materials

1. according to this essay linked, cite a line that most clearly...
according to this essay linked, cite a line that most clearly embodies the opinion (thesis)
that forms the basis of Morrow's argument. Explain the correlation between this line and
the essay's introduction.
"THE GLOBALIZATION OF EVIL" - Lance Morrow
GEORGE W. BUSH and his critics use the word "evil" in ways that suggest both sides
are fighting the last war, talking about a world that no longer exists; or rather, both sides
fail to see what evil has become in the world that exists now.
The word needs serious parsing.
It is possible that neither side in the debate about evil quite knows what it was talking
about. President Bush uses the word in an aggressively in-your-face born-again manner
that takes its resonance from a long Judeo-Christian tradition of radical evil embodied in
heroically diabolical figures: personalized evil of the kind insinuated by the sauntering
Tempter in the first scene of the Book of Job, when God and Satan speculate like racing
touts about whether Job can go a mile and a quarter on a muddy track. In Bush's usage,
evil has the perverse prestige of John Milton's defiant Lucifer. Evil emanates, implicitly, 1
from a devilish intelligence with horns and a tail, an absolutely malevolent personality,
God's rival in the cosmos, condemned to lose the fight (eventually), but nonetheless
powerful in the world.
Bush's critics, hearing the word, go ironic, and put evil into quotes. They mock Bush for
what they see as a primitive and frightening use of a medieval term that should probably
be banished from civilized discourse in a multicultural world.
Evil, such critics say, is, in any case, such an elusive term that it can only cause
mischief in human affairs, and has a way of evaporating—or turning into something else
as time passes. But even if evil is elusive and even if the term is used brainlessly, evil is
still there—a mystery, a black hole into which reason and sunshine vanish, but
nonetheless there. Talk to the children in Sierra Leone whose hands have been
chopped off by the rebels there.
It is as fatuous to deny the existence of evil as it is to toss the word around
irresponsibly. The children of the Enlightenment sometimes have an inadequate 2
understanding of the possibilities of the Endarkenment. The question is not whether evil
exists, but how it exists, how it works.
1 John Milton's Paradise Lost - an epic poem originally published in 1667. Depicts the story
of the Fall of

2. Man, the temptation of Adam and Eve and their expulsion from the Garden of Eden.
2 Enlightenment - an 18th century movement which advocated Reason as the primary basis
of authority.
Go back 40 years to the controversy that surrounded Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in
Jerusalem, a study of the Adolf Eichmann trial in which she coined the phrase "the 3
banality of evil." Arendt did not seem satisfied with the term, and afterward wrote in a
letter to a friend (the great scholar of Jewish mysticism Gershom Scholem): "Today I
think that evil in every instance is only extreme, never radical: it has no depth, and
therefore has nothing demonic about it. Evil can lay waste the entire world, like a
fungus, growing rampant on the surface." This was what W. H. Auden meant: "Evil is
unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table."
Always human, but evil nonetheless.
The truth about evil that needs attention now is that shallow, deadly, fungus quality:
Nice people—especially in a tiny, multicultural world in which different civilizations
inhabit different centuries—are often moved to evil deeds, like blowing up the other. Do
not bother to demonize people as being inherently evil. That's not how it works. Instead,
we should view evil as opportunistic, passing like an electrical current through the world
and through people; or wandering like an infection that takes up residence in individuals
or cultures from time to time.
Distance once helped to dampen the effects of human wickedness; and of course,
weapons once had limited range. But evil has burst into a new dimension. The
globalization, democratization, and miniaturization of the instruments of destruction
(nuclear weapons or their diabolical chemical-biological stepbrothers) mean a quantum
leap in the delivery systems of evil.
This levels the playing field, so to speak—and the level field has fungus on it. Every
tinhorn with a chemistry set becomes a potential world-historical force with more
discretionary destructive power at hand than the great old monsters from Caligula to 4
Hitler ever had. In the new dimension, micro-evil (the dark impulse to rape or murder,
say) and macro-evil (the urge to genocide) achieve an ominous reunion in any bid for
the apocalyptic gesture.
That's the real evil that is going around.
Evil has a wandering, fluid quality; it drifts like thought. Evil is not systematic (although
the Nazis bureaucratized and industrialized it for a time, since that was their style) but
3 Adolf Eichmann - high ranking Nazi and SS Lt. Colonel. Charged with war crimes and
crimes against
humanity for his role in WWII.
4 Caligula - third Roman Emperor known for his extreme depravity and cruelty.
rather, when it is between jobs, is organic and Protean and given to flowing from place
to place along the channels of least resistance.
Evil seeks its opportunities and settles in like a parasite where it finds conditions
welcoming. It adopts the local language and customs; it infests the life forms and takes
them over, in rather the way that insanity may enter the previously wholesome life and
displace the person who lived there before. This is the model of demonic possession,

