Banal Face of Evil

This picture appears on the front page of today's London Times.  It is that of Mohammad Sidique Kahn, 30.  Kahn, born in Leeds, is described as an Islamic bookshop owner, husband and father of a 14-month-old daughter.  He also worked as a "learning buddy" to children in a troubled-neighborhood school, helping kids from difficult backgrounds focus on education.

He was one of the four suicide bombers who attacked London on July 7th.

How can this be?

Our everyday understanding of people operates according to principles of generalization, coherence and consistency.  We attribute traits to others based upon our experiences with them and tend to  move quickly from the particular to the general.  A pleasant first encounter with a person becomes a belief that he's a "nice guy,"; the opposite is also true.  Two or three encounters solidifies the impression, despite miniscule situational variability.  We fill in the gaps in our experience with others by attributing clusters of traits consistent with those at the center of our impressions.  This fellow's story would probably lead us to believe him a good husband, good father and kind to his pets.

Comforting as it may be to sort humanity into "good" and "evil" piles, we once again sadly see how unfounded this everyday personality theory can be.  We are more complex creatures than this simplistic sorting can account for.

Pressures in Khan's marriage  forced he and his anti-Taliban wife to separate a few months ago.  Does this piece of data change our impression of him?  Of course.  We now have an operative "theory of the case."  Equally superficial, it is nonetheless equally inevitiable; we must make sense of the world somehow.

When Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols murdered hundreds in Oklahoma City, Americans had to come face-to-face with the realities of the banality of evil in ourselves and our society.  Britain is now forced to do the same.  It is soul-wrenching to have to come to terms with the fact that someone as "kind" and "helpful" as Mohammad Sidique Khan could have calculatingly walked onto a London subway last week and committed an act of atrocity that will never be forgotten. 

It's important that we recognize that acts like this are often carried out by fellow human beings who resemble each of us in more ways that we may comfortable with.