universal in its truths, not as simply a local or transitory experience. But a phenomenon is always filtered through a schema of local reality postulates, prejudices and assumptions of a “common mental world” determined by peculiar histories, bequeathed across generations and sometimes millennia.[1]

When a person or a people’s peculiar histories include traumatic events, their lifeworld becomes deeply shaken and a return to a solid foundational myth can bring comfort from the chaos of the trauma. It makes perfect sense for victim populations to experience bad things in exaggerated ways. Trauma damages psyches, making people fearful and suspicious, and making their world appear threatening and hostile.  The firm structure and clear imagery of the mythological worldview help to sort out the chaos of victim lives in the aftermath of horrors. Evil is the language of victims. Thus, we should not be surprised to find the myth of evil in the employ of the people of Liverpool. For the Jews in a post-Holocaust world, for Palestinians in their barbed wire compounds, for terrorized Sierra Leone mineworkers, and for many Westerners post 9-11, evil lurks everywhere.

Yet, curiously, we find the language of evil on both sides of many tragedies, even conflicts where the perpetrator and victim seem so clearly demarcated, where the identity of the bad guy seems beyond contention. Adolf Hitler had his mythology of evil; Richard Koenigsberg counts hundreds of instances where Hitler refers to the Jews in terms of a dangerous infection seeking to destroy the innocent and noble German people.[2] The use of the myth of evil by obvious perpetrators confirms the violent-proneness of victim populations. And it raises a troubling question: Do we purge people from our midst because they are evil, or do we name them evil so we can purge them? Hitler said: If the Jews had not existed, we would have had to invent them.

2. Child Monsters

On the 12th of February 1993, the British media flooded with the story of “Child Monsters.” Two ten-year-old Liverpool boys had enticed two-year-old James Bulger to a railway siding and then beaten him to death with bricks and iron bars, leaving the body lying on the tracks to make it look like an accident. The two children were tried as adults; their names made public, they were held to adult standards of conduct. Found guilty, the boys were sentenced to eight years secure detention. The Home Secretary intervened (1994) to set the minimum detention at 15 years (later overturned by the House of Lords).

A striking feature of the tragedy was the language employed by police and the media in describing the crime. Metaphors of evil, like an insidious disease, seeped into public discourse around the event, eating away at public sympathies. The child perpetrators were called “freaks of nature” and “products of the devil.” The courts too became infected with the language; the trial judge declared the murder “an act of unparalleled evil and barbarity.”[3] The imagery was so powerful, so seductive, that it found its way from public discourse into government policy on justice; notions of responsibility, culpability, and retribution were rethought in the light of the case. Social and legal policy became contaminated by metaphors of evil. Obsessions with the demonic practices of modern youth pervaded the media and predisposed police investigations of youth crime across the nation.

The discourse of evil requires no further investigation because evil cannot be explained. No information was submitted at the time of the James Bulger trial to explain how two ten-year-old children had come to commit the heinous deed. There was no investigation of family background, no analysis of relations with peers in school or neighborhood, no studies of psycho-social or sexual make-up, no inquiries into detection or intervention policies by social or educational services. Such investigations had no bearing on this case or on others for some time to come.

3. Monstrous Civilizations

We may recognize a similar phenomenon in the United States’ reaction to the September 11, 2001 tragedy at the World Trade Center. This event, achieved so easily in the heart of the American homeland, disarmed the populace, who, as citizens of the global superpower, were unaccustomed to being the target of global violences, unaccustomed to the role of victim. Their reaction to their new-found identity was shock, a sense of woundedness, and outrage. They called for justice. The scales of fair treatment in a rational world had been tipped in the attackers’ favor, so the people sought redress of their losses. They wanted to punish their attackers to the degree that their victims had been hurt. They wanted their due measure of compensation from their attackers for the undermining of their sense of security and well-being. 

Their leaders set about to determine how the scales of justice might be duly rebalanced. Bush looked upon the Arab hijackers, Saudis for the most part, declared them Muslim “terrorists,” and then straightway attacked the Afghanistan countryside seeking the secret stronghold of terrorist Bin Laden. Bush’s argument for the justness of this attack was: “terrorists are evil; they hate us for our freedom.” Bush identified three “axes of evil” in Iran, Iraq and North Korea, and it was only a matter of time before this line of thinking culminated in the “Shock and Awe” blitzkrieg of Iraq. Few Americans questioned the sleight of hand that identified the Saudi hyper-religious fanatical brand of terrorism with the Iraqi secular dictator’s  state terrorism of his own people. Terrorists are terrorists, it was supposed; evil is evil. Good people react to evil with uncompromising standards of justice that do not necessarily pass through the deliberative rational process of weighing just desserts.

