by Susan Neiman
Princeton University Press, 358 pp., $29.95
Where were you two years ago when the first plane hit? Downtown, grabbing a second cup of coffee at Little City? Filling up at the gas station? Heading to class? Where were you in your workaday morning? A little later, you'd watch unimaginable events at a great distance. Images of anguished people, ash, and drifting paper. Watch TV anchors sit dumbly at their desks, unable to hang their metaphoric hat on a thing. They try, but it only dispirits you more. "No, it's not the end of the world, one anchor says as if speaking to children, "it just looks like it. And poor Peter Jennings doesn't even know the South Tower is silently collapsing onscreen behind him. He is busy finishing a reporter's sentence. He looks up at the monitor, speechless. Words fail. They do. The next day, as if to confirm this, CNN shows catastrophic images, a scrawling NO COMMENT NO COMMENT NO COMMENT below. Ticker tapes from the subconscious. "More than we could bear: These are the first words that make sense. But it would be a while before any others would.
Struck dumb. That's what Susan Neiman, author of Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy, says happened to us on September 11. But it wasn't a new form of evil that made us mute -- it was a form so old that we had difficulty recognizing it. This probing and wonderfully written book is about the struggle to understand why our reason (our this ought not to have happened that we carry with us everywhere) has never been at home in the world (that uncooperative is of reality). Neiman points out that the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington represented an evil less sophisticated than we are used to, unless you live in the world of the traditional Western. Think of the old John Wayne movie Red River, and you get the idea: an unambiguous world where harsh judgments are made with clarity. Although we might fantasize about such a world (why else would the image of a hip-canted John Wayne still resonate?), most of us, in our heart of hearts, don't believe in it. We mosey on. Think of the implications of this belief from another point of view: The only good American is a dead American, or a terrorist has to do what a terrorist has to do.
Many of us recoil from this explanation for the terrorist attacks because, well, it's simplistic. Evil, we know, is more complex than this. But here are people who are willing to die in order to bring death and fear to people they don't know. What can you do with that thought? Where does it have a place at your table? As Susan Neiman writes, "Those whose conceptions of evil had been shaped less by Hollywood than by Chile and Vietnam and Auschwitz and Cambodia are at more of a loss. We have learned how easily crimes are committed through bureaucratic structures of ordinary people who do not let themselves acknowledge, exactly, what it is they do. But the terrorists had planned the attacks for years. It was "massively intentional. So many of us "seemed left with no good choices. To call what happened on September 11 evil appeared to join forces with those whose simple, demonic conceptions of evil often deliberately obscure more insidious forms of it. Not to call the murders evil appeared to relativize them, to engage in ... calculations that made them understandable -- and risked a first step toward making them justifiable. As a result, many of us were rendered literally speechless. Those who weren't -- Jerry Falwell, the Bush administration, and those who thought our own foreign policy brought this destruction upon us -- were only doing what comes naturally, according to Neiman.
If you can explain evil, their thinking goes, you can ward more of it off and re-establish sense-making in the world as a whole. But as Neiman's book makes clear, as understandably human as this urge may be, it's a form of denial. Evil is, by its very nature, sense-destroying. So whatever you've explained, it's more than likely not evil. You've hung your hat on the wrong post. You've forced your ought on the is of the world. Wars have been fought over less. Other evils perpetrated. Neiman warns that "the appearance of old forms of evil need not blind us to other forms, and it may even sharpen our eye for them. Particularly for evils we might participate in ourselves.
Susan Neiman's Evil in Modern Thought is primarily a history of how we got to this point in thinking about evil, how enlightenment and post-enlightenment philosophers have reacted to other catastrophes, such as the Lisbon earthquake in 1755 that killed 15,000 people. The question: How could a just god permit such things? The answer, after much agonizing, was that it was the wrong question. It's hard for us to conceive of how shattering the consequences of this realization were -- that things simply happen in the natural world. That no one is protecting you. Figuratively and literally, you could no longer trust the ground beneath your feet. After Lisbon, human evil became the only evil in town.
