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From the Devil to Frighteningly Normal and Sane People
Leonidas Donskis After the twentieth century, we, especially Eastern Europeans like me, are inclined to demonize the manifestations of evil. In Western Europe and North America, humanists and social scientists are inclined to analyse the anxiety of influence, whereas Eastern Europeans are preoccupied with the anxiety of destruction. Central Europeâs conception of modernity is akin to the Eastern European apocalyptical vision of modernity only in sharing the same anxiety of (physical) destruction.1 But if in Eastern Europe the dark side of modernity asserts itself as an absolutely irrational force, annihilating the fragile cover of rationality and civilization, in twentieth-century Western European literature a totally different type of modernity manifests itself â one that is rational, subjugating all to itself, anonymous, depersonalized, safely splitting manâs responsibility and rationality into separate spheres, fragmenting society into atoms, and through its hyperrationality making itself incomprehensible to any ordinary person. In short, if the apocalyptic prophet of modernity in Eastern Europe is Mikhail Bulgakov, then the latterâs equivalent in Central Europe would undoubtedly be Franz Kafka and Robert Musil.
Yet during a public lecture on the natural history of evil you gave in September 2010 at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, Lithuania, you shed new light on the âdemons and fiendsâ of evil: you recalled the case of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem aptly described by Hannah Arendt in her provocative book.2 Everybody expected to see a senseless and pathological monster, yet they had to be discouraged and bitterly disappointed by psychiatrists hired by the court who reassured them that Eichmann was perfectly normal â the man might have made a good neighbour, a sweet and loyal husband, and a model family and community member. I believe that the hint you dropped there was extremely timely and relevant, keeping in mind our widespread propensity to explain away our traumatizing experiences by clinicalizing and demonizing anybody involved in a large-scale crime. In a way, it stands close to the point Milan Kundera makes in his Une Rencontre, writing about the protagonist of Anatole Franceâs novel Les Dieux ont soif: the young painter Gamelin becomes a fanatic of the French Revolution, yet he is far from a monster in situations and exchanges that are distant from the Revolution and from their founding father Jacobins. And whereas Kundera elegantly links this quality of Gamelinâs soul to le dĂ©sert du sĂ©rieux or le dĂ©sert sans humour (the desert of seriousness, the humourless desert), contrasting him to his neighbour Brotteaux, lâhomme qui refuse de croire (a man who refuses to believe), whom Gamelin sends to the guillotine, the idea is quite clear: a decent man can harbour a monster inside him. What happens to that monster in peaceful times, and whether we can always contain him inside us, is another question.
What happens to this monster inside us during our liquid times, or dark times when we more often refuse to grant existence to the Other or to see and hear him or her, instead of offering a cannibal ideology? We tend to replace an eye-to-eye and face-to-face existential situation with an all-embracing classificatory system which consumes human lives and personalities as empirical data and evidence or statistics.
Zygmunt Bauman I wouldnât have ascribed the phenomenon of the âdemonization of evilâ to the peculiarities of being âEastern Europeanâ â condemned to live for a few recent centuries at the âlimenâ separating and attaching a âcivilizing centreâ, formed by the west of Europe with the âmodern breakthroughâ, from and to a vast hinterland, viewed and experienced by juxtaposition as âuncivilizedâ and âin need of civilizingâ (undeveloped, backward, lagging behind). Evil needs to be demonized as long as the origins of goodness (grace, redemption, salvation) continue to be deified, as they were in all monotheistic faiths: the figure of the âDevilâ stands for the irreconcilability of the presence of evil in the world as it is lived in and through, with the figure of a loving God: a benevolent and merciful father and guardian of humanity, the fount of all that is good â the fundamental premise of all monotheism. The perennial question unde malum, of where evil comes from, complete with the temptation to pinpoint, disclose and depict a source of malevolence code-named âDevilâ, has tormented the minds of theologians, philosophers and a large part of their clientele, yearning for a meaningful and veridical Weltanschauung, for more than two millennia.
