Photo by Craig Manners

The eminent theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote about Moral Man and Immoral Society almost a century ago. But what happens when an immoral man leads the United States? And what happens when our society has computers and algorithms questioning whether machines can be moral? In our politically polarized world, we are used to hearing the Evangelical Right use religious language. So we should take notice when public intellectuals like Fintan O’Toole and Susan Neiman use moral language to describe the Trump era. Even Tom Friedman in the New York Times refers to Trump as “morally warped.” And when questions about AI’s overwhelming humanity become questions about morality itself, traditional secular language seems inadequate to describe the AI revolution.

Something is happening. Moral language is appearing in places we might not expect it. It is being used not simply to tell us what is right or wrong, but to describe people, politics, and technologies that are increasingly difficult to comprehend in customary language. Trump’s hosting the upcoming G20 at his private club in Florida, for example, is now described as an “easily understood example of how he has defined deviancy down” instead of a simple news report.

Far beyond deviancy and terms like corrupt, the word evil is being used to describe Trump’s politics. Something is going on when O’Toole and Neiman use moral language, as if secular political language is inadequate to describe Trump and people like Roy Cohn.

O’Toole takes on what he titles “The Devils in America” in a piece on a book about Roy Cohn in the October 8 New York Review of Books. His focus is on Roy Cohn and Cohn’s mentoring of and relationship to Donald Trump. Beyond political commentary, O’Toole writes of “the evil spirit that possesses Donald Trump.” He uses words such as depravity, malevolence, villain, Satan, devil, and darkness in describing Trump/Cohn.

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