The Banality of Evil

Yale University Press, 2010

I don't like Terry Eagleton: not as a literary critic, not as a cultural theorist, and particularly not as a Marxist theologian addressing the question of evil, which he thinks of as a metaphysical desire to negate being. 

This simple and straightforward definition of evil - rooted in Freud's notion of the death drive - is not one that I share. But then I'm one of those postmodern individuals whom Eagleton vehemently despises and so lack the moral depth to understand the "true destructiveness" [15] of evil, or appreciate the need for redemption. Nor do I believe that "Hell is the final victory of  nihilism over idealism" [78]; that there can be "no life outside God" [78]; or that there is "good reason to believe that the devil is a Frenchman" [93]. 

In fact, I find Eagleton's casual xenophobia, aggressive misogyny, and bluff-empiricism not only irritating, but offensive. He comes shamefully close at times to being a Little Englander, exasperated by clever foreigners who always complicate matters and terrified of "filth-dabbling feminists" [84] who "strike at the root of all social and sexual stability" [80].   

It's this - the phallocratic regime guaranteeing stability and the firmness of his erection - which Eagleton wishes to safeguard from evil; the latter now understood as that which emasculates and challenges all order. He tells us, for example, that the witches in Macbeth deserve to be burned because they practise a form of chaos magic, lacking in rhyme or reason and without any clear aim: "They are radical separatists who scorn male power ... whose words and bodies mock rigorous boundaries and make sport of fixed identities." [80-1]

As the above makes clear, it's not just social and sexual stability that Eagleton wishes to protect, but also ontological stability: he wants human being to be fixed and immutable. Such essential continuity is to be cherished rather than lamented, he writes, for only self-identical men and women are capable of leading lives rich with purpose, meaning, aspiration and achievement - unlike the damned who are decentred and incapable of finding fulfilment in life.

Eagleton speaks at length about these evil ones who lack souls and move around like zombies,"leeching life from others in order to fill an aching absence" [71] in themselves. Thus his language insistently draws upon (and reinforces) all the old metaphysics of presence, plenitude, and authenticity. Evil is now characterized as a form of lack or deficiency of being and its "seductive allure is purely superficial" [123].

Again, it's depressing and disappointing stuff from one of 'Britain's foremost intellectuals'. One can't help but wonder if, in his intellectual dotage, he even cares any longer about serious critical thinking - or even, for that matter, the problem of evil. For at the end of chapter two he suddenly makes the unexpected confession that evil "is not something we should lose too much sleep over" [130]. If only his publishers had been bold enough to put this line on the cover they'd have saved us all a lot of time and effort.

Eagleton should probably have concluded his study at that point. Instead, he adds a third and final chapter and it's here that we get to watch with wide-open eyes of amused astonishment as he oscillates frantically between two poles of delirium: Christianity and Marxism.

Eagleton cannot decide whether he believes in Salvation or Revolution - or both - because he can never quite decide whether people are essentially good, or originally sinful. As a Marxist, he wants to believe that men and women are conditioned into evil by a system of "vested interests and anonymous processes" [143]. But as a Catholic he can't help reaffirming the view that that evil is "a condition of being as well as a quality of behaviour" [152].

And so, whilst we are determined by historical forces and therefore innocent at a certain level, Eagleton also maintains we are corrupt and that any revolutionary optimism must be tempered by religious pessimism. What we need, he decides, is a new political faith founded upon a more realistic reality principle (not too sanguine, not too gloomy); one that will finally enable the passing of "reliable moral judgement on the human species" [153].

This, of course, is Eagleton's ultimate fantasy - to establish a tribunal over which he and his God can preside and pass verdict. It's this disgusting mania to judge and to find guilty that, ironically, I think we could characterize as evil. And the noble task of philosophy and literature remains what it has always been: to have done with judgement.