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Wolfe - Political evil: what it is and how to combat it

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The distinctiveness of political evil -- Widespread evil within -- Unrelenting evil without -- The misuses of appeasement -- Democracys terrorism problem -- The case against dramatizing genocide -- Ethnic cleanings seductive attractions -- The politics of counter-evil.;A timely, eye-opening examination of political evil, a concept widely misunderstood and desperately in need of clarification in our ever more chaotic world. In an age of genocide, terrorism, ethnic cleansing, and torture, evil threatens us in ways radically different from tsunamis and financial panics. Nature unleashes its wrath and people rush to help the victims. Evil shows its face and we are paralyzed over how to respond. It was not always this way. During the twentieth century, thinkers as diverse as Hannah Arendt, Reinhold Niebuhr, Arthur Koestler, and George Orwell made evil central to everything they wrote. Acclaimed political scientist Alan Wolfe argues that in an age of partisan blame-assigning, therapeutic excuse-making, and theological question-dodging, we need to get serious about the problem of evil once again. While there will always be something incomprehensible about evil, we are very much capable of understanding and combating the use of evil means to obtain political ends. Diplomats and politicians with their own agendas ignore this side of evil to grim and often tragic effect. These movers and shakers apply the concept of general evil, seemingly inconquerable, inviting only violence and despair to situations that are local in nature. Looking at examples of political evil around the globein the Middle East, Darfur, the Balkans, and at home in the WestWolfe shows us how seemingly small distinctions can make an immense difference in international response. And he makes clear that much-needed change can be initiated with a shift in how we talk and think about political evil. International shame in the years following the Rwandan genocideafter the world failed to recognize it as suchled to a large-scale campaign against genocide in Darfur. Except, Wolfe argues, in Darfur it wasnt genocide: it was civil war. We seesurprisingly, and powerfullythat labeling the conflict incorrectly had disastrous effects, even extending the violence as soldiers waited for seemingly inevitable Western intervention. When, on the other hand, Western leaders compared Serbian president and infamous ethnic cleanser Slobodan Milosevic to Hitler, they failed to recognize that exterminating people and seeking to take over their land are both evil but they are evil in different ways; misguided Western intervention in the Balkans eventually brought ethnic cleansing to an end, but only by allowing it to run its course. At once impassioned and pragmatic, Political Evil sheds essential light on the creation of policy and on a concrete path to a more practicable and just future.

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ALSO BY ALAN WOLFE Religion and Democracy in the United States Danger or - photo 1

ALSO BY ALAN WOLFE

Religion and Democracy in the United States: Danger or Opportunity? (with Ira Katznelson)

The Future of Liberalism

Does American Democracy Still Work?

Is There a Culture War? A Dialogue on Values and American Public Life (with James Davison Hunter)

Return to Greatness:
How America Lost Its Sense of Purpose and What It Needs to Do to Recover It

The Transformation of American Religion: How We Actually Live Our Faith

An Intellectual in Public

School Choice: The Moral Debate (editor)

Moral Freedom: The Search for Virtue in a World of Choice

One Nation, After All: What Middle-Class Americans Really Think About God, Country, Family, Racism, Welfare, Immigration, Homosexuality, Work, the Right, the Left, and Each Other

Marginalized in the Middle

The Human Difference: Animals, Computers, and the Necessity of Social Science

America at Centurys End (editor)

Whose Keeper? Social Science and Moral Obligation

Americas Impasse: The Rise and Fall of the Politics of Growth

The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Threat: Domestic Sources of the Cold War Consensus

The Limits of Legitimacy: Political Contradictions of Contemporary Capitalism

The Politics and Society Reader (with Ira Katznelson et al.)

The Seamy Side of Democracy: Repression in America

Political Analysis: An Unorthodox Approach (with Charles A. McCoy)

An End to Political Science: The Caucus Papers (coeditor with Marvin Surkin)

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A KNOPF Copyright 2011 by Alan - photo 2

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright 2011 by Alan Wolfe
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wolfe, Alan, [date]
Political evil : what it is and how to combat it / Alan Wolfe.1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-70147-3
1. Good and evilPolitical aspects. 2. Political sciencePhilosophy.
3. Terrorism. 4. Genocide. 5. Political violence. I. Title.
JA 79. W 65 2011
320.01dc22 2011003409

Jacket illustration by Shasti OLeary Soudant
Jacket design by Barbara de Wilde

v3.1

Must we not warn victorious nations that they are wrong in regarding their victory as a proof of their virtue, lest they engulf the world in a new chain of evil by their vindictiveness, which is nothing else than the fury of their self-righteousness?

