Canto III, ll. 3–9

Per me si va nella citta dolente Per me si va nell’ eterno dolore Per me si va tra la perduta gente Giustizia mosse il mio alto Fattore; Fecemi la divina potestate, La somma sapienza e ‘l primo amore. Dinanzi a me non fuor cose create Se non etterne, ed io etterno duro. Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate.

Through me the way to the grieving city, through me the way into eternal sorrow, through me the way among the lost people. Justice moved my high Maker; divine power made me, highest wisdom and primal love. Before me were no things created except eternal ones, and I endure eternal. Give up all hope, ye who enter.

Tr.: Robert M. Durling
The Divine Comedy of Dante, vol. 1: Inferno
New York: Oxford University Press, 1996

The aim of this book is to understand evil. To demystify evil altogether would be much too ambitious a task. I am committed, however, to the belief that we can make sense of a good portion of what goes by the name of evil, though there will remain areas that will continue to baffle us. We can assume that those territories on the grand map of evil will, through scientific inquiry, be rendered smaller with each succeeding generation.

Along the path of our investigation, there will be several high hurdles to clear. We need, for example, to reach an acceptable definition of evil. The question must be addressed: who, if anyone, is qualified to make judgments about evil? There is also the problem of how to agree upon the legitimate domain within which evil can meaningfully be said to exist. If evil emerges as a legitimate topic for discussion, as I believe it is, are there important differences between what is considered evil in times of war or group conflict and what we may regard as evil committed by individuals in peacetime?

DEFINING EVIL

There is a close connection between our ideas about evil as an abstract concept and the religious sources in which these ideas are rooted. The very term itself occurs some 604 times in the Bible (Old and New Testaments together) but covers a wide array of human failings and crimes—from seemingly minor acts, like touching creatures that crawl, to abominations like incest and murder. There are lengthy lists of evils to be found in Leviticus and Deuteronomy, including those embodied in the Ten Commandments. In the New Testament we find another such list in Paul's Epistle to the Galatians.1 There, Paul inveighs against fifteen wrongful attitudes and behaviors: among them jealousy, debauchery, selfishness; religious acts such as idolatry and heresy; and also acts associated with violence: hatred and murder. In the Bible “evil” is equated with “wrong” or “bad” and is not limited as a label to be reserved for the worst of the bad or wrong actions to which we are prone. This same global use of evil is found in the Koran as well.² The third-century Persian prophet Mani³ (from whom Manichaeism is derived), divided human experience, as had Zoroaster⁴ before him, into Good and Bad. Zoroaster ascribed Good and Bad to two twin gods representing these influences: a god of light and the good (Ahura Mazda), and a god of darkness and the bad or evil (Ahriman). Buddhism emphasizes, besides lust as a primary sin, a tripartite concept that gives special weight to anger, greed, and foolishness.⁵

Religion has played a powerful role in shaping our ideas about evil. Many insist that discussion of the subject is legitimate only when put forward either by religious leaders—whether the clergy or professors of theology—or else by philosophers. Philosophers are the other group to whom we have ceded over the centuries the privilege of instructing us on matters of good and evil. Meanwhile, one will search in vain for a useful working definition from the earlier of these sources. There are, however, a few contemporary philosophers, most notably Susan Neiman, who have contributed importantly to the problems inherent in creating a useful definition.⁶ Neiman states, in fact, that her book will not offer a definition, nor does she think an intrinsic property of evil can be defined, though she adds that to call something evil is a way of marking the fact that “it shatters our trust in the world.”⁷ Similarly controversial: how to draw the line where the “very bad” ends and the “truly evil” begins. There might be near-universal agreement about the opposite ends—the somewhat bad (slapping one's child) and the extremity of evil (Auschwitz in wartime; raping a child, in peacetime), as Delbanco mentions8—but there will always be a gray zone in the middle, where opinion is far from unanimous. Further on, Neiman helps us distinguish between natural versus moral evil, reminding us that earthquakes and floods had been seen in the past as natural evils, often inflicted upon us by a deity as a punishment for our sins. Moral evils are those that we ourselves initiate. Since most of us no longer consider natural disasters as stemming from divine retribution, if we speak of them as “evil,” we are doing so metaphorically. This book concerns only the evil acts for which we are alone responsible—the moral evils. Religious doctrines converge in holding us responsible in this sphere, as conveyed in the Koran, where it is written: “Whatever benefit comes to you, o Man, it is from Allah, and whatever misfortune befalls you, it is from yourself.”⁹ Passages like that, also found in the Old and New Testaments, situate evil in us, where it admittedly belongs, but do not further define its nature or boundaries.

