“If we leave words like evil in the hands of people who are fanatical, who are demonizing, we are leaving the most powerful weapons we have in the hands of people who don’t know how to use them.” — Susan Neiman
Susan Neiman is cornering the market in books about evil. First there was her 2002 Evil in Modern Thought, an alternative history of philosophy. Then Learning from the Germans, her 2019 treatise about race and the memory of evil. And now Call It Evil, an attempt to understand the Trump era which offers an alternative history of contemporary economics.
So what, exactly, is “evil”? Rather than defining what she describes as our most “explosive” word, she gracefully dances around it with all the elliptical subtlety of a clever philosopher. In spite of its Trumpian subtitle (“Understanding the Trump Era”), the book isn’t an inventory of Trump’s crimes. Instead, it investigates why half of America accepted a man whose (evil?) character was already blatantly self-evident.
Her answer focuses on economics rather than politics. The major source of evil in our age, she argues, is an ideology built on a falsified Adam Smith — self-interest as the whole of human nature — propped up by evolutionary psychologists misreading Darwin, and sold so effectively that we now mistake it for common sense. In a word: neo-liberalism. The (a)moral universe of the Heritage Foundation, Milton Friedman and Margaret “there is no alternative” Thatcher.
So is capitalism evil? Yes, the philosopher suggests, quoting Einstein and borrowing from contemporary economists like Amartya Sen. But rather than a return to Marx, she wants us to reimagine the 19th century Kantian socialist, Eduard Bernstein, in the context of the injustices of contemporary capitalism. Rather than evil, Neiman really is a philosopher of the good. She wants us to imagine that gap between the way the world is and the way it ought to be. Doing good means standing up to evil, she says. Like Henry Fonda’s performance as the morally defiant juror in the 1957 movie Twelve Angry Men.
Five Takeaways
• Why She Won’t Define It. Evil is “the most explosive word we have” — the gap between how the world is and how it ought to be. Abandon it to the fanatics and they get our sharpest weapon.
• The Falsified Adam Smith. The major source of evil in our time: an ideology built on misreading Smith and Darwin. Is capitalism evil? “Oh, I do, actually” — quoting Einstein.
• Not a Book About Trump. Not an inventory of his crimes but an answer to how half of America accepted him twice. Trump as the reductio ad absurdum of an idea we now call common sense.
• Socialism Needs More Kant. Bernstein’s heresy, against Marx’s “foam on the beer” — and Mamdani as proof: affordability framed not as money in your pocket but as justice.
• How Ordinary People Behave. Gaza, Truman’s bomb, Arendt’s banality and the Argentina tapes — and the prescription: tell the truth in private. She rewatched Twelve Angry Men the night before.
About Keen On America
Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen.
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Buy Call It Evil: wwnorton.com
Chapters:
00:00:31 Introduction: looking at Trump’s America from Germany
00:02:12 Why distance helps — and why Berlin makes evil unavoidable
00:04:07 Partly repudiating Learning from the Germans
00:04:57 What does evil mean? Why definitions fail
00:06:17 The gap between is and ought — and why children see it first
00:08:27 That’s not fair: the bully in the sandbox
00:11:00 Whose title is Call It Evil?
00:11:14 Kant: born with a capacity for morality
00:13:25 The opposites: Hume, Nietzsche, and the limits of custom
00:15:20 Adam Smith falsified — Friedman, Heritage, Hoover
00:17:00 Darwin misread: altruism as a problem
00:18:09 Is capitalism evil? Einstein’s answer
00:19:30 Thatcher: economics is the method, the soul is the object
00:20:49 Not an inventory of Trump’s sins
00:23:00 The baby carriage, and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis
00:24:23 Trump as the reductio ad absurdum
00:25:57 Two sides of ourselves, in Kantian terms
00:28:56 Bernstein: socialism needs more Kant
00:31:25 The foam on the beer: what’s wrong with Marx
00:32:30 Mamdani: affordability as justice
00:34:52 Gaza — is it genocide?
00:36:27 Using one evil to justify another
00:38:13 Popular fronts, compromise, and what links left and liberal
00:45:28 Was Truman’s bomb evil?
00:46:21 Rawls and Kantian democratic socialism
00:48:40 Kehlmann’s The Director — how good people capitulate
00:51:46 How ordinary people should behave
00:53:30 Twelve Angry Men
00:59:55 Arendt, Eichmann, and the Argentina tapes
01:04:03 9/11: two different kinds of evil
01:05:22 The AfD in Saxony-Anhalt — too soon to tell?