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 Far from being a religious or outdated concept, evil is a vital lens, Susan Neiman argues, through which to understand the threats we face today.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.
Every sentence is worth reading in this compelling book. For readers who are horrified and want to understand how we got here, this book is an absolute must.
Neiman movingly evokes Albert Einstein’s democratic socialism as a model for moral renewal today but does not reveal how her readers, numbed by daily government spin, might go about implementing it ... Advocates a return to moral universalism as a panacea for an erosion of values.