Brian Masters, who wrote an excellent biography of the serial killer Dennis Nilsen, is no stranger to the concept—and the enigma—of evil.¹⁰ Evil, for him, is “an occult word meaning little more in reality than conduct which is so bad that it is better left unexamined.”¹¹

It would be convenient if we could at least define “absolute evil” and if we could answer the equally elusive question: can one be born “evil”? Answers to such questions would be comforting to philosophers and to the legal community. But the answer to the first question is not to be found, and the second answer is simply “no.”¹² To define and describe absolute evil would require, it seems to me, a universal agreement among people of good will—philosophers, theologians, medicolegal experts, and people in ordinary life—as to what the characteristics of this extreme phenomenon might actually be. One would like to think that the death camps of Auschwitz or one of the other twentieth-century genocides would earn this kind of unanimity, but we know that there remain groups here and there who think differently. Perhaps the rape and murder of a child would serve as our high-water mark for an absolute evil. And for 99 percent of us that probably would fit, but there is still that 1 percent who would differ. To be “born evil” could only mean that some infant, crippled by a perverse twist of the genetic code, would grow up, in no matter how loving, harmonious, and even prosperous a family, to commit acts, repetitively and undeterrably, that the community regarded as evil. This would be the “vicious mole of nature” that Hamlet spoke of to Horatio, cited by Masters in his persuasive argument that “good and bad are co-existent and part of one another, and harmony emerges from the correct and decent balance between the two.”13 Born evil? I know of no such person, even in the annals of crime or in the biographies of despots. The answer here is no.

So far, this may seem like an exercise in futility—we cannot define evil in a useful way or even establish a meaningful hierarchy or scale of evil acts. But before I share with you my working definition of evil and my approach to measuring evil, I need to say something about what it means to make judgments of this sort in the first place.

MAKING JUDGMENTS ABOUT EVIL

Some people feel strongly that no one has the right to make judgments about evil. Religious people in particular hold to the view that God is the final, perhaps the only rightful, arbiter of such decisions. Since He does not speak to us directly, many religious people are willing to make the compromise, allowing for clergymen, God's earthly representatives, to make such judgments. Philosophers, because of their wisdom, and especially those far in the past, have also been privileged in this regard. Within Christianity, Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas were doubly privileged, since they were men of holy orders in addition to being philosophers. In Judaism, certain revered rabbis like Maimonides occupy almost as hallowed a place in making such decisions. In Islam, the word of Mohammed, as Allah's prophet, enjoys more than respect: it has the force of law.

People raised in a humanistic but not-so-religious a tradition may give more weight to the opinions of philosophers than of clergymen. It is rare, however, for either leaders of the various faiths or secular philosophers to get down to actual cases. What we are left with are guidelines and prescriptive comments, such as the generalities of St. Paul's Epistle to the Galatians or the outlines for good and bad behaviors in Leviticus and Deuteronomy. Detailed clinical descriptions of individuals—what we would consider case histories—are seldom found before the late eighteenth century, except in the biographies of kings and aristocrats.14