4. Mythical Vengeance and Deliberative Justice

Victims generally have difficulty seeing clearly what constitutes “due measure” in regard of wrongs done to them. Aristotle states: Most people are bad judges in their own case (Politics 1280a15-16). Victims tend toward excessiveness in their responses to offense. They take their offenses to their family and friends who revenge them with radically violent responses meant to secure the world from future threat. Generally these radical violences had the opposite effect; they generated cycles of violence between warring clans that could last for many generations.

Solon, in forming the first Athenian democracy in the sixth century B.C.E., sought to correct the tendency toward excessiveness in punishment by establishing a judicial system of public trial that would take vengeance from the hands of the victim and entrust justice to a third party duly authorized to rebalance the scales of justice that had been tipped in the favor of the wrongdoer and out of the favor of the wronged. The trial system involves a process, an unfolding drama that seeks just desserts.

First there is the voicing of positions in open forum before an authorized audience of peer judges. The victims are granted a hearing, where they cite their grievances, voice their outrage, and have their wounding heard by fellows who share their sense of right and wrong. This is a vital and important step because the public airing of wrongs is crucial to the healing of victims, but the process must not stop here. Next there is a hearing from the defendant explaining the special circumstances that surround the wounding action. Then there is rational deliberation, in the cold objective language of the law, on the appropriate compensation to be exacted from the wrongdoer.

The advent of this juridical process, staged in the final book of Aeschylus’ trilogy Oresteia, not only celebrates the overcoming of tribal revenge killings and their replacement with deliberative trial process as a means to achieve the desired end of justice; the play demonstrates the necessity for the evolution of states from tribal vengeance to deliberative process by sanctioned state authorities, in determining the “due measure” of justice. The avenging Erinyes (Furies) that chase Orestes into Athens, follow mechanistically upon the spilled blood of clans. Cycles of vengeance plague the house of Atreus from the moment Agamemnon sacrifices his daughter Ephigenia to the winds of war; they drive Clytemnestra to kill her husband upon his return from Troy; they drove Orestes to avenge his father by killing his mother and her lover. Orestes flees the avenging Erinyes in throwing himself on the mercy of Athena. Athena declares that even a goddess cannot decide alone such a grave case as homicide, so she convenes the Areopagus, a court of noble peers equal in status to the wronged and the defendant who will bring due measure to their responses to wrongdoing.

The new justice is a process: the victim voice is heard, then his outrage is filtered through the social body (hundreds of jurors sit in the Areopagus) and the cold objective language of legal discourse, before a just response is decided. The passions are not removed from the scene of judgment in addressing the wrongdoing; rather, the process grants a hearing to the impassioned outrage of the victim and the impassioned pleading of the defendant, so that responds to their passionate discourses can be met with rational deliberation in the language of objective fairness.

4. Vengeance Short-circuits Justice

Given the practice in the art of justice that the Western world has enjoyed since Solon’s first courts, one might have expected some serious deliberations about what constituted a just response, in both the case of the James Bulger murder, and in the case of the September 11th tragedy. However, when people are faced with horrifying things that they do not understand, there is the tendency to resort to metaphors of evil. They resort to this imagery because it grants a kind of cognitive comfort in the face of loathing and terror. The imagery is comforting because evil appears to furnish a complete explanation of the horrifying event: the wrongdoers us because they are evil. Evil is the language of victims; it voices in extreme terms their sense of moral outrage.

Vengeance is framed in the language of evil. Solon and Athena determined that justice must not be framed in the language of victims. Only when we resist the imagery of evil, do questions arise that permit the deliberations that compose justice. Mark Thomas (Every Mother’s Nightmare 1993) and Blake Morrison (As If 1997) resisted the loaded language and popular imagery.[4] Instead they asked the questions the courts should have asked—questions about children gone wrong. Their questions led them to the discovery of two youngsters, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, trapped for years in desperately unhappy and tragic situations.

Young Robert was the fifth of six sons in a household where domestic violence was common. Father abandoned the family when Robert was only five and the mother then turned to drink, leaving the children to fend for themselves a good part of the time. Unkempt, dirty, running wild, stealing, and playing truant, each brother in turn seriously abused the younger ones. Eventually, the two elder boys were seized by family services, and then the next was taken into care, and eventually the next, leaving Robert alone with a younger brother Simon whom he bullied mercilessly. Despite all these symptoms of dysfunction, the neighbours reported the family as “unexceptional.”  Jon too came from a broken and unhappy home. Jon’s father left when he was three. Jon’s school behaviours (at 9 yrs old) included head-banging, rocking and moaning, making strange sounds; he cut himself with scissors, and threw things at his classmates. His reports of being bullied by other boys went unheeded by his teachers. Eventually he attacked another boy with a ruler, trying to choke him.

