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.
The language of criminality, Weisband and Thomas believe, has attempted to internalize their understanding of evil already, if implicitly.
"We have seen over and over that those who do evil aren't psychopaths or sociopaths and a lot of times they are not criminals. We make them criminals under international law because we've codified that which we know anyway that governments should not be executing en masse their own citizens, that that is evil," Thomas said. "But we don't have that language of evil because that language has been appropriated and so we make it criminal. But criminality is a different set of issues and a different set of meanings. In a lot of cases where evil is done, those who do it aren't breaking the laws that are set by their governments. To the opposite, they are abiding by the laws. They are lawfully doing what their government has told them to do."
Third is the "oldest of all."
This argument goes, "Satan works his way through the internalized deformities of humankind. Evil is Satanic. The problem there is, for me, is that it is a reprehensible copout. It takes away human moral responsibility for human behavior. It lets a force external to humankind dominate human action," Weisband said.
Once the socio-psychopathological, the criminal and the Satanic are eliminated, Weisband and Thomas believe they have cleared the space to begin to use evil as a tool in understanding human politics.
"Our goal is to make what is thus far inexplicable, amenable to analytical explanation. There may be those who may disagree with our explanation - no one has the last word. But to make the subject of evil defined in the political in this way is to bring it down to the human condition where it deserves to be," Weisband said.
The freedom to do evil
The mass violence that pressed Weisband and Thomas into their investigation of evil has also initiated the thinking of many local religious leaders. Their responses to the problem of evil - the presence of death, destruction and violence in a world they understand to be governed by a just, all-knowing and all-powerful God - fell into two main camps.
The first wrestles powerfully with the question of freedom in God's eyes. Because God wants a "genuine relationship" with His children, he has to allow some degree of freedom - even when that freedom allows tremendous suffering.
"When we look at the question briefly, it really does seem like God is really not doing what he should do. I share this feeling. The challenge is from God's standpoint," said Jim Pace, head pastor for New Life Christian Fellowship. "He would have to answer the question of what evil do I stop and what evil do I allow. If I stop all evil, people have no free choice. Some evil that is done is unintentional and so God would have to limit any free flexibility of activity on our part to truly insulate us from evil. By definition of insulating us from some, we couldn't see what he was preventing. Well then how far down that list does He go? So it gets more complicated from God's side when he's trying to interact with free thinking human beings and he's not trying to force them into a banal life."
The challenge in this worldview becomes channeling one's life in the proper direction.
"In Kabbala (Jewish mysticism), there's a saying that there's a lot of grain in the strength of an ox - a bull can plow fields and fields for you. Or you can let it out loose and it can destroy," said Zvi Swiebel, head of the Livieu Librescu Chabad House.
The second camp argues that man is fundamentally unable to understand God's will.
"Part of the problem is that (man's) value system is different. We are physical beings and we value comfort on a physical level more than spiritual good. God knows what's best and he has different values, so God achieves spiritual values. But we're just not in the position to do a one-to-one correspondence that, 'Oh, well this is what came from that,'" said Dave Clark, campus staff for Campus Bible Fellowship and a former Christian missionary in Asia.
In this view, mankind pushes on without knowledge of the will of God because deep in one's heart is an understanding that life has a mission and a meaning.
"Our knowledge is not there to compare to His knowledge. As a little child, how do you reconcile your parent who prevents you from watching a television program? You know from the depth of your heart that these are your parents who have taken care of you all these years. And at some time you say, 'This is your way of caring for me.' You don't understand, but there it is," said Sedki Riad, a Muslim and professor of electrical engineering.
Evil in both of these interpretations exists within the individual. Jon Rice, the campus pastor of Chi Alpha, said, "I don't think evil is thrust upon us. Every person has the inherent potential to turn away from God - and what I mean is not just the Christian religion but the idea of those things that God represents, to turn away from those toward a self-centered view. I think that manifests itself in evil actions. But at the same time I don't think evil is all consuming. I think in every person there is that image of god that even no matter how far they've gone they can still be redeemed."
Forgiveness
Weisband and Thomas have several points of understanding with the campus religious community within their framework. But none are as total as their understanding of an individual's ability to be, in one's soul, evil.
"In history, there are people like Hitler, like Cho, who have done atrocious acts, and you look at the Scripture and you see people who have done heinous acts. Paul, in his history, murdered Christians before his surrender to God. No one would think he had hope, Christians would classify him as evil, but through his conversion he changed and became the greatest missionary that ever lived," Rice said.
Weisband and Thomas specifically structured their inquiry to avoid the impossible task of assessing the souls of suspected evildoers.
"I hesitate to point to a person, to any person, and say that person is evil. To do that is to say there is something in their being, in their nature, in their personality, that is evil. I prefer to think of it to think that people do evil. People who do evil are normal. And to say that they are evil sets them apart and makes them less human, less like the rest of us, that's inaccurate," Thomas said.
An understanding that evil individuals are rare and, even if in existence, impossible to identify allows Weisband and Thomas to leverage their conception of evil powerfully in regard to forgiveness.
In the aftermath of an evil event like genocide, the international media focuses on the leaders of the different movements who, more often than not, Weisband said, escape justice or are simply confined to a cell in the Hague, the home of the Internatinal Criminal Court. The widespread, social participation needed to enact evil events like the Holocaust goes untreated.
"You'll get one or two big fish. But for the most part, when evil is done, it is done by many. If you think in terms of criminality or pathology, you can never, ever, ever, get to (the many)," Weisband said. "You can never have a true process of forgiving and transcendence because you can't have historical transcendence. You can't get to forgiveness because cultures can't build on denial. If you have criminality and criminality is sequestered - a couple of big fish go to prison and history can move on and its all forgotten - you can never develop beyond the original reifications, the original forms of objectification. So the rise of anti-Semitism, the rise of hatreds between people, can never be transformed. That's why evil is the other side of forgiveness. It's not just analytical, theoretical or semantic. It's about cultural development."
Where their understanding of evil takes the thinker, Weisband and Thomas argue, is to a more creative space where new futures are possible.
"The imaginative capacities of individuals are trapped in this idea of criminality, of trial, of incarceration, of punishment, and not in the idea in that you have an entire culture that needs to find a way to forgive and move forward," Thomas said.
Closer to home, there might be another upshot, Weisband said.