Jennifer L. Geddes, an associate professor of religious studies and co-program director at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at UVA, is currently researching a book titled The Rhetoric of Evil, How People Think and Talk about Evil. Her work has been gaining national notoriety at a time when politicians and cable news personalities increasingly use “evil” to describe everyone from murderous despots to members of Congress. We asked Geddes why we should think twice before declaring something “evil.” Here’s some of what she had to say.—Jay Neelley
C-VILLE: How does one study evil?
Geddes: What I do, practically, is look at testimonies, speeches or memoirs of people that have been involved in the worst sorts of things that human beings have done to each other. One of the strange counterintuitive things I’ve noticed, in terms of the Holocaust testimony, is how the Nazis describe what they are doing, making themselves victims: either, ‘I was just following orders,’ or ‘we had to do
it for Germany.’ But the way that they tell it is designed to elicit sympathy from their listener. Whereas a lot of the survivor testimony, all they want is for you to acknowledge that it happened. There’s no eliciting of sympathy. What each narrative is requesting of you is really different than you would expect.
How is the concept of evil used politically?
That’s the misuse of the word that I really want to warn against. As soon as you label the other “evil,” there are no limits on the violence or the suffering you can inflict. That’s one of the dangerous elements in fanaticism—the labeling of the other as evil which then leads to the infliction of extreme suffering on humans through violence.
What have you learned from studying evil?
What’s really important to me is the issue of moral responsibility. The idea of “the devil made me do it,” or “that’s just evil,” doesn’t treat humans with the dignity of holding them morally responsible for what they do. That’s why I would say no human being is purely evil, but humans need to be held morally responsible for the evil actions that they do. When you start to label people “evil,” it can tend to have the effect of making you feel so distant from that person that you have a kind of self-righteousness that doesn’t acknowledge your own capacity to do evil.
