On Evil ...

[ A version of this first appeared on LiveJournal at http://timlondon.livejournal.com/ ]

I was pulled up short the other day by a science fiction book. I referred to the Scots science fiction writer Ken Macleod in my April 6th posting [ Macleod and '300' - Two Responses to the Darkness ] so it was interesting to discover a new writer, Charles Stross, recommended by Macleod, who has many similarities in style and sensibility.  There is a sudden rush of his books on the market, all very recent and published first in America (although he is a Brit). I picked up what I believe is his second to be written and the first to be published here (The Atrocity Archive) and it is an enjoyable pulp read [see http://www.antipope.org/charlie/index.html for more on Stross]

Anyway this isn't a book review. The book has many flaws but if you think in terms of a mix of H. P. Lovecraft, Len Deighton and Neal Stephenson (his assessment) and then add in a mix of hacker techno-nerdiness and BBC Sci-Fi humour (my assessment), you get somewhere close to what Graham Greene might politely call an 'entertainment'. It is very much in the vein of Mick Carey's much-loved (by my family) Felix Castor novels - http://www.mikecarey.net/ - which have the sexiest demon-incubus you have never ever wanted to meet.

These novels are part of a wry contemporary English horror/sci fi style made up of cynicism, dark humour, nerdy manners and tributes to American and British genre pulp that seems to go down well in a reading culture that is at much at home with Marvel Comics as it is with Conan Doyle. Think of the peculiar but stimulating world-view of Alan Moore [from V for Vendetta through to Promethea] and you see the culture of an angry radicalism that has been bent to market needs.

No, I am not offering a book review but a single observation. I am not giving the story away by saying that one of the key conceits of the book is that the mass murder of the Jews in the Second World War was the ritual sacrifice of millions to gain sufficient psychic energy from pain to call on an occult power, not unlike one of Lovecraft's Great Old Ones, to ensure a national socialist victory.  I am told that this is not the first use of this trope and someone is already out there searching Robert Anton Wilson for an earlier use of it - but its casual use in a popular novel on the shelves now is worth thinking about.

The conceit pulls you up short - has the very real suffering of millions under a vicious regime now become mere fodder for a rather tasteless foray into alternative history? Has it moved from the transgressive (if Anton Wilson did use the idea) to the mainstream?  Is this the point where the Holocaust has become finally released from lived experience (after being, for a few decades after 1945, 'that of which nothing may be spoken") in order that it might become the plaything of creative artists?

If so, it has been creeping in that direction for some time. The evil of the Holocaust has become steadily detached, first, from greed and power and, then, from ill-will and human malice to become the subject of occult forces beyond time and space? How different is this, in terms of the potential for a psychological denial of the truth, from the works of David Irving - not that I would ban either?  Not at all if we know how to distinguish between fact and fantasy but perhaps the remaking of fact into fantasy does have a moral dimension of sorts.

The point is that, at a certain time after an act has taken place, it seems that the act can move into a world where it is disconnected from reality and becomes fodder for fantasy.  This can happen in our private lives where we redraft reality to suit our current condition as a matter of course.  I met an old girlfriend from nearly twenty years ago by chance not so long ago and it was amusing to see how we had entirely different narratives about how and why we parted - as Maurice Chevalier sang, 'Ah, how I remember it well!'

The conservative philosopher John Kekes [The Roots of Evil, Cornell, 2005] does us a service in his book by returning to some of the great crimes of the past, not excluding the realpolitik of the Cathar Crusade, to lodge evil acts back where they should be lodged - at the heart of the human condition.  There comes a time perhaps, having redrafted history repeatedly, that we do have to go back and moralise on what happened as if would could make a contemporary judgement based on clear if primitive moral absolutes of the 'eating people is wrong' type.  While I cannot entirely dismiss the environmental roots of evil, as Kekes seems to want to do by implication, he is persuasive that not all evil can be optimistically wished away as something that is purely a matter of condition and that there is no evidence that, with improvement of condition, evil will be automatically banished from the world.

