"Evil be thou my good" - Milton.There were another three murders in this country last weekend. Three violent murders, writes Marie Murray.
Each morning Ireland wakes up to a catalogue of overnight crime. There are brutal stabbings. These are not single, panicked, defensive blows with a convenient knife: these are multiple frenzied, frenetic attacks.
There are gangland killings. There are premeditated murders. Men are massacred. Bodies are found in freezers. And we are, allegedly, and not without irony, one of the safest societies in which to live?
This begs a most unpopular question. This introduces an antiquated word: one so politically incorrect, so incongruous in a secular world, and dissonant with societal discourses that it is difficult to articulate. But it is time, perhaps, that it was said. The word is "evil". And the question is: "Are the acts described above evil?" If they are not evil, what are they? What clinical categories or what psychological rationalisations can we provide to explain and contain these behaviours at this time?
Clinically we know the negative impact of violent pornography. We hear that a young man was kept in a shed and systematically brutalised by others over an extended period until he died. Whereas acts of extreme cruelty were once considered to be the aberrations of the depraved, the deviant and the deranged few, they are now presenting so routinely that "the banality of evil", as described by philosopher Hannah Ahrendt, that image of evil in pure pedantic form, seems to be making itself visible and it is not a pretty sight.
When psychiatrist M Scott Peck published his seminal work two decades ago entitled People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil, he opened a psychological Pandora's box by describing his encounters with people whom he believed were manifestly evil. This was a major theoretical and practice departure for clinicians, whose assigned societal role, after all, is not to judge but to "cure". This was to suggest that either society was dealing with something beyond pathology, or that certain pathological conditions, particularly those of sociopaths and psychopaths, were portrayals of evil.
Sigmund Freud regarded "medieval, mythological ideas of the devil to be outplayed" but later researchers, among the most famous, or infamous, being social psychologist Stanley Milgram, who in his classic and somewhat ethically dubious experiment on obedience to authority showed the extent to which people would torture others simply when asked to.
That good people can act in cruel and callous ways, depending upon context, was confirmed by the research of Philip Zimbardo in his famous Stanford prison experiments in which he found how little it takes for "man's inhumanity to man" to emerge. If Nazism had not already convinced us of that, more recent images from Abu Ghraib prison must surely do.
Most cultures have a concept of evil and words to describe it, although our postmodern world is increasingly scornful of ideas of good and evil. Radical relativism has replaced the notion of evil with the paradigm of perspective, whereby ethics are relative and "truth" is what you believe. Entitlement to live one's life, primarily based on one's own concept of right, irrespective of the rights of others, is increasingly valorised. And we have to ask if the rights of the paedophile should outweigh the rights of the child? Should the rights of the rapist outweigh those of the women he rapes? Should the right of those who are impulsive, frenzied, crazed on drugs and out of control be greater than the rights of their victims? Because many who have experienced attack feel further violated by a society that too often frees perpetrators to offend against them again.
Ask any ordinary person who has been a victim of violence in all its multifarious forms if evil exists and they will tell you that it does. They know. They have encountered it. They have been in its presence. They have felt its force. But unless we are prepared to acknowledge its existence, in the individual, in the collective, in the perpetrator, in the community and in those who stay silent before it, then people will become more anxious, more depressed, hopeless and suicidal than they already are. Society has been stabbed. It is wounded.
The proximity of the media to events as they unfold makes evil more immediately manifest than in former times. Psychotherapists may have a duty to be non-judgmental but they have an equal duty to consider if political correctness is serving society well. They must ask if they have categorised, codified, labelled and pathologised every act to the extent that there is a rationalisation for every atrocity and reluctance to name any behaviour as wrong.
For whatever bedevils our society today, it is bringing misery to far too many.
Clinical psychologist Marie Murray is director of the student counselling services in UCD. Fintan O'Toole is on leave