What is evil? Philosophers, laymen struggle to define four-letter word

EVIL 1. a) morally bad or wrong; wicked; depraved b) resulting from or based on conduct regarded as immoral 2. causing pain or trouble; harmful; injurious 3. offensive or disgusting 4. threatening or bringing misfortune; unlucky; disastrous; unfortunate

– Webster’s New World Dictionary

On a dirt road in North Idaho four years ago, fear overcame Victoria Keenan as she came face to face with a white supremacist.

“He looked like the devil,” Keenan wrote, describing neo-Nazi security chief Jesse Warfield, one of three men who assaulted Keenan and her son that night. In an article for the Southern Poverty Law Center, an Alabama-based human rights organization, Keenan described a man with a shaved head and glaring eyes – “something about those eyes was just evil, mean,” she wrote. “He had ‘KILL’ in his eyes.”

Keenan, a Native American whose lawsuit against the Aryan Nations eventually bankrupted the group, isn’t the only one who has called the neo-Nazis evil. When Aryan Nations founder Richard Butler died last month, online discussions about him contained messages like “Good riddance to an evil man.”

The Jewish Defense League referred to Butler’s 20-acre headquarters as “the compound of the evil empire.”

And Morris Dees, founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center and the attorney who went after the Aryans after Keenan was assaulted, once described Butler as being so evil that his eye “burned a hole through me.”

While few would disagree that Butler spawned evil in this world, some hesitate to label him as “evil.”

Was he high on the list of wicked people in history like Adolf Hitler and Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot? Butler never committed murder. He was only charged with a misdemeanor for interfering with a police investigation of a disturbance in front of his property. His grandson, Chad J. Witherwax, of Post Falls, recently pointed out in a letter to the editor that Butler was a father and grandfather and that he will be missed by his family.

Still, many will never forget how much Butler loathed Jews and people of color. Like his hero, Hitler, he believed that the white, Aryan race was meant to rule the world. His teachings and the gatherings he sponsored engendered such hatred among his followers that some ended up committing heinous crimes, such as the bombing of a synagogue, the assassination of a Jewish talk show host in Denver, the killing of a Filipino American postal carrier and the attempted shooting of children in a Jewish day-care center.

So by espousing hate and breeding attitudes that led to the injury and death of others, was the late Aryan Nations leader truly an evil man? Just what is evil, in the first place? What are other examples of evil in our world?

And the even scarier question: Aren’t we all capable of evil?

Evil ideology

For Jim Waller, a psychology professor at Whitworth College and an expert on the topic, evil is “the deliberate harming of humans by other humans.”

Although he focuses on physical killings in his book, “Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing,” Waller’s definition includes psychological injury and harm caused by taking away someone’s freedoms.

“I would be hesitant to say someone is evil, but certainly (Butler’s) ideology of hate is evil because it involves limiting the rights of other humans, harming them, wanting to exterminate them,” Waller said. “He espoused ideologies that had evil consequences.”

Ross Woodward, of Spokane, said he wouldn’t disagree with anyone who labeled the late racist as evil, but it’s difficult to judge the man without a psychological assessment or some other scientific analysis. “He might have been crazy,” he said.

As a secular humanist who believes that humans alone are responsible for their actions and destiny, Woodward is uncomfortable with the term “evil” because of its religious connotations. Evil, to him and many others, is not a horned devil leaping from the fires of hell. Nor is it the religious concept of sin, a “moral evil,” which is what happens “when the intelligent creature, knowing God and His law, deliberately refuses to obey,” according to the Catholic Encyclopedia.

To Woodward, a longtime radio broadcaster who leads a local focus group on secular humanism, evil is an action, “an extreme situation where you deny personhood to a person, where you regard a person as a thing and deny them the traditional rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Regardless of their religion or personal beliefs, most people have a difficult time denying the existence of evil and its pervasiveness in the world. People also tend to distinguish between “physical evil,” which includes illness and catastrophes such as hurricanes, and “moral evil,” which is the malice that humans commit.

“Human beings have free will,” said Gary Singer, the sh’liach tzibbur, or lay service leader, of Congregation Ner Tamid, a Reform Jewish congregation in Spokane. People “sometimes choose to be haters, thieves, antisocial, to put down other groups to elevate their own self-righteousness or thirst for power.” From Singer’s perspective, Butler was indeed an evil man because under the guise of religion, Butler and his followers “taught and urged others to hate their fellow human beings … They made a conscious choice to behave in an evil fashion toward others.”

Many examples of evil have existed in history, he noted, from the notoriously cruel Roman emperor Nero to mass murderers Hitler and Josef Stalin to former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, who is currently facing charges of genocide and crimes against humanity. But evil also happens “when a person is indifferent to the suffering of our fellow human beings, to poverty, to genocide in the Sudan, to racism, to spousal abuse – these are all examples of evil,” Singer said.

