Collegiate Times

For Edward Weisband and Courtney Thomas, the journey began with a minor linguistic slippage. They had included a word on the tail end of a co-authored paper - a professor of political science and a Ph.D. student, respectively - they had presented at a conference in Ljubljana, Slovenia, that their colleagues challenged with some force.

The word Weisband and Thomas had included to describe their system of understanding the relationship between anxiety, the human experience and mass violence was a familiar one. They called it evil. Fellow conference participants disagreed.

"They asked us, 'Well, are you really talking about evil?' It was a really flippant kind of question but we stepped back and decided, 'Yeah, we are,'" Thomas said.

In setting off into the deepest of emotional, philosophical and theological thickets, Weisband and Thomas have treated what Weisband called the "greatest single political issue of the past and present century," while raising deep questions about the nature of freedom and forgiveness at work in the minds of Virginia Tech's religious community. 

Into Evil

There are smart people at Virginia Tech who take issue with the very attempt at pinning evil down as a methodological tool or a unit of analysis.

"I'm not convinced that the category of evil is very helpful in making a difference or being an analytical tool. It's an object of analysis," said Brian Britt, professor of religious studies. "How can you have a robust category of evil outside of a very parochial or sectarian worldview?"

Britt said that he sees great value in evil as an object of analysis but that the deep epistemological (the question of how man comes to know and create knowledge) and ontological (the nature of essential human existence) questions put the subject beyond utility - not that the discussion should be avoided altogether.

"Some people take this idea, the insider epistemology of, 'It's a Christian thing, you wouldn't understand.' That's a luxury we can't afford in this world. It patronizes religious claims of being incapable of rationality and exempt from public scrutiny," Britt said.

It's the avoidance of the term in the discipline of political science that turned Weisband and Thomas onto evil's trail to begin with. Beginning with the advent of the modern nation state, Weisband and Thomas aim to bring evil into the realm of the political by demonstrating that the function of nations "have been misappropriated in ways that perpetrate intense, widespread, human suffering. The metric of evil in the political is a metric that focuses on how intense and widespread human suffering is caused by not natural forces - not the Devil, not criminality, but by the politics of the nation state," Weisband said.

Evil for Weisband and Thomas is a corporate activity done by nations against their own civilians resulting in "immense human suffering, caused systematically." This evil has become distinguished from other categories of tragedy for the pair by spending serious time with the Oxford English Dictionary.

"Catastrophe is derived from a term that means change that occurs at the end of a process, it's a dynamic. It's akin to the notion of tragedy," Weisband said. "Calamity derives from a word meaning corn or grain and as close as you come to a calamity is the notion of famine. It's the absence; it's scarcity. My point is that evil is all of it in different contexts. Evil is calamitous, it's catastrophic. But it encompasses it all."

Weisband and Thomas are clear about what evil is not. The first category largely imagined as evil that is excluded from their framework is that of the sociopathological. Child molesters and serial killers don't constitute evil because they reside squarely in the realm of language regarding psychological and sociological problems.

"If you have a language of pathology, why in the world do you need the language of evil? You have a separate language. And that language actually constitutes a defense against evil. If you're pathological, you can't help it. You have impulses, compulsions, you are "sick," you are insane. You can't do anything else," Weisband said.

The second category encompasses the criminal. Sex traffickers, drug dealers and gunrunners reside within a language of, "crime and punishment. You do things that are punishable in courts of law. In both the pathological and in the criminal, you pay your dues," Weisband said. Criminals with certain motivations or practices can be pathological.

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