The Sociology of Evil transcript

[Music] we live in an age of extraordinary social and technological advancement Universal human rights unprecedented medical Innovation complex Global interconnections and a whole new digital world have almost literally transformed our experience of the human world we might even be at the Apex of a civilized society but within all of this progress we have been unable to rid ourselves of one historical constant and we still live under its shadow evil still exists and its definition still eludes historians often attempt to catalog evil discover its forms and chart its consequences Emperor Nero Genghis Khan and Elizabeth Bathory are called forth from other times and places Jack the Ripper Breivik and Myra hindley emerged from a more recent past as the library overflows with examples weakling to a diminishing sense of hope the society will be able to learn something from its past perhaps there is Comfort to be found in religion or theology but questions remain how can an omnipotent and omnibenevolent God who has no limit on the ability to compel allow such things does the presence of evil mean that God is cruel is this why bad things happen to good people or does evil have a Divine Purpose which would mean that it is not in fact evil at all [Music] philosophers too ruminate on evil how is it defined is nature evil or is evil in our nature does evil result from free will or a failure of responsibility does evil have to be monstrous or is it a creeping Terror lurking within the mechanisms of society that is seemingly designed to protect it psychiatrists neurobiologists and psychologists similarly seek it out in search for its causes they look for its antecedents in the images of MRI scans and the results of personality tests they interrogated on the therapist's couch they recreate it in complex experiments pathological minds and bodies are identified and categorized extra chromosomes neural structures and chemical imbalances are held Aloft malign surroundings too are considered is nurture purely to blame but no matter how much work is done evil Still Remains so what if we were to seek an understanding of evil that does not rely on the assumption that it is solely located or expressed by the individual as an evil deed sin or vice what if we were to seek an understanding of evil that is not solely played out in myth religion or philosophy what if we were to ask why we need evil what if there were a sociology of evil so the point of sociology is to recognize that individual action and social life don't occur in a vacuum they work in tandem together with and through history therefore the aim of a sociology of evil is to examine specific cases of evil and there are great many within contemporary society and attempt to understand them as a product of the social and historical context that they emerge from this isn't to ask why so-and-so did this or why so-and-so did that it is however to empirically examine how evil is said to exist why it exists in that form and with what consequence what went on in is mine why had he set his hand against his fellow men taken the life of another of a stranger he must have some plan some goal that called for sudden death to anyone who got in his way we're all familiar with the idea of serial killers being evil films the media and popular non-fiction tells us so but how many people realize that the idea of a serial killer being a clear and present danger emerges in 1970s America and out of the FBI's need to legitimate their status as a national agency serial killers have always existed but the FBI deliberately talked up the problem and their own expertise in dealing with it by seeding the national news and media with stories that showed them in an extremely positive light their tactic worked and now they're able to work across state borders with much greater efficiency [Music] a regular feature in so-called top 10 lists of evil women is a female concentration camp guard called Irma grieza but when reading accounts of her crimes of which there are many who stops themselves to ask why we see the face of Irma grieza why not the 12 other guards she was put to death with at Hamlin jail or for that matter why not the other 3500 or so German women and who knows how many men who worked in the camps what does that Collective memory of grieza an apparently beautiful young blonde woman from rural Germany tell us about that deeply ingrained assumptions of gender and violence what does the fact that we keep reproducing the story tell us about our expectations of women then and now so when we look at narratives of extreme deviants we also need to ask the question deviant to what and we can't afford to be uncritical of the assumptions that lie hidden within those narratives to paraphrase the sociologist Jeffrey Alexander only by asking these difficult questions only by facing evil head-on interrogating applications of the term and perhaps even seeking it out where it's absent might we establish the fundamental reality of evil [Music]