As a Catholic, Kent Hoffman said he found himself praying for Butler. “There was something deeply sad and painful about that man,” he said. As a psychotherapist, Hoffman acknowledged that Butler participated in “evil activities” that incited contempt and discouraged his followers from reflection – conditions that could lead them to commit acts of evil.

To understand human capacity for evil, Hoffman uses a formula based on two straight lines in the shape of a cross. On the horizontal axis, you have empathy on the left side and psychopathy or “malignant narcissism” on the right side. On the vertical axis, you have high reflection at the top and low reflection at the bottom. If a person finds himself in the lower-right quadrant, where there is black-and-white thinking or no reflection coupled with extreme self-absorption and contempt, that person would be in danger of hurting others.

Despite the pain that humans inflict upon one another, the good news is that people “are hard-wired for empathy,” which reduces their capacity for destruction, Hoffman said.

As a Spokane clinician who works exclusively through agencies focused on high-risk parenting, Hoffman has learned from 30 years of research on attachment parenting that children raised in the context of empathy have high empathy. Things happen in childhood that eventually affect people as adults, he said, so parents should be encouraged to develop the natural tendency to love and care for their children.

What sometimes gets in the way of empathy is the absence of someone to help regulate one’s emotional experience. When a child is alone with negative feelings, shame can creep in, Hoffman said, which can lead some to grow up hating themselves and other people.

Like bacteria, evil is an active presence that infects people who find themselves in a place where there is little self-reflection and the focus is completely on “the other,” he said. One of the reasons Hitler committed monstrous acts might be that he was beaten every day by his father, making him an open wound, ripe for infection from that bacteria, Hoffman said.

Evil within

Evil is a loaded word, many say. By labeling a person “evil,” said Waller, we end up focusing on the most evident examples rather than our own potential to hate, our own capacity for evil.

In “Becoming Evil,” a book dedicated to the 100 million people who were murdered in the past century, Waller explores how anyone – under the right conditions – is capable of becoming a killer. To become killers, according to Waller, members of a group must believe it is the right one; they usually fear outsiders and want their group to dominate. They are swayed by peer pressure and let go of their personal responsibilities. They are encouraged by a group or government. Finally, killers fully accept that the people they target are less than human.

“When people talk about issues of racism in America, they want to talk about the neo-Nazis and white supremacists,” said Waller, who is also the author of two books on prejudice. “The things that made Butler sensational are still things that you and I do – we have stereotypes, we have prejudices and petty grievances, we discriminate against people. It doesn’t excuse him, but it separates us from the larger problem.”

When Butler was alive, Karen Boone didn’t live in fear of the Aryan Nations leader himself, she said. But as an African American, the fact that he was allowed to preach his racist message forced her to frequently look over her shoulder and worry about her safety and that of her two daughters. She never expected Butler himself to hurt her, but she was wary of the possibility that she could be subjected to an act of hate by someone who secretly embraced his teachings. That hasn’t changed now that Butler is dead.

Not all racists look like skinheads, said Boone, who in 1997 was the target of a racist letter mailed to her home in Spokane. “You don’t know if the person sitting next to you at work is a white supremacist,” she said.

Patrick McCormick, a religious studies professor at Gonzaga University, said it’s probably fair to say that Butler was indeed a bad man. “But what troubles me about calling Butler evil is this: Butler represents the extreme form of racism in society, but he doesn’t represent the most dangerous form.”

People of color and other minority groups are still targets of racism and discrimination, McCormick said. That bias is reflected in economics, in the fact that African American families continue to earn less than whites, in the justice system and in other facets of society. All this has nothing to do with Butler and his hate speech, McCormick emphasized.

“When we just pick on the Butlers and the Hitlers, we don’t see how pervasive injustice is and how we are all participating in it,” he said. “You can get rid of all the Christian Identity people tomorrow, but racism wouldn’t be gone. People of color would remain disenfranchised.”

By defining what is evil, we draw lines in the sand and polarize ourselves, McCormick said. Some have done this by distinguishing the “freedom-loving people” from the terrorists who commit evil, he said.

And by labeling someone as “evil” and as “the enemy,” we not only lose our capacity for self-reflection, we also treat the enemy – the “other” – as less than human. That’s scapegoating – “to believe that the enemy or the stranger or foreigner is the carrier of all evil.” That’s what Hitler did to the Jews in Nazi Germany, McCormick pointed out. It’s also reflected in Butler’s racism and his distortion of the Gospel to fit his Christian Identity beliefs.

When we ascribe all the evil in the community to one person, we fail to acknowledge “our own contribution to the injustice in the world,” McCormick said. “I believe that’s the most dangerous form of evil – the failure to recognize the evil in ourselves.”