Ultimately the two boys found themselves in the same class for problem children—like prisons, the perfect training ground for socio-pathological behaviors. Violence experts know that, where people act together, the sense of the abnormality of their behaviors is reduced; the chances of socio- and psycho-pathology are exponentially increased when troublesome individuals act in concert.

 Thomas’s and Morrison’s more measured approaches to the case led them to very different conclusions than those reached by the judge. Thomas states: “It is extremely unusual to find children of quite such tender years capable of killing another human being. Yet much of [these boys’ earlier] behavior conforms to patterns familiar to those who have studied such crimes in older children and adults.”[5] Violence scholars know a great deal about what factors contribute to homicidal behaviors. One thing that is strikingly frequent in perpetrators of radical violence is adverse family factors. There has usually been violence in the family home; the children have been abused, physically or sexually, and emotionally during their childhood.[6] There is often instability of the caretaker situation and inconstant parental residency, especially absence of a father, and very common is parental alcoholism, criminality, or psychiatric history.[7] 

In the case of the “monsters” who killed the James Bulger, there existed glaring signals that more alert and caring parents, teachers, and social workers would have recognized as indicative of a propensity for extreme violence. When the sadly dysfunctional backgrounds of the two children were finally exposed, their crime seemed much less a mystery, and it became clear that those adults entrusted with the children’s upbringing had been the ones to fail “monstrously.” The children themselves had been victims at every stage of their young unhappy lives.

What also becomes clear is that the failure of police, the media, the populace, and the judge to employ justice instead of vengeance. These social actors became lodged in the mythical worldview that rages, like the furious Erinyes, after a blood payment for the offense. The people judged the case from the victim standpoint, but they failed to complete the three stage process in which justice unfolds as “due measure.” The language of evil trapped them in victim rage and poised them toward vengeance, rather than delivering them to Athena’s court of justice.

5. Just Balance among Victims and Perpetrators

Violence scholars know that certain predictable signals of propensity to violence can explain tragedies after the fact. But those signals can also help to identify tragedies before they occur. Configuring violence as reasonable allows authorities the opportunity for healing would-be perpetrators, in advance of their projecting their abjection onto others. The worst perpetrators have been victims of some kind of wounding in their earlier lives, and have been left with a negative view of their world that causes them to arm themselves against that world and prepare themselves for battle against it. It falls to social institutions and judicial authorities to see that people are protected from wounding, and to address woundings when they do occur, setting right the wrongs that have been done to people, recalibrating the scales of justice that return people’s worldviews to a just balance.

When victims seek repayment in vengeance, victims are cheated as much as perpetrators, because everybody pays when they live in a community where the scales of justice are out of balance. In the excessiveness that necessarily accompanies vengeance reside the seeds of the next cycle of violence. The furious Erinyes chase down the scent of blood mechanistically and relentlessly. Cycles of vengeance escalate, causing universal tragedy, which explains why the proponents of the current War against Terror posit their project as an “endless war.” The cycles of excessive violences cannot be broken by upping the ante on the next round of violence, but only by stepping off the stage of mythical responses and into the broad court of peer group deliberation that measures due desserts objectively.

6. The Continuing Uses of the Mythology of Evil

The myth of evil is very old, compelling, and seductive, steeped in moralistic overtones and entrenched in violent ritual tradition, which facts explain its frequent resurfacing in diverse historical eras: talk of evil tends to have a gripping effect on audiences. The myth crops up regularly across the historical landscape in the least likely of times and places, because it very effectively serves important pragmatic functions in the life of a person, a people, and a state.

First, the mythology of evil serves important political functions. In Genealogy of Morals, Friedrich Nietzsche demonstrates that people use the terms “good” and “evil” to distinguish themselves from others. Powerful, healthy (hyper-masculine, military) cultures value noble birth, strength, bravery, liberality of spirit, honesty, and loyalty. A culture that is disempowered will use “good” to affirm their characteristics but their efforts will culminate in an inverted morality, a reactive morality born of resentment for those in power.[8] Starkly moralizing worldviews affirm the rightness of the status quo of power relations by demonizing outsiders to the group. For the weak in society, hyper-moralities make people feel better about who they are, and about their disadvantaged status. The multi-dimensional functionality of moralizing worldviews explains their prolonged existence long after people’s social relations and historical circumstances have shifted course.

