Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) October 13, 2011: In his learned new book Political Evil: What It Is and How to Combat It (2011), Alan Wolfe of Boston College examines and discusses political evil, concentrating political evil in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. If you have found yourself at times reflecting on political evil and American foreign policy, and perhaps reflecting on American foreign policy as political evil, you may find Wolfe's detailed discussion of political evil thought provoking, regardless of whether you should happen to agree or to disagree with certain points he makes. In short, if you're looking for a thought-provoking book to read about political evil, you will almost certainly not be disappointed by Wolfe's book. Regardless of how individual readers, including me, may respond to particular points he makes, Wolfe has done the country an enormous service by examining and discussing the various forms of political evil and the various ways of discussing political evil that he examines and discusses. As a result, his book deserves to be widely read and discussed.
If Wolfe's book were widely read and discussed as it deserves to be, the discussion could take our current political discussion to a new level by giving liberals news ways of thinking about and discussing political evil. If this desirable result were to happen, then liberals would be better equipped to fight the good fight against the Republican noise machine. In my estimate, the Republican noise machine has for decades out-scored, as it were, tongue-tied liberals.
In roughly the first half of the book, Wolfe discusses World War I, World War II, and the Cold War. He analyzes totalitarianism in detail, with special attention to Hannah Arendt's work. In the second half of the book, Wolfe turns his attention to far more detailed discussions of terrorism, genocide, ethnic cleansing, and the politics of countering political evil, or counter-evil. Because of my own interest in terrorism, I will highlight his discussion of terrorism below and then round off this review essay with my reflections regarding the elections in 2012.
However, as I will explain momentarily, I find certain statements Wolfe makes regarding individual evil puzzling, to say the least. For this reason, I think that I should start by establishing where I am coming from, as they say, in order to establish the intellectual framework I am using for discussing certain points in Wolfe's book.
Centuries before Christianity came along, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle discussed virtue. According to their way of thinking, we humans are not born virtuous. As a result, we need to work deliberately and self-consciously to cultivate virtue.
Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle famously conceived of virtue as the mean between the extremes of over-doing something and under-doing it. For the sake of discussion, I am going to style their way of thinking about virtue as three-way thinking. At the risk of sounding flippant, I would say that for each one virtuous way of acting, there are two ways in which we can miss the mark of the virtue in question. So if I were a betting man, I'd bet that we are probably going to miss the mark of the one virtuous way of acting a lot. I'd bet that we will probably be inclined to go after one or the other of the two ways that miss the mark.
Now, the two opposites of virtue are vices, vicious ways of acting, not virtuous ways of acting.
Now, for the sake of discussion, let's say that vices represent evil, which we can operationally define as the opposite of good (i.e., not good).
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