Maggie's Farm

A few other things have occurred to me as I've been thinking about the subject of your post over the past few days. One problem with the word evil is that the word is used by many people synonymously with "people I hate."

This is such a commonplace defensive construction that some people are naturally hesitant about using the word evil to describe other people and their actions. Remember that Islamic extremists don't hesitate to refer to America as ‘evil.’ The word has fallen into a certain amount of disrepute because many of the people who use it do so in a transparently dishonest and aggressive manner in the course of defensive splitting and projection. You could say that they make evil use of the word evil, albeit unconsciously. (This doesn’t even begin to deal with the religious charlatans who make dishonest use of the word in a very conscious manner).

Even though lay people can't necessarily name the defensive operations involved, I think many intuitively recognize that the word evil is frequently used in a defensive manner. I am not reassured in the least that throngs of people who feel confident about the legitimacy of their own use of the word will jump forward to declare that they are referring to real evil when they use the word. We both know how defenses work. None of this is to say we shouldn’t speak about evil, but it helps if we use the word when we know who we are addressing and that we are reasonably assured that the listener will understand where we are coming from. Failing this there is a high risk that we will be dismissed as just another defensive moron who calls every unwanted, projected part of his or her primitive world ‘evil.’ If we really want to discuss evil and be heard, it might be better at times to explain what we mean rather than use a linguistic short-hand that might actually mislead people. It is, after all, the substance rather than the package with which we should concern ourselves.

I would also raise a practical question here. What value is there in using the word evil to describe what occurred in Virginia? Of course it was an evil act. Paradoxically, anyone who needs the word evil to recognize it as such will probably not recognize it as evil no matter what word is used. I fear, however, that much of the concern about whether the word evil has been used enough to describe this event arises not from a pure desire to reckon with evil so much as it arises to from the inclination to use this event defensively… to locate evil decisively and finally outside oneself. That may not be true for everyone (I certainly see the killings as a manifestation of evil), but I know people well enough to know that many people rely exclusively on scapegoats for expiation of sin. That the scapegoat in this case is actually guilty makes it all the more effective a vehicle for the defensive expiation of guilt. That is not consistent with my Christian understanding of how to deal with sin.

Which leads to another question: why is the word ‘sin’ avoided and why don’t more people complain about the avoidance of that word? I’ll spare you another essay and say, simply, that I think it is for the same reasons that some people are careful about when, where and how they use of the word evil. It may not be because they don’t believe in sin, but many of us know how frequently it is merely used in the course of defensive operations.