Dr. Brian Melton

Denying the Politics of Good and Evil
July 11, 2008

It has been some time since President Bush first coined his “Axis of Evil” terminology. Almost before the speech had even finished bouncing from satellite to receiver, the Internet had lit up with criticisms of the idea that we might actually call our enemies “evil.” We’ve heard the basic theme echoed often since then through various liberal organs often enough to almost become a motif. I believe that this dynamic has more intellectual meat to it than one might at first think, and in a recent response to a reader’s question, one strong critic, Camile Paglia on Salon.com, gives us an explanation of her rationale for attacking the idea of political “evil.” Her explanation provides an important chance to examine the issue more closely:

What makes me uneasy in your argument is the Manichean polarization between "good guys" and "bad guys" among world governments. In my view, such stark moral absolutes do not exist...[W]e should reserve extreme terms like "evil" for the genuine monsters of history, like Nero, Vlad the Impaler or Hitler. Calling every petty regional dictator "evil" is ultimately counterproductive by coarsening our political discourse and dehumanizing our opponents.

While Paglia would claim to be promoting international peace and human rights, the hard reality is that if her criterion is practically applied, the results will be the polar opposite of what she, in all good faith, intends. In fact, if we as a political culture adopt her approach, I’m afraid that it will only be a matter of time before we see another holocaust, one for which the West may well be held passively responsible in the court of history.

While the initial question dealt with whether or not a country could be called evil, we see that all of her examples of real “evil” are individual people. That of course begs the question: Is she willing to give an example of a government as a whole be considered “evil” apart from an individual? While it is possible that her equivocation in terminology was accidental, the implication is that while specific individuals can be evil, governments cannot. This idea is supported by her assertion that there are no “stark moral absolutes” by which we can draw such conclusions. In fact, we cannot even call individuals “evil” without admitting absolutes.

The idea that there is no such thing as political evil has very important effects. When good and evil are not worthy considerations in political discourse, then there has been a tendency to feel that no nation can pass judgment on another, and those that did certainly could not act on those judgments. To do so would be to “dehumanize” their opponents. While this might sound reassuringly “enlightened” at first, the practical end is that international politicians tend to wink at atrocities and ignore human rights violations. After all, we may dislike atrocities, we may even “deplore” them, as Paglia does, but we cannot call them “evil.” If we refrain from even using the word out of fear someone might be offended, how dare we think of actual, tangible interference in their affairs?

Paglia does leave us an exit from this dilemma. Apparently, there are times when we can call someone “evil”; she just asks that “not every petty regional dictator” get that label, only “the genuine monsters of history.” Frankly, in one sense, she is right; when we over apply and misapply a word, it tends to lose real meaning. So, we need to take care not to label “evil” every little miscreant that comes down the international pipeline. But that isn’t all that Paglia is saying. She means that the word essentially has no meaning at all, apart from a functional sense when applied to cases where one can hardly avoid it. This thought raises a more important practical issue: The simple fact is that all true monsters of history were all at one time petty dictators. None emerged full-blown onto the world stage. They had to develop over time into what Paglia would call “evil.” Paglia only allows us to apply the word (and therefore act) long after the worst of the damage has been done.

Much of this likely flows from postmodern literary criticism, and, to Paglia, seems perfects coherent. If I understand her, she doesn’t believe that words—in this case “evil”—have any inherent meaning or refer to any clear objective reality. It’s the old "meaning to say that a word has no meaning" and writing books and essays about how writing books and essays communicates nothing approach. She may claim that the word really has no meaning and so her system of thought is consistent, but the practical reality is she uses the word to specifically describe clearly functional evil in the form of Nero, Vlad, Hitler, etc. etc. 

The more immediate problem is that Paglia has offered a definition of political evil that seems to be wholly based on actions and cannot take ideas into account. “Monsters” become “evil” through their proven actions examined after the fact. They are distinguished from “petty dictators” in that we know that they have committed atrocities on a large scale—it’s apparently not enough to just promise and promote them. Hence, the Impaler is “evil” because we know he acted on his beliefs, but Ahmadinejad is just a petty dictator because he hasn’t actually fulfilled his threats to wipe Israel off the map. This is a very unfortunate and naïve approach.

I’ll consider Hitler for the matter-of-fact reason that I am currently reading John Toland’s biography of him. Whatever Paglia might say about Hitler today, he did not meet her fuzzy definition of evil when he came to power in 1933 or for years afterward. He was, according to journalists who thought much like Paglia does, little more than a “petty dictator,” who at first could be controlled and then later negotiated with. When Hitler came to power, the New York Times declared that “The composition of the Cabinet leaves Herr Hitler no scope for the gratification of his dictatorial ambitions” (308). The general public shared in this illusion. Toland notes that when Hitler pulled Germany from the League of Nations, most Britons had “considerable public sympathy for the plight of the new Reich, with many ridiculing the notion that Hitler was driving toward war” (341). By the time it was fully and abundantly clear that Hitler was verifiably evil according to Paglia’s definition, he had rearmed Germany, embarked on wars of conquest, and was well advanced in his “Final Solution.”

It should therefore be easy to see why her view on political evil falls gravely short. Though his actions to that point had only qualified him as a mere "petty dictator,” he was also in fact already a moral fiend. As William Shirer first pointed out, Hitler had spelled out all the basics of his plans—including the holocaust—as far back as the first publication of Mein Kampf. If the Germans, British, or the French had acknowledged the depths of his stated evil and more uniformly opposed him, six million Jewish men, women, and children might have survived. Instead, the West’s “politically enlightened discourse” and appeals to Hitler’s humanity allowed him change from a theoretical evil into Paglia’s historical one.

If mass murder on the scale of what Allied soldiers uncovered when liberating the concentration camps is required before we can admit that “such stark moral absolutes” do indeed exist and have in fact been violated, then there is no way to prevent it from happening. By this measure, we can only take a “petty regional dictator” seriously after they've accrued a high enough body count to qualify as a "monster." As a necessary result, we will most likely sit back enjoying the very best of reasonable discussion while oppressed people are murdered but at least we avoided using rough political language to describe their murderers.