Another complicating factor lies in the different tone of the Old and New Testaments. Although God is still the Final Judge in both, in the Old Testament, men of blameless lives are accorded the privilege of making judgments. “In righteousness shalt thou judge thy neighbors”—as we are told in Leviticus.¹⁵ The prophet Ezekiel strikes a more ominous note in his diatribe against what he saw as the sinfulness of Israel in his day: “Now is the end come upon thee [land of Israel] and I will send mine anger upon thee, and will judge thee according to thy ways, and will recompense upon thee all thy abominations.”¹⁶ (“Recompense” here means to pronounce sentence or to penalize, not to repay someone a debt.) The tone is not as harsh in the New Testament. In fact, we find Jesus saying: “Judge not that ye be not judged,”¹⁷ adding a little further on: “And why beholdest the mote in thy brother's eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?”¹⁸

Writing as a psychiatrist and a psychoanalyst, I face another high hurdle. Psychiatrists are taught not to make moral judgments about their patients. This cautionary note is sounded even more emphatically in psychoanalysis. The early generation of psychoanalysts recognized, however, that people who habitually violated societal norms were not good candidates for their method of treatment. Freud had said a hundred years ago, for example, that if one were to benefit from psychoanalysis, it was essential to have a good character. As a method of understanding the inner workings of people, irrespective of their moral standing, psychoanalysis retains its usefulness. In subsequent generations, a few psychoanalysts did begin to work with delinquent adolescents, modifying their treatment methods so as to encourage the development of “prosocial” habits that would replace the earlier antisocial habits. Other forms of therapy might still prove effective for patients of a more questionable character. The physician's model of offering treatment to all, while withholding judgment, is no less honored in psychiatry than in medicine in general. But psychiatrists, in their other role as ordinary citizens, make moral judgments all the time, the same as everyone else. Men committing rape or serial sexual homicide seldom make it to the analyst's couch. Such men avoid self-revelation and generally commit their acts unburdened by the shame or guilt that would propel someone else to seek psychiatric help. Psychiatrists and psychoanalysts, reading about such individuals in the newspapers or hearing about them on the television, certainly make moral judgments: “Those were atrocious things to do,” or perhaps even, “That was an evil act.”

As for this kind of shift between a doctor's professional versus public self, I am reminded of some incidents in New York's Bellevue Hospital half a century ago. One incident concerns a police van that had brought a prisoner to the parking lot within view of the unit where I was working as an intern. When let out of the van, the prisoner, his arms and legs bound in chains, tried to escape, hopping as best he could away from the van. The police shot the man in the back. That was their job: to prevent escape. Thus immobilized, he was carried straightway to the emergency ward just on the other side of the parking lot. There, the surgeons immediately began stanching the bleeding and extracting the bullets. That was their job: to save the man's life, never mind that he was a prisoner. Some time later, I was working in that emergency ward, where an alcoholic man, drifting in and out of consciousness, was getting care for a nasty cut on the palm of his hand. Whenever the man was unconscious, the surgeon was busy stitching up the large wound. Whenever the man awoke for a bit, he would hurl vehement curses and racial epithets at the surgeon—who paused momentarily in his efforts until the man became stuporous again. This back-and-forth routine continued a few times until the stitching was completed. It would have been unethical for the physician to have refused to treat the man because of his insulting behavior.

In the face of all the religious injunctions and moral constraints against making judgments about evil, what is a psychiatrist writing on this subject to do? How might I extricate myself from the ethical quicksand that grips whoever enters this territory? The way out, I believe, is to be found by turning to the public. People in everyday life, as it turns out—including authors of books on crime, journalists, commentators in the media—all use the word evil quite frequently and freely, in describing certain varieties of violent crime and certain perpetrators of these crimes. And they—or, rather, we—do so without much attention to the supernatural, metaphysical, ineffable, “occult” overtones with which the term is otherwise so loaded. And in their reactions to violent crimes of a particularly depraved nature, clergymen, philosophers, judges, attorneys, psychiatrists, and other physicians, reacting as private citizens to the events of the day, also speak of evil, and do so with great regularity.

