Defining "Evil"

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This was just released. I'm well into it. A very interesting read.

 

This struck me at the outset:

Donald Trump has made it easy to be shamelessly racist, misogynist, and homophobic at a time when we’d made some progress in beating hatred back. Even worse, he has done so by making it acceptable to have no values at all beyond the search for wealth and power. Everything else is for losers. He’s the reductio ad absurdum of a set of old ideas that blossomed throughout the world as the Cold War ended. For as the Turkish writer Ece Temelkuran argued in How to Lose a Country, the loss does not begin when you notice that unprecedented breaks with justice have become routine.

Looking back, it becomes clear that the process only really starts after severe damage has been wreaked on the fundamental concept of justice, and once the minimal morality you didn’t know you depended on has been destroyed. 

What is it about the moment that makes the word evil ring true? Social psychologists argue that only 2 percent of the world’s population are psychopathic, people who not only lack empathy but take pleasure in others’ pain. There’s some evidence that the president of the United States is among them. His rise to power reflects a culture that sells cruelty as entertainment and finds buyers willing to pay high prices for it. Yet it’s hard to argue that the twenty-first century is fundamentally more brutal than others. The largest structure that remains of a republic once justly proud of its legal system is the Roman Colosseum, built to amuse people by watching others die miserable deaths. (“Bread and circuses” was not a reference to clowns.) Well into the eighteenth century, families in London, Paris, and Madrid vied for the best seats in elegant public squares to watch men and women be dismembered or roasted alive. 

Trump’s enjoyment of staged violence is unnerving, but I am less concerned with cruelty than with something less obvious and more insidious, the sort of thing signaled by his remark, in an interview on the afternoon of September 11, 2001, that he now had the tallest building in Manhattan. It’s unlikely that he actively enjoyed the desperation of those frantically seeking signs of life in the still-smoking ruins of the World Trade Center. He simply focused on the one thing that he thought mattered. Nor did he possess a sense of shame that prevented him from blurting it out. 

How could anyone be elected—twice—whose response to the deadliest attack on his country’s soil was to crow about its benefit to himself? Before you stop to be appalled, however, consider what George W. Bush said in September 2001: “Lucky me, I won the trifecta.” At the time, only fans of horseracing recognized the word; hit the jackpot captures the same emotions. You may be tempted to overlook it as a chance remark that slipped out the under stress and strain of the moment. Perhaps that’s how it began, but Bush thought it clever enough to repeat in fundraising speeches that he made to thirteen Republican audiences from February to June 2002. Here’s an example:

When I was campaigning, I said, would you ever deficit spend? And I said, yes, only if there were a time of war, or recession, or a national emergency. Never thought we’d get (laughter and applause). And so we have a temporary deficit in the budget, because we are at war, we’re recovering, our economy is recovering, and we’ve had a national emergency. Never did I dream we’d hit the trifecta. 

Were this speech, like the others, not documented by the office of the White House press secretary, you might suspect it was invented by hostile critics—a charge made against Paul Krugman when he first reported it in The New York Times. Anyone still persuaded by the myth that the Iraq War was driven by misguided idealism would do well to google the speeches. The repeated jokes about the windfall provided by the terrorists left no visible traces, but Bush’s gloating marked a milepost in moral discourse. There is, to be sure, a difference between the presidents’ reactions. Trump really did crow over an attack that left him with the biggest, uhh, tower in Manhattan. Bush’s joke was not just tone deaf; it reveals a lack of moral seriousness at a moment when that was what we needed. When an international leader cheapens death by jesting about its blessings, moral language is lost between coarseness and kitsch. 

In public, however, Bush was concerned to defend the moral legitimacy of his attack on Iraq by presenting a series of excuses that would have been unnecessary had even one of them been true. If heard often enough, this instrumentalization of moral language leads many to conclude that no claim to moral purpose is genuine. Bush’s misuse of concepts like moral clarity to describe things that were neither moral nor clear contributed to undermining the legitimacy of both. When ideals are abused to support torture and murder, it’s the ideal that suffers most. I’d be willing to bet that neither moral nor legitimacy is a word Trump comprehends. Had he understood them, he would have at least pretended to honor the sacrifices of American soldiers. The renaming of the Department of Defense is especially chilling when you know that even the Nazis called their army a Wehrmacht—defense power…

Neiman, Susan. Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era (pp. 8-10). (Function). Kindle Edition. 

"Understanding The Trump Era?"

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