Delphic Maxim 119: Despise evil
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each of the Delphic Maxims for 15 minutes a day.
119. Despise evil
Here’s one of the maxims that invites us to shift our understanding of a concept they’ve described previously. Way back at Maxim 31, it asked for us to ‘shun’ evil — to turn our back on it, to cut it out of our lives. Here we are months later being asked to ‘despise’ it, and I wonder if that shift means anything (beyond problems in translation and unimaginative builders).
I said before that it is pretty rare to find active evil in the world. In part I think this is because evil is a pretty loaded concept — it comes from a religious place. There’s a spiritual dimension to evil, it’s not just that someone is a bad person but also that they are corrupted right down to the essence of their soul. You’ve got to accept a whole lot of predicates — like the existence of a soul, of some transcendental quality to the universe — before you arrive at this idea of actual evil.
But there’s scope to describe the works of people in the world as evil. History is littered with figures whose actions are genuinely evil, they can’t be written off as just ‘bad’. Those people are dictators, genocidal rulers, extremists and religious fanatics who wage war and torture and murder. They are serial killers and rapists, abusers and pedophiles, and the quality they share is that they are unapologetic, and convinced that they have a right to impose this suffering on others.
Over the years, there’s often debate when a massacre is perpetrated by a white person: it gets reduced to ‘mental illness’, where another person is typically referred to as a ‘terrorist’. Two examples that strike me are those of Anders Breivik in Norway — who killed over 70 members of the young labour movement in that country, or the recent mass murderer in Christchurch. These are instances where I would use the word evil, and I think its inappropriate to describe as a product of mental illness: why?
Because evil requires a conscious choice, and these two men in particular very explicitly spelled out a political ideology that drove their actions. They very clearly explained that they were killing people in the name of their opposition to a cosmopolitan, multicultural, open and tolerant world. How can someone actively express those beliefs, and then kill others in the name of them, and not be regarded as evil? This is a a quality worth despising in a person.
So evil is rare, but when understood not in its spiritual dimension, but rather as an active choice to impose suffering and hurt on other people, unapologetically, then it does exist. Despise it.
