Climbing down from the train, it seemed I had dropped into a Christmas card, a charming village where snow draped the surrounding mountains and still speckled the crisp air with soft white flakes. I had traveled to Salzburg, to attend the 7th Global Conference on Evil and Human Wickedness. Salzburg, swathed in its snowy whiteness, once the site of the movie “Sound of Music,” seemed an incongruous site for a conference on such a dark topic. In the ensuing days, the conference delegates explored pedophilia, cannibalism, genocide, collateral damage of war, suicide circles in Japan, linguistic constructions of wickedness. Hitler-era propaganda, justice paradigms of indigenous peoples such as the Navajo, and many other topics (see http://www.wickedness.net).
In contrast to conferences in which one is inundated with Power Point slides, no slides were permitted. In keeping with European tradition, all of us read our papers. Readings were followed by thoughtful and respectful debate, which spilled over into the coffee breaks and communal meals. Delegates pondered questions such as: What is evil? Is it a perceptual construct? Does any theory adequately explain it? What conditions (for example, secrecy) facilitate it? What (if anything) ameliorates it? Is there an erosion of morals and humanism? If I agree that there is, what is my responsibility?
In contrast to the majority of meetings that fill my calendar, where I hobnob with my North American psychiatric nursing comrades year after year, in the Salzburg conference I rubbed new shoulders, with professors of philosophy, English, communication, sociology, anthropology, law, religious studies, and film studies. Their perspectives stimulated, enlightened, and provoked responses. Perhaps because I was so acutely sensitized to evil, even when I took time away from the paper sessions to tour the city of Salzburg, manifestations of evil abounded. Touring the city's fortress, I saw an extensive collection of medieval torture devices, along with murals graphically depicting their application to piteous victims. Readily apparent in the historical artifacts and records of the city were egregious evils perpetrated by both church and state, such as the persecution of Jews in the 15th century and Protestants in the 18th century.
After departing Salzburg, strong images from the conference presentations linger. I cannot forget the clip from a Japanese film in which school children joined hands and leapt to their deaths en masse, in front of a train. I cannot forget the statistics on the massive carnage of war (86 million people killed between 1900 and 1986, and the tally mounts daily). Violence, hatred, terrorism, destruction, depravity, wickedness, evil. Humans have been trying to explain and understand them for millennia. Are we coming closer to that understanding or losing ground? Your thoughts?