Deliver Us From Evil

Of all the explanations for Sept. 11, 2001, and the subsequent alleged war on terrorism, the least illuminating is that it's all about evil. We didn't know or didn't appreciate that there is evil in the world. Now we do know, or ought to. In President Bush's "axis of evil" speech last January, the first item on his list of truths "we have come to know" after 9/11 is that "evil is real, and it must be opposed."

William J. Bennett -- the Martha Stewart of morality -- takes up the theme in a quickie book, "Why We Fight," on a Web site (www.avot.org, AVOT being "Americans for Victory Over Terrorism"), and in a recent Wall Street Journal editorial page piece. "It took George W. Bush . . . to revive the language of good and evil," Bennett slobbers. Until a year ago, he avers, "terms like 'evil,' 'wrong,' and 'bad' " were not in "the lexicon." And even now, a fifth column of "pseudo-sophisticated intellectuals" is undermining America's war effort with nefarious suggestions that it might be more complicated than that.

Bennett's evidence that the concept of evil is endangered is pretty thin. He scrounges up a couple of professors making moral-relativist noises about understanding terrorists as people and the possibility that America's own actions may have contributed to America's current dilemma. Neither of them is actually quoted as dissing the word "evil." My own impression, for what it is worth, is that concepts such as "bad" and "wrong" did pop up occasionally before 9/11 and that there has never in our history been a proposition from which fewer Americans dissent than, "Osama bin Laden is evil." Calling terrorists "evil" requires no courage and justifies no self-congratulatory puffing. It's just not a problem.

But it's also not a solution. There are many groups of people, unfortunately, who would be happy to hijack four airplanes, fly them into crowded buildings and kill 3,000 Americans. In terms of malign intent, they all are evil. But only one of them managed to do it. The concept of evil tells you nothing about why -- among the many evils wished upon the United States -- this one actually happened. Nor does "evil" help us figure out how to stop evil from visiting itself upon us again.