Question: What is Evil?
Bernard-Henri Levy: There is evil in the world. We all know that. What I could be praised of, even if I am not sure also, but it’s two things. Number one, yes, is to fight moral [relativism], multi culturalism, which means the strange attitude which consists in saying that a practice and attitude which would be a crime in America, or in France, should be admitted somewhere else. For example, to oblige a woman to veil her face or to encage her head should be criminal in America. Again, the formal and the real equality between men and women, suddenly, in Afghanistan or in Pakistan, it is okay. And those who pretend to condemn that are racist, neo-colonialist, neo-imperialist. So, what I say, either this attitude of moral relativism, appreciating an attitude differently according to the context and to the place where people are [rooted], this is one of my, or the thing… maybe one of the thing I try to do in “Left In Dark Times.” And the other thing… I don't know if it have to be praised, but which I tried to do, is to finish with or to show the terrible, perverse effects of the idea that the evil can be completely liquidated. This, for me, it is one of the topics of “Left In Dark Times.” This idea that evil does not really exist, that evil is in fact illness and that illness can be cured, if you find a good medicine, the chief doctor, if you identify the [wood] parasite, the proper virus and if you expel it from the social body, then you will have a good society. This idea that evil does not exist but you have only illnesses, this is a matrix. This is the core of the totalitarianism. Totalitarianism always begins with the idea that evil does not exist, that evil is an illusion, an appearance, and that’s why we have only illnesses which can be properly cured if you have a good chief of state, embodied with a good ideology, surrounded by your good council of experts and so on, and finding here are the Jews, there the bourgeois, there the people who wear spectacles, or the place, the free women, whatsoever. A virus identified as such, expelled from the society as if you take a tumor out of cancer razed body. This idea that evil can be solved in a political purity is one of the most terrible temptation of the mind of mankind of yesterday and of today, and this is also one of the targets of “Left In Dark Times.”
Discuss
Musycks on November 3, 2008, 6:17 PM
Nice segment… I’d like tyo hear a lot more of Mr Levy. Totalitarianism starts with the idea evil can be eradicated? he must be a fan of Jeff Delano?!
There is no magic bullet to get rid of evil.. and certainly no celestial one.
Musycks on November 7, 2008, 12:55 AM
okay Pastor Jen, I had to go back and see what it was I heard, and I’m not so sure he’s against multiculturalism per se, I think he’s trying to make a point about moral relativism, and seemed to be using the headscarf issue as an example? again, he’s a little indistinct here and there and I could be wrong?
Obviously waering religious headgear is not a crime in the US, and the next guy I hear bemoaning a Muslim woman covering up, I usually ask them to give a Catholic nun the same treatment. Is Bernard saying we can’t condemn a practice (let’s say female circumcision)in one country and let them off the hook in another in an effort to appease the multiculturalists? and to do so is to descend into moral relativism?
This is tricky as I think morals are not always fixed, and some degree of relativity is sensible, depending on the nature of the issue.
ie. female circumcision is always wrong (as is male). at one end of the spectrum,and
Hijabs or habits or yamulkas are a cultural accoutrement and are no threat to a stable civil society so where’s the fire? at the other.
It would be nice to hear more and have him tie up some loose ends though….
James C on December 3, 2008, 1:36 AM
He’s explicitly against multi-culturalism; he says so.
For another take on headscarves, consider that they can be used to buy out of the beauty myth:
http://www.bigthink.com/features/935
I wonder which acts which are crimes in Algeria, or Pakistan, or Iran, he wants to have made criminal in France or the USA. If he’s hoping for all one-way traffic, then I think he’s asking for enough power to abuse everyone else in the world to suit himself.
Jean Cranmer on January 18, 2009, 8:07 PM
I enjoyed all the segments by BHL and agreed with most everything he had to say until I got to this segment. His clear expression of clear ideas, to paraphrase a French saying, is somewhat muddled here and uncharactersitically un-Cartesian. The question was “What is evil?” His answer was, as Pastor Jen points out, moral and cultural relativism. Rather than deconstructing that response to explain what is inherently evil in that, he gives the example of the required headcoverings for women in some cultures, presumably Muslim. Without a definition of evil, we are left to speculate. I have an idea of what he means, but is the headcovering evil in itself, or more properly a manifestation of evil? It is the intent of imposing the headcovering which harbors the evil, inasmuch as it is a symbolic act of the suppression of the human rights of the individual or group of individuals by another. While we in the west can all agree that this is evil, we must also agree that all western cultures have been guilty of perpetrating that evil in one way or another or at one time or another in our histories. Yes in French history too.
To look at evil from another perspective (moral relativism?), Muslim culture, I am told, and I confess to having no credential here, looks upon sexual overtness and permissiveness so prominent in western culture as evil, unholy in the sight of God. To them women are abased by the display of their bodies to strangers, not to mention by having multiple sex partners. Just how does that fit into a definition of evil in the west?
My point is that I doubt there is a universal definition of evil, one that will apply across the board to all cultures. I deplore as evil the repression of human rights, wherever they occur, I deplore as evil war and torture, whatever the justifications, and I deplore as evil sexual crimes against others, but I do not deplore as evil someone’s choice of sexual permissiveness. My understanding of evil is framed within my culture; so I guess that makes me, along with Claude Levi-Strauss, another famous French thinker and originator of the concept, a proponent of cultural relativism.
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