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In the eighteenth century, when religion began to lose its influence, the belief that people were responsible for the evil they commit also began to wane. To this day, virtually every worldview rooted in a secular outlook denies that evil emanates from human nature.
What until recently was the most influential secular idea, Marxism, is based upon the rejection of man as the source of evil. This was an essential component of Marxism’s appeal. Evil, Marx and Engels taught, is caused by socioeconomic forces, not by human nature.
The common thread running through most secular ideologies has been the focus on forces outside man as the sources of evil. The list of external forces held responsible for human evil is nearly endless — nationalism, religion, money, television, weapons, corruption in government.
The only good thing to be said about these attitudes is that at least they acknowledge evil’s existence. In our time, there has been a two-pronged attack on the belief in evil’s very existence.
The first was moral relativism. As historian Paul Johnson has noted, the West has applied Einstein’s theory of relativity in physics to good and evil, creating moral relativism: “Everything is relative” has come to encompass morality, a particularly sad irony given that Einstein himself strongly affirmed universal standards of morality.
The second attack often emanates from the world of psychology. Although psychology has invaluable insights and is capable of massively helping humanity, it is now commonly used to deny evil. Good has been replaced by “healthy” and evil by “sick.”
Psychological terms that deny evil are even applied to national behavior. When the Soviet Union shot down a Korean civilian airplane in 1983, an editorial in Psychology Today opposed describing the Soviet action as evil or aggressive. Rather, the author, a professor of psychology, wrote, it must be understood in psychological terms as an “act of paranoia.”
Both California and Los Angeles have official task forces on developing self-esteem as a way to prevent antisocial behavior. The underlying assumption behind the establishment of these groups is that pscyhopathology explains violent behavior.
This is wrong.
First, acts of violence can sometimes be moral and psychologically healthy. The Allied soldiers who killed German soldiers to liberate Nazi death camps were engaged in morally virtuous acts, and their desire to inflict violence on Nazis strikes me as quite healthy. So, too, a woman who uses necessary violence to stop an abusive husband is engaged in a considerably healthier response than a woman who submits to repeated violence.
Second, violence that is immoral is not necessarily psychopathological. Society may take it for granted that a person who rapes, mugs, or murders is sick. But why? As incredible as it may sound, it is quite possible to murder or rape and not be sick. It is time to announce loudly, clearly, and repeatedly that such acts may be normal — but evil. In The Politics of Experience, psychiatrist R. D. Laing made this point very effectively: “Normal men have killed perhaps 100,000,000 of their fellow normal men in the last fifty years.”
Why should we think that murder is necessarily sick? Is it sick for a criminal to murder a witness to the crime or is it simply evil?
And why is rape necessarily sick? Polls of male college students have revealed that about half of them could see themselves forcing a woman on a date to have sex if they were certain that they would not be punished. Is the implication, then, that about half of America’s college men are sick? I’m more inclined to think that they suffer from pitifully weak moral values rather than mental illness.
Of course, in some cases, such as the rape of little girls and elderly women, rape is far more than an expression of an uncontrolled sexual urge; it is also pathological. But what about date-rape? What about soldiers who rape because they hunger for a woman’s body and know that they won’t be punished? Aren’t these examples of men who let their libidos dominate their consciences, rather than expressions of psychopathology?
Finally, why is good behavior necessarily psychologically normal? Was a non-Jew who risked his life to save a Jew during the Holocaust acting “normally”? Such an action was noble, but by what criterion was this behavior “normal”?
Evil behavior, in sum, is not necessarily sick. Until we face the uncomfortable reality that evil stems far more from within our nature than from forces outside us or from psychopathology, there is no hope for making a better world.
Dennis Prager
Chapter 24, “Psychology and the Denial of Evil”
Think a Second Time
