Interdisciplinarity is much praised and rarely practiced. Too often, it boils down to a sociologist adding a few anthropological works to a bibliography, or a geographer applying for a political science grant. The ideal of learning from and engaging with other intellectual traditions and conceptualizations is easily lost.
Ruth Grant's collection, Naming Evil, Judging Evil, however, demonstrates what interdisciplinarity can achieve when done for its own sake. In bringing together a variety of scholars from Duke University, Grant encourages an extensive discussion of a central concept in political theory. This results in a reflective and engaged discourse, one that is never undisciplined but that productively strains across the various interlocutors' backgrounds.
The concept is that of evil—for many moderns a troublesome if not potentially archaic concept. More than one essay mentions the difficultly of coming to terms with “evil” in a post-Hitlerian world, not because the man himself did not commit great evil (all are in agreement that he did) but because his legacy has come to stand for evil itself. Such a benchmark, as Michael Allen Gillespie argues, leaves us ill-equipped to make judgments of people or events that are not quite as bad as the Holocaust.
Yet the best aspects of this collection arise from precisely this attempt to grapple with the generation of evil and the human efforts to come to terms with it. “Evil” remains an unsolved and intriguing question not only for political theorists but also for theologians, ethicists, historians, and philosophers. The collected essays take up the central question that—it is presumed—must be answered before one can take an ethico-political stand: How do we properly determine what evil is?
A plurality of the authors conceptualize this modern problem of evil as arising from the difficulty of identifying evil within liberal, democratic pluralism. Malachi Hacohen, who most engages with and against his fellow essayists, argues that this problem, our inability to call out evil and contest it, is rooted deeply in liberalism's history. Thomas Spragens, Jr., sees the American polity as trapped between those with an absolutist vision of good and evil and those whose “soft form of nihilism” (p. 191) leads them to a “pan-nonjudgmentalism” (p. 208) that paralyzes their ability to even recognize evil. While I may disagree with this particular diagnosis (who, exactly, are these nihilists, other than students afraid to develop a central argument?), these authors spell out the issues and the possible effects of such a dualism with intriguing histories and justifications.
Other contributors investigate the intellectual historical conditions that allow for or encourage our conceptions of evil. Particularly noteworthy here are the editor herself and Stanley Hauerwas. Grant identifies a particular dynamic of Rousseau's thought in our willingness to blame evil on systemic or structural conditions. Such a conception, she argues, leads to a Manichean totalization that encourages radical revolutionary attitudes: If society is to blame for man's fallen state, then the necessary corollary is that social structures must be (violently) overthrown and reworked anew. Hauerwas, in his essay, returns to St. Augustine to offer a denial of evil as existing in the world. His intriguing reading of Christianity's history attempts to recenter humility, the idea that one can never know God's intentions, as the proper implication of Augustine's narrative of pride as the cause of evil results.
As with all collections, the essays are uneven. The need to carefully lay out the historical and intellectual conditions of previous attempts to grapple with evil occasionally overcomes any sort of contemporary application or even significance. Other essays approach banality, and not in the Arendtian sense. Something seems disingenuous in a long, footnote-laden, discursively complex analysis that, after much wheezing, teaches us something that is already widely assumed in the West: that, for example, what we call “female genital mutilation” is an evil done to innocent girls. This is not to single out Elizabeth Kiss, whose essay treating this issue also develops a nuanced critique of torture. It is, instead, to ask why the contributors often stack the deck, scoring points against known (and commonly agreed-upon) evils instead of engaging with those who claim evil in more common American practices. It is easy to condemn Hitler or forced child marriage, but neither seems up for debate in contemporary Western society. What about other, more germane but less agreed-upon evils: what some call “male genital mutilation” and others call “circumcision”? Is imprisoning animals and eating their flesh evil? What about the privatization of water and food? Or “pro-life” or “pro-choice” legislation, both of which are denounced as perpetrating evil? If we are truly to confront and judge evil, should we not at least know where the contributors would take us?
Thus, the best essay in the collection, by Peter Euben, describes the localized and specific nature of everyday evils. Euben examines how one particular work of literature, Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day (1989), raises questions of quotidian evil by contesting the protagonist's conflict between duty (he has been a technically superb butler) and judgment (as a superb butler, he has ignored his employer's fascism). Indeed, it may be possible that his employ makes it impossible for him to be a moral person, that “the dignity of his profession requires him to be complicit in his own humiliation” (p. 116). The honest reader of the novel, of which Euben seems ideal, comes away not discovering how best to judge evil, but instead questioning how his or her commitments, practices, and habits allow or even encourage the persistence of evil. This provocation alone would make Grant's volume merit attention. Its ability to put such insights in conversation with ideas from other disciplines makes it exemplary.
