“We just said we can live in fear for a long time or we can trust that everything is going to be OK.” 1
Those words were spoken by Amy who, with her husband Mike, reopened their hair salon in the north-west Oklahoma town of Fairview, at a time when covid-19 cases are still increasing in that state.
“We can trust that everything is going to be OK.”
Trust?
I think not. I’m willing to grant that Amy honestly believes she is doing the right thing, but that is exactly the problem. This kind of reasoning is infantile magical thinking. It is shallow, naive, and ignorant, grounded in nothing trustworthy whatsoever. It is a devastating setup for more needless covid-19 death and destruction. It is innocent hope based on nothing substantial and actually flies in the face of substance. It - the perspective and not Amy, not the person holding it - is evil just because it is so banal.
The combining of two words - “banal” and “evil” - comes from Hannah Arendt and her brilliant 1963 reflection on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of the chief architects of the Holocaust. She published her writings in a book titled Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. The book is, in Arendt’s words, “a sobering reflection on the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us — the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.” 2
Arendt is further quoted:
“It is indeed my opinion now that evil is never ‘radical,’ that it is only extreme, and that it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrow and lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the surface. It is ‘thought-defying,’ as I said, because thought tries to reach some depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its ‘banality.’ Only the good has depth that can be radical.” 3
I titled this article “the evil of our banality.” And by “our” I mean to say every one of us. We are, each in our own way, to a greater or lesser degree, as complicit in the “fungus” that has spread across our cultures and social systems. Our lives have become so inured, so shallow, so suffocated by routine and numbed by mindless consumption of cheap consumer goods and the creeping fungus of a social system that has commodified every single aspect of our humanity along with the entire natural word. Demonic? No. Shallow? Yes. Thought-defying? Yes. Overgrown like a fungus on the surface? Yes.
A few days ago, in a rant published in this venue, I referred to the man occupying the president’s seat as a “lizard-brained piece of pond scum scraped into a dish of slime mold and extruded through a play-doh fun factory.” At the time I was trying to be insulting, but now I realize something more: pond scum and slime mold are just different words for Arendt’s “spreading fungus.” Completely banal, utterly destructive, laying waste to the whole world.
But I am - we are - part of it. Most of our livelihoods, our jobs, our daily living requires that we are part of it. The computer I am using to write this, the electricity I consume doing so, makes me part of it. Every time I - we - say nothing, we are complicit. Every time we make something horrible into Late Night Comedy as a way of making it manageable, we are complicit. Every time we snag a plastic bag in the produce section for our broccoli, we are complicit. Every time we drive when we could walk we are complicit. What is it Judy Collins sang? “You must barter your life to make sure you are living.” Hell, we have outright sold our birthrights for a mess of pottage, our very souls for the shallow conveniences we take for granted.
It has been pointed out by many, including my own state’s infamous Senator Ron Johnson, that we’re making too much of covid-19 deaths, that no one cares about traffic fatalities, about deaths from influenza, about the true cost of our strawberries in winter. My point: that is exactly the banality of evil. Why don’t we - as a culture, as a nation, in our communities - care? Why do we - as a culture, as a nation, in our communities - accept traffic deaths, deaths from poverty, deaths from prohibitively-expensive health care? Senator Johnson is correct in his perception but dead wrong in his reasoning that we should also not care about covid-19 deaths. We — collectively - send workers into coal mines and do not think about Black Lung disease. We send medical personnel into infectious disease ICUs and “trust that everything is going to be OK.” We don’t think past the banal surface fungal scum. We don’t think.
The good news, the truth, is that we can think past the surface. We are also complicit, or at least we can be should we choose, in what Arendt calls “the radical good” that requires depth and wisdom. I’m not alone in my grim assessment of humanity’s current precarious state. Thich Nhat Hahn has been teaching mindful living for a long time as an antidote to the insanity of mindless consumption. All of the spiritual traditions - at their depth - have been teaching wisdom and love for a long time, and I’m not talking about “religion.” Thoughtful contemporary writers like Ira Progoff (the Intensive Journal process) and Julia Cameron (the Artist’s Way) have been teaching this stuff for decades. The deep building blocks of everything we need to put all of this right have been there in transpersonal/mystical patterns of value, both ancient and contemporary, for a long, long time. We can trust those patterns, we can trust that wisdom, because it is not shallow. We can trust them because they are not programs but rather open-ended journeys, not algorithms but rather invitations, not for profit but rather for generosity, not shallow but deep and clear, not banal but right there in your face, not certainties but rather openings. We can trust them because they require us to struggle with them, interpret them, grow into them, evolve them as we struggle, interpret, grow and evolve ourselves.
Putting things right is requiring a helluva lot of work on our parts, more than many of us have put out in our entire lives. It requires getting past the evil banality of shallow religion and shallow politics. It requires the courageous willingness to confront our own shadow, our own complicity in an economic system that privileges the few by the blood, sweat and tears of the many. It requires an utter willingness to give up the selfish privileges we think we have “earned.” It requires reading in depth, and self-reflection in depth, activities that are not (always) entertaining. It means forming communities of trust - real ones, not virtual - where we care for others - all others - because they are us.
No one of us knows the way through this. It’s going to take all of us, along with our libraries of collected human wisdom, along with our poets and musicians and artists to help us create beauty and inspire us to higher aspirations.
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1 On Saturday 25 April, the Guardian ran an article under the headline
“US states’ tentative moves to ease coronavirus lockdowns worry experts.” https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/25/us-states-coronavirus-lockdown-reopening
2 from BrainPickings article about Hannah Arendt
https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/02/07/hannah-arendt-the-banality-of-evil/
3 see #2 above
Sunday, Apr 26, 2020 · 9:28:25 PM +00:00 · old 60s radical
Sunday afternoon 26 April, still reading, responding as I can. This is a rich experience, I hope you all appreciate each other. I hope you all can see the collected and collective wisdom that is here, and has always been here, in all of you.
Monday, Apr 27, 2020 · 6:31:50 PM +00:00 · old 60s radical
From the Guardian today, Monday 27 April 2020. We really need to change the way we’re doing things and it’s going to be agonizingly difficult. It means growing up, cleaning up, waking up, and showing up with our personal attitudes and values, with our individual behaviors, with our cultural mores and standards, with our social systems and structures. This is the challenge of the millennium.
The coronavirus pandemic is likely to be followed by even more deadly and destructive disease outbreaks unless their root cause – the rampant destruction of the natural world – is rapidly halted, the world’s leading biodiversity experts have warned.
“There is a single species responsible for the Covid-19 pandemic – us,” they said. “Recent pandemics are a direct consequence of human activity, particularly our global financial and economic systems that prize economic growth at any cost. We have a small window of opportunity, in overcoming the challenges of the current crisis, to avoid sowing the seeds of future ones.”
>snip<
“Business as usual will not work. Business as usual right now for pandemics is waiting for them to emerge and hoping for a vaccine. That’s not a good strategy. We need to deal with the underlying drivers.”
www.theguardian.com/...
Monday, Apr 27, 2020 · 7:02:54 PM +00:00
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old 60s radical
Please read the comments (not mine) so many have offered. They are profound reflections of the persons who wrote them, who are living them. There’s so much pain, so much hope. They are rich and worthy of the time you give them. Dialog, us talking to each other, will be our path through this disaster.