Call It Evil is a reckoning with one of the most fraught words in our vocabulary. Far from being a religious or outdated concept, evil is a vital lens, Susan Neiman argues, through which to understand the threats we face today.
Neiman argues that widespread misapprehensions about what evil is make people too reluctant to use the word. Despite her willfully provocative title, she categorically states: 'This is not a book about Donald Trump' ... less a philosophical exploration than a polemical guide to the current moment. She believes that people are so attached to understanding evil in terms of individual monstrousness — the gleeful villain, the depraved sadist — that they lose sight of how evil more typically works ... What happens when one person’s jaw drops and another person’s doesn’t? It’s a conundrum that lies outside the scope of this bracing book.
Neiman offers a potent rebuke to those who would rather talk about 'kitchen table issues' than torture. Yet her peculiar definition of evil makes it difficult to actually face the worst cruelties of this administration ... With a fondness for dramatic claims, she often invokes straw men ... Although she has indeed identified real flaws in American politics and diagnosed a real inability to speak about them in moral terms, the book is criticizing the wrong people ... Neiman’s definition of evil as an absence of moral reasoning also makes it difficult for her to recommend solutions.
Curiously cagey about the current President’s alignment ... Neiman has written multiple books about theodicy, the problem with woke culture, and why progressives would benefit from more moral clarity. Her new book allows her to play the hits under a provocative title, but with little novelty ... We’re still waiting for a great, book-length chronicle of the man who puts his face on a gold coin.
