Too Much To Dream

Yes. There's a passage in Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon that's apropos:

"He knows that if wants to hurt me, the best thing he could possibly do is take a shot at her."
"Why does he want to hurt you?" Enoch asks.
"Because he's evil."
Enoch looks tremendously impressed.

I'm curious: have you read that whole thing? It's huger and denser than Atlas Shrugged. To think people make fun of Lord of the Rings...

(This comment has been added to for clarity.)

Oooh, you hit my hot button. I'm going to post an article about this.

You know what's even worse than calling him an "asshole?" Saying he's "not a good guy" or "no saint." This, to some people's eyes, seems to be clever or sarcastic. But it isn't, it just makes you sound like an asshole.

Yep, I've read the whole thing, several times in fact. It's one of those books that you get more out of the second (and third) time than you do the first.

I've also read Atlas Shrugged more than once, even though I'm not, in any sense of the word, an objectivist (I also tend to skip that 3,000 page John Galt speech), and I reread LOTR at least a couple of times a year and the Sil at least once per year.

Yes, I am a hopeless geek.

I skip the speeches in Shrugged too.

"Asshole" is what you call someone who calls Saddam merely an asshole rather than an evil tyrant.

And yet, it seems that there are plenty of people willing to call Bush, et al "evil men."

Back when I gave a rat's ass about engaging such folks, I used to ask what they meant by "evil."

Turns out--surprise!--most such folks hadn't a clue, or even a bit of one. Three decades' worth of mushy academic relativism has left many people with crippled minds unable to grasp the idea of a moral absolute, so evil becomes merely a word that fits neatly onto a posterboard sign, entirely stripped of its true, anti-creative depth.

I was tremendously pleased that GWB introduced the concept of evil back into the public discourse. It was needed.

Hopefully, the debate about the meaning of the concept will jar something loose in the heads of those who have been awash in the pseudo-ethical spittle that's been a staple of moral theory at many of our universities for a generation.

Yes, I am a hopeless geek...

Darn it, Nick, I reread all of Stephenson's stuff every year, including the Crypto, and I also read all the Rand books, and LOTR+SIL. But I'm not a hopeless geek.

Really. Really I'm not. Really.

Uh....

Well, I think part of it is the fact that calling someone "evil" lends a sort of diabolical dignity to them... people say "evil" and they picture something cool-ass like Darth Vader or Ming the Merciless. Calling 'em "asshole" is a little more derogatory.

That's what's screwed up about humanity... we don't think of evil as viscerally loathsome.

I'm not sure it's a problem of humanity as a whole, though. I think it's Western Civilization's problem. You go to Rwanda, or any one of a number of Eastern European countries, and there are people there who can tell you what evil is without a lot of high-flown rhetoric or appeals to some code of religious law. Here in the pampered West, though, we've been so comfortably insulated from the world beyond the city gates that all we've got is theory. Many of the theories that have been given the greatest weight by our intellectual class have either eliminated evil altogether, or have attempted to prohibit us from forming judgments about it. Add to that the liberal elite's continual de-valuing of anything that might be construed as even remotely religious, and you've got a moral culture that's almost totally rootless. Hence: reflexively rolled eyes when GWB is so gauche as to talk about evil.