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Saddam Hussein raised atavistic questions about evil. But the West has grown preoccupied by newer forms -- greed, terrorism, drugs, AIDS, crime, child abuse, global pollution, oil spills, acid rain. The fear of nuclear holocaust, which not long ago was the nightmare at the center of the imagination, has receded with amazing speed.
It is touching in this era, and rather strange, that nature, even at its most destructive, has clean hands. Humankind does not. For centuries nature's potential for evil, its overpowering menace, made it an enemy to be subdued. Today, at least in the developed world, nature is the vulnerable innocent. The human is the enemy.
New forms of evil raise new moral questions. Who is to blame for them? Are they natural evils -- that is, acts of God and therefore his responsibility, or acts of the blind universe and therefore no one's? Or are they moral evils, acts that men and women must answer for?
Padrica Caine Hill, former bank teller, Washington mother and wife, dresses her three children one morning, makes breakfast for them, smokes some crack cocaine and lets the kids watch cartoons. Then with a clothesline she strangles eight-year-old Kristine and four-year-old Eric Jr. She tries to strangle two-year-old Jennifer, but leaves the girl still breathing softly on the floor. When the police come, Padrica Hill says she loves her children. Why did she kill them? "I don't know," she answers in apparently genuine bewilderment. "I hadn't planned on it."
Who or what is responsible? The woman herself? She did smoke the crack, but presumably the effect she anticipated was a euphoric high, not the death of her children. The drug arrived like Visigoths in her brain and destroyed the civilization there, including the most powerful of human instincts, her mother love. The crack itself? The dealer who sold the crack? The others in the trade -- kingpins and mules who brought the cocaine up from South America encased in condoms that they had swallowed? The peasants in Colombia who grew the coca plants in the first place?
The widening stain of responsibility for evil on a constricting planet changes moral contexts. Microevil, the murder of an individual child, becomes part of the macroorganism: all the evils breathe the same air, they have the same circulatory system. They pass through the arteries of the world, from the peasant's coca plant in Colombia to the mother's brain in Washington, thence to her fingers and the clothesline that kills the children in the middle of morning cartoons.