Henri-Pierre Danloux, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
(Le Baron de Besenval dans son salon de compagnie at the Hôtel de Besenval, by Henri-Pierre Danloux (1791). The baron was a patron in both the arts and sciences.)
My main patron for this website, without whom it couldn’t continue, forwarded a link to a NYT review of a new book releasing next week, Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era.
Here is the Amazon blurb:
“Call It Evil is a bold reckoning with one of the most fraught words in our vocabulary. Far from being a religious or outdated concept, evil is a vital lens, Susan Neiman argues, through which to understand the threats we face today.
Neiman is one of our most important philosophers, and one of the world’s leading thinkers on the nature and question of evil. She opens this sharp, revelatory work with the idea that the reelection of Donald Trump is the outcome not simply of political and economic forces but the erosion of values that have been subject to derision for more than a century. She goes on to show how we have been quietly bombarded from all sides with messages that undermine basic moral principles. Misreadings of Adam Smith and Charles Darwin have led to a view of human nature we now accept as common sense: ideals are for losers, or for politicians who wish to deceive them. Neiman then explores how that ancient view, first formulated by pre-Socratic philosophers, has been steadily promoted by corporate interests and (pseudo) scientists in the modern era. Drawing on history―from European fascism to the moral failures of recent U.S. leaders―she demonstrates how the normalization of evil corrodes trust, destroys justice, and endangers our future.
This is a book for readers who refuse to accept moral confusion as the price of political life, and who believe that confronting evil is the first step toward renewing it.”
A book review is in the NYT, entitled “This Philosopher Thinks It’s Time We Call Out Evil in Our World.” Here are some excerpts:
In “Call It Evil: Understanding the Trump Era,” Neiman argues that widespread misapprehensions about what evil is make people too reluctant to use the word. Despite her willfully provocative title, she categorically states: “This is not a book about Donald Trump.” An American-born moral philosopher now based in Germany, Neiman wrote an incisive history of evil in modern thought in 2002. Her new book is less a philosophical exploration than a polemical guide to the current moment. She believes that people are so attached to understanding evil in terms of individual monstrousness — the gleeful villain, the depraved sadist — that they lose sight of how evil more typically works.
She recalls an interview with a podcast producer who kept asking her about a gruesome case of cannibalism in Florida. Even when she tried to tell him that such incidents distract from evils she considered more common and more dangerous (“making war to stay in power”; cutting aid to lower taxes on the rich), the producer kept returning to the lurid particulars.
Neiman wants readers to think about evil in ways that are less spectacular and more systemic. She cites Hannah Arendt’s concept of “the banality of evil” as especially useful. The fact that Arendt was denounced for it illustrates our stubborn reluctance to see evil as anything but demonic.
Arendt was writing about Adolf Eichmann, one of the Nazi organizers of the Holocaust, and her critics excoriated her for depicting him as a desk-murderer marked by “sheer thoughtlessness.” But Arendt insisted that this didn’t make him any less guilty, or any less evil — quite the opposite. What makes such evil so destructive is that it has no depth, Arendt said: “It can overgrow and lay waste to the world precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the surface.” …
“Call It Evil” has three main parts. “What’s at Stake” argues that our misunderstanding of evil has lulled us into complacency, so that we now take cruelty and corruption for granted. “What Convinced Us” explains how tribalism and an ideology of self-interest undermined our commitments to one another. Market fundamentalism elevated economic rationality over moral reasoning. Brutality and ruthlessness became signs of a politician’s “authenticity.” … Her third section, “Ways Out,” offers prescriptions. …
In conclusion, Neiman quotes Ece Temelkuran, a Turkish journalist who had to leave Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s autocratic Turkey and currently lives in exile. …
Temelkuran suggests how easy it was early on to miss that something insidious was overgrowing and laying waste to her country. Such slow-motion moral decay becomes clear only “after severe damage has been wreaked on the fundamental concept of justice, and once the minimal morality you didn’t know you depended on has been destroyed.”
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Thank you.
It is my understanding that the early Greek and Roman thinkers considered it fundamental to good government for both the citizenry and the leaders to possess virtue.
While the definition of virtue can be somewhat objective, I don’t think any society has ever celebrated extreme wealth concentrated in just a few as virtuous.
Every functional society seems to have certain agreed upon ethos that are universal.
The old “do unto others” seems to be a basic value.
I gather Neiman raises the question: Can a society enjoy sustainable success if it loses sight of the common good?
My personal opinion is no, it cannot.
A centralized, selfish oligarchy will either create a circumstance in which the oppressed revolt, or, where the People as a whole will no longer strive to defend or sustain the status quo with marshal arms or labor. It either crumbles slowly or is consumed in catastrophe. a national malaise of “quiet quitting”.
As I typed this an example came to mind.
The movie “It’s a Wonderful Life”.
Jimmy Stewart and his community of Bedford Falls was the quintessential society where virtue and values were woven into the fabric of life.
The alternate reality of Potterville was an unpleasant place of nastiness and people following their own self interests. A generally miserable, transactional town.
I gather that Ms Nieman’s observation of a society void of virtues/values would be somewhat akin to Potterville.
One addition to the concept of what makes for a healthy society. Where we avoid the evils of cruelty being accepted as a norm.
The last line of George Eliot’s ” Middlemarch”
“….that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
Yes there is a banality of evil, but there is also the banality of the daily labor, work, and normal decencies upon which the well being of all rests.
Men and women leading the lives that Thoreau described as “lives of quiet desperation”, while failing to fulfill all that might have been for themselves, do make for a society such “that things are not so ill….as they might have been…”
I think your conclusion has it about right.
as usual, I agree with everything you say and love the Eliot quote. Going to watch the Middlemarch TV series from 1994.