Consider this extract from a piece by Anthony Daniels in The New Criterion:

In his essay, The Empire of the Ugly, the great Belgian Sinologist and literary essayist Simon Leys recounts the story of how, writing one day in a café, a small incident gave him an insight into the real nature of philistinism.

A radio was playing in the background, a mixture of banal and miscellaneous chatter and equally banal popular music. No one in the café paid any attention to this stream of tepid drivel until suddenly, unexpectedly and inexplicably, the first bars of Mozart’s clarinet quintet were played.

“Mozart,” Leys says, “took possession of our little space with a serene authority, transforming the café into an antechamber of Paradise.”

I love my wikipedia. I learn a lot I didn’t know and I refine my thinking by finding fault too. (The problem is knowing what is worth learning and what needs unlearning!)

Consider the wikipedia definition of evil:

Evil is generally defined as any activity which takes advantage of another person for one’s own benefit….(In contrast, good is helping others, even sometimes self-sacrificially; see saint, sainthood.)

There’s something dodgy about the form of this definition and also something very familiar about its implications. For one thing, it fits with the the lable ‘anti-social’ which refers to behaviour which has ill effects, but good intentions - “well, in his culture that behaviour is normal”. Whatever happened to ill intent, though? (For another thing, what’s the counterpart to sainthood?)

According to this view all employers are evil because they necessarily pay their employees less than they earn (’necessarily’ because otherwise there would be no profit).

Why is it that in the popular media super-psychopaths like serial killers are portrayed has having such rich inner lives? (Consider the highly cultured Hannibal Lecter.) That’s not right at all.

Anthony Lane, film reviewer for the New Yorker, makes the point well:

There was a time when, as a God-fearing member of the community, you could commit a single murder, drop a couple of clues, and wait to be unmasked. Now it’s all serial slayers, stacking up bodies like air miles. Filmgoers are supposed to find this multiplicity enticing, and we are constantly being invited to enter into the “mind” of the serial killer, but in truth there is no drabber place to be, and the idea that there might be an artfulness, even a style, to the act of homicide is one of the more pernicious fantasies that movies like to hawk.

By now everyone knows about the astounding case of incest, etc. in Austria. The abominable story can be read here. No doubt some are going to excuse Josef Fritzl by suggesting that he must be a mad man. Others (for instance here) will find fault with society.

These rationalisations are because for regular people the immensity of the crimes are blinding. But there are enough clues already that what Fritzl is is a psychopath and as such is responsible for his actions.

Take one small detail - the alleged role of drugs in the case.

Franz Polzer, the Austrian police chief leading the investigation, said Fritzl had given the impression, during protracted interrogations, that after 24 years he now actually believed the web of lies he had constructed to keep his incest a secret from his own family, the police and the public.

Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel is just one person who has said the following: “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference”. In other words, the opposite of love is not hate, as might have been expected. We’ve all heard this contention and been struck by it. Yes, we’ve thought, it is terrible to be ignored. (Pretty awful being hated too, of course.)

But I’m grateful to Dawn Eden for mentioning another powerful proposition.

Eden, promoting her book ‘The Thrill of the Chaste‘, is currently visiting Canadian high schools.

The students seemed interested when I told them what Pope John Paul II called “the opposite of love.” It’s not hate, as some of them guessed when I asked them what they thought it would be, nor is it indifference. It’s use.

The blogger, Sir William, has a post ‘What is evil? which employs what is a very common way of talking about psychopathy and evil.

Psychopaths do exist but they are not fully human: they are animals who lack one of the qualities which defines our species.

This is a very comforting explanation for those who have been on the receiving end of psychopathy. It seems to answer the question how could someone do something like that? Answer, because they’re not really a ‘someone’. They’re actually and animal, not a human being.

How does this line of thinking account for evil committed by non-psychopaths?

Isn’t it strange how the mind works? I read with approval Dr Leedom’s latest post. In it she manages to be at once hard-nosed, realistic, and still keep positve. There are very real differences in the brains of those with psychopathic traits, she writes, but the brain is plastic and therein lies just a sliver of hope.

For some reason the opening lines of Martin Amis‘ novel House of Meetings came back to me. It is set in the Soviet Union:

Dear Venus
If what they say is true, and my country is dying, then I think I may be able to tell them why. You see, kid, the conscience is a vital organ, and not an extra like the tonsils or the adenoids.

Amis has also written a stunning nonfiction book about Stalinism, Koba the Dread, which has its own staggering opening:

Donna Anderson’s important latest post reminds me that one topic which will never be worn out is that of the psychopath’s lies and their impact on others.

This week I want to very briefly introduce yet another take on this inexhaustible topic. Everyone lies, but there’s something else at stake in the case of the psychopath’s lies.

To illustrate: you might say about any regular (non-psychopathic) person, “Things would be better if s/he was to lie less often. Her/his soul or psyche would be healthier as would her relationships.” That’s true. Now try this on for size and notice how wrong it seems: “Things would be better if the psychopath was to lie less often. His soul or psyche would be healthier as would his relationships.”

Weirdly, this is patently not the case. The psychopath will be just as sick/evil no matter how many or how few lies he tells. It’s not a quantitative but a qualitative matter.

Gov. Eliot Spitzer, a beacon of probity, has been caught allegedly hiring a prostitute. He has appeared on TV to apologise - see it here. And what an inadequate job he did.

I was reminded of a previous apology he made in the New York Times last July for his administration’s involvement in ordering the State Police to record the whereabouts of State Senate majority leader Joseph L. Bruno - read it here.

In neither case does he even do the first thing that any apology worth anything should do - he does not state what he did. If you’d missed news broadcasts you’d have no idea what he was apologising for.

According to Perfect Apology the key steps in any good apology are:
1. a detailed account of the offence
2. acknowledging the hurt caused
3. taking personal responsibility
4. recognising one’s role
5. stating one’s regret
6. asking for forgiveness
7. promising that it won’t happen again
8. offering resititution

I was recently reading a 2003 paper in the journal Nature called Forensic psychology: Violence viewed by psychopathic murderers which is both interesting and frustrating. Interesting because it demonstrates that, even amongst murderers, psychopathic murderers are different. Frustrating because the authors extrapolate their finding in a way that is ultimately misleading being so narrow as to completely miss the point.

I pick this particular study only because it is rather typical of scientific studies in the field: 1. it neglects to consider what the psychopath gets out of behaving the way he does, and 2. it let’s the psychopath off the hook.

The study
13 psychopathic murderers, 17 non-psychopathic murderers, 39 psychopathic other offenders and 52 non-psychopathic other offenders were given the Implicit Association Test (IAT) .