Speaking Evil offers no real solution to this problem. While Ophir does think that there ought to be some agreed-upon system of exchange or form of discourse by which the gap may somehow be bridged and injustices measured and made good, he nonetheless is forced to admit that “there is no ‘meta-language’ capable of bridging, once and for all, between competing systems of discourse.”⁴³ The injustice suffered by the other may remain incapable of being addressed, for when the moral actor cannot understand the expressions of the other’s distress, it is unreasonable to expect him to respond properly. Ophir confirms that at times the injustice is “a result of the limitations of discourse”⁴⁴—an evil that, while unnecessary, cannot be demonstrated, since it exceeds the bounds of what can be expressed.

These barriers between the moral actor and the other raise serious doubts about the “rational calculus of waste” as a basis for morality. In the absence of objective data, calculation gives way to conjecture and guesswork—a shaky foundation for what purports to be a firm ethical method that is to offer guidance in genuine dilemmas, in which the subject is forced to decide which course of action will serve the “other” in a better fashion.

As if this were not enough to undermine our faith in a postmodernist “practical wisdom” as a guide for moral decisionmaking, Ophir weakens it further by pointing to a second epistemological barrier facing the moral actor: Not only is he barred from ever fully understanding the other’s distress, he is also unable to grasp the impossibly complex methods of operation of the vast social structure in which he is supposed to act—a giant web in which the moral actor is a fly forever trapped. “In this net, which is at once limited and open to the infinite, there are innumerable (because they cannot be numbered) patterns of behavior that are intertwined and interwoven, which incessantly change and undo the changes, over and over, in order to repeatedly create the impression of their permanence.”⁴⁵ This image of unending dismantling and assembling, of a fabric that is constantly growing and changing, of the expansion, reproduction, and dissemination of the patterns that create evil, owes much to the thought of the French thinkers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, and, specifically, to their description of the social order as a “rhizome”—an anarchic thicket of connections, divisions, and intersections without beginning or end, which grows in all directions at once.⁴⁶

Given the complexity of evil, the aspiration of moral philosophy to serve as a reliable guide begins to look like an empty pretension. Man cannot weigh the ethical possibilities facing him if he lacks the tools to decipher the reality in which he lives; he cannot assess the likelihood that his actions will in fact lead to a reduction of unnecessary evils if the math required for such a calculation is far beyond his abilities. Only one certainty remains: Unnecessary evils, in whatever form, lie in wait at every turn. “We can never know if the deed will not generate more unnecessary evils than those that it is meant to limit or eliminate,” Ophir writes. “There is little doubt that it will create evils that, from someone’s perspective, will be unnecessary.”⁴⁷

Under these conditions, the moral reasoning of whose practicality Ophir has aimed his entire work at convincing us becomes abstract and ephemeral, offering scant hope for anyone actually wishing to put it into practice. When the reasonable person facing a moral dilemma cannot fully understand the “other” whose subjective suffering he is expected to remedy, when he is lacking the basic tools for understanding the world in which his actions are supposed to achieve redress, and when his only certainty is of the evil that he will ineluctably produce, he is sentenced to moral paralysis.


 

The picture becomes darker still, however, when Ophir informs his readers of the awesome, daunting forces with which the moral actor is supposed to contend. In his account, the rule of evil in human reality is almost total; its presence in the world is boundless and all-inclusive. These chilling conclusions, of course, are a predictable outcome of his initial premise: By insisting that only evil is tangible in the world, Ophir chooses a path that necessarily leads to fatalistic pessimism. Inspired by postmodernist political theory, which sees exploitation and repression lurking behind every corner, he ends up finding manifestations of evil everywhere. Although Ophir notes that “in the spaces between the islands of ordered evil” it is possible to discover moments of tranquility, triumph, and elevation, such moments are rare and fleeting. “We have not yet reached the peak of the curve” of accumulated evils in the world, he writes, but the increase of evil appears to be unstoppable; its apex can already be seen on the horizon.⁴⁸

