To define or quantify evil is to try to contain and control it. Yet evil is insidious and shape-shifting. If you think you’re exempt, you’re vulnerable. The lessons of Reserve Police Battalion 101, the Stanford Prison Experiment, and the Milgram experiments—in each, ordinary people, placed under particular social pressures, engaged in actions they might otherwise find reprehensible—suggest that the odds of defying authority and resisting evil are slim.

When did the devil disappear? The image of Satan persists, but mostly as kitsch. The few who believe in him are typically portrayed as unserious, even gauche. The prevailing view holds that progress has vanquished the superstitions of earlier, more fearful, eras. It matters little, apparently, that the twentieth century was the bloodiest in history.

One could accuse the Reformation of diluting Christianity or suggest that the Enlightenment banished the Prince of Darkness. One might blame Copernicus or Nietzsche. Carl Jung speculated on the devil being “the grotesque and sinister side of the unconscious.” Why invoke the devil when man had exceeded him in cruelty? Even Pope Francis reportedly claimed that hell doesn’t exist. Humanity’s ruin is our own.

For Voltaire, the Great Lisbon Earthquake was inconsistent with a just and omnipotent God. That the resulting firestorm was fueled by candles lit for All Saints’ Day added to the celestial nihilism. “The eighteenth century used the word Lisbon,” philosopher Susan Nieman claims, “much as we use the word Auschwitz today.” In other words, God was among the bodies; the devil was superfluous.

But does disappearance equal destruction? “My dear brethren, do not ever forget,” Baudelaire wrote, “that the loveliest trick of the Devil is to persuade you that he doesn’t exist!” A version of the phrase returns in the 1995 neo-noir film The Usual Suspects. The villain Keyser Söze is the zenith of evil, so ruthless that he kills his own family to spite their kidnappers. Söze is a bogeyman for adults, the embodiment of conspiracy with tendrils everywhere. Strip away the horns and pitchfork, and what remains is the thing itself: evil. Whether personified or abstract, it refuses to disappear.

To be agnostic to evil, as some are today, is to exist in rarefied privilege. If you don’t believe in evil, you haven’t lived enough. However medieval, hysterical, or unsophisticated it may seem, stand in Dachau or Cambodia’s S-21 and you will feel it still. “Were a stranger to drop, on a sudden, into this world,” the arch-skeptic David Hume noted, “I would show him, as a specimen of its ills, an hospital full of disease, a prison crowded with malefactors and debtors, a field of battle strowed with carcasses, a fleet foundering in the ocean, a nation languishing under tyranny, famine, or pestilence.”

To define or quantify evil is to try to contain and control it. Yet evil is insidious and shape-shifting. If you think you’re exempt, you’re vulnerable. The lessons of Reserve Police Battalion 101, the Stanford Prison Experiment, and the Milgram experiments—in each, ordinary people, placed under particular social pressures, engaged in actions they might otherwise find reprehensible—suggest that the odds of defying authority and resisting evil are slim.

One of the most significant cultural confrontations with evil occurred during the trial of Adolf Eichmann, where Hannah Arendt observed one of the architects of the Holocaust. Her account challenged the preexisting orthodoxy of evil as a debased form of heroism. Eichmann, she noted, “was not Iago and not Macbeth…Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all.” This was not the deranged baby-bayoneting Boche of the World War I yellow press or the mythic Teutonic Übermensch, in her view, but a diligent functionary. “The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.” Arendt’s phrase “the banality of evil” became so pervasive that it formed a new, unintended orthodoxy. Evil was now dissociative, bureaucratic, institutional. This understanding provided a distance—plausible deniability—that the Nuremberg trials rejected but that nevertheless entered the discourse. Evil, in this view, was structural rather than the result of human decisions—a result of obedience and passivity, not active malice.

It scarcely matters, though, whether genocide is committed with hot or cold blood, warped passion or distorted logic. World War II saw plenty of gothic-level evil, from the Dirlewanger Brigade to the gates of Jasenovac. The Doctors’ Trial revealed how easily the line between rationalized detachment and sadistic cruelty could blur. Arendt was right to highlight the bureaucratization of evil afforded by modernity, but her insight should have been added to, instead of replacing, the existing understanding of evil’s many forms, which history has long demonstrated.

The further we moved from war, though—the most brutal reality check—the more evil disguised itself, and even, like the devil, seemed to vanish. The media have played a central role in this process, through embedded reporting and sanitized coverage, as has the rise of remote-control warfare. All of it abstracts away from suffering. During the mediatized Gulf War, the French thinker Jean Baudrillard spoke of “war stripped of its passions, its phantasms, its finery, its veils, its violence, its images; war stripped bare by its technicians even, and then reclothed by them with all the artifices of electronics.” It is immeasurably more so now. Much of modern warfare involves detaching the perpetrator from the consequences of his actions.

Noir exists in opposition to this. Created in a postwar environment, it remains one of the few places where true evil still gets treated as if it exists. Noir could see that sentimentality was the real cynicism. The last words of SS officer Theodora Binz, the scourge of Ravensbrück, were: “I hope you will not think we are all evil people.” Noir locates the diabolical manifest among and within us, from the individual corruption of The Third Man to the societal degradation of Chinatown.

Many noir/hard-boiled writers had firsthand experience of war or military life. Mickey Spillane was a fighter pilot and William P. McGivern a sergeant. William Lindsay Gresham was a medic in the Spanish Civil War. Auguste Le Breton served in the French Resistance. Gerald Butler wrote Kiss the Blood Off My Hands in bomb shelters during the Blitz. Assigned to observation posts, James M. Cain was lucky to survive being gassed. Dashiel Hammett endured not one but two world wars.

Social psychologist Ronnie Janoff-Bulman’s “shattered assumptions” theory has relevance in this context. Few returnees from the wars could return to prelapsarian innocence; as they came home, many were disgusted by what they saw as a callow society. Some, like the lead character in Dorothy B. Hughes’s In a Lonely Place, brought the violence back to unleash upon innocents. Few could forget what they’d survived and seen. In David Goodis’s Down There (filmed as Shoot the Piano Player), for instance, it’s haunting how thin the ice of civilization really is.

Crucial to noir was its fidelity to life. “I make no conscious effort to be tough, or hard-boiled, or grim,” Cain noted. “I never forget that the average man, from the fields, the streets, the bars, the offices, and even the gutters of his country, has acquired a vividness of speech that goes beyond anything I could invent, and that if I stick to this heritage, this logos of the American countryside, I shall attain a maximum of effectiveness with very little effort.”

That this was still a radical proposition decades later, when Elmore Leonard dared to write how people actually speak, says much about literature and who is allowed to write it. As Raymond Chandler said of Hammett, he took “murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley…He wrote at first (and almost to the end) for people with a sharp, aggressive attitude to life. They were not afraid of the seamy side of things; they lived there. Violence did not dismay them; it was right down their street.”

Charles Bukowski suggested that writers stop writing for a decade and get a job to give them experience, a repository of stories, and a developed worldview. For contemporary literature—filled with the fads of academia and the shallows of autofiction—this was a road largely untaken. Noir writers, by contrast, rarely lost connection with the raw edge of existence.

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