Think of a serial killer like Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer. One man raped and sexually mutilated dozens (if not hundreds) of women, and left their bodies to rot all across the U.S. - from the Pacific Northwest to Florida. Yet, he was a good looking, well educated member of his community’s local Republican establishment. His exterior façade was certainly banal, but his very actions were the antithesis of that; and even the most rabid Andrea Dworkinite Feminazi could not seriously claim that Bundy was typical of men in his sexual proclivities. Or, take Dahmer. Does one really want to argue that a cannibalistic sex fetishist who stored parts of his victims in his refrigerator was banal, run of the mill, ordinary? Or, better yet, take any well known member of Arendt’s personal evil bete noir. The Third Reich. Again, men like Mengele, Eichmann, Himmler, and on and on, were banal only in their façades, not in their reality. As misanthropic as I may want to sometimes get in my frustrations with the stupidity of the human race, I always take a step back and review Hanlon’s Razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. The corollary to that, though, is that when stupidity is inadequate as an explanation, then evil may suffice. And, mere stupidity cannot explain the evils I described above. Only unmitigated evil, and -- sorry, Hannah! -- evil as that is certainly not banal; at least not in any known definition of the word, for such actions do not go on all the time, and in large numbers. Yes, there may, indeed, be thousands, even millions, of evil acts (large and small) committed by humans, in a given day, but surely a large number of good ones comes close to balancing that, and most certainly (statistically speaking), there are billions, if not trillions of utterly indifferent (i.e., extramoral, or extra-ethical) acts that dwarf the good and bad. In short, that maxim is just one of many that has been repeated so often that its manifest fallacy has been lost in the unthinking weight of its ceaseless repetition.
But Rowlands does dispense with the idea that evil is merely an Academic exercise:
The idea that evil is a medical condition, or the result of social malaise, is ultimately because we have now engineered in ourselves the helplessness we have carefully constructed in others. We are no longer, we think, even worthy subjects of moral evaluation. If we are bad, or we are good, then this is really something else - something that must be explained in other, non-moral, terms; something beyond our control. To explain away our moral status, to excuse our own culpability in the manufacture of evil, this is the ultimate manifestation of that manufacture of evil - the clearest expression imaginable of the weakness that we have assiduously assembled in our own souls. To think of morality as really something else - the weakness is so palpable that only a human could miss it. We are no longer strong enough to live without excuses. We are no longer even strong enough to have the courage of our convictions.
Article comments
1 - Sebastian
"smite the apostate down"
That's the language of the Taliban. It has no place in educated society... not even as a metaphor.
This article was a muddle-headed meander of pseudo-science, and superstitious moralising. The errors of logic and fact are so numerous the article is not worth correcting.
Incidentally, fish have a highly developed sense of touch (including an organ designed specifically for it which we do not share: try to guess what it is) and are perfectly capable of feeling pain. What little research there has been into their intelligence also demonstrates a capacity for learning and memory.
It is an error of Victorian proportions to assume that lack of personal knowledge is equivalent to knowledge of lack.