What Evil Means to Us [Hardcover]

C. Fred Alford (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1997

C. Fred Alford interviewed working people, prisoners, and college students in order to discover how people experience evil--in themselves, in others, and in the world. What people meant by evil, he found, was a profound, inchoate feeling of dread so overwhelming that they tried to inflict it on others to be rid of it themselves. A leather-jacketed emergency medical technician, for example, one of the many young people for whom vampires are oddly seductive icons of evil, said he would "give anything to be a vampire." Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, Alford argues that the primary experience of evil is not moral but existential. The problems of evil are complicated by the terror it evokes, a threat to the self so profound it tends to be isolated deep in the mind. Alford suggests an alternative to this bleak vision. The exercise of imagination--in particular, imagination that takes the form of a shared narrative--offers an active and practical alternative to the contemporary experience of evil. Our society suffers from a paucity of shared narratives and the creative imagination they inspire.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Alford (government and politics, Univ. of Maryland, College Park) spent over a year interviewing state prison inmates, college students, and working people to find out how people conceptualize and experience evil. To many of his informants, doing evil is the "pleasure in hurting and lack of remorse." It is rooted, from what they told the author, in a baleful, bottomless sense of dread; to cause others to suffer this existential dislocation is somehow (in the mind) expected to alleviate it in oneself. "How to know and live with this malicious destructiveness in oneself, one's friends, one's lovers, and the world around?" Alford suggests that hope, and the answer to the problem of evil, may be found through shared narrative?the realm of "metaphysics and theology." Although this is a difficult book, it provides an unusually systematic approach to a topic more often addressed through anecdote or abstraction. Of interest especially to professionals who work with people "on the edge."?John R. Leech, Brooklyn
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 200 pages
• Publisher: Cornell University Press (September 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0801434300
• ISBN-13: 978-0801434303
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.7 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,146,281 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A brilliant answer to a vexing moral problem, April 7, 2000

By 

Stephen Appel - See all my reviews

This review is from: What Evil Means to Us (Hardcover)

After reviewing, and finding wanting, much of the traditional discourse on the question of evil, C. Fred Alford interviews two population groups, violent convicts and college students to find out what it is that we mean when we describe an experience as evil. He comes up with his own definition: evil is the projection into another of one's own feelings of dread. In other words, an event is not evil because of its great scope, but because of it's (usually, but not always, unconscious) malicious intent. I find this answer very helpful on two grounds. First, it helps one to discriminate between experiences which are simply unpleasant and those which are characterised by human malevolence. Second, there is a practical usage too - Alford's model helps one to look deeply into one's own actions and ask: "Am I causing someone else to feel pain which I should actually be dealing with myself?"

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Saying the Unspeakable, March 20, 2006

By 

G. Bestick (Dobbs Ferry, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: What Evil Means to Us (Hardcover)

This book is a valuable contribution to a discussion we should never stop having: Why is there evil in the world, what causes it, and how can we prevent it? Evil is a topic we find easy to symbolize but difficult to categorize. Alford first attempts to define it by conducting interviews using a questionnaire he designed. One group of interviewees is a random sampling of middle-class Americans. The second group consists of inmates in a maximum security prison doing time for violent crimes. Alford also held regular group therapy sessions with the inmates to probe their thoughts about evil.

While the interviewees, particularly the inmates, come up with some striking observations, Alford isn't really conducting an empirical study. He quickly lays a theoretical grid over the subject. Citing Thomas Ogden's writings on the "autistic-contiguous position" Alford asserts that evil is rooted in a kind of pre-categorical dread that we first experienced as infants. The infant's lack of boundaries and total identification with the caregiver lead to anxiety that the self is being subsumed by another. The average person experiences the bliss as well as the anxiety of infantile connection, followed by a period of forgetting this experience ever happened (infantile amnesia). The normal person then undergoes the stress filled process of separating from the caregiver and establishing an autonomous self. The successfully functioning adult has both a sense of their own personal boundaries and an ability to empathically understand the boundaries of other people.

For the evil person, this process gets short-circuited. Unable to deal with the anxiety caused by pre-categorical dread, the evil person displaces this anxiety by using force to violate the boundaries of another person. One arresting insight is that evil doers don't seem to have an ability to displace their anxieties or desires into symbolic or narrative form - they lack empathic imagination. So they need the physical connection with their victims to validate their own selfhood. Evil is invasive, intimate, yet ultimately unimaginative.

Alford also discusses institutionalized evil, such as the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. This is Kant's radical evil, which twists moral positions for evil ends. It also exists in political and tribal organizations, and has existed for centuries in monotheistic religions. To Alford, this is a problem of cultural containment; cultures without strong symbolic or narrative methods for making the anxiety of the human position bearable to its citizens are more likely to spill over into violence or fall prey to tyrants.

Alford's approach to his subject is to loop back and revisit previous assumptions and definitions. Sometimes this clarifies the initial proposition, such as his analysis of how words are imbued with the feelings they generate within us. Sometimes returning simply muddies the ground, such as using the idea of the autistic-contiguous position in so many different contexts we have a hard time remembering precisely how it buttresses his argument.

Speaking of the autistic-contiguous position, tying evil so tightly to the need to expunge dread was problematic for me. This wasn't a conclusion that could be derived from Alford's admittedly limited interview samples. Since infantile confusion about the boundaries between the self and others is a universal human experience, you could also argue that it's an essential component of non-evil humanity. The anxiety caused by fear of losing the self doesn't in most cases lead to violating the self of another person. If most of us learn to live with our dread, how can dread be the root of evil? Since the vast majority of Alford's inmates who committed violent crimes were victims of child abuse, bad parenting must have an enormous amount to do with making evil adults. Not getting enough lap time as a child might be a more likely indicator of adult evil than inability to process ontological dread. Since Alford doesn't dissect the childhoods of his evildoers in much detail, he doesn't really connect the dots between parental behavior and childhood anxieties.

Nevertheless, you'll come away with a deeper understanding of the topic because Alford's stimulating questions and hypotheses force you to look more closely at your own feelings about evil. In an appendix, Alford includes the questionnaire he used, and it's helpful to take it as part of your experience of his book.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Heart of Darkness, November 14, 2005

By 

Elyssa Joy "Dr Joy" (Australia) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: What Evil Means to Us (Hardcover)

Alfords combination of psychoanalytic theory,philosophy and theology is, I think, unrivalled. This is the second of his books that I have read and like the first, Narcissism, Socrates and the Frankfurt School I found it to be very thought provoking. In a time when evil clearly abounds and yet our social sciences constantly negate it Alford sinks his teeth into 'the heart of darkness.' I particularly enjoyed his revision of Stanley Milgram's Obedience to Authority experiments and Zimbardo's prison studies.(Both of which I was familiar with.) Individuals obeyed,Alford suggests, simply because they found pleasure in inflicting pain on others and were given an occasion to do so with impunity.

The language of evil and the lens to understand it needs to be engaged in directly or else we will be left to demagogues who do know evil exists and speak directly to the heart of darkness without the fairness and compassion of Alford, who understands that many individuals suffer as much evil as they perpetrate. It is a fascinating contribution to the cycle of violence literature. Satan, remember, was a seducer and evil has its pleasures. There is power in the dark side.