Remarking on the exceptional lucidity of Bertrand Russell’s prose, the philosopher Stuart Hampshire once described clarity of expression as almost a moral imperative:

Whatever his defects, ideological and otherwise, Russell was a straight shooter, stoutly avoiding the obfuscations to which so many intellectuals, then and now, have been prone. The best representatives of the analytic tradition in philosophy have reflected the same exactitude as the school’s founder, the same commitment to stating things forthrightly, without equivocation or evasion. John Kekes is no exception. As much as it might have dismayed the incurably progressive Russell, Kekes has for thirty years marshaled the resources of the analytic tradition in behalf of a robust conservatism, explicating and defending it with singular clarity and rigor.

A complaint frequently raised against analytic philosophy is that it fixates on sub-philosophical arcana to the exclusion of those serious questions, especially about man and his place in the world, that provide the very impetus for the philosophical enterprise. This charge is certainly not without substance—witness the tedious squabblings over technicalities that dominate whole sectors of the philosophical profession. Nevertheless, Kekes proves with each new book that the complaint mistakes an observation about certain philosophers for one about analytic philosophy as such. The titles alone—The Art of Life, Moral Wisdom and Good Lives, The Illusions of Egalitarianism, A Case for Conservatism—testify to Kekes’s readiness to explore humane questions in the analytic idiom. Indeed, his newest book sets into the deepest of waters, attempting nothing less than a systematic account of the nature and causes of evil.

The first half of The Roots of Evil is a sober examination of what Kekes takes to be six paradigmatic cases of “serious, excessive, malevolent, and inexcusable harm”: the Albigensian Crusade, the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, the Nazi death camp at Treblinka, the Manson family murders of the 1960s, the Argentine “dirty war” of the late 1970s, and the wanton exploits recorded by the psychopath John Allen in 1975. Tender souls who blanch at the mere mention of “evil” would do well to meditate on the bloody excesses detailed here and ask themselves what phrasing might be more apt. “Disutility,” perhaps? Kekes’s deadpan prose lacks the sparkle of Russell’s, but it lacks none of its exactness, and his eye for detail brings home the reality of what can only be called evil:

Such stuff jars awake the moral sense, inducing us to make judgments, to take sides—surely a salubrious effect in an era choked by moral indecision. It also provides ample fodder for the anatomy of wickedness the author sketches. Kekes reflects on his six examples to show how wrongdoing can arise from such diverse motivations as faith, ideology, ambition, pride, honor, and boredom. This section repays a careful reading, as the author treats with some subtlety the conditions under which common motives end up wreaking uncommon devastation. For instance, consider the example of acedia, sloth, boredom—that condition of listless disengagement so characteristic of the modern soul. As one hoary formulation puts it,

It has often been observed, ever since Augustine’s famous theft of the pear, that those who endure this self-inflicted malaise often turn to mischief as a self-prescribed cure. It is less well-understood—and Kekes is perceptive to point this out—that what makes the numbness of acedia so disquieting is that it undercuts the individual’s own ability to cope with it: “Resistance or recovery seem hopeless because they depend on the very self that is disintegrating.” This observation goes a long way towards explaining why nihilism does not die easily, and why accommodating it only makes matters worse.

Of course, Kekes also takes some missteps in his survey of atrocities, mostly owing to a shallow understanding of religious faith. To take one conspicuous example, while there is no question that faith has inspired crimes of massive proportions—as have kin and country and every other object of fierce passions—Kekes’s assessment of it as a “permanent threat” to the social order is due to his misguided assumption that faith is essentially antagonistic to reason. It is curious that such a normally conscientious critic should fail to notice that irrationalism is a minority position in the Christian tradition, or that faith itself is a powerful vehicle for the self-examination he considers so crucial to holding evil in check. It is equally curious that he should go on to assert blithely that empirical evidence is unable to point to anything beyond nature, as if verificationism had never been discredited. Like Russell before him, Kekes is at his worst when discussing religion. Fortunately, his remarks about ideology, pride, and other dangerous motives are closer to the mark, and even his mistakes are expressed with admirable clarity.

Kekes shifts gears in the book’s second half, developing a complex account of human depravity aimed at accommodating the insights gleaned in the first half. Much of what is found here will be of greatest interest to the specialist, though the author’s scrupulous avoidance of jargon should make it accessible to any determined reader. Kekes considers explanations offered by such figures as Plato, Augustine, Leibniz, Kant, and Freud, and he concludes that any adequate account of evil must factor in elements from each of the classic theories, such as bad or mixed motives, failed understandings, and social conditions conducive to acting on destructive tendencies. The upshot for Kekes is that the causes of evil are varied, that conditions both internal and external to the individual figure into any explanation of evil, and that the occurrence of evil is, in the last analysis, unmysterious.

The great novelists know better than to try and tell us what lies at the bottom of such misdeeds.

But there’s the rub. It is easy for analytic philosophers to overdo it, to drum up explanations where there are none. Aristotle observed that one should press only as much precision upon a subject as the subject will bear. Likewise, while the quest for understanding aims at dispelling mysteries, we must not eliminate more mystery than our subject will allow. Why does Dostoevsky’s peasant flog his horse so cruelly? What makes Melville’s master-at-arms plot the destruction of the blameless Billy Budd? The great novelists know better than to try and tell us what lies at the bottom of such misdeeds. Careful students of human nature, they explore with extraordinary insight the swirling motives of the heart and the perilous hazards of circumstance. And yet they have no comprehensive theories to propound. Is this not precisely why their treatments of vice are so compelling? After all, our very own motives can defy explanation; our own choices sometimes mystify us. By affirming evil’s existence while denying its irreducibly mysterious character, Kekes falsifies our experience.

The principal value of The Roots of Evil is that the author squarely faces the challenge of evil, a task of no small importance when Islamofascism and much else are testing the mettle of the West. While some obsess over the “root causes” of the appalling things people do to one another, Kekes reminds us that evil actions find their origin in the individual. His book closes with some sensible if currently unfashionable recommendations for coping with evil: attending to its internal conditions by exposing people to the humanities and attending to its external conditions by a firm commitment to punishment. Indeed, the book contains much by way of sturdy good sense, which alone makes it a refreshing alternative to most of what passes for political philosophy, and all of it is expressed with that “extraordinary nakedness of clear assertion” praised by Hampshire. Kekes’s reductionistic impulses and his tin ear for religion do make his account unsatisfactory. Nevertheless, inasmuch as The Roots of Evil prompts the reader to reflect deeply on the challenge of evil, it makes for profitable reading.