DELIVER US FROM BIOLOGICAL DETERMINISM :

Deliver Us From Evil (Michael Kinsley, September 20, 2002, washingtonpost.com)

If the great essential truth about terrorism is that some people just hate the United States, the obvious next question is: Why? But that is precisely the question that offends the All-About-Evil crowd, because it leads in two unacceptable directions. One is toward psychology, trying to understand how a human mind could plot the deaths of so many innocents and gladly die in carrying it out. "Root causes" is what this kind of thinking is called in the context of domestic social issues such as crime and welfare, and conservatives regard it as a major liberal disease, with symptoms that include coddling criminals and forgiving sloth. [...]

Using the word "evil" to resist any more complex understanding of terrorism is doubly philistine because of what the study of evolutionary psychology is learning about how much of human behavior is hard-wired into our brains.

Ordinarily conservatives are quite thrilled by the idea of a genetic basis for nearly anything, and eager to accuse liberals of refusing to face the truth. The whole subject appeals to their treasured sense of futility. In this case, though, it is conservatives who are hiding from science.

Advances in our understanding of the brain do indeed pose a challenge to the moral concept of blame or fault or guilt or, yes, even evil. But the challenge is not necessarily insurmountable. (Robert Wright explores and explains all this in his wonderfully lucid book "The Moral Animal.") In any event, wrapping yourself in the flag and burying your head in the sand is not an appropriate way to deal with an unwelcome philosophical challenge. It may not be evil, but it isn't very nice.

Even by Mr. Kinsley's embarrassingly low standards this is an awful column. One begins by noting that the case for the Left no longer believing in evil is hardly a Right-wing concoction. It has been put well by "America's best social critic", the liberal Andrew Del Banco, in his unsubtlely titled, The Death of Satan : How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil (1995).
Posted by Orrin Judd at September 20, 2002 4:43 PM