What evil means to us / C. Fred Alford.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Alford, C. Fred.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Good and evil.

Physical Description:

xi, 185 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Ithaca : Cornell University Press, 1997.

Summary:

C. Fred Alford interviewed working people, prisoners, and college students in order to discover how people experience evil -- in themselves, in others, and in the world. What people meant by evil, he found, was a profound, inchoate feeling of dread so overwhelming that they tried to inflict it on others to be rid of it themselves. A leather-jacketed emergency medical technician, for example, one of the many young people for whom vampires are oddly seductive icons of evil, said he would "give anything to be a vampire".

Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, Alford argues that the primary experience of evil is not moral but existential. The problems of evil are complicated by the terror it evokes, a threat to the self so profound it tends to be isolated deep in the mind. Alford suggests an alternative to this bleak vision. The exercise of imagination -- in particular, imagination that takes the form of a shared narrative -- offers an active and practical alternative to the contemporary experience of evil. Our society suffers from a paucity of shared narratives and the creative imagination they inspire.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 163-178) and index.

ISBN:

0801434300

OCLC:

36621819