Bernard-Henri Lévy on Evil | Bernard-Henri Lévy

We are Big Idea Hunters…

We live in a time of information abundance, which far too many of us see as information overload. With the sum total of human knowledge, past and present, at our fingertips, we’re faced with a crisis of attention: which ideas should we engage with, and why? Big Think is an evolving roadmap to the best thinking on the planet — the ideas that can help you think flexibly and act decisively in a multivariate world.

A word about Big Ideas and Themes — The architecture of Big Think

Big ideas are lenses for envisioning the future. Every article and video on bigthink.com and on our learning platforms is based on an emerging “big idea” that is significant, widely relevant, and actionable. We’re sifting the noise for the questions and insights that have the power to change all of our lives, for decades to come. For example, reverse-engineering is a big idea in that the concept is increasingly useful across multiple disciplines, from education to nanotechnology.

Themes are the seven broad umbrellas under which we organize the hundreds of big ideas that populate Big Think. They include New World Order, Earth and Beyond, 21st Century Living, Going Mental, Extreme Biology, Power and Influence, and Inventing the Future.

Big Think Features:

12,000+ Expert Videos

Browse videos featuring experts across a wide range of disciplines, from personal health to business leadership to neuroscience.

Watch videos

World Renowned Bloggers

Big Think’s contributors offer expert analysis of the big ideas behind the news.

Go to blogs

Big Think Edge

Big Think’s Edge learning platform for career mentorship and professional development provides engaging and actionable courses delivered by the people who are shaping our future.

Find out more

Transcript

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.”