The Structures of Evil

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THE STRUCTURES OF EVIL

BYDAVID ARTHUR WALTERS

Evil is not a Thing nor NothingThe word ‘Evil' is not a substantive but is a predicate. People might say witches are evil andburn them, or that the world itself is evil and destroy it. They have identified the adjective withthe noun and throw out the baby with the bath water. Equally absurd would be to separate aquality from a thing and to search for the quality alone as if it were a thing itself. Communistdevils may exist and they may be perceived as red-colored, but only a fool would go aboutsearching for Red as if Red were a thing. Of course, it may be convenient and even necessary to



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discuss evil as if it existed, but while doing so we should keep in mind that evil is nothing initself. Otherwise we shall lapse into gross superstition regarding our abstractions, allowing oursubjective prejudices to rule our behavior in disregard to the objective aspect of reality withoutwhich we have no life as we know it.

Those of us who believe that life is a great good may think of death as a great evil, an event atthe end of life that may be fictitiously personified as the Grim Reaper although there is no suchthing. Ernest Becker, a proponent of the interdisciplinary or unified approach to the humansciences, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in the year of his death for his elaboration, in TheDenial Death (1974), of the theme that the human personality is a defensive mask or armorfashioned by the fear of death. That structure or coping mechanism may be neurotic orpathological to the extent that the recognition of reality is avoided.

Personality is not formed in a vacuum. Social influences are essential to its development.Societies may also be sick or mentally ill defensive organizations that tend to the very ruindefended against. For example, armies are organized and wars slavishly waged to bring

freedom to the world so that a final peace may be realized. The warrior wages wars to end allwars, and may wind up prematurely resting in peace if killed in action.

In the Structure of Evil (1968), Professor Becker proposed that the structure of evil is behind thealienation of the individual from his full power as a social being. He opined that modernalienation arose with the decline of medieval cosmology.

Medieval man felt he really knew the difference between right and wrong, but by the time ofthe vengeful atom-bombing of civilians in Hiroshima, man had lost his sense of good and eviland was nauseated by the meaninglessness of the world and of scientific facts without value. Atlease the medieval world had a moral value; it was a hellish place because there was always a

heaven above to ascend to, but today, with the secularization of religion, there is no heavenawaiting us: the world is absurd as we go through the fragmented motions waiting for Godot.

Modern man is subjected to impersonal forces and becomes a mere unconscious automaton ofthe corporate machine. The individual has not achieved an ethically unified perspective, whichwould presumably allow him to place the social influences, especially liberal capitalism, underrational control. He identified the impersonal forces as demonic:

"...the demonic comes into being for man whenever he is manipulated by large impersonalforces beyond his control; forces that he is actively and uncritically contributing to ....Responsibility is nowhere; grinding power is everywhere.... This is the demonic nature of social

evil of our time.... We must take critical control over the automatic function of our economicinstitutions.... Once again the specter of War Capitalism is descending on the world... For theacting human organism, the Good and the Beautiful must always be a function of the exerciseof his distinctive self-powers, name, responsible choice based on the fullest exercise of criticalpowers.”

So “ evil" is a sociopathological phenomenon. And what is the purpose of sociology as a truescience of man for if not the progress of mankind on the whole? If it is simply a science for the



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benefit of a few, that they might manipulate and exploit the masses, would not that be a greatevil? Professor Becker was only one of many sociologists who believed capitalism as it ispracticed is the structure or form of evil. The evil structure of capitalism is War Capitalismensuing from unrestrained economic and social institutions condoned by the perniciousmythology of laissez-faire economists who perverted the work of Adam Smith, eliminating his

moral philosophy from his economic theories. The laissez-faire philosophy justified the spoilssyste m, asserting a “ natural right" to previous accumulation as a political law enforced by apolice state controlled by the exploiters. This modern structure of domination is the structureof evil alienating dispossessed man from his natural ability to function morally; that is to say, toact responsibly as independent, critical thinking individuals. The alienated individual does nothave a "unitary perspective" or a "commanding view" under the modern capitalist state, henceis thwarted from achieving maximum individuality within maximum community.

