To triumph over evil
“It is my very firm conviction that we all have the capacity to get into states of mind that we might call evil. It’s better that we understand those aspects of ourselves.”
Gwen Adshead, criminal psychotherapist
Bizet’s Carmen is a crowd-pleasing spectacle of beautiful and jaunty music alongside high-drama and razzmatazz, top billing for Opera North’s return to the Leeds Grand stage after 581 empty days. According to the Guardian, the Frenchman’s opera has “gone on a camp bunny-hop with serious ambitions.” The virtuoso Chrystal E. Williams waving ostrich-feathers to guard her modesty exposes its contradictions from the outset. She gives energy and power — contained in a sweet mezzo-soprano, honey in the mid-range — to perform an operatic character fatally doomed in a plot we already know.
Mary Midgley wrote one of the first serious modern attempts to understand evil in her book, Wickedness. She located it ambiguously somewhere between obsession and the darker sub-personalities that people the soul. Hate-fuelled complexes, largely repressed in civilised hearts, can derive a daimonic energy from obsession. Can be turned against their owners or against the vulnerable (because we can’t tolerate those who show us our own weakness, who remind us of ourselves).
More recently, science has taken up the baton from philosophy. Professor Simon Baron-Cohen (sibling of Ali G and Borat) locates evil in the erosion of empathy through neglect and abuse, a finding corroborated by Adshead. Dr Julia Shaw joins these scientists in supplying nuance — crude binaries of good and evil are unhelpful. Here is a malleable spectrum and each one of us can be driven along it to cruelty or compassion without awareness.
Do we see something of this in the current political landscape? A pandemic has thrown kerosene on the inflammatory trend of digitising our lives, extremism is on the march. Increased fear and isolation breed hate as vulnerability protects itself behind fantasies of potency. Access to limitless depictions of increasingly graphic, hyper-realistic violence in video games, movies and pornography blur divisions between fact and image.
The sudden and intense virtualisation of our lives may help explain the sea-change in politics from when character mattered, to our present-day clownshow in which probity, integrity and virtue carry no weight. Internet content vanishes in moments and exists in the ether amongst endless other fantasies and dreamworlds, forever spooling past us. Jean Baudrillard forseaw our predicament in Simulacra and Simulation (1981) with chilling clarity. Nothing is real.
Recent psychological research tends to support Baudrillard’s anxieties. Dubbed ‘The Medusa Effect’, researchers at PNAS found that on-screen representations of people tend to impair our theory of mind, making us ascribe less humanity to them.
In this spirit, we must choose with intention. If we look in the abyss, do so with fear and trembling and build routine practices of light. Do not allow a grim soundtrack of evil noise to steal your careless attention. Or your child’s. Choose hope and love and structure them into your existence. Care about the truth. Hold your MP to account. Hold technology companies to account. Vote.
Carmen’s persecutor is a troubling cartoon of menace and obsession, a corrupt private locked in murderous limbo — worth understanding; but also laughed at and dismissed, unnamed.
Our choices are critical and form us. I choose instead to remember Sarah Everard’s memorialised legacy of love and kindness and her sweet, imperishable smile.
