We make evil when we label something so. Evil exists as a word, as a subjective concept. But I firmly believe there is no person, no group, no behaviour, no thing that is objectively evil. Perhaps evil only really exists in our fears.
I like books about the brain and human behaviour, and I thought that Julia Shaw's Evil:The Science Behind Humanity's Dark Side might give insight into what makes this “dark side” tick. But that's not really what this book is about. The TL;DR is that we are all capable of doing harm to each other, each society has a different definition of “harm”, and none of us deserve to be labelled for life by the worst act we've ever done (as determined by the society we live in). I get that “othering” people as monsters does nothing to eliminate behaviour that most of us consider deviant, but with very little actual science and many snarky personal asides, this read more like an opinion piece than even Buzzfeed-level pop science. Not really what I expected or wanted. (Note: I read an ARC and passages quoted might not be in their final forms.)
We may think that our labelling of others as evil or bad is rational, and our behaviour towards such individuals justified, but the distinction may be more trivial than we expect. I want to help you explore the similarities between the groups of people you consider evil and yourselves, and to engage with a critical mind to try and understand them...Let me help you find your evil empathy.It's a useful example for Shaw to point out that there are countries in the world that still have a death penalty for homosexuality – most of us in the West see that while those who think of homosexuality as evil feel justified in throwing “offenders” from rooftops, they are very wrong. So, what are we wrong about here? Shaw basically says that there is no behaviour that anyone engages in that we are not all capable of, and it's more useful to talk about ways to improve society than throw around the label “evil”. For example, rapists are a product of rape culture:
Are those who sexually assault evil? They are certainly often portrayed as such. Unfortunately from the cases we do know about, sexual assault is so prevalent that if we were to send all the perpetrators to a remote island, we would see our population shrink dramatically.What she recommends is “better sexual socialisation”, and to “treat the women of the world as capable, complex, fully formed human beings, who are not inferior to men.” Shaw has similar thoughts on slavery's relationship to the society it operates within:
I think that enslaving someone is one of the worst things we can do to another human being, but calling slavery evil feels like letting slaveholders off the hook. It is greedy. It is selfish. It is harmful. But it's the result of broken systems and an individual's broken values rather than some fundamental and immutable aberration within the slaveholder.And I'm not arguing against that: slavery used to be normalised in the West and is still practised here by the “greedy” and “selfish” in the shadows; but can't "greedy" and "selfish" still be evil? It was more challenging for me (in a very large section on sexuality) to think of pedophilia as a sexual orientation instead of an active choice, and Shaw urges us to see it as natural (and unharmful if not acted on) so that pedophiles can feel safe to open up about their urges and seek help.
By trying to understand paedophilia we are not dismissing the realities of child sexual abuse, nor are we condoning or normalising the issue. Instead, we can work towards a world where we are in a better position to deal with the reality of the issue. Paedophilia has always existed, and always will. Flippantly dismissing it as an aberration helps no one.On murder, Shaw sees no evil: a person who has killed once in the heat of the moment doesn't deserve to be labelled a murderer; even Jeffrey Dahmer was apparently just lonely.
When we start to scratch below their scary surface, even the worst killers turn out to be human beings. And, looking at the data, it seems that human beings largely kill for the same reasons that they do many other things – to find human connections, to protect their families, to achieve their goals, to acquire things they think they need. They do it to deal with basic human emotions like anger and jealousy, lust and greed, betrayal and pride...If your murder fantasies were deeper, and you had less to lose, you too might act on them.Right up to Hitler, Shaw refuses to use the label “evil” to describe anyone. Beyond the chapters on criminal behaviour, I didn't get anything out of the section on why new technology (and particularly AI) shouldn't be labelled evil, and the section on corporate greed, third world working conditions, and factory farming (Shaw is a vegan) felt more woke than sciencey. And as for the science, most of the research quoted were variations on the Trolley Dilemma, the Milgram (shock button) Experiment and the (generally discredited today) Stanford Prison Experiment that I studied at university a hundred years ago.
When we understand what leads to harm, we can begin to fight against it. This involves taking action to stop harm, fighting against our own urges to do harm, and helping people who have done harm to get better. And whatever we stand for, fight for, feel for, we must never dehumanise people.I'm all for stopping harm, and I'm not arguing against the idea that understanding is the first step to fixing anything. But this wasn't really a science book. And it didn't really convince me that some people's actions don't deserve to be called by a name that marks them as outside the range of acceptable human behaviour. Three stars is a rounding up.