It is on this general usage that I base my own impressions about evil. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once said: “The meaning of a word is its usage.”19 Well and good. So besides the (maddeningly vague) use of evil in religion and philosophy, there is also the often quite specific use of the term, authorized, as it were, by the public in everyday speech. Reminiscent of the Hungarian saying, “If three people call you a horse, buy a saddle!” if a judge, journalist, and the public concur that a particular crime was evil—well, then, it was evil. For that establishes the meaning of evil—down here on earth. If we can accept this as a working definition of the concept, we need not feel so self-conscious in calling certain acts “evil,” as though we had intruded upon a space reserved for the clergy.

As I will show in more detail in the first chapter, this is the approach I will rely on in my discussion of evil. Further, I hope to show that certain acts of violence or otherwise hurtful actions are seen as underlying this notion of evil—to a greater extent than other not-quite-so-dreadful actions. This makes the fashioning of a scale for capturing these community-based distinctions at least a thinkable enterprise—one that is worthy of scientific inquiry. And these community-based distinctions, legitimate as they appear in the here and now, are not necessarily permanent or eternal.

CULTURE AND ERA

Because a community is an organic entity that grows, changes, and evolves over time, prevailing opinions about what is or is not evil are subject to modifications from one geographic setting and from one historical period to another. Perhaps the closest we come to a universal is murder—regarded as wrongful (by definition) and often enough as evil across all cultures and in all eras. With rape, in contrast, the story is different. The position of women was hardly the same in the times of the Old Testament as it is now in the “developed” countries. Wherever women cease to be men's property or chattel, attitudes toward rape undergo corresponding changes. There wasn't a separate word for rape in the Old Testament, but there are references to forced sex. Fine distinctions were drawn. If a man forced sex on a betrothed virgin in the field, she was considered blameless. If she cried and there was none to save her, the man was put to death. But if a man forced sex on a virgin that was not betrothed, then the man must pay fifty shekels (about a third of a year's wages) to her father and must marry her—without the possibility of divorce.20 Presumably the sex was not consensual (this was three thousand years before the Pill and Women's Liberation, after all), so the girl was in effect compelled to marry her rapist, without much thought being given to her feelings in the matter. What we now view as a big evil was in that era and culture a relatively small evil.

In the biblical period (of both Testaments), people tended to live in small tribes, usually of around 150 people. A tribe, if it were not to be conquered by a larger tribe nearby, truly needed to be fruitful and multiply (so its sons outnumbered the sons of the would-be aggressor tribe). This meant that the laws and warnings against masturbation, prostitution, abortion, homosexuality, and adultery—all of which interfered with fertility or optimal child rearing—had a compelling rationale in those days.²¹ These activities endangered group survival, even individual survival (a conquered tribe might be slaughtered or enslaved). Practices that threatened reproductive success constitute violations of an evolutionary principle. For similar reasons infanticide and child sacrifice, as were practiced by the heathens, were abominations to the Israelites.²² Infanticide is still practiced or sanctioned in many parts of the world; it is not yet regarded as a crime universally. Incest is close to being universally regarded as wrong—stronger language is used in holy books (“an abomination,” “evil”)—but the punishment was much more severe in biblical times (death by burning or stoning) than now.

The need for group survival underlies the importance of group cohesion. One way to ensure group cohesion is for the leaders of a community to insist on unity of values and beliefs. Ideally, each member of the group should be willing to do anything necessary to strengthen that unity—including to die defending the group's values or to destroy those who threaten the solidarity of the group's customs and beliefs. This accounts for the persecution of heresy in the situation where a new religion is taking shape while its membership is still small and vulnerable. In much of the developed world, heresy belongs to the moldy books of bygone times, when it was punished by expulsion (following excommunication) if you were lucky; by death, if you were not. And that death might include being burned at the stake.23 Heresy was a very big evil, as it still is in certain parts of the world today. If the group was a national rather than a religious one, the comparable crime was dissidence, or simply being different from those accepted by the leader. Not to be an Aryan in Nazi Germany, not to be a Communist in totalitarian Russia led to the same kinds of persecution, death penalty included, that once awaited heretics.

