Hollowell :  7th February 2000
“He who is without sin, let him cast the first stone”
If we were to stop some people in the street and ask them to name three of the Ten Commandments I dare say that those against murder, theft and, perhaps, adultery would be among the first to spring to mind.  I suppose it can be argued that Eve committed the first theft in history when she pinched the apple in the Garden of Eden. Murder came a little later in Adam & Eve’s family. Most people have heard of Cain and Abel.
So murder is a concept with a long history, which is pretty easy to grasp. We see it on the television or at the cinema with almost monotonous regularly. And when we are not looking at it in a fictional context, we can get plenty of the real stuff in such places as Kosovo, Bosnia, East Timor or Northern Ireland. The bodies fill the screen. But very few of us, thank God, ever have any direct involvement with it. 
The shock caused last week by the conviction of Dr Fred Shipman for killing 15 of his patients and possibly scores more, was not so much I believe occasioned by the acts of murder as by the fact that a trusted member of our society, a doctor, should have killed more or less at will and got away with it for so long. And all that in an apparently very normal suburb of Manchester. 
Why do people do appalling things to each other?  How do we explain the wanton destruction of life? Should our search for explanations begin with psychology, psychiatry, genetics or a range of environmental or social factors?  To many people such a search is merely aimed at finding excuses to forgive those whom only God can forgive. The Nazis who ran the concentration camps, Pol Pot who arranged for millions to be killed in Cambodia, serial killers like Shipman, the Moors Murderers and others like them; for this group of people who inflict pain and suffering without apparent reason we don’t have to look too far for an explanation – they are simply Evil.  The tabloids say so.
This seems to have been the view,too, of the courts that convicted various serial killers in this country and abroad, including Denis Nilsen, Peter Sutcliffe and Ian Brady one of the Moors Murderers. The fact that the latter two have since been diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenics does not seem to have affected the judicial sentence or process and nor it seems do may people care.
But Evil is a highly subjective concept. Philip II King of Spain and wife of our own Mary I, was a pious man who spent forty years living next door to a monastery, part of the time trying for his own good reasons to reclaim this country for Catholicism.  Yet a 100 years ago one historian said this of him:  “There have been few men known to history wh9 by their own endeavours have been able to achieve so vast an amount of evil as the King who had just died. If Philip possessed a single virtue……..”
The moral and legal problems associated with judging people who do appalling things to other human beings are often presented as so much liberal musing and philosophising and which does nothing to address the need to protect the public. It’s easier to declare people Evil and put them way for good. 
Evil is of course associated with the Christian concept of Heaven and Hell, God and the Devil, and for almost 2000 years people have been prepared to explain the wickedness of others in theological terms.  The devils entered the Gadarene swine and off they went over the end of the cliffs. Evil is in this context something with a mind of its own which actually seeks people out. “The Devil finds work for idle hands to do” as my grandmothers used to say when I broke a window kicking footballs or drained the garden pond.
Those who work with notorious murderers who more often than not have been labelled as “Evil” by people who have never met them, do not think apparently that this description is accurate or important.  Evil, they believe is not something separate and dynamic in itself, but rather something, which is part of us all.
That’s as may be, you may say. But if all of us have some evil in us why is it that in some people this manifests itself in only a few and why? Can it really be that even the most mild mannered of us, given the right mix of factors, could turn into monsters?  Sometimes I wonder how I would behave if I had absolute power over some group of people and no fear of punishment for what I might do to them.  It is a little frightening.  
It has been calculated that between 1820 and the end of the Second World War about 59 million people died in Europe as a result of war or acts of violence – 6000 a day at Auschwitz. In our own country the NSPCC report  that 200 children die each year at the hands of their parent or stepparents. Childline, the help line for abused children, receives thousands of calls each year. We are, you could say, being swamped by the forces of Evil.
There is a growing awareness, however, that many murders and vicious criminals such those who abuse children have too often themselves been abused. There is a pattern in the lives of some serial killers, which is based on childhood experiences of loneliness, isolation and being abandoned by those they loved.  Most of these people lived in fantasy worlds where they seek to be the dominant figure having the power of life or death.  
Imagination, Man’s greatest asset is also his Achilles heel. And to see someone else, as Evil requires an imaginative capacity not found in animals. 
It is Man’s ability to give meaning and purpose to his life that elevates him above the animal world. As the French philosopher Pascal put it:…………Man is only a rose tree………..
 It can be argued that we could end cruelty and wickedness by beginning to value all who live in our world, regardless of their size, their sex, their colour, their religion and their politics.  This may be a forlorn hope. But if we can start by recognising that no one is “Evil” separately, dynamically and totally, and that instead the roots of wickedness are in us all, we can begin to move forward.   
