After a brief hiatus, I've returned to the Great Traveling Fantasy Round Table. This month's topic, hosted by Warren Rochelle, is "Evil and the Fantastic." My entry is below, but please go read the others. And write your own!
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I don’t think it’s possible to discuss evil without talking
about the literature of the fantastic. We hear people talk about “evil
incarnate,” usually in reference to some person or institution that has committed
particularly heinous acts, as if evil were a tangible, measurable thing that
exists outside the human imagination. In real life, things are rarely that
simplistic.
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Certainly, history and even some current religious thought puts
forth the notion of those, human or not, who are inherently evil. To this day,
some people believe that snakes (or spiders or other animals) are evil (I
encountered one such man in a pet store, warning his young son that the garter
snake would steal his soul if he weren’t careful). Once the mentally ill (or
physically ill, such as those who suffer from epilepsy) were thought to be
possessed by demons. Such beliefs persist today on the fringes of mainstream
Western society, although they have largely been expunged from medical and
psychiatric practice. We believe that such conditions as schizophrenia and
sociopathy arise from disorders of neurophysiology, even if we cannot yet
pinpoint the precise etiology. Even when we do know exactly what
neurotransmitters and part of the brain are involved, it is still a widespread
and understandable human tendency to ascribe unexplained phenomena, whether
beneficial or destructive, to supernatural agency. Even though intellectually
we may understand that a mass murderer is not an incarnation of some demonic
spirit, nor is he possessed by one, and even if we cannot explain why such a
person is utterly lacking in empathy for other human beings, we still often use
words like evil, wicked, damned,
devilish, satanic, and demonic.
Humans are capable of cruelty and viciousness so extreme in
degree or scope that few of us can comprehend it, let alone the motivation
behind it. How can we make sense of atrocities like the Holocaust or its
equivalents, historical or modern? Of the massacres in Africa, Central Europe,
the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, to name but a few?
