The use of such sweeping terms such as ‘good’ and ‘evil’ as policy-defining pillars in a secular society such as the United States of America might seem difficult to justify and understand. I will argue, however, that the notion of absolute evil has always been present in the American psyche, barely covered by secular mentality and contemporary conventions, and that the attacks on America that happened in 2001 have served to revive in their society and politics the image of Satan. By ‘Satan’ I mean not so much the fallen angel of Christian mythology, but the personification of evil, whose most marked characteristic is precisely its changeable nature. In the next few paragraphs I will draw upon the work of Richard Kearney, Andrew Delbanco, Peter Singer, and Jean Baudrillard, amongst others, in order to analyze the ethical, practical and political reasons and consequences of the policies adopted after those fateful attacks. I will also attempt to shed some light onto why the policies adopted by the Bush White House –which have continued to prove extremely unpopular amongst the international community – have been accepted in a seemingly unquestioning manner by a large proportion of the American population.
In Death of Satan, Andrew Delbanco argues that America started its colonized history with a system of beliefs in which its inhabitants had a clearly defined conception of evil - materialized in the figure of Satan – and has then proceeded in a relentless advance towards secular rationality. Since Delbanco’s book was published in 1995, however, the direction of this change has been effectively reversed. The current situation in the United States following the change in presidential administration from Bill Clinton to George W. Bush and –most significantly - the attacks of September 11th 2001, have reinforced the psychological need in Americans for clear boundaries between ‘good’ and ‘evil’, and that is exactly what their current president and his administration are providing them with – a working concept of absolute evil, materialized and concentrated in the now almost iconic figure of Osama Bin Laden.
President Bush’s initial reaction to those attacks, Richard Kearney comments, was to divide the world into good and evil. In the days immediately following the terror, he declared a ‘crusade’ against the evil scourge of terrorism’ (2003: 111). This move towards a dyadic philosophy where all issues are starkly contrasted in black and white and all moral choices – and consequently all people – are either classed as good or evil, is quite remarkable and significantly worrying. The unwillingness of the American government – and of a very significant portion of its population – to engage in informed debates over the complex issues surrounding the emergence of terrorism, simply defining it as an evil instead, has already resulted in two wars in the short space of four years.
Delbanco does provide an insight into the current situation, hinting at the deeply ingrained reasons for this willingness to accept absolute evil as a self-evident fact. He says that ‘Americans have always wanted Satan back’ and quotes Walter Lipman, who at the outset of World War 1 said that ‘that there is a war between good and bad men’ (1995: 229), a quote that could easily be attributed to president George W. Bush today. Kearney concurs, saying that after September 11th ‘war had been declared and everyone, as Bush made plain, had to “take sides”. For the “civilized” or the “barbarians”; for the innocent or the damned; for the courageous or the “cowards”’ (2003:112). When the moral clarities of this war become blurred, Delbanco argues, Americans tend to lose their bearings. ‘Sometimes’, he continues, ‘this war is openly declared […] (such as) during the seventeenth-century witch-hunts, when, according to the historian John Demos, to discover the Devil – in a sense both literal and metaphoric (involved) the naming, the locating, the making tangible, of what had hitherto seemed obscure’ (1995: 229). The danger in making evil tangible, Delbanco argues, is what Augustine described as Manichean heresy. ‘among the worst works of the devil’ – he continues quoting Augustine - ‘is his ability to convince human beings that they have found in him the source of all evil, and that this discovery exonerates themselves’ (2002: 229)
At other times, Delbanco argues, this ‘war between good and bad’ remains a covert war […] when it is no longer reputable publicly to demonize outsiders or minorities, even as resentment against them patently grows’ (1995: 229).
This ‘covert war’ against outsiders in America is nowadays becoming less concealed as the demonizing of these minorities is increasingly endorsed by government attitudes and policy. Sardar and Davies comment that ‘as the noted Palestinian writer Edward Said, for many years a resident of New York and teacher at Columbia University, commented in an article for Al Ahram Weekly: ‘I do not know a single Arab or Muslim American who does not now feel that he or she belongs to the enemy camp, and that being in the United States at this moment provides us with an especially unpleasant experience of alienation and widespread, quite specifically targeted hostility. (2002: 49)
