The evil that men do
Theodore Dalrymple can find no better explanation for man's wicked behaviour than the doctrine of Original Sin For personal reasons that it would be tedious to explain, my entire adult life, at least in its professional aspect, has been a search for the source of man's evil. Besides this question, all other questions — at least those pertaining to mankind — seem to me almost trivial. But I cannot say that I have answered the question to my own satisfaction, let alone to anyone else's. I am still mystified.
I do not mean that all men are evil; far from it. Most men are not, or at least not habitually. But all men are capable of evil. Evil is always lurking in the lair of man's heart, including my own, awaiting its chance to pounce; and if man were a computer, which of course some believe that he is, I believe that his default setting, as it were, would be to evil rather than to good.
I have seen evil on large scale and small: massacres in civil wars and the cruelties wilfully inflicted upon one another by men and women in the privacy of their homes. Evil, however, is not to be measured on a linear scale, like height or weight, but against a man's opportunity to commit it: a man who murders four people is not necessarily one fifth as evil as a man who kills 20, though the evil he has done is only one fifth as much. This explains why people who have committed the worst crimes are not necessarily the worst people, and why evil may inhere in petty deeds.
Sometimes I think evil exists only because we should be thoroughly bored without it; what literature or drama could there be without evil? Some men, though, are evil methodically, pedantically, boringly. They go about their evil as auditors go through accounts. They are conscientiously, not flamboyantly, evil.
In my youth I believed, along with Rousseau, that man was born good but had been corrupted by civilisation: in other words, that a social environment could be created in which, if man only had enough hot and cold running water and other such conveniences, amenities and benefits, he would be entirely benign. Indeed, in so far as I believed that man was the product of his environment. I believed that, in the right circumstances, he could not be other than benign, for such was his essential nature. I did not concern myself with such subtleties as to whether a being without the choice of evil could in any sense be said to be good. There would come a time, or so I thought, when arrangements would be so perfect that evil was impossible. This is clearly hogwash, however. Even the Swiss can be, indeed often are, evil.
Could evil be the result of what some of my patients, eager to exculpate themselves, call 'a chemical imbalance'? Would a little more serotonin transmission in the brains of the people of the world eliminate evil? There have been scientific conferences on the neurology of evil that suggested as much. If only we doctors prescribed enough Prozac, or ensured that babies had enough oxygen during childbirth, all would be sweetness and tight: the householder would lie down with the burglar, the victim with the perpetrator.
No, this won't do. Evil is not banished by Prozac or more oxygen at birth. Perhaps we should look to evolutionary biology for our explanation. It is certainly fashionable to do so; the selfish gene's drive for replication, for example, is said to explain why stepfathers are much more likely to kill and abuse children in their household than biological fathers are. They want to clear the path, or reduce competition, for their own offspring.
The problem is that not all stepfathers are bad, let alone killers. Many look after their stepchildren as if they were their own. Nor, I suspect, is the reproductive success of abused children, considered merely from the numerical point of view, much reduced by comparison with children who were not abused. Only death confers the kind of certain advantage that the theory requires, and the killing of a child is still a rare event, even in our urban jungle.
The best way of understanding evil is by way of metaphor, the metaphor of Original Sin. I do not think that Adam actually existed as a historical figure, of course; yet the idea that death and sin came ineradicably into the world (ineradicable, that is, by man himself) with Adam's first disobedience, the eating of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, is a metaphorically realistic account of the human condition — far more realistic, and hardly less conjectural, than any other that is supposedly more scientific. It explains why technical progress is not moral progress, and why utopian dreams are bound to fail. Imperfect beings cannot bring about perfection.
Once man had become self-conscious, there was no turning back. But with selfconsciousness came not only the possibility of but the propensity to evil, a propensity that has always to be controlled but cannot finally be eliminated. I am not a Pelagian who believes that man's evil is in imitation of Adam, but rather that Original Sin inheres in each and every one of us, and manifestations of this emerge irrespective of any examples around us. You could be born into a community of saints and yet commit evil. I say this, incidentally, as a person without religious belief.
Original Sin accounts for the manifest imperfectibility of man. No social arrangements, however civilised or compassionate, will ever result in the elimination of man's desire to do evil: the best that can be hoped for is that they will limit the scope of its expression. There is, for example, so much domestic evil in this country for two reasons: because there is nothing to discourage it and because there is so little room for evil, at least of the cruder sort, in the public sphere. This is not to say that one day the opportunity to commit evil in a larger, public theatre and on a vastly larger scale will not arise; indeed I think it very likely that one day it will. Goodness is fragile because it requires self-restraint, but evil is strong because it requires self-expression.
You could say that modern Darwinism has a concept of Original Sin, that our genes endow us with certain ineradicable traits such as the drive for dominance, or (in the case of our weaker brethren) the resistance to dominance, that are akin to Original Sin. But Darwinist explanations of actual human conduct are as metaphorical as biblical ones, and no more illuminating: they explain some of the past all right, but never predict the future. They are always wise after the event.
Self-conscious as we are, I don't think we shall ever understand ourselves fully. I doubt that we shall ever pluck out the heart of our own mystery. We shall never advance beyond the theory of Original Sin, which brought not only death and sin into the world, but permanent disgruntlement and perpetual searching for what has not been there since the Fall — namely sublunary perfection.
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