Lance Morrow sets the stage on the subject of evil with his essay "Your Periodic Reminder That Evil Is Real" (click: Morrow, Evil Is Real), a subject we first discussed in our book club session some seventeen years ago with reference to his then-published “Evil: An Investigation.” Our discussion back then was but a dress rehearsal for the glimpse of the skull on display today.
Yet it seems like yesterday we struggled with such questions as: Can we even define evil or is it a case of we know it when we see it? How do we even know we can see it? Is it understandable only in terms of its duality with good? Lance Morrow offered a shortcut, maintaining it’s something (any) decent conscience, uncontaminated by ideology, knows what it’s looking at.
That ideological contamination qualification opens the way to a deeper analysis where a view of evil is refracted through the lens of a fundamentalist religion with its ideological celebration of death over life. The Middle East then begins to look like a sanctioned murder-suicide situation – the only wrinkle being people not agreeing who is the murderer and who is the suicide…
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