The threat to the group from supposed witches led to their persecution and execution (often by the most cruel means) in times past. Here the threat lay in the supernatural powers people attributed to them. This meant that witches, even though few in number, could—according to people who believed in witchcraft—create havoc in the community.²⁴ Now and then even in contemporary America there are a few people (mostly women) who profess to be witches, and others, not in great number, who fear their powers and regard them as evil handmaidens of the devil (in whom they also believe).

We would like to think that as citizens of the twenty-first century we have outgrown the superstitions that led people to stigmatize, persecute, and all too often kill “outsiders” whom their communities saw as “evil.” And we would like to think that whenever we use the word in our culture and in our day, it applies to those who are “really” evil and who would be properly labeled so for the rest of eternity. There should never be a time, for example, when child rape, serial killing, torture, wife bashing, and the like become acceptable. This is an understandable hope. Given the history of the world, however, I do not think it is a reasonable hope. Still less reasonable is the hope that the large-scale evils that unfold in times of war and conflict—where torture, mutilation, and enslavement suddenly seem “justifiable”—disappear from the earth. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse have yet to be unseated.

GRADATIONS

Susan Neiman's hesitation in drawing a line between the very bad and the evil stems in part, I suspect, from the inherent vagueness in how such phrases have been used in religious and philosophical texts. Codes of law, both in ancient times and modern, make many fine distinctions—gradations, if you will—between the bad, the very bad, and the extremely bad. But the law avoids the word evil, preferring a vocabulary that corresponds pretty closely to what the community might call evil: words like heinous and depraved. Side by side with “evil” in books and journals there is a similar set of strong words, such as fiendish, diabolical, monstrous, abominable, which also overlap quite closely with the public's use of “evil.” At the very least, there have always been simple systems for placing unacceptable or “wrong” behaviors into categories such as misdemeanors and felonies. And then there are those felonies that are so serious as to amount to capital cases—or in places where the death penalty has been abolished, what used to be capital cases—for instance, treason and certain forms of murder. What the law identifies as an extreme felony the public often identifies as evil—but the connection isn't that close. An unintended murder during the course of an armed robbery might be spoken of as “terrible,” whereas “evil” might be reserved for the rape and murder of a child or the murder of a kidnap victim. Two thousand years ago, the Talmudic triad of incest, murder, and taking the Lord's name in vain—all punishable by death—was set off against a host of lesser crimes, but all were called ra: a word that meant “bad” but could also mean “evil,” for which there was no special word that set it apart from ra. There is a graded system in the Catholic Church in which sins are divided into “venial” (forgivable, minor ones) and “mortal.” But the “mortal” list contains more than thirty examples. Some of these are, to modern attitudes, much less serious than others. Envy, drunkenness, and cowardice are not at the same level as defrauding, robbery, and murder. For whatever reason, rape, arson, and assault are not mentioned specifically. There is no easy way to draw a connection between our current notion of evil and the various mortal sins.

Our word evil today does set apart the bad from the beyond-the-merely-bad. The next chapter will also reflect my efforts to hold a magnifying glass, so to say, over the realm of the beyond-the-merely-bad, in hopes of finding meaningful differences within this otherwise blurry region of smudged-together “evils.”

