Tony Blair was recently taken to task for having written that he had “a grudging respect and even liking” of Rupert Murdoch. He responded (The New York Times Magazine, October 9): “I know all the newspaper proprietors. The idea you’ve got the evil Rupert Murdoch here and these lovely other people there is not quite right.”
He implies, surely convincingly, that all British newspaper proprietors are capable of committing crimes not altogether different, though perhaps a tiny bit less heinous, from those for which Murdoch has been condemned. There are, he suggests, degrees of thuggery.
And also of evil. However, in order to explain Hitler, some people say: “There is a Hitler in all of us.” They mean that being Hitler is a form of original sin. Those of us who are neither priests nor psychoanalysts are in no position to affirm or deny this. We are in a position, however, to state with certainty that outside ourselves there is plenty of evil in the world for which there is no need to flagellate ourselves for the dark evil lurking in our own hearts.
In his essay “The Limits of Good vs Evil” (Slate Magazine, reprinted in the National Post, September 30), Michael Ignatieff names some of them. “Adolescents slaughtering other adolescents at a high school, predators molesting children, loners acting out fantasies of revenge and empowerment with automatic weapons. Our various therapeutic and explanatory discourses still leave us without consolation in the face of these murderous frenzies, but we should at least spare ourselves the foolish idea that such evil lurks in all our hearts. The Norwegian killer who sprayed bullets over children at a liberal party summer camp was a psychopath. He is not us and we are not him. He tells us nothing about Europe, about Norwegian society, about anything. It accords him a dignity he does not deserve to explain him. It is appropriate to mourn and remember, and it would be prudent to keep him locked up for good. It is an utter waste of time to give him significance.”
So there are (A) ourselves – most of us reasonably clean, (B) thugs, (C) demons, and (D) psychopaths. The important thing is to make proper distinctions, even though obviously the categories occasionally overlap.
Ignatieff warns us against using historical analogies. “Saddam Hussein was not Hitler. Milosevic was not Stalin. Darfur is not Auschwitz. Clinton was not Chamberlain. Contemporary evil is bad enough. It has no need of historical frames that do not fit. Everything is what it is and not another thing.”
Ignatieff concludes, basing some of his ideas on those of the political scientist Alan Wolfe: “We need to set aside moral frames of good and evil that assign our politics – and our military – tasks they cannot accomplish; we need to stop seeing international politics as a morality play in which our role is to back innocence and victimhood against malignity and viciousness; we need to counter the politics of violence with a politics that drains evildoers of support and drives them to the margins. We need the inner discipline and self-knowledge to refuse the temptations of believing that we are always on the side of the angels. Wolfe asks us to fight evil with the restraint of adults, not with the certainty of adolescents.”
Eric Koch’s book, The Weimar Triangle, is available at Indigo-Chapters and in your local bookstore. 
I surmise with all three categories that we are dealing degrees of an absence of empathy: that innate ability to see others as fellow human beings. Thugs have some empathy while demons and psychopaths have none.
Dr. Simon Baron-Cohen goes into greater detail in his book (2011) The Science of Evil: On empathy and the origins of human cruelty. Basic Books. ISBN 978-0465023530
Excellent comment. I must have a look at that book. I have seen reviews. The author is a cousin of the actor who played BORAT.
I guess maybe Mr Ignatieff has learned something since his support for Bush’s revenge war against Iraq.
Additional example of his de-guilting: all men are not potential abusers of women. (Too many are, but not all…)
Re empathy, or lack of: a friend of mine, now an ethicist, says that the kids who won the schoolyard fights were the ones who didn’t care how much they hurt you. (I presume that there must be an evolutionary advantage to empathy that offsets the bullies and thugs in the longer run or in the larger population – though such folks occasionally get elected…)