Mediating Evil

Good and Evil in Conflict

Journalist H. L. Mencken wrote, decades before September 11,
that “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace in a
continual state of alarm (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by
menacing them with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them
imaginary.” While his description remains valid, our hobgoblins are no
longer imaginary.

There are seemingly unending conflicts between Palestinians and
Israelis, Indians and Pakistani’s, Irish Catholics and Protestants, Turks
and Kurds, Hutu’s and Tutsi’s. In addition to these, there are
countless conflicts around the globe between rich and poor, despots
and democrats, leftists and rightists, labor and management, natives
and settlers, ethnic majorities and minorities, environmentalists and
developers, each accusing the other of evil.

The deepest and most serious of these conflicts are no longer
confined to the boundaries of nation states, but affect everyone
everywhere. Even outwardly minor disputes between competing
communities can rapidly escalate into world crises, triggering the
slaughter of innocents, rape, ethnic cleansing, economic collapse, the
ruin of eco-systems, and hatreds that cannot be dissipated, even in
generations. Each of these acts directly affects the quality of our lives,
no matter how far away we feel from the actual fighting.

Following these disasters come those who pick up the pieces and
start over again. While it is always helpful to offer aid in food, clothing
and shelter, the victims of these catastrophes also need to develop
skills in resolution, recovery, reconciliation, and regeneration of
community. Recovery requires acknowledgement of grief and
amelioration of loss. Resolution requires the dismantling of systemic
sources of conflict within groups and cultures that actively promoted
violence. Reconciliation requires the ability to engage in public
dialogue, and speak from the heart. Regeneration of community
requires the creation of a new culture based on collaboration,
compassion, and respect for differences. Together, these require an
understanding of how assumptions of evil, even in petty, interpersonal
disputes, lead to war and terrorism.

In political conflicts, it is common for each side to label the other
evil. Yet what is evil to one is often good to another, revealing that
evil is present in miniature in every conflict. Evil sometimes originates
in the attribution of blame to someone other than ourselves for harm
that has befallen us, or the assumption that our pain was caused by
our opponent’s pernicious intentions. Blaming others for our suffering
allows us to externalize our fears, vent our outrage, and punish our
enemies, or coerce them into doing what we want against their
wishes. It allows us to take what belongs to them, place our interests
over, against, and above theirs, and ignore their allegations of our
wrong-doing.

Evil is not initially a grand thing, but begins innocuously with a
constriction of empathy and compassion, leading ultimately to an
inability to find the other within the self. It proceeds by replacing
empathy with antipathy, love with hate, trust with suspicion, and
confidence with fear. Finally, it exalts these negative attitudes as
virtues, allows them to emerge from hiding, punishes those who
oppose them, and causes others to respond in ways that justify their
use.

A potential for evil is thus created every time we draw a line that
separates self from other within ourselves. This line expands when
fear and hatred are directed against others and we remain silent or do
nothing to prevent it; when dissenters are described as traitorous or
evil and we allow them to be silenced, isolated, discriminated against,
or punished; when negative values are exalted and collaboration,
dialogue, and conflict resolution are abandoned and we do not object.

At a more subtle level, identifying others as evil is simply a
justification and catalyst for our own pernicious actions. By defining
“them” as bad, we implicitly define ourselves as good and give
ourselves permission to act against them in ways that would appear
evil to outside observers who were not aware of their prior evil acts.
In this way, their evil mirrors our diminished capacity for empathy and
compassion, and telegraphs our plans for their eventual punishment.
The worse we plan to do to them, the worse we need them to appear,
so as to avoid the impression that we are the aggressor. The ultimate
purpose of every accusation of evil is thus to create the self-
permission, win the approval of outsiders, and establish the moral
logic required to justify committing evil oneself.

Allegations of evil are therefore directly connected with the
unequal distribution and adversarial exercise of power. The German
philosopher Nietzsche wrote that perceptions of good and evil
originated historically in social relationships of domination and
dependency between unequal economic classes:

[T]he judgment good does not originate with those to whom the
good has been done. Rather, it was the “good” themselves, that
is to say the noble, mighty, highly placed, and high-minded who
decreed themselves and their actions to be good, i.e., belonging
to the highest rank, in contradistinction to all that was base, low-
minded and plebian…. [Thus, the] origin of the opposites good
and bad is to be found in the pathos of nobility and distance,
representing the dominant temper of a higher, ruling class in
relation to a lower, dependent one.

In contemporary terms, if we, as individuals or nations, believe
ourselves to be good and possess more power than others, we will
naturally seek to justify our use of unequal power by indicating our
intention to use it for the benefit of those with fewer resources who
are less good. But without empathy, compassion, and power-sharing,
this will inevitably evolve into a belief that whatever benefits us must
benefit them also. This will lead us to regard their criticism of our self-
interested benevolence as ill-mannered and ungrateful, and their
opposition to our power as support for evil. We will then interpret
their desire for self-determination as rebellion and perhaps, as in
Vietnam, seek to “kill them for their own good.”

In order to exercise our power without experiencing injury or guilt,
we are increasingly driven to dismantle our empathy and compassion
until we are no longer able to recognize our opponents as similar to
ourselves. We can then feel justified in wielding power selfishly and
attacking them, or anyone who tries to curb our power or equalize its
distribution. It is at this point that simple, natural, innocent, self-
interest begins its descent into evil. At every step, it is aided by anger,
fear, jealousy, pain, guilt, grief, and shame, and the suppression of
empathy and compassion.

Yet all these dynamics occur on a small scale in countless petty
personal conflicts every day, and are used to justify our mistreatment
of others, including children, parents, spouses, siblings, neighbors,
employees, even strangers on the street. Every dominant individual,
organization, class, culture, and nation manufactures stories and
allegations of evil to justify withholding compassion, using power
selfishly, and violating their own ethical or moral principles in response
to perceived enemies. Worse, these small scale justifications can be
organized and manipulated on a national scale to secure permission for
war and genocide, just as war and genocide give permission to
individuals to act aggressively and resist reconciliation in their personal
conflicts.

For these reasons, we need to carefully consider how, as
individuals and nations, we define our enemies, disarm our empathy
and compassion, organize our hatreds, and rationalize our destructive
acts through conflict. For example, we frequently combine the
following elements to create circular definitions of “the enemy”:

Assumption of Injurious Intentions (they intended to cause the
harm we experienced)

Distrust (every idea or statement made by them is wrong or
proposed for dishonest reasons)

Externalization of Guilt (everything bad or wrong is their fault

Attribution of Evil (they want to destroy us and what we value
most, and must therefore be destroyed)

Zero-Sum Expectation (everything that benefits them harms us,
and vice versa)

Paranoia and Preoccupation with Disloyalty (any criticism of us or
praise of them is disloyal and treasonous)

Prejudgment (everyone in the enemy group is an enemy)

Suppression of Empathy (we have nothing in common and
considering them human is dangerous)

Isolation and Impasse (blanket rejection of dialogue, negotiation,
cooperation, and conflict resolution)

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy (their evil makes it permissible for us to be
an enemy to them)

[Based partly on work by Kurt R. and Kati Spillman]

We can deconstruct and transform each of these elements, for
example, by differentiating intention from effect, rebuilding trust
through small agreements, accepting responsibility for problems,
identifying shared values, adopting interest-based processes, being
self-critical and acknowledging, distinguishing individuals within
groups, extending empathy, engaging in dialogue and negotiation, and
refusing to behave in evil ways ourselves. To begin, we need to
recognize how evil is reflected in the language we use to describe our
conflicts, enemies, issues, and ourselves.