In an interview on Evil

Your last book is Nick Reding’s Methland: The Death and Life of An American Small Town.

This is a book which I have just finished reading. I don’t know how much methamphetamine there is in Britain. It’s a drug that in World War II was used by soldiers on both sides of the war in milder doses. It is basically something that keeps you awake and charged up and gives you a high. This book is an account of how it has become a plague of sorts in American farming communities. 

There are many reasons for this: the massive consolidation of the farming industry in the last 30 years, increasing dependence on illegal immigrants from Mexico for things like meat-packing, Mexico being the place where most meth is now produced. The drug has really rotted away towns that were already damaged by unemployment and lower educational levels. 

What is strange is that it has such a different profile from the way that Americans are used to thinking about drugs. Normally drugs are associated with urban communities, primarily African-Americans. The vast majority of meth users are white, it is out in these rural communities and for a long time, unlike other drugs, much of it was produced domestically. It’s an awfully damaging drug which burns people out very quickly and destructively and is highly addictive. It began as a working-class drug to keep people awake but now it is sold in much more potent, pure form for the high rather than the ability to concentrate. 

With these five books we have looked at the many different faces of evil. What fascinates you about evil as a subject? 

As you may be able to tell from my descriptions, it was Out of Eden that got me thinking about it most forcefully. It echoed Stanley Cavell’s point about the avoidance of love as a source of evil, and it made it clear that we really don’t have a coherent way of conceptualising evil in our secular, rationalist culture. And yet we all have an intuition that there is such a category of action, something that exceeds mere bad behaviour or selfishness. Hannah Arendt’s thesis that at the bottom of evil lies banality seems too thin a description of the phenomenon to account for its psychological force. It’s a messier business, more closely tied to everyday life. And to that extent I suppose these books represent more than anything what I’ve been dwelling on lately, perhaps in preparation for what I’ll write next.