Man is in part a rational being or thinking animal, one that knows his body will die, which is anevil inasmuch as it is contrary to his natural will to live. He is a moral being with ideas of goodand evil no matter how rational or secular his thinks he is.

If we trace back the etymology of "man" to Sanskrit variants, we encounter the definition, "hewho thinks." Man is a moral creature because he may think or imagine what he is going to dobefore he acts. In fact, moral" was a term once used by philosophers to indicate the thinkingprocess; it was taken for granted that man thinks in order to act, hence thinking, a symbolicaction, is a moral process. Thinking is our best defense against the "evils" that would destroy usif we remain passive - God does not HAVE to think, but as human beings we must think. Thus allthinking, even scientific thinking, is a moral process. And thinking, no matter how abstract, ismotivated by feelings of pleasure and pain which we equate, rightly or wrongly, with good andevil.

Good and evil. An Islamic fundamentalist might call Becker's "demonic" force "satanic" and itsleader, our beloved United States, "Satan." Therefore should not godly people embark on a waragainst the anti-capitalist devils now that the red devils have been capitalized?

“Successful” politi cal leaders may reflect the prejudices irrational mass and direct itsmomentum to orgies of murderous devastation. Man is obviously not in control of his actionsas he wages war against an evil he cannot isolate and destroy as a thing. The evil is within; thatis not say that man should equate the concrete man with evil and destroy mankind as a devilunto itself, but to say that evil is subjectively determined, that men and women can and shouldstop treating their prejudices and self-hate as outside of themselves, as something to searchout and destroy as if it were a thing. We may refer to evil conditions generated by that hate andmake the needed reforms, but the first reform must go to the source of evil: it is "radical"reform, or self-reform. Evil is not something running around in or under the world or flittingabout on a metaphysical plane: evil is man-made, a definition, a quality that man endows onobjects and abstractions.

So evil is a social concept, a social quality for Professor Becker and like-minded thinkers. If thereader wants to quickly put his thumb on evil itself in The Structure of Evil , he will be



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disappointed. The structure of evil is the formal quality of society; the evil itself is unconscious,it is unknown. Wherefore reason is good because it raises the unconscious to consciousnessand empowers us to control passions and to progress from evil to good. That is, the reasonelevated by the Enlightenment, not the Reason deified during the Revolution, the unreasonthat reigned over the Terror. Of course mundane reason went out of vogue when it fell from

the altar during the world wars. Still, our ability to reason and to use reason as a tool is our bestchance for progress.

To speak of evil as a substantive rather than a predicate might be convenient. Since all of ourmoral thoughts are human thoughts and are thus a bit anthropomorphic, sometimes it is morehonest and practical to personalize evil as a devil. In doing so we must be careful lest we lapseinto the superstitious behavior at the root of great evils.

And it may also be convenient to suppose there is such a thing as impersonal, absolute evil, butthe metaphysical question of evil is historical; that is, evil itself has no being: one can onlyexamine what various people thought about it over time according to the conditions they then

lived in, then arrive at one's own presupposition which can be proven neither true nor false. Tosay there is an absolute evil in itself is an absolute presupposition incapable of proof since thereis nothing to relate it to.

Absent an ethically unified mankind, ethical relativity may result in evil social formations. Eachof us "knows" what evil is, what is not good, but that too is socially determined. For example,the ancient Jews were considered by civilized Romans to be uncivilized barbarians because theydid not practice infanticide. Despite the relativity of ethical considerations, societies have in thecourse of history arrived at certain universal maxims: we may all agree some day on a universalcode of ethics, perhaps based on the simple imperative to love one another.

Finally, there is no evil per se. There is no Devil. I mean no personal offense to those who lovedevils or need them in order to have their gods.

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Honolulu 2001

Becker, Ernest, The Structure of Evil , New York: The Free Press, 1968

The Structures of Evil

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