Once again, I fall victim to digression and, for that, I ask your forgiveness and patience. As irony would have it, I am summoned to divagate to discuss just what I was lamenting in the last post: To whit, television. In my defense, I do rush to note that I was watching what I had classified as "junk" TV (the type designed solely for entertainment and that makes no effort at serious analysis of issues or the world situation; in brief, it is "pure entertainment"). The show is one of my favorite "junk" offerings and I confess to watching it regularly. It is Criminal Minds, which highlights the work and cases of the F.B.I.’s renowned "Behavioral Analysis Unit". I will not discuss the show any further, in and of itself, other than to say one of the highlights, at least for me, are the quotes used to preface and conclude each of the shows.

Recently, they used a thought-provoking quote which I can only paraphrase here:

"Evil knows no boundaries. It is not confined to nations or particular races nor does it know any socioeconomic boundaries. It is found in nature only in the human animal, in whom it's capacity is unlimited."

I have tried in vain to find the precise quotation and had even less success finding the author, but that is unnecessary for my purposes; the paraphrasing suffices. I cannot begin to tell you how long and how deeply I have thought about this assertion. [Imagine that! Something on television that makes you think! And "junk" TV, at that.] It strikes at my heart and its precision, clarity and legitimacy is, I think, wholly irrefutable.

In my youth, I remember watching the brutality of the African beasts as they mercilessly hunted and savagely killed their prey. I hated the tiger or lion when it crushed the young antelope’s throat, suffocating it to death and, then, tearing the lifeless carcass to shreds. In my naivete, I thought the bloodied face of the beast must be evil incarnate. Later, videos of our closest animal relative, the chimpanzee, were shown pack-hunting smaller monkeys and ripping them from their branches and, with almost a maniacal look in their eyes, tearing their captures limb from limb and eating of their flash. Surely, this was the face of evil.

Only as I grew older, did I come to understand that what I had thought was "evil" was simply survival in the wild. Lions, tigers and chimpanzees simply were doing what eons of evolution had taught them was necessary for their survival. It is no more reasonable to think that these carnivores could stop "doing evil" and become vegetarians than it is to believe the sun could simply change course and move west-to-east. This is not evil; it is the order of things.

Man’s inhumanity to man is the singular (and most unforgivable, if for no other reason than we have a brain sufficiently advanced to recognize it) example of pure evil on our tiny blue planet. It is not, regardless of its "justification" in the mind(s) of the perpetrator(s), part of "the order of things". There can be no justification, no reasonable explanation, no understanding of evil. It exists, sadly as well as tragically, simply because the capacity for evil is in us all.

Evil, to my simple way of thinking, exists uniquely in man because of two main reasons:

- First, we have a ineradicable need to dominate, humiliate, punish and torture our fellow H. Sapiens, and

- Secondly, we have the cerebral apparatus to conjure up the most humiliating, lethal, painful and vicious means to achieve this primal need.

When considering evil in a historical context, one’s mind usually gravitates toward Adolph Hitler and the Holocaust. Here was a man who, though probably not insane in the clinical sense, had a pathological hatred of the Jewish race (if I may use that term). This deep-seeded psychological animosity was probably based on experiences with the Jewish community in Austria in his years there as a painter. Yet, with the prodigious memory of Homo sapiens, he carried this murderous rage for a lifetime. When he acquired power, he was able to act on his anger.

Apologists - fortunately, few in number - will remark that, in order to unite the German people, Hitler merely used the Jews as a "straw man". They were painted as the original and sufficient cause for Germany’s loss in World War I and for the continued suffering of the Germany people, economically, after the war. From his pulpit of hate, Hitler preached that, if only the Jews could be eliminated, Germany would rise like a Phoenix from their ashes to the greatness they were destined to achieve. The German people, perhaps the most educated people in Europe, bought into the argument. Never, ever underestimate the power of a well-run propaganda machine and an effective demagogue. Horror, tragedy and genocide were the end results. The story is well known and need not be rehearsed here.

The point to be made is that only in the human species can such evil exist. History has proven this, over and again, throughout it’s annals. Caligula and Nero of Rome were but heralds of the evil that men can do. Giles de Rais, one of the richest men in France, killed and raped over 100 young girls and boys in the 15^th Century. Countess Elizabeth Bathory murdered nearly 600 girls in Hungary during the early 17^th Century. And, three centuries later, Hitler rose to the heights of atrocity. But, these are only the colossi of the inglorious pantheon of evil men. The hallways are filled with the busts of less famous - but hardly less evil - men (and women) that have marked mankind as not merely the keepers of the flame of evil amidst nature but give silent witness to the cruel fact that evil is always among us. The list (and there actually is one) of evil proves that no geographic boundaries exist for the perpetration of evil deeds.

It is not difficult for this observer to conclude that, among the emotional capacities of man - love, compassion, anger, pity, guilt, jealousy, revenge, happiness and the all the others - it is evil alone that suffers no diminution, no surcease and never dies.

To test this claim, one need only observe the headlines that flash daily across our collective memories - recent and past: A man in Austria holds his own daughter captive in a dungeon for 24 years, fathering 7 children by her. The 29 black youths killed in Atlanta during 1979-81. In contemporary America, we can call up the faces of evil by simply recalling a litany of familiar names: John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono, David Berkowitz, Ted Bundy, ad infinitum.

Why, one may ask, is evil the private domain of man? Is it simply that we are unable to perceive evil when it exists in other beasts? Does evil go on about us - in the sum of the animal kingdom and, as humans, limited as we are, are unable to recognize it? Are there animals who kill other of their own species for sexual, psychological or some undefined perverse satisfaction? It is, after all, a very large and unobserved population of animals.

I am of the opinion that this is not the way of nature. And, even if it were discovered to be true, it should not give us much comfort. We are, after all, the most "advanced" of earth’s animals. We are the ones with the magnificent three pounds of billions of neurons and their connections. We are the beasts with the ability to reason, contemplate, investigate, invent and reach out to the heavens. We are the ones who can count Michelangelo, da Vinci, Mozart, Beethoven, Shakespeare, Newton, Einstein and Gandhi among our ancestors. We are capable of incredible creativity and, rarely, can approach perfection. And, yet...

And, yet, the same mass of near perfect function that allows us to create beauty can also be the cause of our own greatest plague: evil. The evil that men do haunts us, befuddles us, confuses us and disturbs us, often, to depths of despair and helplessness. How can such a dichotomy exist? The sublime versus the unthinkable? Beauty versus horror? Mother Teresa versus Hitler?

I, in my simple way, can only surmise that evil is the price that mankind must pay for having the capacity for conceiving of and creating beauty, for experiencing true love, for self-sacrifice, compassion, for hopes and dreams. Evil is a tax - a surcharge - extracted for our other gifts. It is the dark side of our glowing moon, the shadow we cast by our brilliance and benevolence. We are truly a Janus-faced animal - one pair of eyes behold the glories of man, another pair prepared to reek unspeakable suffering on the weak, the forgotten and the vulnerable. Hand in glove, the polar opposites bestride man’s spirit, each with the capacity to control our choices and our actions. Which ultimately wins our hearts is determined by our free will.

Sophocles wrote: "To live without evil belongs only to the gods". Thus, we will never defeat what is so intimately bound within us all. We can only hope to fight the good and just fight, both within ourselves and the world, at large. Good men cannot eradicate evil but only confront it at every turn and be vigilant of its seedlings for it seldom erupts, full blown. That is the best, tragically, we can aspire to. Gandhi said: "Man's nature is not essentially evil. Brute nature has been know to yield to the influence of love. You must never despair of human nature".

But, I ask, how can one not?