Evil wears an ordinary face

Traditional views of evil emphasise "otherness", but evil is an all too human phenomenon

“The settlers want to see the sea,” said Daniella Weiss, leader of a Zionist settler movement. “In order to see the sea, it is necessary that there are no homes. There will be no homes, there will be no Arabs. It’s just an elegant romantic way of saying I want to see the sea. How will you see the sea? There will be no homes, there will be no Arabs, look at the sea.”

I was shocked by the contrast between her bright eyes and pretty face, and the ugliness of her words. Evil was wearing the face of an elderly Jewish woman.

(image from Wikimedia)

I have no doubt that what I saw in her face and heard in her words was pure evil. In that video she called for the violent clearing of the whole of Gaza, for no other reason than that Jewish settlers want the land. Over two million people live in Gaza, but she was not remotely concerned about their fate. For her, they were simply vermin to be eradicated. I cannot call the desire to displace or wipe out over two million people anything other than evil. I hope you can’t either.

Never in all my life had I thought evil could possibly appear in such a form. But perhaps that says more about me than it does about the nature of evil. When we talk about evil, what image springs to mind? What does evil look like, and how do we recognise it?

In religious art and literature, the devil is the personification of evil. It is typically represented as a deformed and distorted human. This “humanoid” devil can be male or female. In the male form, he may be a mixture of man and beast, and is often dark-skinned and grotesquely oversexed. It’s not difficult to discern the racist and ableist roots of such imagery.

In its female form, evil is usually portrayed as old and ugly. The witch Maleficent is unusual in being physically beautiful, though in an aloof and haughty way. Sociable, she is not - and in women (though not in men), unsociability is considered ugly. It’s not difficult to discern the sexist, ageist and ableist roots of such imagery.

Outside religious circles, people reject such personifications of evil. The devil doesn’t exist. Visions of demons are the delirious fantasies of sick or drugged minds. And demonisation of people who look ‘different’ reflects the mistaken values of a bygone age.

For many people now, the face of evil is not the dark-skinned oversexed devil or warty old witch of religious art, but a living, breathing human being. A mass murderer. Hitler, perhaps. Or Fred West. Or Harold Shipman. Or - since evil can take a female form - Lucy Letby.

But we still want evil to appear abnormal. We feel safe labelling Hitler as ‘evil’ not just because he killed millions of people, but because he looked and sounded deranged, particularly towards the end of his life. Fortunately we’ve moved on somewhat from associating evil with physical deformity, but people with mental health problems, developmental disorders such as autism, and learning disabilities are still distressingly liable to be demonised.

It is hard to recognise evil when it wears an ordinary face. And when we do recognise it, the form it takes challenges our prejudices. “He looked such an inoffensive little man,” said my mother about the serial killer John Christie. Christie murdered at least eight people, including the wife and child of his lodger, Timothy Evans, who was wrongfully convicted of murder and hanged on the strength of Christie’s false testimony. Christie himself was hanged three years later, in 1953. On a visit to Madame Tussaud’s in London, I saw his wax image in the Chamber of Horrors - a slender bespectacled man holding a paintbrush. He did indeed look inoffensive.

Another inoffensive man, the genial Dr. Harold Shipman, killed about 250 people. But whereas Christie was a sexual pervert, gaining pleasure from murdering, mutilating and raping his victims, Shipman’s motive was much more clinical. His victims were mainly elderly women whom he killed for their money.

It’s easy to describe as ‘evil’ perverted murderers like Christie, especially if their victims include small children (Geraldine, Evans’ daughter, was only two when Christie killed her). And I have many times seen it said that true evil finds pleasure in the suffering and death of others. But this leads people to weird and dangerous conclusions. If evil means enjoying the suffering of others, one would have to conclude that Christie was evil but Shipman was not, and that Rosemary West is evil but Lucy Letby is not. I doubt if the relatives of the elderly people Shipman killed, and the parents of the babies Letby killed or tried to kill, would see it like that. I also doubt if those whose families were decimated in the Holocaust would regard that as anything but the most unspeakable evil, even though the Nazi death machine was clinical and depersonalised, and some of those tasked with the killing are known to have suffered from PTSD. Insisting that true evil necessarily derives personal pleasure from the suffering of others gaslights the victims of some of the most horrific murderers in history.

The trial of Lucy Letby demonstrated beyond all doubt that discrimination is very much a factor in Western perception of evil. Glamour magazine angrily asked why so many news articles had focused on her appearance rather than what she had done:

Why do we not imagine someone capable of multiple murders to be a university-educated professional? Why do we not imagine them to have friends who think they are kind or doting parents who gave them an idyllic childhood? Why – most of all – do we not imagine them to be a young, blonde, white woman? And why is this presumption so pervasive in our society that it feels like rather than focusing on her sickening crimes, every news publication is instead reeling from the sheer fact that someone who looks like Letby could be capable of such atrocities?

It wasn’t difficult to work out why. But so blind have we become to racism, ageism, ableism and misogyny that there is now a whole industry devoted to proving that Letby is innocent, because how can a young, pretty white woman with a sociable nature possibly be evil?

