THE THRILL OF THE KNIFE:

Nick Berg's executioners all too clearly enjoyed beheading him (Theodore Dalrymple, 5/13/04, The Daily Telegraph)

My vision of humanity has darkened, not since I read about Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, which seemed to me exotic and distant, culturally and politically, but since I began to investigate the lives of ordinary British people in modern conditions. I have come to the conclusion that the default setting of man is to evil and that, if not all, then many or perhaps most men will commit evil if they can get away with it.

Where there is neither social nor legal pressure to behave decently, there will be a festival of evil. We have created a society in which often there is neither such pressure; as a consequence, I am confronted every day in my work by new evidence of man's propensity to evil, in the conduct of my patients or that of the people with whom they consort. The gratification that people derive from inflicting suffering on others is unmistakable. Furthermore, it is quite obvious that evil exerts a fascination and attraction for others who do not themselves indulge in it. [...]
If the Kingdom of God is within you, so is the Kingdom of Evil. I know this from my experience of myself. When I was about nine, there were often ants' nests at the base of our house. I used to love pouring boiling water on the ants, seeing them transformed from living beings into little boiled black dots.

How easily I persuaded myself that, by killing them, I was defending our house, preventing it from being undermined! Yet even as I told myself this, I knew that it was the killing I loved, not the structure of our house.

Both self-examination and my experience of others tells me that evil lurks within all of us, waiting for its opportunity to spring. Civilisation may be a veneer, but it is the veneer that separates us from barbarism. Never forget Original Sin and its consequences.

It is arguable whether working in a prison is the best place from which to judge human nature. One can forgive Dalrymple such an overly pessimistic view of men, as you would not expect a man who was given the dregs from the wine press to live on to have a very good opinion on the product of the vineyard. But neither should we, who are spared the unpleasant experience of such people by the very efficient operation of the criminal justice system, naively congratulate our race with platitudes of nobility and goodness. The next time that you let a petty insult pass, or fail to maket the universal hand gesture for automotive disapproval, take some satisfaction in the fact that you are helping to preserve that thin veneer of civilization.

Posted by Robert Duquette at May 15, 2004 5:36 PM