3. dramatized in the Gospel stories of Christ's miraculous power to heal, but now a
somewhat disreputable paradigm, demoted to horror movies—the narrative of The
Exorcist, for example, wherein an innocent child is hideously colonized by evil.
There's always that aspect of violated normality. On the perfect morning of September
11, 2001, the bustling, complex normality of commercial Western civilization (all the
computers up and running, airliners vectoring across borders, world trade clicking and
humming, the great hive busy making honey), suddenly the airplanes went off their
normal disciplined paths and smashed spectacularly into the hive itself. Normality
revolted. Or rather, something turned normality (scheduled planes, bustling towers)
against itself. Why? Non serviam? Lucifer's "I will not serve"? Some other principle of
aggressive incompatibilities? Since then, in the world and time in which we live, evil has
become, as it were, so fitfully predictable as to seem almost the new normality.
Each age and place has its own style of evil. Evil exploits available resources—turns
them to parody and destruction. Evil is a wit among the witty, an imbecile among
morons, an industrial program among the industrious, and an apocalypse in the hands
of religious fanatics who have abandoned the smaller mortal human decencies for
visions of righteous obliteration—an escape from time into the absolute.
Evil refines itself as technology proceeds, and as with nuclear fission, works on a
disproportion between cause and effect (the tiny seed produces an apocalyptic
blossom) that gives us part of our difficulty in thinking about evil; our moral thinking
remains stubbornly Newtonian—the model of weight and counterweight acting
proportionately is the basis of our idea of justice, for example, in which the punishment
should fit the crime—even as the universe has long since passed on to new surprises
and outrages of that sense of residual cosmic seemliness that we (slow learners from
the Pleistocene, firing along at the speed of light) may have brought along with us into
the twenty-first century.
The world's new dimension (computers, Internet, globalization, instantaneous
communications, widely available instruments of mass destruction, porous international
borders, ease of global travel, and so on) amounts to a new metaphysics that, by
empowering individual zealots or agitated tribes with unappeasable grievances, makes
the world unstable and dangerous in radically new ways, and, in doing so, transforms
both the political and the personal dynamics of good and evil.
Whether or not there is an axis of evil," there is distinctly a new ambience of evil—or of
what we have to think of as evil, when human behavior crosses certain lines beyond
which more civilized vocabulary refuses to follow. Violent religious extremism has
reappeared as a world-historical force for the first time since the Enlightenment.
Terrorism has become an active, globally mobile, flittingly visible evil. Nuclear war—a
monster kept locked in siloes during the Cold War - has become a real possibility in the
Middle East and the Indian subcontinent.
The nuances of projected evil have changed. We no longer fear a big bang of nuclear
extinction, as we did in the U.S.-Soviet balance of terror, but rather, seem to discern,
sooner rather than later, a future of survivable regional apocalypses. September 11,
2001, becomes in our minds a probably modest preview of the previously unthinkable.

4. People have learned to expect such novel evils as dirty radiation bombs, or anthrax in
the mail, or smallpox on an epidemic scale.
Evil, of course, is the sensationalist branch of theology. It is impossible to discuss evil,
surely one of the two or three most significant and mysterious facts of human existence,
while employing euphemism or other methods of veiling.
Are we mistaken in our unconscious assumption that life is essentially good and that
evil is an anomaly? Maybe evil is not an anomaly but the rule. Maybe evil is the rule and
good is a grace and a rarity. That has been the case from time to time in totalitarian
societies, and in the most brutal subdivisions of totalitarianism—in Auschwitz or the
Gulag , for example. More confusingly, it is frequently part of evil's sleight of hand to 5
impersonate good, and even to make good and evil seem, by a sort of metaphysical
magic, to be interchangeable. In an essay about Dostoevski's Grand Inquisitor, D. H.
Lawrence wrote: "Think how difficult it is to know the difference between good and evil!
Why sometimes it is evil to be good." It is evil, for example—one assumes he
means—to impose brutal, Dickensian rectitudes upon innocent children; or evil, in
Lawrence's scheme of things, to align oneself with "the terrible mad mistake that money
is life." Notice, however, that Lawrence did not say that "some times it is good to be
evil." In any case, there is always an interesting recreational perversity in the trick of
5 Gulag - the government body responsible for administering prison camps across the
former Soviet
Union.
arguing that black is white and white is black. Oscar Wilde's career as a wit was
founded on this principle of metaphysical switching. As Richard Ellmann wrote in his
biography: "[Wilde] was proposing that good and evil are not what they seem, that moral
tags cannot cope with the complexity of behavior." Bernard Shaw's cosmopolitan hell in
Man and Superman is preferable to his charmless and anodyne heaven.