Here’s Why We Should Stop Calling ISIS Evil
The recent beheading video of journalist James Foley has once again injected evil into the public debate. Why has ISIS done such a horrific thing? To quote one commentator, “They’re evil. They do obviously evil things for evil ends.” This is a shame. Denouncing a group as evil is a rhetorical button that, when pushed, instantly pollutes the discourse and lowers the quality of analysis. In the words of Tyler Cowen, “imagine every time you’re telling a good vs. evil story, you’re basically lowering your IQ by ten points or more.”
Evil is often portrayed like the rogues gallery from a police procedural. The villain is a sociopath whose obsessions and compulsions drive them to commit rape and murder. This fundamental lack of restraint is their defining characteristic and what makes these villains fascinating and horrifying.
People with preferences for murder and rape exist. But evil preferences are insufficient to explain the level of organized violence we witness in the world. There are simply not enough sociopaths and sexual sadists to generate the levels of violence we observe. Truly evil preferences are exceptional but, to paraphrase Hannah Arendt, organized evil is banal. Her argument was that Eichmann was not particularly vicious, but that he was stupid. He went with the herd and believed the slogans in the newspapers and radio. He didn’t think much beyond doing what he was told. This sort of evil is not the result of exceptional brain chemistry or structure but the all too human occurrence of leading an unexamined life.
Mere words fail to describe the moral obscenity of the Holocaust. The organized annihilation of millions took the concerted efforts of hundreds of thousands of individuals. They were not all sociopaths. Weimar Germany was a thriving society — a world leader in the arts, science, and industry. This does not mitigate the horror of the Nazis; it amplifies it, because it demonstrates that thousands of men and women who worked hard and loved their children could be persuaded to pick up knives and murder their neighbors. The moral challenge of the holocaust comes from holding up a mirror and dispelling the simple platitudes we all want to believe about ourselves. It is not that the Nazis were evil; it is that they were familiar.
A focus on evil preferences quickly abstracts away the fundamental problem: that organized mayhem requires the support of people with a broad diversity of motivations. The literary trope of good versus evil is used because it simplifies the motivation for conflict. Sauron’s orcs were bent on conquering Middle Earth because they were once elves but had been tortured, corrupted, and broken. One cannot reason with a hemorrhagic fever and its uncompromising appetite for destruction. Orcs must be destroyed, annihilated if possible. There are no war crimes in fighting orcs, no room for half measures.
Michael Muhammad Knight tells the story of how he left New Jersey to study at a madrassa in Pakistan. There he flirted with the idea of joining the Chechen resistance fighting against the Russians. He identifies his primary motivations as being strongly influenced by American culture:
But when I think about my impulse at age 17 to run away and become a fighter for the Chechen rebels, I consider more than religious factors. My imagined scenario of liberating Chechnya and turning it into an Islamic state was a purely American fantasy, grounded in American ideals and values. Whenever I hear of an American who flies across the globe to throw himself into freedom struggles that are not his own, I think, What a very, very American thing to do.
People want their lives to have meaning, so they join causes that offer a transcendent purpose. It is a very human desire to want to change the world for the better. There is, however, disagreement about how to immanentize the eschaton. Whether the cause is secular or religious, the goal is to improve people’s lives, often at a tragic cost. Evil for its own sake is simply not an effective recruitment tool.
Assume some military action is needed to counter ISIS. That assumption does not go very far in determining the content of the response. The military has a number of tools at their disposal, but the choice of tool will be determined in part by the political realities facing the administration. The rhetoric of evil is more likely to create a bias towards a disproportionately large response that diminishes the human cost of war. In the wake of Foley’s beheading, some called for the United States Air Force to begin destroying ISIS-occupied towns, killing thousands of innocents. Undoubtedly, what some might dismiss as collateral damage, others, in Iraq and around the world, would call evil.