Merv Griffin has made millions producing the popular game shows “Wheel of Fortune” and “Jeopardy.” He should consider a new offering, “Today’s Demon.” Its contestants would include representatives of different professions, life styles, gender and ethnic backgrounds. Each would tell the audience how his or her willful pursuit of pleasure, power, and prestige led to the immiseration of friends, families, colleagues and other hapless victims. The audience would vote for the most despicable demon, who would win an all-expense-paid trip to Alcatraz.

George Bush’s frequent, almost ritualistic denunciations of “evil men” should encourage us to explore more fully just what evil is. For Bush, the answer is simple. The business and political worlds have clear standards known or at least easily knowable to all. A few men and women still choose to violate those standards. The vicious and deadly attacks on the United States are an example of the work of such evil men, who control and orchestrate a worldwide axis of evil. Domestically, workers and investors have suffered needlessly because a few extraordinarily evil corporate heads have shamelessly ripped off their fellow citizens.

Historically, the American right regards the private market as the perfect synthesis of order and freedom. Many liberals and progressives have highlighted the damage often inflicted by many market winners. These contrasting views are reflected in and help sustain particular patterns of demonization. Republicans target foreign left or pseudo left despots (Castro, Hussein, Gadhafi) and such domestic suspects as unwed welfare mothers. Democrats zero in on corporate CEOs, accountants, and lobbyists. Today, both parties often adopt each other’s villains, with Republicans now eager to show they are tough on corporate crime and Democrats eager to attack Saddam. Yet both parties seldom ask just why demons get out of hand when they do or just how many of us often share at least some of the traits we love to vilify.

Surely there are some standards of civilized life regarding honesty and respect for others that most would acknowledge. In any society a few individuals would commit crimes of avarice or passion that must be punished. Nonetheless, such a view of evil does little to elucidate the vast forms of suffering and poverty so prevalent in the modern world.

Reinhold Niebuhr, one of the mid twentieth century’s most respected Protestant theologians, once suggested that conventional moralists exaggerate the degree of sin in specific evil act even as they understate the sin in the widespread human tendency to assume one’s own culture fully grasps the difference between good and evil. His views are to be contrasted with those of Cal Thomas, a more articulate advocate of the Bush worldview. Thomas argues that evil springs from the unwillingness of this culture to accept the notion that there is a clear line between good and evil and to adhere to that line. Thomas recently quotes with approval a former Senate chaplain whose words might be taken as the quintessential valedictory on classical conceptions of good and evil: “Abandoning an absolute ethical [and] moral standard leads irresistibly to the absence of ethics and morality.

Each person determines his own ethical/moral code. That’s anarchy. Humans become their own gods and decide, each in his own way, what is good and what is evil. Evil becomes good – good becomes evil. Upside down morality! Good is ridiculed! Evil is dignified!”

The chaplain’s words might be set against some of the great atrocities of the last few centuries, including the massacre of Native Americans, slavery, and the Holocaust. Each was perpetrated by a “civilization” firmly convinced that it abided by a clear and unitary moral code, a code that was not merely theirs but was divinely inspired. Even today, there is nothing in the chaplain’s remarks that Ayatollah Khomeini or Osama bin Laden would reject. Whatever else they may be, most modern terrorists are not ethical relativists.

No social or even personal life is possible without framing at least minimal distinctions between good and evil. But perhaps there might be less suffering on a grand scale if civilizations’ masters and spokespersons were able – or were compelled – to entertain the possibility that any distinction we draw may well reflect not only timeless and necessary requisites of any sociality but also narrow and conventional rationalizations and glorifications of our own petty prejudices and lifestyles.

That having been said, the best ethics are those that strive always to open themselves to critique, to let as many flowers as possible bloom in a social world that may never be fully amenable to our purposes. This suggestion, like Cal Thomas’, is hardly completely proven and may not inspire any game shows. Nonetheless, it surely deserves a hearing amidst all the fashionable talk of good and evil and the willingness to kill and die on behalf of such talk.

John Buell is a political economist who lives in Southwest Harbor. Readers wishing to contact him may e-mail messages to jbuell@acadia.net.