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The authors from this collection have both very different and very similar ideas of the word evil.  There’s really no other way to describe how to recognize evil except by the words of Kanan Makiya

“…Evil is something that, when you see it, when you know it, it’s intimate.  It’s almost sensual.  That is why people who have been tortured know it by instinct.  They don’t need to be told what it is, and they may have a very hard time putting it into words.”

Makiya is absolutely right.  Evil is difficult to describe.  It seems like there are exceptions to things that are evil.  Take murder and killings for example.  It’s evil when when there is an attack on the U.S. and hundreds of people die, but it’s justified when U.S. soldiers kill citizens and soldiers in Iraq?  Going back to the quote, evil is something you feel.  After 9/11, I think our generation has a new understanding of the meaning of evil.  Because there are exceptions to a definition, evil is something you have to feel.  Makiya also mentioned in the article that just because evil is human, doesn’t mean that human beings can always understand.  It changes over time and evolves with the changing culture.  The Puritans used to believe that pride and self-assertion were qualities that were to be associated with Satan, but today these things are not seen as evil.  What they saw as evil, we don’t, which means it’s possible that what we see as evil today, in some hundred years, or even decades, will be seen as a part of survival.  We may have an understanding of what evil is today, but not nessecarliy what it was “yesterday” or what it will be “tomorrow.”  In the words of Ian McEwen, ” ‘Well it’s evil.’ It’s us.”  Whatever we do, wherever we go, evil will follow.

In JJ’s post, he wrote:

“It states that September 11th was no doubt an act of war, and does not say that it was an act of evil.”

 He wrote this in response to an article he read in Times Magazine.  I thought it was very interesting how September 11th was said to be an act of war, not evil, but if you asked someone what evil was, war would be sure to come up.  When symbolizing evil through pictures, many people chose people like Hitler and Saddam Hussein.  Both of these people seem to represent both war and evil.  So if war, even an act of war, is evil, then wouldn’t September 11th be seen as an act of evil?

In the article we read for class, the author said that “evil is in the eye of the beholder,”  So not only is something seen as evil depending on who is viewing it, but the meaning of evil will differ with who is defining it.  It’s hard to explain evil without using the word itself in the definition.  To me, evil is something that is wrong or harmful to yourself or others.  It’s difficult to say with complete sincerity that this is my definition of evil, because something like cheating on a test is wrong, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say it’s evil, although it does apply to my definition.   I would say that torturing someone is evil.  Other modern examples of evil is murder or stealth.

Using this general definition of evil, you could see the past as a series of evil events.  Some of these events have led to great things though.  The Civil War, even though lots of people were killed, which is an “evil” act, eventually helped America become a more unified country, rather than a seperated one between blacks and whites.  Through the eyes of an American, the terrorists of September 11th are evil, but from their point of view, they were doing something good.  They sacrificed themselves for a cause that they believed in and proved a point to America.  Hitler didn’t see anything wrong with what he was doing during WWII, but many people felt, and still feel, that he was evil and all the things he destroyed and all the people killed were an effect of his evil.  Americans can see an event as evil, or a person as being evil, but another group, which may have the same definition of evil, doesn’t view the event or person as evil.