Casting all-too-visible âmodernityâ (an eminently human product and acknowledged as a human choice, as well as a mode of thinking and acting selected and practised by humans) in the role hitherto reserved for Satan â invisible to most and seen only by a selected few â was just one of the numerous aspects and consequences or side-effects of the âmodern projectâ: to take the management of world affairs under human management. Given the strictly monotheistic stance of the âmodernity projectâ, inherited lock, stock and barrel from centuries of church rule, the shift boiled down to a substitution of new (profane) entities with different names for the old (sacred) entities â inside an otherwise unchanged age-old matrix. From now on, the query unde malum led to this-worldly, earthly addresses. One of them was the not yet fully civilized (purified, reformed, converted) plebeian âmassâ of commoners â residues of a premodern upbringing by âpriests, old women and proverbsâ (as the Enlightenment philosophers dubbed religious instruction, family lore and communal tradition); and at the other resided the ancient tyrants, now reincarnated in the shape of modern dictators, despots deploying coercion and violence to promote peace and freedom (at least according to what they said and â possibly â to what they thought). Residents at both addresses, whether caught in action or supposed to be there yet sought in vain, were thoroughly examined, turned over, X-rayed, psychoanalyzed and medically tested, and all sorts of deformities suspected of gestating and incubating evil inclinations have been recorded. Nothing much followed, however, in a pragmatic sense. Therapies prescribed and put into operation might have removed or mitigated this or that suspect deformity, yet the question unde malum went on being asked since none of the recommended cures proved definitive and obviously there were more sources of evil than met the eye, many of them, perhaps the majority, staying stubbornly undisclosed. They were, moreover, shifting; each successive status quo seemed to possess its own specific sources of evil â and every focus on diverting and/or trying to plug and stop the sources already known, or believed to be known, brought forth a new state of affairs better insured against the notorious evils of the past but unprotected from the toxic effluvia of sources hitherto underestimated and disregarded or believed to be insignificant.
In the post-demonic chapter of the long (and still far from finished) story of the unde malum query, much attention was also devoted â aside from the âwhere fromâ question but still in tune with the modern spirit â to the question of âhowâ: to the technology of evildoing. Answers suggested to that question fell roughly under two rubrics: coercion and seduction. Arguably the most extreme expression was found for the first in George Orwellâs 1984; for the second, in Aldous Huxleyâs Brave New World. Both types of answer were articulated in the West; in Orwellâs vision, however, painted as it was in direct response to the Russian communist experiment, an intimate kinship can easily be traced with Eastern European discourse, going back to Fyodor Dostoevsky and beyond â to the three centuries of schism between the Christian Church in the West and the Eastern Orthodox. It was there, after all, that distrust of and resistance to the principle of personal freedoms and individual autonomy â two of the defining attributes of âWestern civilizationâ â were at their strongest. Orwellâs vision could be seen as inspired by the Eastern rather than the Western historic experience; that vision was, after all, an anticipation of the shape of the West after it was flooded, conquered, subdued and enslaved by Eastern-type despotism; its core image was that of a soldierâs jackboot trampling a human face into the ground. Huxleyâs vision, by contrast, was a pre-emptive response to the impending arrival of a consumerist society, an eminently Western creation; its major theme was also the serfdom of disempowered humans, but in this case a âvoluntary servitudeâ (a term coined three centuries earlier by, if we believe Michel de Montaigne, Ătienne de la BoĂ©tie), that is using more carrot than stick and deploying temptation and seduction as its major way of proceeding, instead of violence, overt command and brutal coercion. It has to be remembered, however, that both these utopias were preceded by Yevgeny Zamyatinâs We, in which a blending and simultaneous as well as complementary deployment of both âmethodologies of enslavementâ, later to be elaborated separately by Orwell and Huxley, had already been envisaged.
You are so right when you draw into the forefront another motif in the seemingly everlasting and unfinishable debate of unde malum, conducted in our modern post-Devil era with the same, and growing, vigour as in the times of a scheming Devil, exorcisms, witch-hunting and pyres. It concerns the motives of evildoing, the âevildoerâs personalityâ, and most crucially in my view the mystery of monstrous deeds without monsters, and of evil deeds committed in the name of noble purposes (Albert Camus suggested that the most atrocious of human crimes were perpetrated in the name of the greater good ⊠). Particularly apt and timely is the way you recall, invoking Kundera, Anatole Franceâs genuinely prophetic vision, which can be construed retrospectively as the original matrix for all the subsequent permutations, turns and twists of explanations advanced in subsequent social-scientific debates.
