Emerson wrote that "most men have bound their eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attached themselves to ... communities of opinion. This conformity makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars. Their every truth is not quite true. Their two is not the real two, their four not the real four: so that every word they say chagrins us and we know not where to begin to set them right."
We might ask ourselves whether the "deciders" among us have blinded themselves in this way regarding evil. Evil, we're told, lurks everywhere. And only by appearing strong through physical confrontation, the argument continues, can it be convinced to back down. When we do not win, evil is supposedly encouraged and attacks. When we win, it retreats having taken us seriously. There are, however, two things of which I am convinced regarding evil: First, there is indeed evil in the world and it needs no encouragement other than its existence to attack those it deems enemies, yet (2) sometimes in life, as distasteful as it may seem, it's necessary to deal with lesser forms of iniquity to preclude success by the more virulent. It's sometimes necessary to negotiate with those we dislike in order to listen, learn and outsmart those who hate and seek to destroy us.
I'm questioning here the wholesale assignments of parts of the world to the category of "evil." By doing so we preclude the option of dealing with those among them who could help us to avoid heinous problems likely to be perpetrated by those even they find odious. This is, no doubt, shocking to some - easily disparaged as a kind of warped "liberal soft on terror" view. But, I'm not referring here to capitulation - a far cry from skillful negotiation, yet one too often confused with it. I am proposing we think long and hard before casting into a broad bin of "evil" all who disagree with us for among them may indeed be those who could choose to lean our way and provide much needed intelligence and perspective.
Abraham Lincoln took this approach in finding common ground between what he saw as good people in the North and South. Unlike so many who denounced all slave owners as corrupt, Lincoln argued, "they are just what we would be in their situation. If slavery did not now exist amongst them, they would not introduce it. If it did now exist amongst us, we should not instantly give it up... I surely will not blame them for not doing what I should not know how to do myself." This frame changed the course of history.
The tendency today is far from measured in this way. When the designation of "evil" is assigned, as it was even internally to Ned Lamont, a candidate for public office who won an election by popular vote, then surely gratuitous associations with evil have gone too far. And, as if it were not sufficiently desperate to take this course, real evil is thereby granted a reprieve of sorts when the aggravating, disheartening, even despicable actions that barely reach its proximity on the continuum of good and evil are carelessly brought into its association. By so doing, we give evil companions it might otherwise not have. We engage in a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy where those we define as evil become so having been pushed away from a better option we might have offered.
If we are going to fight the virulent forms of evil that threaten us today, we must know them well and spare those we dislike, even disdain, spurious shared categorization. As Howard Dean said on Meet the Press yesterday, Suddam Hussein as a leader was a "bad man." Yes, a truly bad man who needed to be stopped. But was he so evil compared to other forms now threatening that we could not have stopped him in some other way rather than devoting nearly all of our military strength to his destruction - sending over 2,500 of our young to their death, many more thousands to irreparable injury and devastation to Iraq? Designate all who are "bad" as "evil," shut them out, provoke them by refusing to talk and thereby facilitate their recruiting, go to war to rid us of them, and, in so doing, our supposed leaders blinded by "handkerchiefs" of myopia, power, and diplomatic ineptitude extend the tendrils of terrorism. In this sense, they are the real enablers of evil.