Towards its conclusion, Speaking Evil begins to take on an apocalyptic tone. In the ninth chapter, which addresses “The Present Era,” Ophir explores the daily intensification of evil through the processes of modernization and globalization, and the “tremendous growth in the modern period in the extent, range, frequency, intensity, and diversity of the evils that are created and disseminated through social means.”⁴⁹ What appears to the naive observer as social, political, economic, or technological progress also brings about, sometimes intentionally, further improvement in the means of production of evils, and the increased efficiency of “the social order, which is capable of creating ever more sophisticated patterns for generating evils, and which is in truth incapable of existing without them.”⁵⁰ With the tractor came the tank; with the airliner came the long-range bomber; and with penicillin came nerve gas. “The ‘ascent of man,’” Ophir explains, “is intrinsically bound up with the improvement of the means to impose evil, as well as their penetration into the division of labor and the social order, which have become increasingly complex.”⁵¹ Ophir pins the blame on the capitalist economy and the nation-state, which he considers to be “the two most powerful systems producing and distributing unnecessary evils.”⁵² Above all he finds the functioning of “market forces” to be the highest expression of the patterns of creating and spreading evil. Although he concedes that they also were responsible for “wide-ranging changes in the ability to extend aid and alleviate suffering in all spheres,”⁵³ he nonetheless charges them with causing “the appearance of evils of a magnitude and range previously unknown in history”: The flourishing arms trade, international drug trafficking, the scandalous exploitation of cheap labor in Third World countries, and more.⁵⁴ “The globalization of evil,” he writes, “marches hand in hand with the other processes of globalization: Of the economy, of transportation and communications, of war and tourism, of the balance of fear, of international relations. Poverty, unemployment, disease, environmental pollution, terror, drugs—all of these know no borders.”⁵⁵

This indictment of human civilization reaches its climax in his discussion of the meaning of Auschwitz—the place on earth where evil appeared “in its clearest, purest form.”⁵⁶ Auschwitz, he stresses, “was of this world”;⁵⁷ he rejects—cautiously, it must be noted—the temptation to ascribe to Auschwitz a kind of “sanctity,” to transform it into something “incomparable.”⁵⁸ For Ophir, the Nazi death factories were not a monstrous exception to the human norm, but rather its highest expression: Just as the other catastrophes of postmodernity—nuclear disaster, ecological holocaust, mass terror, aids—are an “immanent part of the way the integrated systems work,”⁵⁹ Auschwitz, too, is the culmination of the “superfluity” of evil which the modern era produces with dizzying speed. This is a development of an argument that is especially popular in postmodernist thought, one that looks at the Holocaust as the quintessence of Western culture and modernity, and of their systematic oppression of the other. “In the apocalypse at Auschwitz,” writes the French philosopher Philippe Laclau-Labarth, “it is no more or less than the essence of the West that is revealed—and that has not ceased since that time to reveal itself.”⁶⁰

Yet Ophir does not content himself with condemnation of the modern West. His indictment spans the entirety of human society, which he sees, by its very nature, as a mechanism of evil. In this sense, the destruction of European Jewry was not a betrayal of mankind, but its full exposure in all its monstrosity: “If Auschwitz is a model,” he writes, “perhaps this is not because it is a symbol of human corruption, but because it symbolizes the realization of the human potential?”⁶¹

Faced with this postmodernist nightmare, it is hard to avoid a sense of futility. A reality so dark, in which evil spreads like an unstoppable plague, offers little hope. Ophir himself admits that this “systematic, almost holistic perception of the production of evil places all the blame on humans, but leaves very little hope for change.”⁶² The entrenchment of evil in the different systems in which our daily lives are intertwined is so complete that there is hardly any point in trying to improve them. Ophir writes that education, for example, “is not a tool for the lessening of evil, but rather a collection of mechanisms for its duplication”;⁶³ generally speaking, the intervention by wealthy countries and international humanitarian organizations to alleviate the suffering of the Third World only augments the mechanisms for the production and spread of evils—since accompanying the diplomatic pressures to improve human rights is always the motivation of economic liberalization and the desire of industrialized nations to penetrate the markets of poverty-stricken countries.⁶⁴