A recent article by Edward Rothstein in the New York Times discusses the book “Evil Incarnate: Rumors of Demonic Conspiracy and Satanic Abuse in History” by David Frankfurter. Mr. Frankfurter, a professor of religious studies and history at the University of New Hampshire, shows just how similar stories about evil have been over the years. Rothstein distills the essence of Frankfurter's passages on the nature of Evil:
'...the most decisive aspect of the myth {of Evil} is that it is, literally, a myth. Every single example of evil he gives turns out to be evil imagined: there is, he says, no evidence for any of it. Evil, {Frankfurter} argues, is not something real, it is a “discourse,” a “way of representing things and shaping our experience, not some force in itself.”
Evil is always associated with the Other, the outsider, whose mysterious rituals or food practices are not just seen as alien; they become demonic. Finding evil in the Other is a human impulse, reflecting an effort to control “a chaotic world of misfortune, temptation, religious conflict and spiritual ambiguity.” The Other is actually far more human than he seems... Mr. Frankfurter seems to suggest that by calling anyone evil, we are simply tapping into the old imagined archetypes without explaining anything.
Using the term evil, he argues, prevents us from understanding context and cause; it places something beyond the human, and that’s when trouble starts. “The real atrocities of history,” he says, “seem to take place not in the perverse ceremonies of some evil cult but rather in the course of purging such cults from the world. Real evil happens when people speak of evil.” That is when you have purges and pogroms and massacres.'