Perspectives on Evil and Human Wickedness 5

Session 12b: The Origins and Projection of Evils
Chair: Dianne George

Soon out of the Mouths of Babes: Verbal Abuse in the Nursery
Michelle Rennert
Clinical social worker at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey, and the Newark Public Schools, USA

"You're greedy," "Shut Up!"
These are remarks often heard in nurseries as new mothers bottle-feed their infants, oblivious to the startled and agitated reaction of the baby and others in proximity. The damaging effects of these words on children during their formative years is incalculably great. As their responses are internalized, feelings of helplessness and frustration often grow into anger. The acts that follow upon these feeling are often so destructive as to blind us to their origin.
Frequently overlooked in theoretical discussion is the practical reality of what takes place literally in the first 24 hours of life in a hospital nursery. We need only to recall St. Augustine's depiction of a baby's cries--sinful and greedy in the revenge it takes on adults for not catering to its needs--to see the extent to which theory may serve as a distorting lens. Here the social worker and neonatologist can offer a penetrating glimpse into the way in which social and moral insensibility is forged.
The infant is born a virtual "tabula rasa," upon which an "essay" of introduction to the world is written. In time, it takes its place in that narrative, fully formed. The individual becomes part of a group that impacts society, ultimately impacting the individual once again. It is a circle of life. It can also be a vicious one.
"The evil men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones." No place else are the truth and the pathology of these words more significant than in the mother's pronouncement.
The proposed paper draws on anecdotal and psycho-social research in examining the above.

The Evil Experiment: Masculine Science in Arthur Machen’s Fiction
Amanda Mordavsky
Department of English Literature, University of Sheffield, Sheffield UK

Throughout the early fiction of Arthur Machen, the theme of the decadent scientist repeatedly appears, posing a threat to the innocents of the stories. Although these male scientists believe their experimentation is for the good of either the subject or society, their meddling continually ends with the corruption or destruction of the innocents. In ‘The Great God Pan' and ‘The Inmost Light' (both published in 1894), Machen places a male misogynist in contrast to a helpless female. This juxtaposition coincides with fin de siècle fears of degeneration, as well as misgivings over the rise of the New Woman.
In both stories, the creation of a female monster comes from the hands of the male scientists themselves, both of which are in positions of power over the women. In ‘The Great God Pan,' the subject is the legal ward of the scientist; in ‘The Inmost Light,' it is the wife of the scientist. However, neither male assumes responsibility for their creations, and instead a third male must be brought in not only to unravel the mystery but to also end the experiment. Moreover, the secondary characters continually place blame on the ‘evil' female subjects for driving men insane. This redirected blame demonstrates the period fear of the sexualized female, as evident in both works, but most prominent in ‘The Great God Pan.' This fear demonstrates a societal apprehension of the period, one that would later inspire the writings of Sigmund Freud to include the vagina dentata myth.
This paper intends to explore fin de siècle British culture through these Machen works. As a reflection of the period, both culturally and scientifically, Machen exhibits male fears as projected on female subjects, thus addressing the aforementioned concerns with degeneration and female sexuality. However, while Machen's characters redirect blame onto the female subjects and subsequently rely on a male to rectify the situation, Machen avoids such condemnation of women and instead allows for a debatable reading of his own position on female and male evil.

The Sleeplessness of Vigilance: An Introduction to the Concept of Political Insomnia
Benjamin Lozano
Institute for Radical Theory, University of California Santa Cruz, USA

The liberal Enlightenment project speaks in the language of “awakenings”, often thought of as a definitive break from the “mind-forged-manacles” of the myths and superstitions of tradition, of coming-to-enlightenment. Contemporary expressions of it emphasize the maintenance of a hyper-vigilant political disposition in order to preempt the recurrence of the evils of the past. But what happens when one is chronically awake?
We argue here that insofar as the “awakening” or coming-to-awareness of one's history and context is premised on the necessity of maintaining a hyper-vigilant political disposition, far from arriving at the expected outcome articulated by its proponents, on the contrary, insomnia and its subsequent degenerative psychic correlatives (i.e. a general loss of reality, memory, and identity, etc.) is the result.
And so, one inquires, what would it look like to begin to think about insomnia politically? Of course one need not seek far for the ideological counterpart to the phenomenon of chronic insomnia: our liberal-democratic human rights culture and recent war on terror provide the most profound attempt at incessant vigilance that takes on insomniac-like features.
Constitutionally, theories of transitional justice, liberal cosmopolitanism, political philosopher Judith Shklar's liberalism of fear, and now a post 9/11 world all share a common maxim -the identical theme running throughout their logic requires a staid vigilance, the incessant sleeplessness of a night-watchman, ever-prepared and distrustful of the future, fearful of the evils of the past. For transitional justice, this theme is expressed in an emphasis on preventing the recurrence of past (non-liberal) evils; for cosmopolitanism, in remembering to forget one's cultural particularity and (national) identity; for Shklar this manifests in the fear of fear itself; and now, America's “war on terror” provides the fullest expression of the long-term effects of chronic vigilance. It is this common theme –of the necessity of a fear-requiring-vigilance - that runs through the liberal political disposition. And it is the psychic origins of this theme that requires explanation. This essay is devoted to articulating the general theme of these features, as they are expressed in the literature of the liberal-democratic human rights project, as well as the psychic roots of this hyper-vigilant political disposition.