TO DO EVIL IS HUMAN

Before I offer you my working definition of evil, there are two ideas about evil that need to be put forward first, as a kind of prelude to this definition. First, I believe we can make a solid claim that evil applies only to human beings.25 We reserve the word evil now for describing certain acts done by people who clearly intended to hurt or to kill others in an excruciatingly painful way. That pain might be physical or it might be emotional or mental, involving extreme humiliation as well. Either way, the perpetrator must have a knowledge of death and an awareness that his or her action might bring about the death of the victim. Another requirement for using the term evil is that the perpetrator be aware that the victim would suffer intensely, experience agony—the same as the perpetrator knows he would feel if the tables were turned and he were the victim of those same actions. But ours is the only species that has this kind of conscious awareness and imagination about death and suffering. Ordinarily, humans also have a sense of shame, which acts as a braking mechanism to prevent us from carrying our violent or vengeful fantasies into action.²⁶ Some people who commit evil acts have a sense of shame, but in dire circumstances this sense of shame seems to go temporarily “off-line.” In others who commit such acts, this sense of shame was never properly developed to begin with.²⁷ As humans, we can also hate, which means we can think how much better life would be if the object of our hatred were put out of the way. Animals lack these qualities, so they are not capable of evil. The lion chasing after a gazelle, the cat pouncing on a mouse—they are prompted to do so for their supper. They do not hate the gazelle or the mouse, nor are they vividly aware that what they are about to do will bring about suffering and death to their victims. Actually, predatory animals like the cat family try for a coup de grâce: one quick scrunching of the neck so that death comes instantly. Perhaps chimpanzees have the capacity to plot, singly or in groups, to kill other chimpanzees or even to bash them in ways that must hurt a great deal. I'm not so sure they experience shame or have the ability to mull over such actions way ahead of time and then to act “with malice aforethought,” using our kind of elaborate language—to rape another chimp's mate and then bludgeon the rival with a tree branch. Even so, I am not ready to call this evil. In the same say, I know that a cat will sometimes seemingly tease a mouse it has captured, pouncing on it, letting it go for a second, pouncing on it again, until it finally does what it set out to do, which is to eat the mouse. This may look “sadistic” to us, as we imagine what people would call us if we behaved that way to someone else. But the cat is probably just engaging in a kind of practice-play, honing its skills the better to catch another mouse on another day. Without malice, without awareness of suffering and the finality of life, without shame or guilt: that is, without our uniquely human qualities.

The second point I have already hinted at: people tend to agree closely about which acts are evil when committed by individuals in ordinary civilian life—that is, in peacetime. In times of group conflict, including war, there will be two sides—each thinking the other is “evil.” It is sometimes very difficult to get around this subjectivity. We would like to think that some neutral observer could size up a situation, say, where Country A invaded Country B and committed atrocities against the citizens of B and declare that, viewed from the mountaintop, clearly the A-people involved in these acts were the evil aggressors. History often agrees with such a choice. There are no longer many people who endorse the goals of the Spanish Inquisition, claiming that its victims were the evil ones who got what they deserved. But wars, including the “asymmetric” wars of a terrorist group versus a strong country, that are going on in our own time may have as many supporters as detractors. Islamic extremists are as ready to praise 9/11 as we are to condemn it: our “hijackers” are their “shaheedis” (holy martyrs). The net effect of this subjectivity is that it will be easier and more convincing to create a scale for the gradations of evil in peacetime than for evil in times of war. Do I believe that the Nazi genocide was evil, the earlier Turkish genocide of the Armenians was evil, that Stalin's starvation of the Ukrainians and the millions he sent to the gulag were evils, that the Japanese Rape of Nanking and Mao's destruction of tens of millions of his own people in the Lao-Gai (Labor-Reform) camps were evils? Of course I do (and this is just the short list). But here is where it would be helpful to have a God that everyone looked up to and who periodically sent us memos to the effect of: “I have looked over the situation between the A-people and the B-people, and I am letting you all know that I consider the A-people to be the evil aggressors here and the B-people to be their victims. Signed, God.” Alas, even the most devout members of any and all religions must ruefully acknowledge that we do not receive such final judgments. Instead we must often make do with the consolation that comes (within our lifetime, if we're lucky) from the consensus of respected historians. To do justice to this complicated topic—to analyze the kinds of evils perpetrated in wartime—would be beyond the scope of this book and would, in fact, warrant a book of its own.

Returning to the situation in peacetime, I will submit here a definition of evil that I think captures the essence of what people in everyday life—the final arbiters of what is meant by “evil”—see and experience before they spontaneously intone this dreaded word. Owing nothing to religious or philosophical teachings, the definition is purely pragmatic.

