The Banality of Evil
Nothing is good or evil in itself. Evil is a concept that people who are not religious have trouble understanding. It can be thought of as an absence of good, but action or inaction can push things to one side or the other. When they hear the word evil, non-religious people might think of torturers, murderers, dictators, or regimes, but what puts these villains on the wrong side of the fence is their actions. Those who hold power are adept at justifying their actions, whether they are for the common good or the common ill, but their actions will be judged negatively by the population if they are based only on expediency, selfishness, ignorance, or neglect.
The Italian media was recently occupied by the case of a 35-year-old mother who, in a hot July, went on a trip to another city with a new boyfriend and left her 18-month-old child to die of thirst and hunger. She originally gave birth to the baby in a washroom because she didn't know she was pregnant, and had been heard to say the baby was an obstacle to getting on with her life. She defended her neglect by saying, "Nobody liked me when I was a child. I had no friends." Using her own pain, she used these mental gymnastics to allow her helpless daughter to die. Some mothers suffer from postpartum depression and have been known to kill their children. Was her inaction evil? Was it a mental illness?
People who do evil are aware of the consequences of their actions, but mentally ill people are not always aware of them. The evil one is assumed guilty, while the person with serious psychological problems is not. Psychiatric conditions are considered to be involuntary, while in behavioural disorders, choices are made. One of the choices available is inaction with full knowledge of the probable consequences. If a person has a toothache, they can go to a dentist to have the problem resolved, or they can do nothing. Their inaction will probably result in even more pain, but there may be factors that stop them from going to the dentist, like fear or finances. Their teeth might completely decay, and they will have painful abscesses, but they will not act, as if by closing their eyes and ignoring the evidence, magical thinking will make the problem go away.
The mother who allowed her baby to die was able to convince herself to stay away from home longer than she knew was reasonable, but she deceived herself into believing everything would turn out fine. She left the child with two bottles of milk, two of water, and one of iced tea for the days she was away, but when day three came around, and she couldn't get a ride home, she figured the baby would be good for another day. If anyone she knew asked her about the child, she told them her sister was looking after her daughter. She was afraid to ask her new companion to take her home because he didn't want to know about the baby and was full of insults about her stupidity. When enough days had passed, she began to doubt her own fantasy that her sister or mother had gone into her flat to look after the child. If the child was already dead, she reasoned, there was no hurry to go home, so she stayed away for six days, while a small part of her brain continued to believe she would find the child alive. The deceased child had eaten part of her diaper. The mother said she never meant to harm her daughter.
"I was worried about her," she said, "but I was afraid of my boyfriend's reaction. I was afraid to talk to him because he was aggressive. He said he loved me, but it wasn't true. He just used me.”
She claimed she was abused as a child at the hands of a family friend, shunned by her family, and grew up sad and solitary. There were drunken parental fights, missed birthday parties, no gifts, and no school friends because the other students thought she was too serious. She married young but miscarried, and her husband divorced her, saying the miscarriage was her fault. Her family disputed all of these claims and said she was a normal child, perhaps on the slow side.
As a writer, I am curious what her thoughts were while she put off going home to save her child. "If my boyfriend is in a better mood tomorrow, I'll ask him again if he'll drive me home. I could take the train, but that costs money that I'd rather spend on other stuff. Maybe the baby hasn't finished all of her bottles. I left her five, which should be enough for at least two days. Yesterday would have been the right day to go back, but my boyfriend was really affectionate in the afternoon and asked me to stay for another day. He told me if I loved him, I could stay, so that's what I did. Sometimes the baby slept so soundly she went through the night without a bottle, and that was ten hours, so she could go for a while before she got hungry. She was a chubby little thing anyway, everyone said so, but I really must go tomorrow one way or the other."
"My sister must have stopped by. She knows where I leave the key. Did I leave it there the last time I used it? The baby would be so happy to see my sister because she would have been lonely and calling for me. I knew what being lonely was like. I'd gone away for a day or two before, and the baby wasn't any the worse when I got back. She'd have to be an independent sort to make her way in this world. Maybe she'd even found her way out of her crib. She could stand up if she held onto something, and if she was hungry or thirsty enough, she could get out."
"I really should get home, no matter what my boyfriend says. I'll ask him again tomorrow. The baby must be really hungry by now. I would be starving after five days, but then she's just small and doesn't need much to keep her going. For sure, my sister has passed by, and the baby is all right. It would have been polite if she had phoned me to tell me what she'd done, but then she was one of those who said I should have given the baby up for adoption, so I don't trust her. My phone is out of minutes, and I asked to borrow my boyfriend's phone to call my sister, but he told me I needed to learn to be independent. What did I care about my family? They'd never done anything for me. He was right. If I called my sister and she hadn't checked on the baby, she'd give me an earful I didn't want to hear."
The ability of a person to convince themselves of something contrary to all logic is boundless, even if it means the death of an innocent. "They probably had it coming," they'd say. People are killed in so many tragic circumstances that one wouldn't think the human race needed to add to the carnage by engaging in wars for territory or resources. The way humans can mobilize their populations to go off and kill other people is the same way that humans can kill their fellow man, which is by "othering". If a person, a tribe, or a nation are not like us, it is easy to put them into a box called "them." They are less human than we are. If these people look different from me, dress differently, have different customs, worship differently, it is easier to keep them at a distance, and our fear of the unknown encourages that. Governments are adept at manipulating people into believing that the others are the bad guys, while an "other" government does the same. Judging others as separate from ourselves is easy to do, and some factions, let's call them the evil ones, or the bad actors, encourage us to exaggerate our differences instead of appreciating them. So-called evil, or incorrect behaviour, can lurk just under the surface of any of us and is usually kept under control by society's expectations, but it doesn't take much of a scratch in the surface of a supposedly good citizen to reveal a darker, nastier, selfish side. The tale of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde illustrates this. The surface of Dr. Jekyll's respectable life is disturbed when he ingests a drug. Although the good doctor can't remember the details of the reprehensible things he did as Mr. Hyde, this does not excuse the fact that he was the one who took the wrong action. He, and not Mr. Hyde, is the guilty party because the sane Dr. Jekyll knew there was a risk, but he took it anyway. Hitler and his ilk knew the consequences of their actions but did them anyway. Whether we are soldiers marching off to a so-called patriotic war or shrinkers from truth and responsibility, the scales of good and evil can easily be tipped in the wrong direction.
When the court gave the neglectful mother a life sentence, they accepted the theory of evil and ruled that although the mother had certain delusions, she was sane enough to know that what she did was wrong. Once the sentencing was over and the mother was back in prison, she went on a hunger strike, which some thought was fittingly ironic, but she was in the hands of the judicial system, which didn't permit her to make a serious error of judgment on their watch. They reasoned that she should be alive to remember what an evil thing she had done.
