In his Oslo speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, President Obama said: "...make no mistake: Evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler's armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda's leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force may sometimes be necessary is not a call to cynicism -- it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason."

     The President's right. Evil exists and war is, however perversely, a necessary evil.

   But even the most "successful" war never offers bulwarks as strong as a culture's taken for granted assumptions. Think of the injunction against incest or the sexual abuse of a child. Obviously violations -evil- occurs every day but, for the vast majority of us,  even the imagined abuse of a child produces instant revulsion.

     Build that kind of prohibition into the brain of a human being and you need neither war nor a police department. People police themselves because cultural beliefs act as an effective and extraordinarily cheap form of social control.

    Enter Dostoyevsky and Durkheim. They both knew evil existed but each reacted to the threat in a very different manner. In novels like Crime and Punishment and The Idiot Dostoyevsky struggled with everything from nihilism to Rashkalnikov's pronouncement that, in the absence of God, "everything is permitted". Even in the best of times, people behaved badly; tragically, atheists and agnostics assured moral chaos . So, whether God did or did not exist, God served a useful purpose because, without the fear of hell, people would lack any form of personal and social control.

      As a boy attending Catholic schools in 1950's Brooklyn I remember nuns who apparently read Dostoyevsky's work. Taking lit matches, they placed them under our fingers to dramatically display the hell that awaited any sinner.

  The "delicious" irony about Dostoyevsky's approach to evil is that, instead of nihilism's triumph,  we live in a world where God is more important than ever. Think of the thriving evangelical movements throughout Latin America or the Saudi funded madrasahs in Pakistan. In 2010 atheists have made way for billions of  true believers; across many religions, hell and its variations are a threat as wide as the reach of the Internet. Yet evil still thrives on each and every continent.

    Fear failed.  Or, as Durkheim suggested, God may help us in the next life; in this one we are on our own. Only people can create the forms of human solidarity that make war an unnecessary way to eliminate evil.

   Durkheim wrote about a world in transition. Whether in the  religious or economic spheres the widespread weakening of  traditional beliefs - i.e., mechanical solidarity-  promised  an anomic, a norm less future. To avoid the anarchy that both he and Dostoyevsky feared, Durkheim ended The Division of Labor of Society with a passionate call to action. He wanted to create a form of organic solidarity because "our first duty at the present time is to fashion a morality for ourselves."

   Durkheim outlined that morality in a marvelous 1898 essay entitled, "Individualism and the Intellectuals". His specific background for the essay was the Dreyfus case; how could France or any society avoid treating a person as hideously as the French system of "justice" treated Alfred Dreyfus? It was a question with only one answer: Embrace the "cult of individualism". Deliberately using religious symbols, Durkheim tried to create a universal sense of social solidarity, a morality that, like a spring sky, always transcended the religious, ethnic, "racial", tribal and class differences that divide societies, not to mention the world.

   Durkheim unequivocally stressed that "individualism never meant a "glorification of the self", an egoism that by definition excludes a warm and compelling concern for the rights of others. Instead, if you became a member of Durkheim's cult, you "glorified the individual in general". With no altars or prayers, you displayed "a sympathy for all that is human, a broader pity for all sufferings, for human miseries, a more ardent need to combat them and mitigate them, a greater thirst for social justice."

     In sociological circles, Durkheim is somehow labeled a conservative. In reality, he is as progressive and idealistic as Marx; but, instead of a labor theory of value, Durkheim roots himself in the provable power of human beings.

    People can fashion a new morality any time they please; indeed, if they are successful they can make the cult of individualism a "social fact". That's a way of thinking that, without violence or war, acts in a coercive fashion. Embedded in the brain, the ardent and admirable thirst for social justice allows no one to endorse, acquiesce, or remain mute in the face of the evil.  It stops before it starts since the "new morality" produces revulsion long before we read about the treatment of Alfred Dreyfus, or, in our time, the water boarding of "unlawful enemy combatants", the wanton slaughter of innocents in Mexico,  or the genocide in Darfur or Rwanda.

     In 2010 individualism is synonymous with human rights. Activists like Durkheim actually succeeded in creating the set of values and principles so clearly displayed  in the United Nations 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. "Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world..." this new morality serves "as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations...."  

      On paper and in principle Durkheim won the day. Th problem, of course, is that we never deeply embedded these beliefs in the brains of enough human beings. For all the beauty of the Universal Declaration or the 1994 Treaty against torture, the distance between ideals and reality is as wide as ever.  

     So, here is an idea for the Noble Committee. The next time the Committee awards its prize select a person who does two things. First, he or she must follow Durkheim and explain, once again, the urgent need for a universal morality. A passionate commitment to human rights is the best way to unite us because it transcends the particularities produced by religious, ethnic or other divisive loyalties. Second, he or she must also offer a way to embed, at the level of incest and child abuse, our "new" commitment to human rights. This is a gargantuan task because, especially with God in the saddle in so many 21st century societies, how do we convince people that man made rules are more important than those of the Bible or the Koran?

   One suggestion is to focus on evil. God is silent in the face of the most terrible atrocities. People speak out; and they do have the power to socially construct whatever world they wish.  Let's give the next prize to someone who empowers our children to take charge of a world where evil produces -as a spectacular social fact-  instant revulsion.

  Idealistic? Utopian? Perhaps. But we do have the power. And the alternative to exercising it is to be modern, to "go online" and read about the biblically evil world in which we now live.