A WORKING DEFINITION OF EVIL

“Evil” is a word we apply to situations or specific acts that have the quality of horrifying or shocking whoever witnesses or hears about these acts. In today's parlance, the term is less commonly applied to the persons who are guilty of these acts. “Evil,” in other words, is reserved for acts that are breathtakingly awful: breathtaking, because the degree of violence, suffering, or humiliation imposed so greatly exceeds what would be needed to express one's irritation or animosity or to subdue the victim.

This element of excess is crucial to the customary use of the word evil. The root meaning of evil from its Anglo-Saxon origins (the word was then spelled yfel but pronounced the same way we do) was “over” or “beyond.”28 To be categorized as evil, there must be a flagrant deviation from the standards of acceptable behavior within the community of the particular culture and time period. The deviation, that is, must be over and beyond what the ordinary people in the community could even envision as something another human being could ever do.

Usually, though not always, evil acts are those preceded by intention or premeditation. This means there was usually malice aforethought: the contemplation of injuring—physically or psychologically—another person in a malign, “over-the-top” way. People will generally know more about the details of the evil act before they get to know something about the person responsible. And as far as the perpetrators go, the more clearly sane (in the legal sense of knowing right from wrong as opposed to being “crazy”) they are, the more readily we will conclude that they or their acts were indeed evil. If we find out later on that the persons in question were insane29 or seriously mentally ill,³⁰ we end up thinking their acts were evil but they themselves were not.

We feel on surer ground in calling an act evil when it results in intense physical suffering, mutilation, or death. But certain nonviolent acts may also reach the level of excess and outrageousness that will call forth the response from people that those acts were evil.

For a more concise definition we can try to get down to the very essence of evil. For an act to be evil

1. it must be breathtakingly horrible;
2. malice aforethought (evil intention) will usually precede the act;
3. the degree of suffering inflicted will be wildly excessive;
4. the nature of the act will appear incomprehensible, bewildering, beyond the imagination of ordinary people in the community.

With regard to the first item, there will rarely be universal agreement within any given community or large group of people as to what is “breathtakingly horrible,” but there will often be near-universal agreement if the act involves the kidnapping and torture of a child. Ironically, certain crimes amounting to less than murder will be experienced as more clearly evil than murder itself, because of the suffering involved—coupled with our very human tendency to identify with the victim and to imagine how the crime would have affected us, had we been the victim. Here is an example to illustrate the point.

Some years ago I interviewed a man who went to prison for having gone on a crime spree. Under the influence of methamphetamine and cocaine, he had become suspicious and hostile, thinking everyone was out to get him. In that frame of mind, he shot three men who had been working on the street. They had been repairing some electrical cables, while standing with their backs to him. One died, but of the two that lived, one was blinded in both eyes. He had just gotten married the week before. The sympathies with the jury during the ensuing trial—as with most people who became aware of the case—were particularly strong for the blinded man. The family of the dead man would mourn for him, of course, but in the fullness of time, they would make their peace with their loss and get on with their lives. But those who knew about the blinded man (with whom I spoke and sympathized) found themselves imagining what it would be like to live the next fifty years as that blinded man, less able than before to earn a good living and to take care of his wife—whom he would never again be able to see. He would be forced to live with the memory of how his life was turned upside down in an instant—thanks to the senseless violence of some “maniac.” The journalists who wrote about the case—for the three days it still was “news” on the inner pages—also spoke of the evil in having blinded the bridegroom. Little was said about the murder victim.

As a footnote to the definition I mentioned above, we can add that when people call a certain person “evil” (in contrast to calling certain acts evil), we imply that the person can be counted on to commit such acts habitually and often. Even so, it will only rarely be true that every moment of that person's waking day is spent doing evil acts. Some persons of this sort may turn out to have been unassuming and helpful neighbors or pleasant and innocuous-seeming coworkers who have led (as we eventually learn)—unsuspected and undetected for many years—a “secret life” devoted to the commission of evil acts.

