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LOS ANGELES — In her article Evil on Trial: Science, Storytelling, and the Search for Good, journalist Alene Dawson captures a compelling evening of dialogue hosted by the Science & Entertainment Exchange, where Hollywood creatives and scholars gathered to confront one of humanity’s oldest questions: what is evil, and how do we respond to it?
Held at the Los Angeles home of filmmakers Jerry and Janet Zucker, the salon-style event featured philosopher Yujin Nagasawa, who challenged attendees to examine the nature of suffering, injustice, and moral complexity. As Dawson writes, “Creatives are holding up a mirror to society, including themselves, and asking hard questions: What is evil? Who gets labeled evil? And who decides?”
Nagasawa distinguished between moral evil—acts committed by humans—and natural evil, such as disease or disaster. He argued that the problem of evil transcends religious belief, posing existential questions for believers and atheists alike. “There are constantly billions of sentient animals that suffer. And I find it quite overwhelming,” he said, referencing Darwin’s own struggle with nature’s cruelty.
Drawing on Buddhist philosophy and medieval Japanese texts, Nagasawa outlined four responses to suffering: reclusion, hedonism, indifference, and transcendence. Each reflects a different way of coping with impermanence and trauma. “When optimism is shattered, people often experience trauma or PTSD,” he noted.
To sum it up, the event draw a distinction between good, evil and individual/ group perception and perspective, it seeks to examine the divide of what we agree as evil and how we endeavor to fight it and ask the highly important question of whether or not those who think they are on the right side (good side) are actually not fostering that which they are trying to fight, it ultimately asks us to do a deep soul searching.
The evening emphasized the role of storytelling and collective reflection in navigating moral uncertainty. As Dawson recounts, Jerry Zucker closed the event by affirming the Exchange’s mission: “To foster dialogue. To bring people from different points of view together. To tell stories together.”
This article is excerpted from Evil on Trial: Science, Storytelling, and the Search for Good by Alene Dawson, published by Templeton Ideas.
