The Science of Evil

[bandwraith at aol.com]

"The Fenways were heavy duty South Bay money, living on the Palos Verde 
Peninsula in a gated enclave located INSIDE the ALREADY gated high rent 
community of Rolling Hills." (p.171)


http://scholar.googleusercontent.com/scholar?q=cache:TSWpmFH29q4J:scholar.google.com/+empathy+circuit&hl=en&as_sdt=0,31

It might help to think of the categories of evil as somewhat akin to 
the City of Los Angeles. In the sense that in both cases the name is a 
general term for a number of very different and distinct subdivisions. 
Some of these suburbs of evil are less interesting or controversial: 
the category of natural evils (earthquakes and the like), evil not 
caused by man, is only controversial when natural evils are 
specifically attributed to acts of God and the proportionality of His 
justice and mercy are questioned. Then there are evil deeds committed 
with intention to do good, and evil deeds done without the intention to 
commit evil. Finally, we come to the inner sanctum of the suburbs of 
evil, to the most elusive and exclusive subcategory of evil, a category 
some philosophers still refuse to concede even exists, although most of 
us know it when we see it. The heart of the heart of darkness, the 
Beverly Hills of evil: conscious, intentional evil, or as the 
philosophical literature prefers to call it, wickedness. Some subdivide 
wickedness itself even further until we arrive at the innermost 
enclosure. There behind the iron spiked gates is the very Bel Air of 
evil: malignant wickedness, cold blooded evil for evil's sake....

                                                      (....)

I thought of my conversation with Berel Lang when, in the aftermath of 
September 11, it was reported that the German avant-garde composer 
Karlheinz Stockhausen called the twin-towers attack "the greatest work 
of art imaginable for the whole cosmos." "Minds achieving something," 
he said, "in an act that we couldn't even dream of in music, people 
rehearsing like mad for ten years, preparing fanatically for a concert 
and then dying ... Artists, too, sometimes try to go beyond the limits 
of what is feasible and conceivable, so that we wake up, so that we 
open ourselves to another world." (Stockhausen later said his remarks 
had been taken out of context; what he really meant was that it was 
"the greatest work of art by Lucifer.") Still, Stockhausen's swooning 
admiration for the artistry of the attacks may be valuable testimony to 
the existence of something real that he intuits about the mind of the 
"artist" behind the September 11 attacks: Stockhausen ascribes to bin 
Laden's act some of the same qualities Lang ascribes to Hitler's evil: 
the"imaginative protraction" and "elaboration" of an act with an 
artistic consciousness behind it ("people rehearsing for ten years and 
then dying"). Others have been unable to resist describing the attack 
on the twin towers in aesthetic terms, as having a "terrible beauty" 
and so on. This may reflect some confusion about the nature of beauty, 
but it also suggests that Lang is on to something in locating the 
ultimate degree of wickedness in the way evil reaches its apotheosis as 
a genocidal art form. That and the laughter. Bin Laden'scomplacent 
grin, the self-satisfied chuckle while discussing the details of 
murdering thousands....

                                   (...)

Is evil over? Has science finally driven a stake through its dark 
heart? Or at least emptied the word of useful meaning, reduced the 
notion of a numinous nonmaterial malevolent force to a glitch in a 
tangled cluster of neurons, the brain? Yes, according to many 
neuroscientists, who are emerging as the new high priests of the 
secrets of the psyche, explainers of human behavior in general. A 
phenomenon attested to by a recent torrent of pop-sci brain books with 
titles like Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain.

Not secret in most of these works is the disdain for metaphysical evil, 
which is regarded as an antiquated concept that's done more harm than 
good. They argue that the time has cometo replace such metaphysical 
terms with physical explanations—malfunctions or malformations in the 
brain. Of course, people still commit innumerable bad actions, but the 
idea that people make conscious decisions to hurt or harm is no longer 
sustainable, say the new brain scientists. For one thing, there is no 
such thing as "free will" withwhich to decide to commit evil. (Like 
evil, free will is an antiquated concept for most.) Autonomous, 
conscious decision-making itself may well be an illusion. And thus 
intentional evil is impossible. Have the new neuroscientists 
brandishing their fMRIs, the ghostly illuminated etchings of the 
interior structures ofthe skull, succeeded where their forebears from 
disciplines ranging from phrenology to psychoanalysis have failed? Have 
they pinpointed the hidden anomalies in the amygdala, the dysfunctions 
in the prefrontal lobes, the electrochemical source of impulses that 
lead a Jared Loughner, or an Anders Breivik, to commit their murderous 
acts?