People don’t question the mythology of evil that demonizes their enemies and counsels projects of vengeance because the mythical worldview not only serves political functions for the powerful, but serves crucial existential needs in their own lives. The cognitive filtering that heightens the subject’s experience of the enemy as exaggeratedly potent and malevolent has a secondary and important existential effect: it amplifies the sense of victim identity as innocent and vulnerable. Because so many people in any political system are victims of that system, the language of evil resonates fiercely with their experience of the world.

However tragic and hopeless people’s existences, whatever adversities and privations they suffer, people take great comfort in a worldview where everything is strictly ordered and makes sense. The grand cosmic struggle between good and evil trivializes people’s mundane concerns like grueling labor, poverty, disease, and the hungry bellies and untimely deaths of their children. Though things may look dark, the mythology of good and evil places the god at the helm of earthly events and guarantees that all will be well in the final accounting. The god repays the suffering of worldly misfortune in a transcendental gift system; the meek shall inherit the earth in an afterlife that rewards their docile obedience.

The myth of evil serves other existential needs peculiar to modern democratic society. The notion of evil and the ritual of the purging of evil provides enemies we can despise together, thereby forging from the diversity that composes modern societies the “common mental world” that is essential to people’s mental health.[9] Moreover, because evil is a morally significant experience, the event of its destruction supplies an episode of ecstatic release from the numbing mediocrity of consumer society, a release that is ecstatic, thrilling, freeing.[10]

Evil comes to appearance exaggerated by fear and loathing within a victim worldview where definitions are categorical and identities are ordered and distinct. Discourses of evil give moral texture to human lives, an illusion of meaning to life events, allowing for stark, clear, morally-significant identity boundaries, and clarifying the work of the god’s faithful. Evil myths achieve these important goals in human lives by locating those beings or forces that do not hold rank in the god’s holy army, those who transgress the moral boundaries of polite human society, creeping in from some moral netherworld.

The myth of evil posits that the world makes sense; bad things happen because evil is. By radically polarizing contested identities, the myth of evil appears to give meaning to tragedy and chaos. It furnishes a sense of a complete explanation; there is no need, indeed no sense, in searching any further for failures in oneself or in the system at large. It is as though, in naming someone or something evil, we place it across a border, a safe and comforting boundary. Beyond that limit, a dark and monstrous reality lurks, incomprehensible to human minds. By tossing all that we do not understand on the far side of that border, our identity remains pure and pristine. No matter whom we may harm in the world, we are reasonable, rational, moral, and more human because others are evil monsters. But the meaningfulness is simply illusion. The term evil adds nothing to our understanding of people or events. In fact, naming others evil forbids their investigation.

People are quick to see evil in things because at times very bad things happen that seem to defy explanation. It is easy to explain the worst crimes in history by attributing them to monsters. But Christopher Browning demonstrates that “ordinary men” populated the ranks of the crack killing battalions of the Third Reich. Ordinary mothers in Poland and Lithuania brought picnic lunches and held their children up to witness the mass executions of their Jewish neighbors. In Rwanda, ordinary Hutu mothers were reported to turn in their husbands and half-Tutsi children for execution, in response to the Hutu extremist propaganda (adapted from the colonial mythology) that Tutsi were foreign “cockroaches” feeding off genuine African peoples.[11]

Extreme terms and rigid mythologies can comfort the downtrodden in a world that is harsh and violence-ridden, but the sad truth is that the bad things people call “evil” are not something special and rare. They are frightfully common—ordinary, banal. “Evils” come to us in many forms that we can do little to circumvent: floods and earthquakes, ageing, disease and death. And evil comes to us in forms that should make us want to change the world: hunger, ignorance, homelessness, epidemic, wars and oppression.

Discourses of evil and their attendant mythologies do not help in the healing of victims; they do not help us to understand why bad things happen, nor do they clarify how to avoid them in the future. Rational deliberation of what constitutes “due measure” in every case restores the balance of justice that lets everyone move forward from tragedies. When ethical challenges and socio-political difficulties are the focus, people are prompted to work together to reach solutions beneficial to all, to protect future victims from harm, to heal those who have been harmed, and to improve the human condition for all.

As long as we employ the imagery of evil in talking about human tragedies, we free ourselves from responsibility for seeking just remedies for bad things. When we see things and people as evil, our responses become extreme. Then we risk legitimating the use of violent methods that we would readily name evil in others. Since the myth of evil serves no valuable explanatory purposes and does not enhance moral response but actually frustrates justice and triggers cycles of violent response, I am recommending that, once and for all, we put to rest these extremist terms of discussion in the graveyard of outdated and dangerous relics that belong to a mythical world.

About the Author

Write to Wendy Hamblet at wchamblet@yahoo.com