. . . What
is evil anyway?
Is it the impulse only of tyrants? Of enemies alone? Or is it
tied to the personal entitlement onto which America, too, hangs
its bunting? Is evil the thing, perhaps, that forever inclines
human beings to believe that they are themselves untouched by
it? Moral maturity, mellowed across the distance of history,
begins in the acknowledgement that evil, whatever its primal
source, resides, like a virus in its niche, in the human self.
There is no ridding the world of evil for the simple fact that,
shy of history's end, there is no ridding the self of it.
James Carroll
