Evil has a peculiar fascination for everyone, including young students. Lurid and gruesome horror film villains from “Pinhead” to Freddy Krueger parade through endless movie sequels. The horror movie Blair Witch Project, in which three young people encounter an unknown, unseen force of evil in the woods at night, became a huge cult phenomenon in the summer of 1999. Students adopt the "Goth" style dress all in black and often turn for inspiration to the seductive Vampire Lestat in Anne Rice’s novels or they enjoy watching Buffy on TV, with her vampire lover. Witches and the Wiccan religion are very popular among some groups of students. Others like Heavy Metal and related genres like “Death Metal” or “Black Metal." Movies and television shows are full of brutality, murder, and violence. Some social science studies indicate that exposure to these pervasive images can deaden people to an awareness of the pain and suffering of others. These programs and films may even encourage imitations (a theory sometimes invoked to explain the horrific high school shootings in Colorado in the early spring of 1999).
What does it mean that all this evil continues to pile up in the popular imagination, while the atrocities of Kosovo or Rwanda--or cases of child abuse, racial violence, or wife battering closer to home--get short shrift? Was Freud right when, late in his life, he formulated the concept of a human “death instinct”?
Our seminar addressed these questions by considering the nature and perception of evil. We examined evil as it is seen in diverse world religions and by philosophers from Plato to Hobbes, Rousseau, and Nietzsche, along with psychologists like Freud. We read political philosopher C. Fred Alford's recent book What Evil Means to Us (1998, Cornell University Press). And finally, we considered possible responses to evil, including reparations and forgiveness, as embodied in South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Teachers in the "Addressing Evil" seminar will draw on the resources of their particular subject areas to help young students think for themselves about questions about values. The general hope is to use the theme of evil to link literature to history and sometimes also to current events. Teachers will encourage students to work in teams to formulate and defend their own definitions of evil, to write fiction or other narratives about evil, and to study an historical event that involved evil. Students will be challenged to think about what evil is in light of philosophical and religious views, to articulate their own accounts, and to apply these accounts to their own lives and experiences.
Many teachers in our seminar chose to address the allure of evil by working with some of western culture’s most important stories, myths, and accounts of evil, from great authors like Euripides, Shakespeare, Milton, Chinua Achebe, Toni Morrison, and others. One teacher is going back to works of Greek tragedy and history. Several teachers plan to discuss witches, both in history and in literary works such as Macbeth, The Crucible, and The Scarlet Letter. Other teachers will combine history with stories, essays, films, and novels, as they consider the impact of actual human evils like slavery, colonialism, genocide, and the Holocaust. Since evil often features monsters, some teachers will consider horror texts like Frankenstein, along with film versions, to see how they address risks that can come along with our technological domination of nature. One teacher who works with special education students will use films and stories about evil to help her students counter feelings about themselves as defective or even "evil" because of stereotypes of villains as deformed or abnormal-looking.
Alford's book on evil argues that it is something very basic that some people do to eradicate deep fears of non-being of the self. He also points out that the popularity of current horror movie villains is partly due to the diminishing power of our western religious frameworks for addressing evil. Popular movies lack the depth of historical literature in dealing with the complexity and allure of evil. Some other cultures still provide myths with the power to explain and address deep sorts of destruction and non-being. Perhaps by providing a clear and direct framework for exploring evil through the world's best stories and theories, teachers can provide young people with more resources to use as they begin to recognize, reflect upon, respond to, and even resist evil.