COMMENT
Funnily enough, I never taught my daughter how to be unkind. I never instructed her in the art of selfishness or greed or disrespect.
But I'm afraid to say that occasionally she can excel at any of those things.
From her first defiant "no!" it was obvious that the man-is-inherently-good philosophy was
utter bollocks.
Because if no one taught her to be naughty, where did it come from? As most parents come to realise, somehow it is there from the start: the potential to be bad along with the potential to be good.
Fortunately, most of the time, in most people, good wins.
I had a discussion with my daughter recently about what to do if she were lost. If we were at the shops, you could go up to one of the people at the counter, I said.
But what if they aren't nice? she asked.
Most people are good people, I replied. And they are.
An old Chinese analogy talks about two dogs forever fighting in our minds, a good dog and a bad dog, each battling for supremacy. Most people try to give the good dog the upper hand and do the right thing.
But there are some who appear to have surrendered to the bad dog: people who extinguish cigarettes on children's limbs and who rape women in front of their families; people who fly airliners into towers full of office workers; and the people who last week took children hostage and forced them to drink their own urine before blowing them up.
For some reason, "evil" has become an unfashionable word in certain intellectual circles.
In a post-modernist world where truth is apparently a personal thing, we are told that good and evil are merely opinions, that there are no absolute values. And how dare you impose your idea of right and wrong on anyone else?
But in a week top-and-tailed by the Russian hostage nightmare and the anniversary of New York's 9/11, no other word seems appropriate.
George W. is criticised for over-using the E-word.
That may be, but, let's face it, there's a lot of it around.
American author Eleanor Stump said, regarding evil, "we feel it immediately".
We don't have to reason about it or think it over. We are filled with grief and distress, shaken with revulsion. We discern it directly, with pain.
I have thought a lot about the potential for evil this week. And while I don't believe we are born totally good, neither are we born bad. Evil babies don't exist, so what happens? How does a cheeky toddler turn into a rapist or a terrorist?
What happens in the home must have an awful lot to do with it. Evil can take root when there is neglect rather than care and abuse instead of affection.
Mark Stephens, the serial rapist known as the Parnell Panther, spoke out recently about his childhood years of beatings and abuse and being forced to eat dog food.
Extreme belief systems are also to blame, be they based on religionor on ethnicity.
Pascal said men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.
Much harm has been done in religious fervour over the centuries, with Christianity a prime example.
Today, it seems followers of extremist Islamic beliefs are responsible more often than not, at least where terrorism is concerned, to the sorrow of peaceful Muslims worldwide.
They are not alone, however, in teaching hatred and committing atrocities in the name of race or religion - look at Ireland or Rwanda.
But while upbringing and indoctrination can make someone predisposed to evil, giving in to it is still a personal choice.
Mark Stephens was the only one of his siblings to end up in jail and he admits he alone was responsible for the choices he made.
Today, he appears to have done a complete turnaround. Married to a lawyer, with a new baby, he has been out of trouble for more than a decade and does social work in South Auckland.
Does that mean evil can be overcome? Is there some good in everyone? I like to think so.
It is easy to feel afraid and helpless in the face of what happened in the village of Beslan and when, closer to home, farmers are being killed on their own land.
In terms of the threat of terrorism, I'm glad I live in this isolated corner of the world.
But nowhere is safe, and evil in its various forms will continue to flourish unless we discern it and condemn it.
There seems little we can do about it from deep in suburbia, except perhaps to keep on raising our children to make good choices, helping them to let the good dog win; correcting them when they are unkind or greedy and teaching them to respect people of all colours and creeds.
As philosopher Edmund Burke said a couple of hundred years ago, all that is necessary for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing.
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