I read this article because I've been meaning for a while to do a critique of the week about the whole Evil One thing. Because to me, the answer to "How wicked is Osama bin Laden?" is, "that's the wrong question." As I have said many times to people who tell me "But Osama Bin Ladin needs to be stopped! He's evil!": it would not matter how evil Bin Laden was if he couldn't get a lot of other people to do his bidding. Similarly, it would not have mattered how evil Hitler was, except to himself and his near and dear, if the rest of Germany hadn't gone along with him. To see something like the WTC attacks as the expression of one individual's personal moral depravity is, in my humble opinion, not only ridiculous, but extremely dangerous. We see the results in the current state of the "war against terrorism": we have destroyed an entire country in a failed attempt to bring one evil man to justice. In the process, we have killed at least as many innocent civilians as Bin Ladin's operatives killed, and sown in that region of the world a new hatred of America and the West which is already beginning to flower (see Robert Fisk's harrowing account of having been beaten and stoned by a crowd of Afghan refugees simply because he was the only Westerner who happened to be within their reach). Our attempt to take out the evil mastermind has not only not reached the evil mastermind himself, but has generated many, many more potential recruits for his and other anti-American organizations.
The focus on Bin Ladin to the exclusion of the larger economic, political, and historical forces that make it possible for Al-Qaeda to exist in the first place is not surprising. Personalization has always been a big part of how mainstream American thought explains history. Joan told a story on ACIDIC a while back about being surprised to find out that Rosa Parks, the woman who sparked the Montgomery bus boycott by refusing to go to the back of the bus when the conductor told her to, had been active in the civil rights movement for a while before that happened, and that her refusal to move to the back was not spontaneous but strategic. The boycott was already in the works, and the movement leadership decided that it would start the next time Parks got hassled for refusing to go to the back of the bus. I was surprised to find this out too, although I shouldn't have been. The story is always told as if Parks was just an ordinary woman who was trying to, in Clinton's oft-repeated words, "work hard and play by the rules," and she just one day decided she'd had it and she wasn't going to move. For Americans, that makes a better story. We're suspicious of organization; we want to believe that social change just happens, inevitably, helped along occasionally by efforts from heroic individuals but not requiring any kind of organized mass movement. That way, we don't have to worry about getting involved; we all know we're not heroes, we're better off leaving it up to providence and the saints. This is, of course, a load of hooey, as I was reminded while listening to a program on "This American Life" about how the American Psychiatric Association came to take the description of homosexuality as a mental illness out of the DSM. It wasn't just that people were sitting around revising the text and they said, "Geez, times have changed, we really should take this paragraph out." The removal of the pathologizing definition of homosexuality from the DSM was the result of an organized, persistent, and often confrontational campaign on the part of gay activists and an organized, persistent, more subtle campaign on the part of gay and gay-friendly psychiatrists who gradually took over enough positions of power within the APA to make such a change possible. Real change doesn't just happen--for good or for evil. Individuals can't affect the course of history--for good or for evil--without a lot of help from the ranks. We've been doing nothing, since October 7, but making Bin Ladin's ranks bigger. I have a bad feeling about this.
The desire to personalize larger social forces is certainly apparent in Rosenbaum's "hierarchy of evil." He argues that in order to avoid sinking forever into the gloomy depths of moral relativism, we need to get beyond the "true believer" model--the idea that, say, the Sep. 11 hijackers believed that what they were doing was good, they were just terribly, horribly wrong--because the "true believer" model doesn't allow us to morally condemn the people who do these things. In his moral universe, people who really are "true believers" can't be held responsible for the immorality of their actions; after all, they really believe that what they're doing is right. In order to blame, censure, judge, and punish doers of evil, we have to see them as "conscientiously wicked"--in other words, they have to know perfectly well that what they're doing is wrong. And of course, once we get up to where Osama is, and people are doing evil because that's what they groove on, we can REALLY go to town on them.
I have, I guess, a number of problems with this hierarchy of evil concept. For one thing, I think Rosenbaum's understanding of the "true believer" model is based on a naive and simplistic understanding of human nature. What he appears not to understand is that it is eminently possible to be a "true believer" and to also know that what you are doing is wrong. In fact, I would argue that the normal mode of human evil is a combination of the true believer and conscientious models--that people believe that what they're doing is right, but at the same time know that what they're doing is wrong. Capital punishment in this country is a good example: all the rhetoric is about how this is the right thing to do, but all the practice argues that even its proponents are deeply troubled and ashamed by the reality of it. Since Rosenbaum presumably is aware of the existence of the subconscious, and of the phenomenon of denial, I suppose his hierarchy is based on the idea that you can't hold people responsible for desires that they are not consciously acting on.
It's the empahsis on conscious, rational action--the belief that we can only condemn/punish people for the ideas and beliefs that they are willing and able to articulate--that makes him want to stop people from using the "true believer" model. As he says, "If we don't beleive in ordinary, knowing wickedness, we can't condemn Hitler for anything more than a well-meaning ideological mistake or bin Laden for anything more than a well-meaning religious mistake. Some moral relativists have difficulty doing even _that_: Who says bin Laden's belief is less valid than our disbelief?" (68). I'd just like to take the guy aside and explain that when you "really believe" that the best way to serve your country or your God is to kill large numbers of innocent people, that's not a well-meaning mistake. That's just more proof of our amazing ability to deny, disavow, and misconstrue our own selfish desires. The "true believer" phenomenon is not limited to people who have the misfortune to come under the influence of evil dictators or religious fanatics. We're all true believers, every time we do evil. Acknowledging and understanding that you actually did something wrong and hurt another person or persons in order to save your own ass or gratify your own desires is one of the hardest things for human beings to do. And in my moral universe, I guess, the reason it's so friggin' hard to do that is that we all know, somehow, that only bad people hurt other people, and none of us want to be bad people. It's precisely the desire to both get what we want and not be bad people that creates these bizarre self-justifying belief systems. It's the desire to do what you damn well want no matter who else it hurts or how badly that is the root of all evil. And we're responsible for those desires no matter how cunningly we conceal them--even from ourselves.
I guess the reason I'm sitting here trying to articulate this is that I feel like the distinction this guy makes between the "true believer" and the "conscientious" evildoer is perfectly calculated to let the US off the hook for the evil we're doing. After all, we "really believe" that this is a justified, rational, effective response to a vicious attack on our soil and our people. So if we "really believe" this, then according to Rosenbaum's hierarchy of evil, we can't be held responsible, by the rest of the world or by posterity, for all the suffering we're causing right now. At worst, all we can be accused of us making a well-meaning ideological mistake. And that, my friends, is bullshit. For all his griping about moral relativists--and I'm sure he would put me in that category, along with Jeanette Winterson, Stanley Fish, and all the "postmodernists" he inveighs against--it's Rosenbaum who's really the relativist, who believes that you can change the moral value of an action just by believing that it's right. Which is very convenient for all us true believers.
The Plaid Adder
Wanna see last week's critique? Go here.
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