A Thousand Shades Of Grey

From time to time I like to explore a word or concept in some depth, and then throw the concept out for further discussion. This is one of those times.

There is a word that modern media tosses around with something approaching gay abandon. You read or hear that a person, movement or an action is truly 'evil', the implication being that the situation borders on the hopeless, and one must immediately take up arms and oppose.

Rubbish.

I can think of nothing in reality that is 100% evil. Rather, things seem to be a thousand shades of grey. And I hasten to add that this is not a reference to that very badly-written and banal book, Fifty Shades of Grey by E. L. James. After three pages, I stopped reading. After all, when you have given a dissertation at Oxford on De Sade's Justine, or lectured on Pauline Reage's Story Of O at the Sorbonne, getting involved with the James' text would be akin to saying "After you've seen Paree, why would you want to visit Don Mills?"

In truth, I can think of only one person that exhibits total evil, and that reference comes from literature, to wit: Shakespeare's portrait of Iago in Othello. Even Iago himself has trouble determining just why he acts the way he does, and his attempt to find a rationale has been brilliantly described by Coleridge as "The motive hunting of a motiveless malignity."

All others, whether in the arts or life, appear (at least to me) to fall into a 'more or less' category. A few examples come to mind.

One nominee for pure evil would be Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost. But hold on a minute. Satan was, in Milton's view, one of God's favourites, but was overcome by an overweening ambition and made the decision that it was better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven. Unlike Iago, there is a cause for the action.

So also with many other fictional examples deemed 'pure evil'. The idea of the serial killer is all too prominent in books, TV and movies, yet in all cases there are references to a ghastly upbringing or some early traumatic event. Again, a cause.

Of course, in real life serial killers also exist, but I believe my argument holds -- there always exists an underlying cause. But what of the likes of Pol Pot, Hitler? Osama bin Laden? Or even that model for Dracula, Vlad the Impaler? Well, let's have a look.

In the cases of Hitler and Pol Pot, I would posit that both were consumed by ideology, the former by Fascism compounded by Anti-Semitism,  the latter by Communism. As for Osama bin Laden, his belief in a lunatic version of Islam is all too evident. Evil men, to be sure, but not exemplars of 'pure' evil -- the causes are too prominent.

As for old Vlad (whose deeds appalled Europe in the 15th century, which took some doing, given the age) we should remember that as a young boy he was sent as hostage to the court of the Ottoman Sultan, Murad II, who delighted in elaborate cruelty and vicious child abuse.

Mind you, the examples given above are definitely into the dark side of the 'evil' spectrum, but not of the 100%  Iago type. As for the rest of us, we fall somewhere on that spectrum -- a thousand shades of grey.

Against this spectrum, we can but throw ethics, and must guard against attacks that stem from a variety of causes, including laws themselves. As John Frederick Gibson has noted in his fine little book, A Small And Charming Place, "In the course of time, legislation and regulation become more important than ethics, and at that point we are lost."

Definitely stuff for discussion here.