The Idea of Evil.(Society)(Column)

RECENTLY, the media drew attention to an interesting new development in psychiatry--the possible rehabilitation of the word and concept of evil in the evaluation of particularly sadistic and vicious killers.

Dr Michael Stone, a Columbia University professor of psychiatry who has examined several hundred murderers and has devised a "depravity table", is unafraid of using the word evil to describe such people. He said that though he was not a supporter of the death penalty, his examinations and conclusions showed that there were people who were neither mad nor disturbed in any classical sense, but who were evil, and must be removed from society--hardly a concept that will appear startling to the average layperson.

Other psychiatrists disagree--some because they say that evil is a meaningless term because it is endemic to everyone (for instance, Dr Robert Simon, who wrote a book entitled Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream of), others because they totally distrust the idea of evil itself, imagining that therefore we are calling up the shade of Satan, or some other direly non-secular concept. Still others of course naively persist in appearing to think that "evil" is a synonym for "ugly" or "inept", with one saying that because murderer Ted Bundy was "romantic" towards his girlfriend, the concept of "evil" couldn't apply to him!

What interested me in this discussion was the poverty of the imaginative concepts of evil displayed by so many of these eminent men and women. The most humble folktale story of the Devil is more complex, subtle and ambiguous in its exploration of evil than are all the depravity tables of people who, for all their undoubted eminence and record in helping the mentally ill, seem powerless in front of the reality that sometimes--rarely, fortunately--there arise human beings who have deliberately chosen the path of evil.

Murderers of the kind Dr Stone examined remain among us despite modern talk about what childhood influences might have made them what they are, or how responsible society is in grooming them; indeed, these days, the truly evil know all the right excuses and psychobabble and have managed to bamboozle a great many psychiatrists, until now, anyway. Dr Stone's "depravity table" is merely a "respectable" way of supposedly scientifically measuring what evil is. It doesn't inspire me.

The old stories of the Devil, and the many explorations of the concept of a personification of evil, from the Adversary to Satan to Lucifer to Mephistopheles, were attempts at imaginatively grasping and understanding what we all know--that we are indeed all born with the "deficiency" as St Columba calls original sin, and that we must struggle against that part of us which is selfish, narcissistic and wishes others ill.

But it is more than that. The ...