Evil is as evil does, my Granny used to say

TV spoof spy, Maxwell Smart of the brilliantly satirical series Get Smart back in the 1960s, once said of a KAOS agent he'd been forced to expedite untimely: "If only he had used all his talents for the sake of the forces of niceness."

Maxwell Smart believed in the "forces of niceness". So, blessedly, do many of us, or society would truly collapse into a morass of KAOS chaos, and we'd be the worse for it. Indeed, not only do most of us attempt to do good -- other than maybe raising a little hell once in a while, or making some bad judgment calls -- but we expect our societies and our governments to also be sitting on the side of the angels. But, in so considering such an enlightened society, are we prepared to accept the possibility there is evil in the world? And if so, how do we approach the genuinely evil, if we accept the possibility?

There are those who do not believe there are evil people. They are, in the eyes of their defenders, victims of circumstance, poor nurturing, poverty, sexual exploitation in childhood, lousy potty training, or whatever piece of mitigation professional advocates wish to trot out. Those who would 'attempt to understand' the motivations of a Ted Bundy or Scott Peterson can be found on the bench, on parole boards, in the schools and pounding out newspaper columns. They are those who refuse to accept that some people are 'bad-to-the-bone.' Maybe they're right, but in being right, they are offering scant solace to the families and friends of the victims of the men and women who perpetrate evil acts.

I once conducted an interview with Canadian prisoner's rights activist Claire Culhane. I asked her the pointed question if she believed some people cannot be defended in normal human terms; that some people are just plain evil. She denied such a possibility, and trotted out all the hobbyhorses of bad nurturing, society being at fault, and so forth. So, I cited a name to her. He was an inmate for whom Culhane had run interference. This was a man doing life for murder who seized a female guard, held her for ransom, and then methodically slit her throat -- fatally. Culhane winced at the mention of the name. "Yes," she conceded. "With the exception of him. He was the closest I ever came to true evil."

Throughout human history we have had monsters. Name them. Their numbers are legion. Hitler, Stalin, Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, Pol Pot, and more. We currently are befuddled as to how we must take Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran. Is he a fruitcake and saber rattler, or is he consummately evil? It is, needless to say, an important question in light of contemporary geopolitics. Remember, this is a man who has threatened, indeed predicted genocide against the state of Israel. This is a man who is laboring to render Iran (a state that is, and for years has been, arguably a much greater threat to the well-being of the West than Iraq ever was in Saddam's wildest perverted imaginings) a nuclear power. So, are diatribes against the guy really just so much political posturing, or should we maybe countenance the possibility that, while Hussein may have been a thug, this dude is a genuinely wicked human being in the mold of a Stalin or Hitler?

ultimately it comes down to how we view the world and our fellows. If there is such a thing as good and evil, and it's not all relative, must we accept a role in eliminating evil, and who is to make the decision? Would love your thoughts.