There was a time when you could call something evil and people knew what you meant. They understood that you were not speaking in hyperbole. They understood that evil is one of the central players in the human drama, a thing that will not perish from the earth. Nowadays, to call something evil is to invite scorn and a sniggering assumption of provincialism. To be labelled as “religious” or “spiritual,” words which have of late gained a patina of ironic contempt.

The slow-motion disaster that has been our culture’s embrace of post-modernism, in which no viewpoint enjoys special privilege or validity, has robbed us of the language needed to discuss even the concept of evil, which presumes certain immutable truths. What we do not discuss, we are prone to forget exists. Men who do not believe in evil cannot believe that they (or anyone) serve it. They are perhaps the most likely to do evil.