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Violent images of man's inhumanity to man -- the manifestations of evil as a force in the world. What drives man to commit unspeakable acts of violence. Will we ever understand the nature of evil?
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Tony Jones:
For all recorded history people have struggled to come to terms with
the problem of evil.
Is it something tangible that exists outside of us? Or is it within -- part of our human nature?
Last week it fell to Justice Frank Vincent of the Melbourne Supreme Court to sum up for the wider community just what had driven 29-year-old Leslie Camilleri to abduct, rape and murder two schoolgirls aged 14 and 16.
"Upon the demon within you being let loose," said the judge, "it was not to be controlled until its lust and anger were exhausted."
The demon within you a metaphor to help explain the inexplicable.
Perhaps it's easier to comprehend evil as something outside humanity that can infect and corrupt individuals.
But now science is challenging that age-old notion with evidence that the capacity for evil may be encoded in our DNA -- a biological inheritance from our ancestors, the apes.
So, can we make sense of evil and in doing so can we eliminate it?
In a moment we'll be joined by four leading thinkers on the subject. But first Iris Makler explores our own heart of darkness.
Video Report
By Iris Makler
Iris Makler:
A 12th century Jewish sage saw humans as a combination of the angel
and the animal. Each struggling within us.
Research 800 years later shows that we might be more animal than angel.
Chimps are our closest relative. We share 98 per cent of our DNA with them. And we now know that they too kill their own species.
This startling evidence first came from veteran researcher Jane Goodall, who also documented chimp wars. When one clan separated from the main group with whom they'd lived.
Howard Bloom, Author, The Lucifer Principle:
The dominant group, the group that was larger in size, began to systematically
seek out members of the smaller group.whenever it found one of the members
of that group it would injure it beyond belief. Group A, the dominant group,
had completed an absolute, complete, total extermination of the other group.
Iris Makler:
Until then, extermination was thought to be the preserve of humans.
This century alone we've murdered tens of millions of our own species. Across cultures and continents.
But despite our horror at each event, it's not new. Our ancestor homo sapiens completley killed off his main rival -- Neanderthal man.
So does biology explain our barbarity? Are we hard-wired for evil?
Howard Bloom, Author, The Lucifer Principle:
Yes,.the first creatures we know about, and those are the bacteria
3.5 billion years ago, were making war with each other.
Iris Makler:
But there's new evidence to contradict this -- from a recently discovered
species of chimp, the bonobo.
Unlike chimps, bonobos live in a peaceful society. And don't kill their own.
The difference? Bonobo society is dominated by females and sex is frequent.
Documentary:
Everybody does it with everybody else, males with males, females with
females, adults with young.
Iris Makler:
So perhaps evil is not in our genes -- it just depends who's running
things.
Or maybe, as the church holds it's spiritual. An eternal struggle between two forces.
Father Peter Quinn at Baptism:
Q Are you happy to renounce Satan and all his empty promises?
A: Yes
Iris Makler:
Baby Quinn Berton is being washed of his original sin. So he can be
helped on the path to goodness.
Father Peter Quinn:
Shadow is not a reality, it's an absence of light, a bit like night
is not -- we think it's real and of course we live in it -- but it is the
absence of the sun's light. And in some ways, I think that's what evil
is. We live in it but there's a terrible absence of goodness. We've been
born to find, to seek in our mind and to love and we stumble.
Howard Bloom, Author, The Lucifer Principle:
Every child born is born a devil, every child born is born with Satan
inside of him or her and because we also, we do have that thin skin of
humanity, we're capable of recognising that. The polyps, the chimps, and
the bacteria can't recognise that sometimes they are going to be seized
by something demonic that is built into their biology. We can see it.
Iris Makler:
Every culture has fables and fairy tales aimed at defining good and
evil. Snow White is fairly typical. The wicked queen is all bad, Snow White,
all good.
Matthew Salgo:
Q: Do you like that story?
A: Yes.
Q: Why?
A: Snow White never dies.
Q: And who do you like better: Snow White or the wicked Queen?
A: Snow White.
Q: Why?
A: Because she's good.
Iris Makler:
We're taught to associate goodness with our own group. But events like
the nail bombings in London are a perversion of this natural loyalty. Attacks
on those considered different.
Howard Bloom, Author, The Lucifer Principle:
Most of us like to say the culture next door is the culture that really
has all of these problems, not our culture. If syphilis comes along and
you live in Britain, it's the French disease, if syphilis comes along and
you live in France it's the English disease. No, this is a universally
human disease.
Professor Wayne Hudson, Griffith University:
The problem for our culture at the end of the millenium is that we
don't have any explanation for radical evil at all, our cosmology doesn't
deal with it in any proper way.
Iris Makler:
We may not be certain what is at the heart of darkness, but we do know
what keeps it beating -- obedience.
In 1961, American researcher Stanley Milgram devised an experiment to test obedience to evil orders. Volunteers believed they were administering electric shocks to people they couldn't see.
The results were astonishing: two thirds of the participants were prepared to give lethal shocks to people they heard screaming in pain. Just because they were told to.
Professor Wayne Hudson, Griffith University:
It points to a fundamental fragility in all human beings, it points
to our evolutionary situation also as animals that are moving out of one
set of natural controls into cultural systems that are not so well designed.
And it also warns us I think that there is no guarantee that in certain
circumstances each one of us wouldn't do the most terrible things -- the
historical evidence is that we would.
Marika Weinberger, Australian Jewish Holocaust Survivors Assn:
I don't know. I was too young and therefore I don't know how I'd have
acted if it was up to me. Would I have had the courage, would I have been
brave enough to go and help someone and risk my and my family's life? --
I don't know.
Iris Makler:
Marika Weinberger is a survivor of Auschwitz. The largest of the Nazi
death camps.
Despite losing her parents and 30 members of her extended family in the Holocaust, Marika has never lost her faith in human goodness and decency.
Today, she's pained by the haunting images of refugees fleeing Kosovo.
Marika Weinberger, Australian Jewish Holocaust Survivors Assn:
End of the century, again in Europe, again in this civilised old Europe,
what do we see -- suffering, torture. I'm not comparing it to the Holocaust,
it's a different thing, nonetheless my heart is with those people the children,
the grandparents, the sick people, the helpless and innocent, suffering
again, lying there in the mud of Europe.