The Catholic Church has a concept in which there are sins of commission and sins of omission. This is useful here. To wilfully order the murder of millions is a sin of commission. To participate for careerist reasons in such a murder and go into denial about what is happening as one does so may be a sin of omission.  Forgetting an evil later because it is convenient to do so is also part of the evil.  Himmler's descendant who married a Jew and who has a half-Jewish child with the Himmler bloodline (a cosmic irony of noble proportions) investigated the Himmler brothers and found that their claims to have stepped away from their brother's romantic hogwash was so much - hogwash.  They had been complicit not as believers but as opportunists, taking every advantage of the family name when it gave them a bit of an edge in a cruel and unforgiving world.

Our culture tends to punish the commission of an act far more than complicity through omission and yet there would be no large-scale evil (it would be mere vicious local gangsterdom or individual rapine and murder) if it were not for this complicity by the grey men and their wives who do their duty. Charles Manson is rightfully incarcerated for life for his actions, yet Robert McNamara, the grey civil servant, continued to teach and write and speak (albeit admitting error) as if nothing had happened to civilians while he was working in national security - much like German lawyers who practised before and after the Gotterdamerung of '45.

McNamara's war (and I do not really want to single him out as much worse than thousands of such grey men in history, not forgetting our own British imperial crimes and misdemeanours), in which he participated 'with good intent', cost the Vietnamese people an estimated 666 times (an interesting number in itself) the number of people who died in the 9/11 incident. A suicide bomber is rightfully condemned, but the act of war that has lead to the murderousness of contemporary Iraq is treated by our establishment as if it were merely an honest mistake by well-meaning buffoons rather than as an act of irresponsible evil.   Those who have done their duty as military men or civil servants drive blame upwards to the 'buffone' yet refuse to accept their own moral complicity in carrying out their duty. Fascinating!  Something in the human, perhaps the Western, condition allows for good intent as an excuse for having paved the road to Hell in skulls.

But a sin of stupidity or denial that is complicit in the deaths of lots of people or creates widespread misery should be much less forgivable than our culture allows.  If vicious things result from good intent, should we be so prepared to forgive the perpetrator? This certainly seems to be very culturally useful for our middle classes, but philosophically it does not stand up well - and not just from a utilitarian perspective either. After all, if existentially we must take responsibility for our actions, then we must take some responsibility for the consequences of our actions. It is not only that we do evil in actually undertaking some act, but that we do evil when we fail to question what we do and when we fail to question what we have done after we have done it.  We do evil when we stop thinking.

Real evil lies not so much in making the error in a sin of commission, but in persisting in the error after the costs and consequences have become clear. Perhaps this is because, in the group-think of 'grey man evil', the alternative is always justified as worse. But this is mere displacement and denial. Perhaps the idea that Communists would overrun all of South East Asia (which did not happen and never was going to happen) justified in the minds of some men, supported at home by their wives, the massive use of terror tactics and of brutal methods simply because such tactics and methods are (using another, more malignly self-deluding, Catholic concept) the 'lesser evil'.  But then we all probably underestimate just how damned stupid, rather than evil, our ruling classes are?

This may seem like a round-the-houses way of linking a popular novel to the thinking of the architects of death in our global elites. Poor old Stross (and I certainly do not want to single him out at all) is just another writer reflecting his times, but there is a quiet potential evil in taking any real suffering and reifying it without thought into something abstract and unconnected to the fact of lots of very individual specific sufferings that actually took place at a specific place and time - whether this reification be through the appropriation of the suffering by Zionists to justify state creation, liberals to justify political correctness or authors to justify a story.  But the error is as great with a person as with a tribe - would it be right for a novelist to construct Diana Windsor (or any other public person) in ways that detach the person loved by William and Harry Windsor from their remembrance?  How much should reality be fodder for fantasy?

The best memorial to those murdered under the conditions of, say, the Holocaust (since nothing can ever bring them back, memory is no substitute for life really lived and their property has merely been restituted through occasionally tenuous bloodlines to 'make a point') is never ever to think about people in the way that their murderers did, as objects for use and manipulation.

Of course, a novelist apparently has the right to do this - at the end of the day, I cannot really condemn Stross for reflecting our culture so accurately in his work. Far from it - I very much recommend his book as a jolly entertaining travel read (if you can get through the bursts of Stephensonian techno-babble).  But actors in the real world certainly do not have this right: if it is true that fantasy should never be limited in either its light or dark aspects, reality is another matter altogether. Or is that thought too heavy for the lightweight brains of our oh-so-well-educated grey men?