Gotham Diary:
Evil? What about Indecency?
3 October 2014
There’s an editorial in today’s Times about the the moral horror of ISIS, and, on the facing page, a column by David Brooks about the futility of pragmatism. Both pieces exhort readers to feel passionately engaged in the struggle against evil in the world. This is not time for liberal aloofness and impartiality, or for taking the time to see both sides — so goes this latest variation on one of the oldest themes in human history, older than the Hebrew Bible, in which, among many other dreadful things, you can still read about the ISIS-like conduct of Joshua’s armies in Canaan. As far as I can tell, appeals to combat evil have always fallen on deaf ears until it is “too late,” or almost.
Which makes you wonder: is there something defective about the concept of evil?
I’m agnostic about the existence of evil. I don’t doubt the existence of malignity, but, unlike evil, malignity can be almost always be explained, and could presumably be explained in every instance if we knew more about the nature of things. We must certainly respond firmly to malign acts and intentions, but we must also acknowledge that, in the ordinary course of affairs, malignity is uncommon. Only a small fraction of those who are convicted of drug offenses, I am quite sure, could be charged with the desire to inflict harm, as distinct from the willingness to do whatever it takes (but no more than that) in the pursuit of a criminal course of action.
Call me naive, but I see something in our midst that is at least as bad as evil is cracked up to be, and that is indecency — the failure to treat our neighbors, including the strangers among them, according to our sense of right and wrong. What’s more, I don’t understood how evil, whatever it is, can spread throughout a society without countless individual failures of decency, lapses of individual moral integrity. Whether the Hitlers of the world are dismissed as nut cases (as Hitler himself initially was) or brought to power depends, at least in our modern democracies, on the decisions of countless men and women. Our own United States has been eaten alive by the indecency of legions of bankers and traders, men and women (but largely men) who, in the course of financializing everything over the past thirty years, have replaced principles with values, and paid top dollar to prioritize their own highly liquid values. Hundreds of thousands of Americans have been reduced to stunted economic conditions as a result. The talking heads who attribute this shift to technological change and the need for better-educated workers carry their indecency to levels that I am happy to decry as wicked.
If you can read this, then it is indecent of you not to be aware of the specific perniciousness to which so-called private-equity operations are prone. Human nature is extremely conservative: we still expect raping and pillaging to be accompanied by bloodshed, and tend not to notice it when all we see are balance sheets. But financialization is raping and pillaging all the same, and you would see that quite clearly if you looked into the matter, and never forgot that the pricelessness of each human life means that it can have no negotiable value at all.
Then we might discuss what to do about it — if only. The gravest indecency of modern society is its structural preference for judgments arrived at by individuals in purely private and independent terms. As a result, we have lost the skill of civil discourse, which is all too easily ruined by narcissistic bores whom no one can be bothered to shout down. We have lost the knack for qualifying the difference between intelligent positions and stupid ones. We have abandoned political life to moral zombies whose only ambition is to maintain and increase personal power.
The indecency of television, coupled with the indecency of indiscriminately watching it (by which I mean to include the watching of advertisements of any kind), is simply beyond comment. There are many things in our society that need to be worked on and brought back to repair, but of television the decent man can only say, Stop watching. Now.
When I was a boy, nobody would have used the word “indecency” as broadly as I have used it here; indecency meant pretty much one thing. But the word is available for repurposing precisely because it has fallen out of civil discourse, knocked down by the long-swelling onslaught of depravity of widespread personal immodesty. Is depravity evil? I don’t see the need for the question. Depravity, which is the willingness to perform inhuman acts in order to indulge a weakness for physical pleasure or for money, is quite bad enough as it is. In a current video campaign, attractive young people tease viewers by lowering zippers and otherwise seeming to disrobe. It is not the teasing that is so bad; it is, rather, the commercial, mediated setting. The viewer will never enjoy the company of these models, but it is suggested that the purchase of advertized products might cure that defect. It is grossly indecent not to be offended by such a marketing campaign, on one’s own behalf no less than for the sake of children who ought to be protected from such images.
When Hitler was coming to power, there were plenty of observers who declared that he must be stopped. But their attempt to demonize him as evil was almost completely ineffective. Had Winston Churchill not been on the scene in 1940, it is likely that England would have capitulated to Naziism just as France had done. Was it evil of France to yield? Charles DeGaulle does not appear to have tied himself up trying to answer that question. But it was certainly indecent. The greatness of Churchill and DeGaulle inhered in their ruthless, ironbound decency. They had to be heroes, too, of course, but they were driven not by virtue but by the common sense of right and wrong that is the essence of decency.
We ought to have the common decency to work on righting wrongs at home before charging distant enemies with evil. I can think of no more powerful way to recommend the principles of liberal democracy to the rest of the world.
Bon weekend à tous!