Published in France in 2006, Jonathan Littell’s novel Les Bienveillantes sold over 700,000 copies and won the Prix Goncourt.

Concerning evil, nothing occurs to me. Evil is simply the privation of good. This was the profound insight of the Church Father St Augustine which in its wisdom would advise feeble spirits to look no further.

The story of the prophet Jonah (Yunus) is briefly sketched out in the Qur’an (37:139-148): Jonah is a messenger on the run, bent on eluding the message, the God who gave it to him, and the duty to deliver it.

Assault rifle in hand, Brenton Tarrant stormed into the Al Noor Mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, on the 15 March 2019. His objective was clear.

As children, whenever I or one of my siblings said in my father’s earshot that we hated someone, he would retort ‘Don’t hate anybody!’ It was a noble but futile injunction.

When asked what he thought the future held in the wake of his invention, Geoffrey Hinton, the ‘Godfather of AI’, and one of the originators of the architecture behind generative AI Chatbots such as GPT4, was blunt: ‘my intuition is: we’re toast. This is the actual end of history’.

Charity, community, duty, and struggle are good – not only sanctified and rewarding but also good in themselves. And yet the evidence is that society at large is losing and devaluing commitment to others: we live in times diagnosed as consisting of social pathologies and a-pathologies – where, curiously, apathy is taken as a variant of, rather than existing in opposition to, pathology.