Evil is real, and the West is in peril for forgetting that
The little girl is wearing a pretty pink dress and standing beside some flowers. Her name is Raz and she is five years old. She is a hostage taken by Hamas, and this picture is one of the many gut-wrenching images now staring out from posters across the world. Many will see Raz’s photo and weep. Some, however, as we now know from numerous episodes captured on film, see such images and feel rage. Not at her kidnapping, but apparently at this innocent little girl herself.
Crucially, this anger believes itself to be righteous, morally correct. Tearing down posters of abducted children from public spaces is such a childish – yet, simultaneously psychopathic – reaction to Israel’s tragedy. What must go through someone’s head to think that such behaviour can ever be justified? Perhaps the culprits simply can’t confront the real-world impact of their ideology – what “decolonisation” means in practice – so prefer to destroy the evidence. Or maybe they believe Jews aren’t quite the same as other people, and deserve what they get.
Much of the anti-Semitism visible in recent weeks has been of an Islamist variety, imported from abroad; but plenty is home-grown, often nurtured on British campuses. A startling number of the vandals appear to be university students; indeed, the reaction among the educated elites to Hamas’s brutality has been a shocking feature of the last fortnight. Cambridge University Students Union was this week planning to debate the possibility of a “mass uprising… like the First Intifada” to “free the Palestinian people”.
According to a recent survey, a majority of 18-24 year old Americans believe the killing of Israeli civilians “can be justified by the grievances of Palestinians”. Either these findings are an aberration or swathes of an entire generation are prepared to justify terrorism. Though UK polls haven’t recorded such alarming findings, 18-29 year olds are still significantly less likely than older people to report sympathy with the Israelis or to favour public gestures of solidarity. Social media has experienced a surge of old-fashioned anti-Semitism; Rothschild conspiracy theories are all the rage on TikTok.
The failure of too many to identify Hamas’s actions for what they are – pre-modern butchery; an anti-Semitic pogrom – speaks of the dangerous moral relativism of our age. Many like to think that our contemporary ethical setup – anything goes, etc – is a sign of civilisation. But without a firm concept of evil – that which is demonstrably and indisputably morally wrong and wicked – our society steers ever-closer to barbarism.
In part it is a metaphysical failure in the modern West that seeks to put everything into some sort of context or explain it away as part of a “system”. Since younger people have been taught to understand history and the world according to power structures, viewing Israel as a “coloniser” becomes a cover for anti-Semitism. People justify the beheading of infants using relativistic arguments and think themselves “civilised” for doing so.
This helps explain the cosmic absurdity of “Queers for Palestine”, why those who normally scream most loudly about racism now appear the most ambivalent, or why lifelong feminists have nothing to say about the use of rape as a tool of war. The Right weren’t merely stoking a culture war when they warned about the dissemination of ideas like “white privilege”, critical race theory and “decolonisation” in schools and on campuses.
But perhaps another reason such hate has received oxygen is a refusal to talk honestly about what has historically stood in the way of the barbaric. In the face of these horrors, the West appears fragmented, passive, blasé about what it is and what it stands for. In Britain, there is a timidity or embarrassment about defending our values. Indeed, cultural elites flinch from saying what, if anything, is positive about our common inheritance. Perhaps that’s because they know exactly where our values come from and they don’t like it.
You don’t have to be a practising Christian to see that our ethics in the West didn’t emerge from nowhere. In his book Dominion, Tom Holland argues persuasively that what we view as our current secular Western mores – what many historians naively attribute to the Enlightenment alone – are, in fact, deeply-rooted in Christianity. The idea that lives have value, that we bear responsibility for our actions and, perhaps most importantly, that some deeds are intrinsically evil, would be alien to the Greeks or Romans; it owes far more to St Paul.
For the Marxist, by contrast, the individual life is not something to be cherished or valued per se but is merely a cog within the great march of progress. There is nothing in the arc of history to suggest that human rights will inevitably be respected; or that human nature is inherently “good”. Our freedoms are relatively new, and not at all a given. If we are to halt our descent into a society plagued by moral relativism and equivocation then we ought to be more honest about saying where those freedoms came from and, crucially, what threatens them.
