Owen Jones doesn’t like the Tories and he explains why. But to the suggestion that they’re evil he registers an objection, all the same. This is the core of it:
Cruel? Certainly. Unforgivable? Beyond doubt. Evil? No. “Evil” is a comforting, but worrying concept. Its connotations are so extreme that, by applying it to someone, you at a stroke strip them of their humanity; you cease in any way to be able to imagine their rationales or thought processes; they simply become a cartoon villain, for whom the ultimate thrill is the inflicting of misery. As soon as you fail to understand your enemy, they have already defeated you. It would be easy to imagine the Tories as a cabal of upper-class sadomasochists, spending their evenings plotting ever more devious ways to hunt children on council estates like rural foxes. But it misses the point.
And Owen goes on to say that most people act on the belief that what they’re doing is right and they rationalize things so as to obscure or othewise marginalize facts which are inconvenient to their view of the world. So it is with the Tories.
That people are subject to the temptation to adjust the world to fit in with their beliefs, rather than modifying their beliefs when necessary to face the facts of the world, is true. But, otherwise, I think there are several points in what Owen says or implies about evil here that are open to question.
First, it isn’t the case that by invoking the concept of evil with reference to some person or group you strip them of their humanity. There are conceptions of evil that make it a sort of inhuman force, but not all notions of evil do this. When Owen says, as he does, ‘Talk of “evil” is best left to theologians’, he denies there is legitimate space for quite secular conceptions of evil, without justifying the move by argument. I can think – and I do – that people can do evil because of some very human impulses.
Second, one can adopt a secular conception of evil without this entailing that you’ve given up on the effort to understand people’s actions in other terms as well. Thus, for example – and these examples are merely illustrative; I’m not proposing them as giving an adequate account of evil – one might think that acts in which individuals take pleasure in the needless suffering of others, or by which they show themselves perfectly indifferent to the suffering of others, are evil acts and that those much given to such acts are evil characters, without wanting to forego attempts to explain how certain policies can be adopted that give some the opportunity to enjoy or disregard the suffering of others. Thus, a political party may adopt policies that cause much suffering without the generality of its membership being evil, but simply because they are mistaken in certain beliefs; yet, at the same time, there could be cruel impulses at work within that ‘constituency’.
Third, to write on this topic as if the left didn’t have its own problems with a history of cruel policies, and people who went along with them, is one-sided at the very least. This history is now rather well known, and nor is it entirely in the past. Owen doesn’t pretend to be ignorant of it; but he also passes over it without mention. I would have thought it was of some relevance to the suggestion he is opposing, according to which a large political party of the centre-right within a democracy one shares with it consists of evil people – whereas we on the left, innocent of any such burden, may freely debate whether its members are indeed fully evil or merely cruel and unforgivable.