Is Evil Real?

“No one is really evil,” so the argument goes. “Cackling, self-conscious villains only exist in movies. Life is more complicated than that. People act out of fear, or misunderstanding, or misplaced anger, or a messed-up sense of morality, or a blind allegiance to authority. You can’t write them off because of that. They’re just people trying to get along in the world, like anybody else. They make mistakes. You shouldn’t hate them for that, or you’re as bad as they are.”

Is there evil?

I’m not one to say that life, or people, are simple. But I also think it’s undeniable that there is evil in the world. And that evil is perpetrated by human beings. There are people in this world who send children into minefields to clear the way for their soldiers. There are people who go into homes and murder entire families, including babies in cribs, to make a point. There are fathers who go home at night and rape their daughters. None of these facts are in dispute. So why is this argument still around?

Perhaps because, in our hearts, we realize that we’re not as far as we’d like to be from the people who do these things. They aren’t some other breed of human that is born and bred separately from the rest of us. They grow up among us, live among us, work among us. Things like the Holocaust, or the Iranian minefields, or the My Lai massacre, or the slave trade, weren’t the isolated actions of a few. Our history as a species is filled with unspeakable acts of violence and horror, not by individuals but by societies. We are a people riddled with evil. And a lot of the time, we’d rather just not think about it.

There’s an important thing to note here. The world isn’t black and white. You can’t look at one incident in a person’s life and put them in a category as a “moral monster.” They’re a human. That’s what human beings are like; we’re messed up. It’s not that there are a bunch of good people in the world and also some well-hidden, pure evil people wandering around causing problems. We all have good and evil in us. That means that people who do really horrible things aren’t beyond redemption. It also means that people that seem nice enough aren’t beyond temptation.

Evil and Violence

Along the same lines, there is a straw-man argument against violence that says you have to hate anyone you are willing to use violence against. But this makes the same black-and-white mistake. We don’t use violence to vent anger; we use it to eliminate threats. It may be necessary to use violence to stop evil. That doesn’t mean you hate the people you use violence against; it just means you’re going to do what it takes to stop them. Would that happen in a perfect world? No. But we work with what we have.

A few years ago, I watched a documentary on the Holocaust. I’ll always remember the story of one elderly man who served as a guard as Auschwitz. Sobbing, he told of carrying the bodies of victims to the furnace to be burned. “Once,” he said, “as I was putting a man’s body in, I suddenly realized he was speaking. He was saying, ‘help me.’ I told the officer, ‘he’s alive!’ But the officer told me to put the man in the furnace. And God help me, I did. I can still see his face.” And the man broke down in tears.

I felt for the man. He wasn’t pure evil – not when he made the documentary, and not when he put that man in the furnace. As the Stanford Prison Experiment and Milgram Shock Experiment demonstrate, he is probably not that far from many of us. But what he did, what he took part in, was undeniably evil. It is right to feel righteous anger at such acts. Some things deserve anger and even fury. Some things need to be stopped – with violence if necessary.

The Importance of Compassion

How, then, do we keep from becoming the thing we hate? How do we avoid allowing the hate to make us evil? I think the answer is two-fold: grace, and humility. Grace, because once the threat is stopped, we stop the violence. One the evil acts are stopped, we stop the violence, even if we have not destroyed the person who committed the acts. To refrain from destroying such people, to forgive them, does not mean absolving them of guilt. It does not mean trusting them without taking appropriate precautions. But it does mean letting go of the anger at that person, holding back from destruction, starting again.

Why? Why should we do this for such people? This comes to the second point: humility. If we see our enemies as a foreign breed of entirely evil monsters, we will have no compassion. But if we realize that they are not so different from us, that ‘there but for the grace of God go I,’ we pause before blindly hating – because one day, we may need someone to forgive us.

The Evil Man

Christianity, of course, holds that we already need someone to forgive us. We need God to forgive us for the evil that each of us holds in his heart. Sometimes it comes out in endemic societal problems. Sometimes it comes out in more subtle ways. I’ve been reading through Proverbs over the last couple weeks, and Solomon’s description of “the evil man” caught my eye. The evil man, Proverbs says, likes to stir up dissention. He says things just to set people against each other. Such people speak rashly; their words are like rapiers, and they bring destruction with their mouths. As I read this, I found myself convicted.

Look me in the eye and tell me you’ve never sat with your colleagues and talked about your boss behind her back. You’ve never laughed when people made fun of her? You’ve never taken the new person aside and told him all the people he should like and not like? You’ve never spread a story about someone you didn’t like (even a true one) just because it validated the fact you didn’t like him?

Proverbs says that’s evil. It says God abhors that. And maybe it’s just me, but if I don’t watch myself, I’d do it all the time. I’m living on the edge of evil every day. Now, I’m not saying, and the Bible doesn’t teach, that all evil is created equal. Some things are worse than others. But even so, I think it’s in all our best interests to give a little grace today. Because I know I’m in need of a little.