…mobilising intelligently demands being willing to ask what habits and assumptions, as well as what chances and conditions, have made possible the risk of evil triumphing. And that leads us into deep waters, to a recognition of how what we tolerate or ignore or underestimate opens the way for disaster, the ways in which we are at least half-consciously complicit. If this is not to be the silly we-are-all-guilty response that has rightly been so much mocked, nor an absolution for the direct agents of great horrors, it needs a careful and unsparing scrutiny of the processes by which cultures become corruptible, vulnerable to the agendas of damaged and obsessional individuals.<\/p>\n
This can be uncomfortable. It raises the awkward issue of what philosophers have learned to call \u201cmoral luck\u201d\u009d \u201d\u201c the fact that some people with immense potential for evil don\u2019t actualise it, because the circumstances don\u2019t present them with the chance, and that some others who might have spent their lives in blameless normality end up supervising transports to Auschwitz. Or, to take a sharply contemporary example, that one Muslim youth from a disturbed or challenging background becomes a suicide bomber but another from exactly the same background doesn\u2019t. It is as though there were a sort of diabolical mirror image for the biblical Parable of the Sower: some seeds grow and some don\u2019t, depending on the ground they fall on, or what chance external stimulus touches them at critical moments.<\/p>\n
If what interests us is simply how to assign individuals rapidly and definitively to the categories of sheep and goats, saved and damned, this is offensively frustrating. But if we recognise that evil is in important respects a shared enterprise, we may be prompted to look harder at those patterns of behaviour and interaction that \u201d\u201c in the worst cases \u201d\u201c give permission to those who are most capable of extreme destructiveness, and to examine our personal, political and social life in the light of this.<\/p>\n