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The first question to be asked, of course, is this: Does evil exist? I know a man who thinks it does not. I know another man who spent a year of his childhood in Auschwitz. I would like to have the two of them talk together for an afternoon, and see which one comes away persuaded by the other.
The man who does not believe in the existence of evil knows all about the horrors of the world. He knows that humanity is often vicious, violent, corrupt, atrocious. And that nature's cruelties and caprices are beyond rational accounting: Bangladesh does not deserve the curse that seems to hover over it. But the man thinks that to describe all that as evil gives evil too much power, too much status, that it confers on what is merely rotten and tragic the prestige of the absolute. You must not allow lower instincts and mere calamities to get dressed up as a big idea and come to the table with their betters and smoke cigars. Keep the metaphysics manageable: much of what passes for evil (life in Beirut, for example) may be just a nightmare of accidents. Or sheer stupidity, that sovereign, unacknowledged force in the universe.
The man's deeper, unstated thought is that acknowledging evil implies that Satan is coequal with God. Better not to open that door. It leads into the old Manichaean heresy: the world as battleground between the divine and the diabolical, the outcome very much in doubt: "La prima luce," Dante's light of creation, the brilliant ignition of God, against the satanic negation, the candle snuffer. Those uncomfortable with the idea of evil mean this: You don't say that the shadow has the same stature as the light. If you speak of the Dark Lord, of the "dark side of Sinai," do you foolishly empower darkness?
Or, for that matter (as an atheist or agnostic would have it), do such terms heedlessly empower the idea of God? God, after all, does not enjoy universal diplomatic recognition.
Is it possible that evil is a problem that is more intelligently addressed outside the religious context of God and Satan? Perhaps. For some, that takes the drama out of the discussion and dims it down to a paler shade of Unitarianism. Evil, in whatever intellectual framework, is by definition a monster. It has a strange coercive force: a temptation, a mystery, a horrible charm. Shakespeare understood that perfectly when he created Iago in his secular and motiveless malignity.
In 1939, as World War II began, Albert Camus wrote in his notebook: "The reign of beasts has begun." In the past year or two, the reign of beasts seemed to end, in some places anyway: brilliant days, miraculous remissions. But as Jung thought, different people inhabit different centuries. There are many centuries still loose in the world today, banging against one another. The war in the gulf was in part a collision of different centuries and the cultural assumptions that those centuries carry with them. Camus's beasts are still wandering around in the desert and in the sometimes fierce nationalisms reawakening in the Soviet Union. They are alive and vicious in blood feuds from Northern Ireland to Sri Lanka.