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GOOD and EVIL (1 of 3)

It is in comic books or in movies with comic-book-like characters that people intentionally do evil. Some evil is done without the evil-doer thinking that what he is doing is evil.

The philosopher Susan Neiman writes: "Every time we make a judgment this ought not to have happened, we are stepping onto a path that leads straight to the problem of evil." As to the question of what evil is, it is commonly thought of as something that in some way is injurious to people, masses of people or to individuals whose demise is a loss to others.

Llike Neiman I believe that we cannot lay down an all-encompassing definition of evil that is universally accepted. What we think of as evil depends on our big-picture of reality, and in identifying evil I'd like to reach into history. I'd like to start with conquerors.

Before there was conquest, small communities of extended families came upon one another with one society committing violence against the other or against each other. This, as I see it, is the evil of anarchy and a universal small-mindedness. Eventually people started conquering other people. There were those persons we know of as Spartans, who came upon the settled agricultural people whom the Spartans enslaved and called Helots. There were the Assyrians who expanded against a number of people, including the community of Hebrews in what we know of as ancient Israel. There were the Italians conquering Libyans and Ethiopians in the 1920s and 1930s. And in 1991 there was Saddam Hussein and his army forcing themselves upon the people of Kuwait. What, we might ask, was the nature or origins of this kind of evil?

What did conquest give to the conquerors? It gave them wealth, glory and power, and for them it was to hell with those they slaughtered or otherwise diminished. It came easy to conquerors before the 1900s because it was accepted behavior among the world's powerful -- largely those who themselves belonged to the tradition of conquest and empire, who called themselves emperors.

Among the powerful of Europe the glory of conquest was embedded and respected from the Middle Ages and into modern times. It extended to Europe's major powers -- Britain, Germany, France and others -- meeting in Berlin in 1878. They gave to the Habsburg emperor of Austria-Hungary, Franz Joseph (also represented at the Berlin conference), their approval for extending his empire to Bosnia -- by conqest. Franz Joseph, a devout Roman Catholic, saw himself as a dutiful Christian and a man of high honor. He sent his army of 200,000 into Bosnia and Herzegovina, its banners with the image of the Virgin Mary fluttering in the wind. Two months of house-to-house and hand-to-hand combat followed. Resistance to the emperor's conquests continued to the assassination of his representative and nephew in Sarajevo in 1914. France Joseph launched a war against the Serbs, which sparked the ugliest and biggest of wars of all time to then: World War I. And the poor settlement in 1919 of this great evil was followed by another great evil and even greater war: World War II.