Reinhold Niebuhr (1948)

There seems to be a curious American tendency to search, at all times, for a single external center of evil to which all our troubles can be attributed, rather than to recognize that there might be multiple sources of resistance to our purposes and undertakings, and that these sources might be relatively independent of each other.

George F. Kennan (1985)

A maxim for the twenty-first century might well be to start not by fighting evil in the name of good, but by attacking the certainties of people who claim always to know where good and evil are to be found.

Tzvetan Todorov (2000)

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION
The Fundamental Question of the Twenty-first Century

INTRODUCTION
The Fundamental Question of the Twenty-first Century
PUTTING POLITICS FIRST

W HEN THE PHILOSOPHER Hannah Arendt wrote in 1945 that the problem of evil will be the fundamental question of postwar intellectual life in Europe, she could easily have broadened her geographic scope. There is no more important problem facing the entire world today than the existence of evil, and there is no subject more characterized by muddled thinking and self-defeating responses. Evil threatens us in ways that make hurricanes, global warming, flu pandemics, and financial panics, as awful as they are, seem small by comparison. Present all around us, evil demands our best efforts to understand it if it is to be contained. In this book I offer a way of thinking designed to do that.

The problem of evil is one of our oldest intellectual conundrums. Volumes have been written attempting to define evil, to catalog its horrors, to account for its persistence, to explain its appeal, to confront its consequences. The subject has attracted philosophers, poets, artists, theologians, psychologists, novelists, composers, and physicians. Every major language has a term for evil, and every major religionpantheistic, dualistic, or monotheisticshows a preoccupation with it. Human beings may want to be good, but they have long recognized that they have to familiarize themselves with the bad. Because it touches so closely the mystery of human existence, evil is a subject best approached with considerable trepidation. Fortunately, this has not stopped some of the finest thinkers the world has ever known from addressing it.

The moment we begin to ask questions about the nature of evil, however, we begin to understand how difficult it will be to answer them. In the West alone, two of the greatest theologians in the Christian traditionSaint Augustine and Thomas Aquinasspent countless pages exploring whether evil exists and what forms it takes, work that in many ways was shaped by earlier, pre-Christian philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle. Every student asked to read Macbeth or Othello is introduced to the complexity of evil, as are those who ponder Paradise Lost or Goethes Faust. A fascination with the problem of evil, argues the philosopher Susan Neiman, dominated the writings of such Enlightenment thinkers as Rousseau, Kant, and Voltaire and found particularly poignant expression in the post-Enlightenment philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Similar concerns shaped Americas writers and leaders, appearing in the sermons of Jonathan Edwards, the debates over the Constitution, the work of Herman Melville, and the speeches of Abraham Lincoln. Dostoyevsky and Conrad were only two of the great European novelists who wrote about evil in strikingly contemporary ways. As late as the 1950s, explorations of evil lay at the heart of such widely regarded scholars as Arendt, the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and those Jewish philosophers such as Emil Fackenheim moved by the Holocaust to reflect on just what future God had in mind for his chosen people. We know evil is there, yet we are not sure what makes people evil or whether their evil can ever be overcome.

One way to start the discussion is to narrow the focus. Evil is all too often analyzed at too high a level of abstraction. If theologians tell us that evil is what human beings do in the absence of God, they face the difficult tasks of defining Gods essence, interpreting his words, and deciding which of many available deities is the authoritative one. Philosophers who conceptualize evil as a disturbance in the natural order of the universe must wrestle with the nature of the universe, not to mention the meaning of order. Contemporary neuroscientists who view evil as a product of faulty hard-wiring in our brains do not always know what is taking place in our minds. There are times and places when discussions of the theology or the metaphysics of evil are appropriate. But there are also times when they can get in the way of knowing what to do when we are confronted with terrorists who fly planes into buildings or enforcers of ethnic solidarity who rape and kill those whose land they covet.

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