Anna’s Blog

I agree most with Andrew Delbanco’s point of view on evil. He claims that “But at the same time to pretend that an event like that which took place on Sept. 11 can be explained with the ordinary language of politics or psychology seems to me quite inadequate to what happened. We really did experience evil on Sept. 11.” It can be understood that other groups or countries have strong opinions of our Western lifestyle. It’s hard to believe that a group could take hundreds of lives because of its strong opinions, however, and so we must blame something else, like evil.

Another point that Delbanco made was that prior to 9/11, America had lost its sense of evil, and that left us “in a position of considerable vulnerability both to forces outside ourselves and to ourselves”. Because we are a world power, we thought that nothing and no one could conquer us, so we “lost touch with the reality of evil”. Because of this, America hasn’t been able to realize that other nations aren’t necessarily as accepting of our culture as we are. Since we lost a sense of evil, we also lost the ability to criticize ourselves, or see the parts of our lifestyle that need improvement.  If there’s anything our country should have learned since 9/11, it’s to be more realistic and realize that we’re not a perfect nation, and we need to ask ourselves questions about the consequences of our actions.

Lucy writes:

In my opinion, the KKK are some of the most despicable people alive.

I think it’s very interesting that Lucy considers the KKK to be so horrible. That group was racist against African Americans and would definately be seen as something “evil” today, but back in the early 1900’s, being a part of the KKK seemed like the right thing to do to most Southerners. In Gone with the Wind, for instance, you can really see how it would seem right to be involved with that group. Some of the main characters are in the KKK, and part of the reason they are is because the pressure from the society. Rather than seeing it as a racist group, the characters viewed it as something that helped to protect their community, and something that actually stopped evil, rather than creating more evil.

My definition of evil is something that is viewed by the society as something bad or looked down upon. I also consider any person or event that harms people for no clear reason to be evil. Something like this in the modern world would be September 11th. Any crime done that has no justified reason, such as what the terrorist group did to the Twin Towers on September 11th is evil. There have been many evil events and people in history, such as the Holocaust or Stalin. Hitler would be another example of an “evil person”, because he took the lives of many people for no fair reason.

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