Evil is not a metaphor which can be dispensed with by some rhetorical gimmick. Nor is evil a psychiatric or social condition which can be resolved by the march of progress. Evil is a permanent element in human affairs.
Update: It reminds us of another quote, which we could not find last night when we first posted:
" . . . while times change quickly, people change slowly. Abraham would be astonished at electricity, but not at Ceausescu. Lifestyles in Elizabethan England were very different from ours, but Shakespeare's characters viewed life just as we do."
Jeff Cooper said that in the foreword to The Modern Technique of the Pistol, to establish a similar point: if human civilization could have made evil go away, we would have done it by now. Of course we haven't, and we must still deal with it in our personal lives. Evil must be opposed, and it is opposed most successfully by the intended target or victim of that evil. A society- or state-sponsored third-party interdiction of evil is a distant second best.
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