Black Lamb

August 2012 in Black Lamb

Volume 10, Number 8 — August 2011

August 1st, 2012

In The eyes have it, Ed Goldberg begins this issue of Black Lamb by telling us how to recognize true evil. Lorentz Lossius continues his lyrical diary of a 2004 trip to Turkey. Elizabeth Fournier tells how she keeps her meadow clear in Lawn, goat, sheep.

In Swift Boats, Part 1: Kingfisher, Toby Tompkins recalls an exciting speedboat ride near Cape Cod. John M. Daniel tells a not so unusual story in Ménage à trois. In the seventh part of a continuing series, Dan Peterson writes about Chile during the presidency of Salvador Allende. M.A. Orthofer reviews Lloyd Jones’s novel Mr Pip in Dickens in Melanesia. In Grim occupation, Brad Bigelow reviews Invasion, by French-Belgian writer Maxence Van der Meersch.

We welcome English novelist William Cooper, Australian prize-winner Tim Winton, and New Yorker editor William Maxwell into our coterie of Honorary Black Lambs. Millicent Marshall comments on a timely topic in Olympic blues. And Professor Avram Khan gives us another of his challenging word puzzles. •

Posted by: The Editors
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The eyes have it

Some thoughts on the nature of evil & how to recognize it

August 1st, 2012

BY ED GOLDBERG

Evil is easy, and has infinite forms.
— Blaise Pascal

I have been ruminating on Evil. The first thing I realized is that I wasn’t even sure what it meant. It wouldn’t be in the religious sense, because those definitions are narrow and self-serving: masturbation and extra-marital sex are evil, but slaughtering heretics, i.e., anyone whose idea of god is different from yours, isn’t?

I asked a friend who teaches philosophy, and she told me that philosophers don’t like to deal with fuzzy concepts like “evil,” for which no objective definition can be found. So I went to the Oxford English Dictionary, one of the shining beacons of my faith. The first definition: Bad in a positive sense. Delicious, and unimprovable, although I’m not sure what it means.

I was disappointed to find that Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary does not define the word.

I also knew that the similarity between evil and devil is simply a coincidence of spelling. There is no etymological connection. The devil will be absent from this discussion. I think.

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Posted by: The Editors
Category: Goldberg | Link to this Entry