The popular idea of what evil looks like is itself evil. It demonises innocent people who don’t conform to social norms of appearance or behaviour, and excuses murderers who do, with terrible consequences. Christie, Shipman and Letby all got away with murder for far too long because in the minds of those with whom they came into contact, they did not ‘look’ evil.

Adolf Eichmann, about whom Hannah Arendt coined the term “the banality of evil”, didn’t ‘look’ evil either. Like Christie, he was an inoffensive little man - indeed, the two men looked rather alike. Yet he was one of history’s greatest mass murderers. He knowingly sent millions of Jews to their deaths. Why he did so is disputed: Arendt saw him as a petty bureaucrat of no great talent or ingenuity whose sole intent was to please his superiors and further his career, but others claim he was driven by ideological hatred of Jews.

Arendt was heavily criticised for her portrayal of Eichmann, and her view of him remains controversial today. But whether Eichmann was a rabid Jew-hater who delighted in the deaths of millions or a pathetic little man who efficiently organised deportations to death camps in the hope of gaining promotion is neither here nor there. Unquestionably, what he did was evil. And because he was both inoffensive in appearance and inconsequential in personality, he nearly got away with it. At the end of the war, he slipped away and lived quietly in Argentina until his capture by Israeli agents in 1960. Had he been a more flamboyant character, he might have been brought to justice much sooner.

But although there’s no question that his deeds were evil, Eichmann’s motives and character do matter. In the popular imagination, evil can have no redeeming features. The thoughts, words and deeds of a mass murderer must be entirely evil. There can be no weakness, nothing that would make them appear an ordinary, flawed human being, because that would make evil ordinary. Evil cannot be ordinary, or it can be committed by anyone - and no-one wants to admit to being capable of evil.

By portraying Eichmann as ordinary, even pathetically flawed and vulnerable, Arendt destroyed the myth that the capacity for evil is a rare and profound abnormality, and revealed the truth that all human beings are capable of evil. Evil is an everyday occurrence. It is, in this sense, “banal”. Evil can wear anyone’s face, even that of an elderly Jewish woman or a young blonde English nurse.

To her critics, Arendt’s dispassionate analysis of Eichman’s personality and motivation was a “great mistake”. It knocked the Holocaust off its pedestal of uniqueness and incomprehensibility, and dumped it into a rather large (and pretty full) bucket marked “terrible things humans do to each other”:

We understand what stirred the wrath of Arendt’s critics, and it has a direct affinity with the psychology of the observer’s perception of evil, which brooks no compromises: It is her demonstration of a lack of empathy and compassion for the victims, alongside her attempts to understand Eichmann’s psyche. To this was added a diminishment of Eichmann’s part in the mass annihilation project and a severance of the connection between Eichmann and hatred of the victim. Each of these put a crack in one of the necessary conditions for the perception of evil and placed the “Nazi-Jew” dyad in a different dimension, less horrific and monstrous.

The linking of the words “banal” and “evil” is utterly astonishing – pairing those words not only lessens the primary bases for the mental feeling and the reactions of the body and the consciousness to the acts of horror embodied in the word “evil”; it also narrows the entire emotional spectrum at a stroke: If it’s merely “banal,” for the observer that means that the nullifying and incomprehensible dimensions of the atrocity are evaded.

Exposing the ordinariness of evil was a cardinal error - even, one might say, a mortal sin. Arendt’s critics never forgave her for it. They are still panning her book now, sixty years after its publication.

But although Arendt may perhaps have misunderstood Eichmann, her wider point stands. The Holocaust was certainly unusual in its sheer scale and industrial nature, but the beliefs that made it possible are all too common. The evil deeds of people like Eichmann are supported by the evil words and thoughts of people like Daniella Weiss. When the Eichmanns of this world are punished for their crimes, the Weisses melt back into the population, keeping their thoughts and words to themselves until the horror has faded and it becomes safe to express them again. I make no apology for bringing together Eichmann and Weiss like this: what Eichmann did to European Jews, Weiss wants to do to the Palestinians of Gaza.

Arendt’s challenge cannot be resolved by appealing to differences in perception, as Aner Govrin tries to do. It is true that what to an observer may look like a helpless victim may to the perpetrator of an atrocity look like an existential threat. But the babies Lucy Letby murdered were not an existential threat to her. For reasons we don’t know, she just wanted to kill them. The elderly women Dr. Shipman murdered were not an existential threat to him. He just wanted their money. The children the Moors murderers Brady and Hindley tortured and killed were not an existential threat to them. They did it for pleasure. I could go on, and on, and on. Ascribing a single motive to the evil that humans do would narrow it down so much that people who have done really terrible things would be excluded while people who have committed lesser crimes would be included. The injustice of such an approach would itself be evil.

Evil wears an ordinary face. It is not ugly. It may even be beautiful. It is charming, and friendly, and sociable. It loves animals (but not the humans it calls animals). It cuddles its new-born baby while cold-bloodedly killing other children by the thousand. It enjoys a meal with its family after dropping bombs that wipe out entire families. It plays on the beach and swims in the sea near the city it has destroyed. And it believes that what it does is right, and proper, and justified; or if not, that it is enjoyable, and that makes it worth doing even if the penalty is harsh.

Evil looks like us. All of us.

Related reading:

No apology, just an explanation - Coppola Comment, 2015

The extent of evil - Coppola Comment, 2013