Standing Outside The Shadow

A member of the Suri in Ethiopia

None of us stands outside humanity’s black collective shadow.

Whether the crime occurred many generations back or happens today, it remains the symptom of a disposition that is always and everywhere present — and one would therefore do well to possess some “imagination for evil,” for only the fool can permanently disregard the conditions of his own nature.

In fact, this negligence is the best means of making him an instrument of evil.

Harmlessness and naivete are as little helpful as it would be for a cholera patient and those in his vicinity to remain unconscious of the contagiousness of the disease.

On the contrary, they lead to projection of the unrecognized evil into the “other.”

…What is even worse, our lack of insight deprives us of the capacity to deal with evil.

Here, of course, we come up against one of the main prejudices of the Christian tradition, and one that is a great stumbling block to our policies.

We should, so we are told, eschew evil and, if possible, neither touch nor mention it. For evil is also the thing of ill omen, that which is tabooed and feared.

This apotropaic attitude towards evil, and the apparent circumventing of it, flatters the primitive tendency in us to shut our eyes to evil and…