ZYGMUNY BAUMAN & LEONIDAS DONSKIS: ON EVIL AND MORAL BLINDNESS

Zygmunt Bauman & Leonidas Donskis, Moral Blindness: The Loss of Sensitivity in Liquid Modernity (Cambridge, England, & Malden, MA: Polity, 2013) (From the book cover: "Evil is not confined to war or to circumstances in which people are acting under extreme stress. Today it frequently reveals itself in the everyday insensitivity to the suffering of others, in the inability or refusal to understand them and in the casual turning away of one's ethical gaze. Evil and moral blindness lurk in what we take as normality and in the triviality and banality of everyday life, and not just in the abnormal and exceptional cases." From the text: "The most displeasing and shocking truth of today is that evil is weak and invisible; therefore, it's much more dangerous than those demons and evil spirits we knew from the works of philosophers and literary writers. Evil is toothless and widely dispersed. Unfortunately, the sad truth is that it lurks in every normal and healthy human being. The worst is not the potential for evil present in each of us but the situations and circumstances that our faith, culture and human relationships cannot stop. Evil takes on the mask of weakness, and at the same time it is weakness." "Lucky were those times that had clear forms of evil. Today we no longer know what they are and where they are. It all becomes clear when somebody loses their memory and their capacity to see and feel. Here's a list of our new mental blocks. It includes our deliberate forgetting of the Other, our purposeful refusal to recognize and acknowledge a human being of another kind while casting aside someone who is alive, real, and doing and saying something right beside us--all for the purpose of manufacturing a Facebook 'friend' distant from you and perhaps even living in another semiotic reality. On that list we also have alienation while simultaneously simulating friendship; not talking to and not seeing someone who is with us; and using the words 'Faithfully yours' in ending letters to someone we don't know and have never met--the more insensitive the content, the more courtly the address. There's also wishing to communicate, not with those who are next to you and who suffer in silence, but with someone imagined and fabricated, our own ideological or communicational projection--that wish goes hand in hand with an inflation of handy concepts and words. New forms of censorship coexist--most oddly--with the sadistic and cannibalistic language found on the internet and let loose in verbal orgies of faceless hatred, virtual cloacas of defection on others, and unparalleled display of human insensitivity (especially in anonymous commentaries)." "This is moral blindness--self-chosen, self-imposed, or fatalistically accepted--in an epoch that more than anything needs quickness and acuteness of apprehension and feeling." Id at 10-11. "To us it seems that evil lives somewhere else. We think it's not in us but lurks in certain places, certain fixed territories in the world that are hostile to us or in which things endangering all humankind take place. This naive illusion and type of self-deception is present in the world today no less than two or three hundred years ago. To represent evil as an objectively existing factor was long encouraged by religious stories and mythologies of evil. But even today we refuse to look for evil within ourselves. Why? Because it's unbearably difficult and completely overturns the logic of an ordinary person's everyday life." Id. at 7. [QUERY: Think of the implications had George W. Bush not so simplistically divided the world into "US" and the Evildoers"? Or had American politicians and citizens not embraced the jingoism of Saddam Hussain as "The Great Satan"? Or if Ben Carson, at the Republican National Convention, had not stupidly characterized Hilary Clinton as "Lucifer"? The evil is always the Other. Yet note, we are someone else's "other". To borrow a line: I have seen the evil, and it is us. It is me, it is you.])