In Amsterdam, I met a one-armed homeopath. The other arm had been eaten by a crocodile. But I digress: it is human horror in our faces today. Bombed hospitals, handcuffed corpses, flattened villages. We find ourselves outraged, and challenged. Wanton malevolence cries for comprehension. The age-old “problem of evil’’ is back to haunt us.
In a book whose title outlived its thesis, Hannah Arendt studied the trial of Eichmann, pouring over volumes of documentation to make sense of his demonic contribution to the Holocaust. She found nothing. She concluded there was no bridge joining a dull bureaucratic mind to the feverish operations of mass slaughter. Her search for the murderous darkness of the Nazi soul led to an empty suit. The book was widely, though not universally, denounced (for complex reasons). But one phrase in the title, and the idea behind it, stuck: The Banality of Evil. How could so much wrong be done by so little? Robbed of mystique, evil presents a greater mystery.
When Julius Caesar besieged Alesia, women, children, the old and the sick scrambled out of the city to seek food, but Caesar wouldn’t allow them inside his fortifications. They were trapped between the city walls and the besieging Romans, and starved to death. The resonance with Mariupol is chilling, and might alert us. This was in 52 BC. Historians, who tell the story of change, tend to ignore what hasn’t changed a bit. Aside from its horror, what’s impressive about human evil is its monotony. Greed, dominance, and careless disregard for life have been repeated over and over since the penning of Gilgamesh, and no doubt before. An inquisitive mind, surveying this relentless moral landscape, might smell a biological rat.
That raises a problem. In many academic halls, our mammalian condition is taboo: the human situation, it’s assumed, should be explicable in social and historical terms alone. This taboo is a hazard of the grant-driven mind, which for all its brilliance is impelled to think along one dimension. Parallel modes of understanding — especially where they defy integration — are rarely entertained. One isn’t permitted to tell an economic story one moment, and a neuroscientific story the next. Reductionism rules: the first line of defense against a complex world. But suppose biology were just one lens of several? Using this lens doesn’t require us to forget the giddying disparities of rich and poor, or the rising tide of environmental disaster, or the transmission of trauma from one generation to the next. Nor are we obliged to concoct a grand unified theory. The linear pursuit of causality always tends to shrink the field, but suppose the point is not to explain but to see? Then reason and poetry would be doing the same job with different tools. Thought could fly without landing.
If the human is animal, what kind of animal is it? Perhaps there’s an answer back at the Cambrian explosion. In a stunningly short time (geologically speaking) the natural world achieved a revolution in bioengineering. Simple clusters of cells evolved into complex organisms. Spinal cords and limbs gave rise to movement. Sensory perception — sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste — appeared. The first nervous systems were formed, precursors to the modern brain. What drove all this inventiveness? In a word, predation. Kill or flee: every astonishing new technology met one or both of these paired demands. The Cambrian explosion was an arms race.
Modern humans, like bears, owls, and tyrannosaurs, have forward-facing eyes: best for predators, because they need depth perception and binocular focus, unlike prey who are better served by side-facing eyes for maximum scanning. This isn’t trivial. We humans are built for predation. That’s worth a moment’s pause. What are the ethics of the predator? Kill and eat. The world is an object of consumption. Appetite validates destruction. We like to sentimentalize other animals, but this risks foolishness. I’m glad Steve Irwin had regard for crocodiles — every guardian of our fragile planet gets my vote — but please don’t tell me the crocodiles had regard for Steve Irwin. Hungry reptiles take what they can get: a fish, a monkey, or a homeopathic arm. Kill and eat. If we drop the rose-tinted spectacles, predation looks a lot like evil. And it’s what we were designed for.
I spent a few months in Botswana as a young man, and since then I’ve always had a special admiration for the San people — hunters and gatherers whose mode of life, so far as it can be understood, probably didn’t change in 20,000 years until (with tragic irony) it was wrecked by a predatory government. Recently watching a YouTube video of San hunters, I was struck by a moment when a young man thrusts his hand into a bird’s nest, pulls out a clutch of chicks, and drops them into his bag to take home. Brought up to find baby anything cute and adorable, I was shocked by these seconds of casual brutality. There’s nothing nice about the Sans’ hunting, or the slow death of their prey by poison arrow. I still find these people astonishing in their skills, language and culture. At the same time, I ask myself: Did agriculture bring an end to hunting and gathering? Or did we simply switch — as the timeless history of slavery suggests — to hunting and gathering each other?
In this light, the so-called problem of evil is actually a problem of goodness. How did we ever come to be more than predators? There’s a biology of kindness, too, of course: the parental instincts of nurture and protection. And again, we needn’t fall into reductionism. We can evoke the animalic dimension of human life, not to explain, but to see our condition in a different light. Biology no more explains kindness than it explains cruelty, because the true mystery of our biology is that we were designed to transcend it.
Something arose that surpasses the delineations of genetic or instinctual law, something that lifted us beyond the Cambrian explosion and gave new purposes to its astonishing inventions. Something we call civilization. And though it may be vulnerable to its discontents, what’s interesting about it is that it’s interesting. Arendt made the bold claim that only goodness has depth. I think she was right. If evil is striking in its monotony, our attempts at goodness are impressive in their variety: from Theravada Buddhism to the French enlightenment, from Chinese landscape painting to special relativity. On the dark side, all we’ve come up with is technical ingenuity in the forms of destruction and torture we inflict on one another. Intellectually, this is an empty shelf. Nazi ideology is probably the most elaborate framework yet given to pure evil, and it’s still fairly stupid. Putin’s nationalism is a conceptual clunker. By contrast, the efflorescence of religions, philosophies, sciences and arts that cultivate life are spectacularly diverse. Civilization’s emergence may be incomprehensible, but one thing we can be sure of: it’s an effort. It will always be harder to build a theater than to blow one up. The retreat to predation is pure moral laziness. That’s the banality.
This line of thought doesn’t easily wrap up. No neat conclusion. Watching today’s mounting barbarity from a place of safety, the least we can do is continue the civilized work — to look, to think, to feel.
