Unlike so-called "crimes of passion", senseless and brutal murders are especially disturbing. And we seem to be having a run of them at the moment. Kiaran Stapleton, the man who killed Anuj Bidve, who referred to himself as "Psycho", did not even know his victim and has shown no sign of remorse.
Then there is the man suspected to have shot 12 people dead during a screening of The Dark Knight Rises in the US. He reportedly referred to himself as "the Joker" and used his budding skills as an "aspiring scientist" to create carnage. They are profoundly disturbing stories to read and follow.
It is as if there is something missing in these individuals. They represent a humanity marked by an absence – presumably, an absence of empathy. Where there should be a soul that feels guilt, that shows regret, that experiences self-punishing shame, there appears to be just a hole. Their actions reveal a dark gap in their personalities, one so bleak that it surprises even the people who knew them before they committed their crimes. As the makers of horror movies know, it is what you can't see that terrifies far more than what you can see.
It is often said that deploying the word "evil" in cases like this risks obscuring what happened, not understanding it. There is some truth in the observation – though the very expressivism of the word "evil" is useful too, keeping the horror of what has happened in view. There is something unspeakable about evil; there should be something unspeakable about evil. But I think violent acts like those that are in the news at the moment warrant the use of the word "evil" in a precise way too. It has to do with that dark gap.
Think of the lack of empathy. Simon Baron-Cohen, the developmental psychologist, has argued that this is what lies behind the most cruel human acts. There may be many social and environmental factors that lead someone to have "zero negative" empathy, as he puts it, and then further circumstances that precipitate the violence. But what lies at the heart of such personalities is a deficiency. It is frightening to witness. Like the zombies of old movies, there is no reasoning with such people because there is no place inside them for such reasoning to land. Empathy has no hold on them either, as it does the vast majority, because it never had the chance to take root in their psyches and grow.
This is another way in which the acts are meaninglessness. That which gives meaning to life – in particular, the capacity to know and love others and to be known and loved by them – is devastatingly depleted or missing.
And here, too, is the link with the traditional understanding of evil. The important point is that evil is nothing positive. According to the theology of Thomas Aquinas, for example, evil is a lack – a lack of what is good. It is a hole in the heart of someone.
To put it another way, evil is not the opposite of good. Rather, evil is to goodness as coldness is to heat: it is an absence of what is good. Evil emerges when the goodness is drained out of someone, much as something goes cold when the heat is removed.
That which is evil chills, then, because it is life as it is supposed not to be in a basic, fundamental way. And when all goodness is gone, you reach absolute zero – "pure evil", you might say.
