The philosopher Hannah Arendt talks about the banality of evil — a morbid social syndrome where a society is so habituated to evil that common people, decent human beings in constitution and general conduct, accept horrendous wrongs as normal and unremarkable. Such, according to Arendt, was the mental state of the common citizens of Nazi Germany. In our own times, when more than one nation or community faces devastation in the full gaze of an apathetic world, we should seriously ask ourselves whether we are so afflicted.
However, my subject today is the opposite, where trivial and inconsequential matters receive disproportionate attention, capture the public imagination, and perhaps cause substantial damage while truly serious issues are ignored. I am not talking of matters intended as diversion or entertainment, like sport or cinema. The hype surrounding popular sports and showbiz may be excessive, arguably an opiate of the people, distorting social priorities. But they are easily seen for what they are, and the harm they might do is offset by the skills they incorporate, the social and aesthetic values they foster, and the relief they bring to the tense lives of our citizens. That is the purpose of sports and entertainment.
What I have in mind is something different, where serious and often pernicious implications are attached to matters that by any balanced assessment must count as marginal, possibly long dead. A quip by a stand-up comedian or an indiscreet shot in a film can ignite society — even literally, leading to rioting and arson if not murder. A casual remark by a public figure is twisted by a morbidly motivated misreading into libel or blasphemy. The relics of rulers and warriors who died centuries ago are redissected to divide society. Lives have been lost, and cities and states thrown in turmoil, by stoking controversy over the grave of an emperor who died over three centuries ago, or the precise historical role of another ruler and general a century later. Every now and then, fury erupts over alleged slights to the memory of equally remote figures or to communities that hold them in regard. History might be rewritten in the process.
Needless to say, such rewriting is generally devoid of historical research, though academic historians often join the chorus. Many street-level protesters might be hard put to name the century when the debated events took place. The issues at work belong entirely to the present, slaking the thirst for power and relevance of the faction advancing it. Their cause is tagged to a historical event or a religious or patriotic shibboleth to lend it credence, or at least to make it unpopular if not dangerous to oppose it.
I recently watched the news for fifteen minutes on a national channel. The three issues filling the time were: first, a supposed insult offered to a politician; second, a confrontation between vegetarian and non-vegetarian neighbours in a condominium; third, an exchange of jibes among national leaders on a matter of undoubted moment but without remotely touching on its serious implications. The news content was scarcely more momentous than the commercial breaks. Food is now a matter of deep public contention: even children are conditioned not to share their lunch boxes. What society will these children build — or dismantle – when they grow up? Seeing as Vivekananda’s name is routinely invoked in contexts he would have recoiled from, I may cite his outburst that our religion no longer dwelt in the Vedas or Puranas,
bhakti or mukti, but in the cooking-pot.
Clothes vie with food in inciting conflict. It is deemed better for a girl to drop out of school rather than attend wearing a particular scarf. Private relations are a social and legal minefield. In other words, things we might regard as most individual and personal, of direct import to no-one but ourselves, have become the concern of the State and the general public — not viewed from afar with wonder like the fairy-tale lives of celebrities, but with the intrusive hostility of a nationwide kangaroo court.
This forcible conversion of the personal into the public, thrusting a generic identity upon the individual, is a grotesque change of scale that gives a new disturbing meaning to the illicit valorization of the trivial. What could have been, and till the other day commonly was, an undemanding pursuit of the lives we wished to lead, concerning no one but ourselves, is now caught in the glare of implicit if not open surveillance by an external social collective.
It would be an underreading of the situation to say, as we often do, that our rulers are distracting us with trivial matters to prevent our focusing on essentials: the economy, the state of education and public services, the serious social maladies from which all material evils spring. If it were that simple, we would at least have gained brief respite from the oppressive norm. As things stand, trivial things have become serious. They symptomize the very ills engulfing the lives of individuals and communities, all the more piquantly because they are trivial: one might have thought they would slip through the net of social stricture.
In other words, banal things have taken on the taint of evil, their very banality an added sinister trait: it shows how far the evil has percolated. A single signboard on a municipal building in Maharashtra might seem much too trifling for the Supreme Court to concern itself with. But in a recent landmark judgment, the court lashed out at the divisive prejudice that called for removal of that Urdu sign. The bench also made a forceful case for Urdu as an Indian language. It needed the nation’s highest court to remind us of what, in a happier land, every schoolchild would know.
If trivial details are aggrandized to work violence and mischief, it behoves us to keep track of such details and send them back to obscurity. When banality grows evil, it is no longer banal. It is simply evil.
Sukanta Chaudhuri is Professor Emeritus, Jadavpur University