It is highly unlikely that readers in the twenty-first century of Anatole Franceâs novel Les Dieux ont soif, originally published in 1912,3 wonât be simultaneously bewildered and enraptured. In all likelihood, they will be overwhelmed, as I have been, with admiration for an author who, as Milan Kundera would say, not only managed to âtear through the curtain of preinterpretationsâ, the âcurtain hanging in front of the worldâ, in order to free âthe great human conflicts from naĂŻve interpretation as a struggle between good and evil, understanding them in the light of tragedyâ,4 which in Kunderaâs opinion is the novelistâs calling and the vocation of all novel-writing â but in addition to design and test, for the benefit of readers as yet unborn, the tools to be used to cut and tear curtains not yet woven, but ones that were bound to start being eagerly woven and hung âin front of the worldâ well after his novel was finished, and particularly eagerly well after his death âŠ
At the moment when Anatole France put aside his pen and took one last look at the finished novel, words like âbolshevismâ, âfascismâ, or indeed âtotalitarianismâ were not listed in dictionaries, French ones or any others; and names like Stalin or Hitler did not appear in any of the history books. Anatole Franceâs sight was focused, as you say, on Ăvariste Gamelin, a juvenile beginner in the world of the fine arts, a youngster of great talent and promise, and a still greater ability to disgust Watteau, Boucher, Fragonard and other dictators of popular taste â whose âbad taste, bad drawings, bad designsâ, âcomplete absence of clear style and clear lineâ, âcomplete unawareness of nature and truthâ, and fondness for âmasks, dolls, fripperies, childish nonsenseâ he explained by their readiness to âwork for tyrants and slavesâ. Gamelin was sure that âa hundred years hence all Watteauâs paintings will have rotted away in atticsâ and predicted that âby 1893 art students will be covering the canvases of Boucher with their own rough sketchesâ. The French Republic, still a tender, unsound and frail child of the Revolution, would grow to cut off, one after another, the many heads of the hydra of tyranny and slavery, including this one. There was no mercy for the conspirators against the Republic, as there was neither liberty for the enemies of liberty, nor tolerance for the enemies of tolerance. To the doubts voiced by his incredulous mother, Gamelin would respond without hesitation: âWe must put our trust in Robespierre; he is incorruptible. Above all, we must trust in Marat. He is the one who really loves the people, who realizes their true interests and serves them. He was always the first to unmask the traitors and frustrate plots.â In one of his authorial interventions, few and far between, France explains and brands the thoughts and deeds of his hero and his heroâs likes as the âserene fanaticismâ of the âlittle men, who had demolished the throne itself and turned upside down the old order of thingsâ. In his recording of his own path from the youth of a Romanian fascist to the adulthood of a French philosopher, Ămile Cioran summed up the lot of youngsters in the era of Robespierre and Marat, and Stalin and Hitler alike: âBad luck is their lot. It is they who voice the doctrine of intolerance and it is they who put that doctrine into practice. It is they who are thirsty â for blood, tumult, barbarity.â5 Well, all the youngsters? And only the youngsters? And only in the eras of Robespierre or Stalin? All three suppositions sound obviously wrong.
How safe and comfortable, cosy and friendly the world would feel if it were monsters and only monsters who perpetrated monstrous deeds. Against monsters we are fairly well protected, and so we can rest assured that we are insured against the evil deeds that monsters are capable of and threaten to perpetrate. We have psychologists to spot psychopaths and sociopaths, we have sociologists to tell us where they are likely to propagate and congregate, we have judges to condemn them to confinement and isolation, and police or psychiatrists to make sure they stay there. Alas, good, ordinary, likeable American lads and lasses were neither monsters nor perverts. Had they not been assigned to lord over the inmates of Abu Ghraib, we would never have known (or as much as surmised, guessed, imagined, fantasized) about the horrifying things they were capable of contriving. It wouldnât have occurred to any of us that the smiling girl at the counter, once on an overseas assignment, might excel at devising ever more clever and fanciful, as well as wicked and perverse tricks â to harass, molest, torture and humiliate her wards. In their hometowns, their neighbours refuse to believe to this very day that those charming lads and lasses they have known since their childhood are the same folks as the monsters in the snapshots of the Abu Ghraib torture chambers. But they are.
