Jennifer Szalai‘s thoughtful essay, whether you agree with it or not, reflects on issues of renewed relevance as we grapple with fundamentalism — among the terrorists and in the dysadministration in Washington. ‘Evil’ is back, and Americans seem to be leading the charge. From Ronald Reagan’s ‘evil empire’ to Dubya’s ‘axis of evil,’ is the problem the disingenuous misuse of the word, with its hypocrisy and namecalling, or having recourse to the concept of evil at all? After a century that has seen some of the worst atrocities in human history, suggesting almost no bounds to the human capacity to inflict harm on others of his own race (yes, it’s usually males…), do we have to grapple seriously with a notion of the diabolical, free of detachment or irony? Is it unfair that moral absolutism has been usurped by the pitiful and embarrassing Right, from McCarthy through Falwell and Buchanan, to Reagan and the Bushes and Shrubs? Does a notion of evil preclude understanding the perpetrators of heinous acts?

Try to understand we should. But suppose, for a moment, we were to come to a point where we amassed all of these “root causes” and then arranged them into a narrative resembling a “logic” behind 11 September; what kind of story would satisfy our craving for “cause and effect”? What kind of structural factors could completely account for the magnitude of the intended carnage? We can try to say that 3,000 office workers were incinerated “because” of American hegemony in the Middle East or Israeli barbarism in Palestine; we can try to say that 800,000 Tutsis were butchered “because” of the legacy of Belgian imperialism; we can try to say that six million Jews were murdered “because” of the Treaty of Versailles, or “because” Hitler was an illegitimate child. All of these factors surely helped to create grievances, and these grievances surely helped to create the events that followed. After a certain point, however, they ceased to contribute anything, as what was to follow exceeded any sense of necessity that characterises the causal relationships we desperately seek.

This dark space – this gap between what would conceivably constitute a necessary response and what could only be considered a horrifying excess – deserves a name. New Statesman