EVIL AS A TERM OF EMOTION

When hearing the story of a particularly gruesome act (or having witnessed it), we will often respond by saying (often enough by gasping) That was evil! We are not putting forth some philosophical comment here. We are not reciting a chapter from the Good Book. We are expressing an emotion. Evil, in everyday speech, means something to the effect: “I feel a horror beyond my ability to understand, beyond my ability to put what I feel into words.”

The meaning of the word evil in everyday speech can be grasped most readily from the accounts in newspapers and in the biographies of those who have committed murder or other violent crimes. From these sources, we can look for common features in the crimes themselves and even in the people responsible for them. Here is a small sampling, culled from hundreds of examples in books and papers:

Derrick Todd Lee, a serial killer from Louisiana, when finally arrested and convicted, was called “evil incarnate.”31

Ronald Kennedy and Jerry Jenkins in Casper, Wyoming, lured Becky Thompson and her half-sister, Amy Burridge, to a remote spot near the Freemont Canyon Bridge, raped Becky, and then threw both girls over the bridge. The author who wrote of the incident spoke of his having been a child, living in Wyoming, when the crime occurred, and mentioned that he was “splashed by the unexpected evil of it all.”32

Phillip Skipper, with his wife, brother, and stepson, in northeast Louisiana, bludgeoned a black neighbor—a woman who had actually helped them financially and had included them in her will. Phil then paid a black man to masturbate into a cup, the contents of which Phil then tossed over her, to mislead the police into thinking her assailant was a black man rather than her white neighbors. People, including Sheriff Bunch, who knew the family, spoke of the wife, Lisa, as “an evil woman from an evil family.”³³

Nancy Kissel, living with her wealthy husband, Robert, in an upscale “ex-pat” community in Hong Kong, had been cheating on her husband. He learned of this through the help of a private investigator. When confronted, she then bludgeoned Robert to death with a lead statuette and then tried to make it appear as though the murder were “self-defense” from his “abusiveness.” When her lies were exposed and she was convicted, the Hong Kong newspapers wrote of Nancy: “Evil foreign woman murders husband.”³⁴

Skylar Deleon conned a retired couple into selling him their yacht and then into meeting them on the yacht to “close the deal.” He then subdued them and tossed them into the ocean. Skylar had conned a notary into backdating documents that would appear as if the couple had granted Skylar power of attorney over their assets. Described as “pure evil” by his own cousin, Skylar was also depicted by a detective on the case as “a complete sociopath guilty of a kind of pure evil that is rare.”³⁵

Gary Ridgway, the serial killer from Washington State, escaped justice for many years. During that eighteen-year stretch, he killed (by his own estimate) some seventy women. When Sheriff David Reichert—the man who helped capture Ridgway—confronted him, he called him “an evil monstrous murdering coward,” to which Gary replied, “Yeah, I am.”³⁶

Dennis Rader, who gave himself the moniker “BTK” (for bind-torture-kill), when finally captured, spoke openly to FBI expert Roy Hazelwood about his bondage fantasies. At his trial, attorney general Phil Kline told the audience: “In a few minutes, you will look face to face with pure evil; victims whose voices were brutally silenced by the evil of one man will now have their voices heard again.”37

Ray and Don Duvall, two brothers from Michigan, savagely beat up two hunters in a bar in the northern part of the state and boasted of having then “fed them to the pigs.” Whether they did or not is unclear, but the Duvalls were so intimidating that no witnesses came forward for seventeen years. When the brothers were finally arrested, the prosecuting attorney, Donna Prendergast, told the jury: “There is no understanding of evil, there is only the recognition of what evil is.”³⁸

In the chapter that follows, we will see numerous examples of evil acts, many that end in murder, though not all of them. And we will examine many additional examples of people whom—because of the numerous and grotesque acts they had committed—the public, including journalists, authors, and the victims themselves or their relatives, unhesitatingly called “evil.”