"The Function Of Evil Across Disciplinary Contexts"

In 2014 Chico State University grad Brian Johnson, now Assistant Professor of Humanities at Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland, Ohio, helped convene a most unusual conference. "Evil Incarnate" brought together presenters from many academic specialties, from Shakespeare to South African crime fiction, and the papers have now been published in book form. 

"The Function Of Evil Across Disciplinary Contexts" ($95 in hardcover from Lexington Books; also for Amazon Kindle) is edited by Johnson and Malcah Effron, a lecturer in the Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional Communications program at MIT. It's a scholarly treatment, from a variety of perspectives, of how evil is to be defined in a secular age.

As the introduction says, "evil was, at one time, a supernatural force … well-defined by theology"; but as "the supernatural has dropped away" the "narrative of evil" has been fragmented. In fact, the editors suggest, evil "as a palpable force is … a metaphor for … social scorn…." 

An example is given by Johnson's chapter, entitled "Ghosts of the Old South: The Evils of Slavery and the Haunted House in Royal Street." The house, in New Orleans' French Quarter, was set on fire in 1834, allegedly by the house cook, one of a group of slaves kept in the building and repeatedly tortured by one Madame Delphine LaLaurie, "a twice-widowed French Creole woman." 

A crowd gathered at the fire. "Seeking justice, the citizens of New Orleans threatened to turn violent against Madame LaLaurie for her crimes." She escaped, but the crowd pressed in, "destroying what remained." Stories arose that the property was haunted by the ghosts of those slaves; the story was featured in 2013 as part of the third season of American Horror Story. To this day it is "considered one of the most haunted places in America."

Ghosts, real or not, Johnson says, "act as evidence of a white supremacist vision of the history of New Orleans." The ghosts "return from the grave because their treatment was beyond divine justice," as if what LaLaurie did was an isolated social evil policed by upstanding slave owners, thereby minimizing the evil of slavery itself.

Johnson calls us to see through those ghosts.

A provocative study of evil from a former Chico State University professor

"Moral Evil" ($32.95 in paperback from Georgetown University Press; also in Amazon Kindle format), by Andrew Michael Flescher, might seem a strange holiday topic. Yet, ultimately, while fully recognizing the sometimes horrifying nature of human existence, it is a book of measured hope.

Andy Flescher taught in the Religious Studies department at Chico State University and is now, according an author's note, "a member of the Core Faculty, Program in Public Health, associate professor of preventive medicine, and associate professor of English at Stony Brook University" in New York. But put all that aside. His probing study of moral evil (and natural evil, too, such as a devastating tsunami) is brilliantly clear and mostly jargon free, well worth pondering.

The core of the book is a description of four (sometimes overlapping) ways of looking at moral evil, each put in conversation with the others. In the last chapter Flescher moves from description to prescription, suggesting the most satisfying (and hopeful) understanding of moral evil involves combining Augustine's evil-as-privation view with Aristotle's virtue ethics view of character development.

Augustine's view sees "evil as the absence of goodness," a lack of being what we should be when we do what we shouldn't or fail to do what we ought. We are no stranger to this evil--it seems part of the human condition.

A second view of moral evil envisions it in Manichean terms, evil as a substantial opposing force "radically separate from the good." This is "evil as the presence of badness"; the battle against evil may never be won. A third view proposes a theodicy, a justification of the ways of God to man, suggesting that evil is really a kind of good if we could only understand the larger picture. It is"evil as the presence of goodness." Finally, evil is only in the eye of the beholder, just a label some people slap on the actions of those they don't like. It is "evil as the absence of badness."

For Flescher, evil is a privation; in response we must "introduce goodness" with "actions that reveal a commitment to the building and rebuilding of human community and connection" and "go out of our way to choose the good." There is Hope.