Motiveless Malignity

Why We Need to Encounter Radical Evil Again

I never took the idea of evil very seriously. There was an episode of The Twilight Zone from 1960, called The Howling Man, about a man called Ellington who finds an imprisoned, howling, man in a monastery in Germany. The abbot warns him that the howling man is, in fact, the Devil. Ellington, disbelieving him, releases the howling man – who promptly turns into the Devil. We are told that this was responsible for the outbreak of World War II. The episode is memorably eerie, even disturbing, but I did not take it seriously as theology or history. I didn’t think we needed to believe that Hitler was satanic to believe that he was responsible for so many deaths.

Judaism doesn’t have a Devil. There are scant references to Satan in Tanakh (the Hebrew Bible or “Old Testament”) and the one or two that do exist (mainly in Job) are interpreted differently, to refer to an angel who tests and tempts mankind, but who does so only because God has entrusted him with this mission to prove the worthiness of human beings. He is not an independent force of evil. Evil is something performed by human beings and not an independent, negative spiritual force. Inasmuch as post-biblical Jewish texts talk about suffering, they tend focus on the Jewish victims of evil and their suffering, growth or repentance, not the nature of evil itself. Evil becomes the “rod of God’s wrath” or, in kaballah (Jewish mysticism) a “shell” with sparks of holiness inside in need of elevation, not a force to be confronted.

It was Hamas’ attack on Israel on 7 October 2023 that led me to reconsider the question of radical evil. Notably, it was the non-Jewish, religiously or culturally Christian, thinkers Jordan Peterson and Douglas Murray who I first heard apply the label of “radical evil” to the horrors inflicted by Hamas on that day. Radical evil fits far more easily into a Christian (or cultural Christian) worldview than an Orthodox Jewish one.

What is radical evil, then? If human life is of infinite worth, perhaps all murder is radical evil. Nevertheless, there seems to be a distinction between different types of murder; some murders stand out for their depravity, as was the case with the Holocaust and 7 October. Some criminals sink to new depths. There is, on some level, a difference between a teenage boy who made some bad decisions, joined a gang and found himself in a knife fight or shootout with a rival gang member that resulted in him killing someone and the kind of organised, planned, physically and emotionally sadistic brutality of the Nazis and Hamas, the kind of evil that filmed its crimes and posted them to the internet – in some cases, posted them to the social media sites of the victims so that their relatives and friends would witness their suffering. It is not just a difference in terms of scale (one death against thousands or millions), but also of (im)moral depth. When evil is pursued from a sense of “selflessness,” from devotion to a particular ideology, without any profit for the perpetrator, this is indeed radical evil. Likewise, suffering from which the perpetrator gains sadistic pleasure is radical evil.

A useful guide to distinguish radical evil from mere wrongdoing, even vile wrongdoing, was provided by the Holocaust survivor, theologian and philosopher, Emil Fackenheim. Fackenheim noted that it was possible to be a good Christian in the Middle Ages and still believe that the Crusades and the Inquisition went too far. However, for the Nazis, there was no “too far.” Literally anything was permitted. The same might be said about Hamas. For them too, there was no “too far.”

We need to confront the nature of radical evil and de-radicalise or imprison those guilty of it. Progressives find this very hard to understand and accept. As Thomas Sowell pointed out, left-wing politics as a whole is based on the assumption that people are essentially good and anything they do wrong is a product of something that happened to them, generally an impersonal social force like poverty or “structural racism.” Either society is to blame or they are caught in an ongoing “cycle of violence,” which has no beginning, but which it is the responsibility of the powerful and oppressive (in practice, white Westerners) to break (by not responding or punishing), even though they are generally not responsible for the worst violence.

This attitude is becoming increasingly dominant in fiction that centres evil as being misunderstood or even oppressed. Films like Wicked and Joker take characters from established franchises that were originally presented as absolute evil and give them sympathetic backstories. This has actually been going on for some time. The Killing Joke, the (excellent) graphic novel that first gave the Joker a sympathetic backstory, was published in 1988, but seems to have reached epic proportions in recent years, albeit finally provoking a backlash.

While there is a place for sympathetic villains in fictional stories, as much wrongdoing is explicable, if not excusable, we need to return to the presentation of radical evil, the “motive-hunting of a motiveless malignity,” where the stated motive is simply a justification after the event, not the real cause of the violence. If we understand the world through the stories that we tell, we need to tell stories about people who perform acts of incredible horror for pure sadistic enjoyment. “How did he get that way?” isn’t always a valid question. Sometimes the more important question is, “What are we going to do about him?”

In the end, radical evil will probably never be fully understandable or describable by people who are not touched by it. To touch the heart of radical evil would be, as Nietzsche suggested, to be a fighter of monsters who becomes a monster, to be someone who stares into the abyss only for the abyss to stare back into him. If we were fully to understand radical evil, we would become evil ourselves or perhaps simply go mad. Nevertheless, we need to remember that radical evil exists in the world and that it needs to be fought with everything we have. Above all, we must not normalise or excuse it, not provide spurious justifications for it, certainly not take it as its own word as distorted good. Otherwise, evil will indeed win and Devil – or the devilish – will be set free into the world again, with catastrophic results for mankind.