In the conclusion of his psychological study of Chip Frederick, the suspected leader and guide of the torturersâ pack, Philip Zimbardo had to say that
there is absolutely nothing in his record that I was able to uncover that would predict that Chip Frederick would engage in any form of abusive, sadistic behaviour. On the contrary, there is much in his record to suggest that had he not been forced to work and live in such an abnormal situation, he might have been the militaryâs All-American poster soldier on its recruitment ads.
Sharply and uncompromisingly opposing the reduction of social phenomena to the level of the individual psyche, Hannah Arendt observed that the true genius among the Nazi seducers was Himmler, who â neither descending from the bohĂšme as Goebbels did, nor being a sexual pervert like Streicher, an adventurer like Goering, a fanatic like Hitler or a madman like Alfred Rosenberg â âorganized the masses into a system of total dominationâ, thanks to his (correct!) assumption that in their decisive majority men are not vampires or sadists, but job holders and family providers.6 Reading The Kindly Ones, published by Jonathan Littell in 2009, one can unpack a covert critique of the common interpretation, endorsed by Arendt herself, of the âbanality of evilâ thesis: namely, the supposition that the evildoer Eichmann was an âunthinking manâ. From Littellâs portrait, Eichmann emerges as anything but an unthinking follower of orders or a slave to his own base passions. âHe was certainly not the enemy of mankind described in Nurembergâ, ânor was he an incarnation of banal evilâ; he was, on the contrary, âa very talented bureaucrat, extremely competent at his functions, with a certain stature and a considerable sense of personal initiativeâ.7 As a manager, Eichmann would most certainly be the pride of any reputable European firm (one could add, including the companies with Jewish owners or top executives). Littellâs narrator, Dr Aue, insists that in the many personal encounters he had with Eichmann he never noticed any trace of a personal prejudice, let alone a passionate hatred of the Jews, whom he saw as no more, though no less either, than the objects his office demanded to be duly processed. Whether at home or in his job, Eichmann was consistently the same person. The kind of person he was, for instance, when together with his SS mates he performed two Brahms quartets: âEichmann played calmly, methodically, his eyes riveted to the score; he didnât make any mistakes.â8
LD From William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe onwards, that is to say, from these two brilliant men of letters who depicted NiccolĂČ Machiavelli as an embodiment of evil, the Devil in politics has assumed a number of interpretations some of which are surprisingly close to what we take as important traits of modernity. For example, a total abolition of privacy leading to manipulation of peopleâs secrets and abuses of their intimacy, which appears as a nightmarish vision of the future in such dystopias as Yevgeny Zamyatinâs We and George Orwellâs 1984, was foreseen, anticipated and wittily depicted in early modern European literature.
Suffice it to recall Luis VĂ©lez de Guevaraâs El Diablo cojuelo, a seventeenth-century text where the Devil has the power to reveal the insides of the houses, or a variation of this theme in Alain-RenĂ© Le Sageâs novel Le Diable boiteux. What early modern writers took as a devilish force aimed at depriving human beings of their privacy and secrets has now become inseparable from the reality shows and other actions of wilful and joyful self-exposure in our self-revealing age. The interplay of religion, politics and literary imagination, this notion of the Devil is manifest behind modern European art: for instance, recall Asmodea from The Book of Tobias, a female version of the Devil, depicted in Francisco de Goyaâs painting Asmodea.
In your Liquid Modernity you analyse the loss of privacy in our liquid times. In Liquid Surveillance, written together with David Lyon, you clearly distinguish between the early anticipati...