THE EVIL WITHIN US ALL
Those of us privileged to work on college campuses have been stunned and heartbroken by the horrific shootings at Virginia Tech. We ache with empathy for the Virginia Tech community, for we know all too well how quickly tragedy can invade a sanctuary of learning. The ghastly murders in Blacksburg kidnapped our optimism, stole our joy and left us numb with confusion. While grieving, we have also been searching for answers -- and for lessons. What causes a student to melt down and cause such carnage? The answers have been plentiful but inconclusive. Expert commentators -- sociologists, psychologists and neuroscientists -- have offered many sophisticated explanations for Cho Seung-Hui's tortured psyche and barren intensity. He was, we are told, suffering from a cluster of toxic syndromes: psychotic depression, pathological alienation and avoidant personality disorder. His curdled mind saw conspiracies everywhere and found love nowhere. Yet the sophisticated diagnoses never congeal into an inclusive explanation. There are, to be sure, no easy explanations for heinous behavior, but what is usually missing from the media's sound-bite analyses is an awareness that evil still flourishes in this supposedly enlightened world -- and that the potential for evildoing resides in each of us, even the young, the affluent and the well-educated. Understanding our innate propensity for malicious destructiveness requires venturing beyond sociology and psychology into the realms of metaphysics and theology. Evil was a pervasive presence in American discourse until well into the 20th century. The nation's most penetrating thinkers took for granted the persistence of evil in the psyche -- and its insidious allure. In the 1830s the philosopher-poet Ralph Waldo Emerson declared that "there is a capacity of virtue in us, and there is a capacity of vice to make your blood creep." In his novel "Billy Budd, Sailor," Herman Melville wrestled explicitly with the "mystery of iniquity." At one point he characterizes Petty Officer Claggart as having "the mania of an evil nature, not engendered by vicious training or corrupting books or licentious living, but born with him and innate, in short 'a depravity according to nature.'" Melville's phrasing derived from his thorough knowledge of the Bible. In the Jewish and Christian traditions, evil is not a function of ignorance, poverty or broken families. Nor is it a state of mind, moral inconvenience or chemical imbalance in the brain. Instead it is a malevolent thread woven into the very fabric of our being. As Theodore Roosevelt reminded people just a century ago, "There is not one among us in whom a devil does not dwell; at some time, on some point, that devil masters each of us." Yet this once widespread but now old-fashioned notion of evil has disappeared from our everyday vocabulary. Commentators rarely discuss unsettling abstractions such as depravity or sin or wickedness. We live in a therapeutic age that assumes every need can be met, every anxiety relieved, every problem remedied -- by more money, more therapy, more regulations or more medicine. In such a curative cultural environment, we don't feel comfortable invoking a mossbacked word like evil. Instead we refer to evildoers as "misguided" or "deranged" or "disturbed." Evil, however, is not an illusion or a state of mind to be wished or prescribed away. It is not a simple matter of bad genes or faulty upbringing or a corrosive social environment or the seductive violence in movies and video games. Its congenital demons inflict the rich and poor, urbane and illiterate, conservative and liberal, religious and secular. As the Polish-born novelist Joseph Conrad explained, "The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness." We will never know why evil exists. It simply is. It can neither be confidently understood nor blithely overlooked. Yet its mystery should not paralyze us. To ignore the power of evil is reckless, to bewail it senseless. We are not impotent in the face of malevolence. The recognition of evil's remorseless power should excite us to action. Mother Teresa once confessed that when she first saw lepers, she recognized in herself a demonic "little Hitler" who wanted to obliterate the disfigured sufferers. Instead, she embraced them. Virtues such as decency, courage, honesty and compassion remain our best weapons against the malignancy within. Like Mother Teresa, we need to acknowledge our inner demon and confront its perplexing impulses -- even as we acknowledge that evil will never be eliminated. At Virginia Tech, and at colleges and universities across the country, the healing has begun amid the fellowship of loss. Shared sorrow helps make humans more humane. There are no strangers on a campus filled with grief; pain binds our hearts together -- and renews our resolve to deliver ourselves from despair and the menacing evil that lurks within.
-- David Shi is a historian, writer and president |