Episode #3035
She Calls It Evil: Susan Neiman on Germany, Capitalism & the Banality of Trump
“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,” and Neiman refuses to reduce it to a sentence — as, she notes, Kant refused before her. It is not a theological concept (the Bible itself shows moral concepts precede theological ones); it is the point at which the gap between the world as it is and as it ought to be becomes so large “that we don’t know how to live in a world where that abyss opens up.” Children spot the gap first, though they call it unfair: the bully in the sandbox is the first lesson in a world that contains injustice. Her real argument is strategic. We have become afraid of moral concepts because we cannot give necessary and sufficient conditions for them — and the cost of that squeamishness is that the word passes to the polemical and the demonizing. Andrew pressed her twice on the dodge; her answer, eventually, was sharp: she is not unwilling to use the word, she is simply more interested in analyzing it than defining it — which is why she has called both the 9/11 attacks and the Bush administration’s response evil, two entirely different kinds, and why any single definition covering both would let one of them off. • The Falsified Adam Smith. The book’s core, and its surprise: a moral philosopher writing about economics. The major source of evil in our time, Neiman argues, is the ideology derived from a bad and simplistic reading of Adam Smith — that we are driven by self-interest and nothing else matters — a reading she calls not a simplification but a falsification, touted by Milton Friedman and still pumped out daily by the Heritage Foundation and the Hoover Institution. Reinforcing it: evolutionary psychologists misreading Darwin, explaining that altruism is a puzzle and that we know how hunter-gatherers thought two hundred thousand years ago (we know almost nothing). Is capitalism evil, Andrew asked — the question she never quite answers in print. “Oh, I do, actually,” she said, and reached for Einstein, a committed socialist who said so all his life. Her favorite Thatcher line isn’t “there is no alternative” but the quieter one: economics is the method, the object is to change the soul. That, she says, is exactly what has happened — and when someone tells you at dinner that human nature is just that way, they are making a philosophical claim without knowing it. • Not a Book About Trump. Andrew put it to her that Call It Evil is barely about Trump, and got a flat correction when he pushed further: “I really think you’re twisting my arguments.” No, she does not say we are all evil. The point of the book is not to count his sins — for that, read Haberman and Swan, “a sickening” but excellent reminder of flooding the zone — but to ask how even half the country accepted him a second time, knowing everything. Trump is the reductio ad absurdum of the ideology: unabashed, unashamed self-advantage in the most powerful job on earth, “a way of giving permission” for everyone else to behave the same way. Against that: the woman helping a stranger with a baby carriage on the subway stairs, and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, who died protecting a neighbor’s rights. We know not everyone is evil because we all have such moments. And the 9/11 quotation Andrew found most revealing of all — Trump noting that his building was now the tallest in New York. • Socialism Needs More Kant. The alternative tradition, and the hour’s intellectual heart. Neiman is a Kantian — the human condition as the struggle between the world as it is and as it ought to be, with an innate sense of justice we are born capable of but not guaranteed. Against Kant she sets Hume (custom, habit, emotion: fine for ordinary life, useless when a society is built on slavery or colonialism and someone wants to challenge it) and, behind him, the Nietzscheans. Her hero is Eduard Bernstein, the German social democrat who said socialism needs more Kant, an early champion of women’s and gay rights, in London during Wilde’s trial, who voted against the First World War. What Bernstein saw in Marx is what she rejects: that ideas are superstructure, “the foam on the beer,” while economics is the drink underneath. Her contemporary proof is Zohran Mamdani, whose win everyone credited to affordability — halal sandwiches, daycare — but who always framed it as justice: it is unjust that the teachers, nurses, taxi drivers and sanitation workers who keep New York running cannot afford to live in it. And Rawls, her teacher, was moving toward a Kantian democratic socialism before the strokes. • How Ordinary People Behave. On Gaza she is unequivocal — yes, genocide, following Omer Bartov’s careful reversal and the Israeli human rights organizations, though she notes the gap between genocide and crime against humanity is not gigantic. What drives the global outrage, in her reading, is not antisemitism (millions of Jews are outraged too) but the use of the twentieth century’s one moral consensus — that the Holocaust was evil — to justify another crime: “the use of one evil to justify another is something that’s morally obscene.” Truman’s bomb: evil, and not only for the dead but as the opening salvo of a Cold War we are still paying for. On Arendt: the banality thesis is right — we are endangered less by sadists than by the thoughtle...
