By Gavin Ashenden, Catholic Herald. (photo: Wikimedia Creative Commons)
What we believe about the existence of good and evil – but perhaps especially evil – shapes the map of the world we hold in our heads. Conversation about good and evil becomes more difficult if – as our culture does – we replace the language of the spirit with that of therapy or the politics of power. Very few people in the West seem to believe in the existence of evil. Most believe that destructive behaviour is a justifiable response to trauma; an expression of victimhood.
Douglas Murray’s new book, On Democracies and Death Cults, starts with the conclusion that extremist Islamism is, or has become, a death cult. But his approach is contingent on a recognition of the reality of evil. Those for whom a theological world-view is accessible will find his argument persuasive.
Others, like Jordan Peterson – with whom Murray spoke on Peterson’s The Jordan B Peterson Podcast last month – may find that examining Islam’s preoccupation with death shifts them uncomfortably into a theological paradigm.
Murray complains that on those rare occasions when evil is recognised, it is often in a downgraded form provided for us by Hannah Arendt in her work on Adolf Eichmann, an architect of the Holocaust. Arendt described “the banality of evil”, but the difficulty with that striking phrase is that it sucks some of the mystique out of evil – and downplays its seriousness.
Arendt’s famous aphorism incensed Murray and Peterson as they discussed On Democracies and Death Cults. Murray argued against the accuracy of Arendt’s banality. He described the gleeful, psychopathic barbarity of the 7 October Hamas terrorists beheading captured Jews with spades as the opposite of banal. Murray has been an excoriating critic of violence in Islamist theological and political culture; he quoted leaders of Hamas who have claimed that “the infidels’ great weakness is that they love life. But we love death, and this is our great advantage.”