What is evil for me? If challenged to write a definition of evil in less than one hundred words, my first thoughts about this question don’t get me too far. When I think of evil, or “le mal” in French, it is the notions of break (déferlement, as what waves do) and overflow (débordement) that come first to mind. I think of viciousness elevated to such a degree that limits disappear. Could this still be part of the cosmic realities…? But then I immediately wonder how it could happen, because I also know of lesser forms of evil: cruelties that one can teach even to animals—or some of them—as extensions of human ill will, indifference where there should be care, jealousies, hate at the local level, paralyzing bullying, or violent acts of self-defense (stopping at torture, however?), etc. Is evil a kind of wave of long-amassed, hidden failures that eventually breaks and carries everything in its path? Should one think of it in the way that in The sound and the fury Quentin remembers his father saying “that Christ was not crucified: he was worn away by a minute clicking of little wheels?” How does a Cain go from the reasons that he has of seeing himself unfairly treated by the deity to the murder of his brother? Or how does one explain the explosion of violence at the Capitol last January?

My sense is that we are a strange kind of animal that has the capacity to abstract and restructure themselves from and against nature at a much higher degree than other animals—nature here including our past transformations of our environment—. It is this capacity for abstraction—or for leveraging our distance from nature—that makes us equally capable of doing good and evil. So, would evil be this overflow of hidden intentionality that somehow was not revealed until a certain point of accumulation and its explosion in full light? Its converse would be hidden goodness. As the poet Apollinaire said in La jolie rousse: “Nous voulons explorer la bonté contrée énorme où tout se tait” = “We want to explore kindness, enormous region where everything falls quiet.” Apollinaire the wounded soldier of WW I. The drama of good vs evil is a dialectic that swirls around acts of kindness, goodness, self-giving, forgiveness, as the hurricane around its eye. Kindness—the broad giving of everything that limits calculation and expectation of recognition—is at the center of being human or pan-human, or is all that this noosphere may consist of.