What is evil?

There is of course the unambiguous sense as characterised by popular media, instanced by mass murderers, rapists, abusers... There is a clear protagonist-antagonist relationship, a good-evil dichotomy. Yet in most cases, evil is enabled by people who do not prevent it when they can. Edmund Burke famously said, "All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing". The intention is clear. It is the responsibility of good people to ACTIVELY circumvent evil deeds. Yet, the majority of people always remain in their starry-eyed passivity, waiting for someone else to fight the noble fight. This does not make them neutral (there is really no such position). No, it did not take a mere fascist dictator to precipitate the Third Reich... It took the majority of Nazi Germany to witness, and some to execute, the deaths of an estimated six million Jews in the Holocaust. The greatest acts of evil that have transpired throughout the sordid course of our blood-soaked history have been accompanied by the unwitting endorsement of weak-willed masses, people who, by letting evil happen, stand alongside it.

This by no means undermines the massive, selfless effort of a passionate minority who give their very best towards making positive changes.

But this post is about those people who choose to avert their eyes from the cruel, the hideous, the violent... By being in the position of being able to help, but choosing to withhold, to merely observe, one has already stepped away from good into evil.

A sterling example would be a recent Chinese television programme Little Nonya that memorably showed the tragic rape of a woman, a plight certainly exacerbated when she saw (whilst being raped) her sister witnessing the act and withholding the help she desperately needed. Same as Amir abandoning his childhood friend Hassan when the latter was being raped by the bully, Assef, in The Kite Runner.

Literature is as real as it reflects reality, and indeed everyone of us are perhaps guilty of sometimes turning a passive eye to people who need. Not just people perhaps. In secondary school, I remember presenting about animal experimentation and its moral implications. I used graphic images of animal abuse during my presentation, which made my classmates squirm. I was made to stop the presentation halfway. Till now, I always felt there was something wrong done, not to me but to the subject matter. Only now in the context, I realise that what happened, the aversion from the evil acts due to disgust, uncomfortable feelings, ignorance, is a form of evil itself.

To say enough, I cannot stand the sight of rabbits with corroded eye sockets from "Draize" testing, of deformed faces of atomic bombing victims from Japan, or faces of countless dead in the Darfur conflict, is to say I do not care enough. Surely, that is morally wrong; we share a common humanity with these victims (even the animals), and it is our moral obligation to do our very best to help when we can.

Of course sometimes, because of political sensitivity, geographical distance, or resource scarcity, we cannot realistically help these people. But, we should at least not avert our eyes from what is happening. Know it, understand it, then feel it, their pain, their loss, their burden, and then be grateful for everything that you have not been denied, if only by the most arbitrary dice-roll of Fate.

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