There can be little doubt that the need to know is one of man's most influential virtues. It has driven him to harness fire, fashion weapons, cultivate the land and found civilizations. But as much as this desire to understand has spurred humanity onto new heights and new achievements, its benefits are not enjoyed without costs. After all, the same need to know that ignites curiosity also drives man to find answers to more troublesome questions. Why do good people die young? Why are the righteous defeated by the ignorant? Why are we here? Unsurprisingly, answers to these philosophical queries have not been forthcoming, prompting man to sketch out his own explanations.
Evil. There is evil at work in the world, an evil that strengthens the arms of the ignorant, an evil that causes the good to die young. Evil accounts for all the inequities, all the unfairness. Evil is what infects the hearts and minds and turns them to wicked purposes.
This narrative is as old as human culture, but now, thanks to the rigors of modern science, evil, like so many other boogyman before it, is yielding. It is being brought under the inquisitive light of reason, forced to identify itself as man's inability to empathize with his fellows. After all, if man has no empathy for his neighbors, he cannot imagine the pain of harming them. And if he cannot imagine the pain of harming them, then there is nothing to stop him from harming them. And if there's nothing to stop him from harming them, then he will harm them, and for no reason anyone else can see. This, to his fellows, is evil, violence made inexplicable by an inability to imagine life without empathy. This is, at least, Mr. Baron-Cohen's premise and he argues it logically and effectively.
The Science of Evil is a swift and systematic attempt to classify and understand those among us who lack empathy. After laying out the numerous regions of the brain responsible for empathy, Mr. Baron-Cohen, a professor of Developmental Psychopathology at the University of Cambridge, transitions from a scientific explanation of empathy -- feeling discomfort at another's pain -- into an attempt to classify those devoid of empathy.
To this end, Mr. Baron-Cohen's research leads him to divide our subjects into two major groups, Zero Positives and Zero Negatives. The zero represents the amount of empathy the subject displays while the designation of Positive or Negative denotes the bent of the subject's personality. For instance, a Zero Positive might be a harmless Autistic, someone with a mind beset by the beauty and the safety of the world's mathematical constructs. Zero Negative, meanwhile, could be any of a number of antisocial personality types ranging from the psychopathic (P), to the narcissistic (N), to the borderline (B). Such personalities are capable of great harm, ruthlessly deploying weapons of violence and manipulation in order to mercilessly achieve their own ends.
Though brief, The Science of Evil is a fascinating and educational examination of Zero-Empathy personalities and the harm they are capable of. But unlike the prior generations of so-called experts who would have dismissed these humans as misfits, Mr. Baron-Cohen has shed some light on how Zero Empathy comes about and how it can be avoided. In doing so, he does not only enlighten his readers on the role empathy plays in gluing together human society, he helps us to understand that there is no such thing as evil; there is merely that which we do not understand. To call this evil is to allow ourselves to shelter in our prejudices, to dismiss the unknown as unworthy of our exploration. Such narrowmindedness only begets ignorance and that we must not accept. (3/5 Stars)
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