Shattering Our Trust in the World

Much analysis has been written about the U.S. presidential election: those who were unwilling to look at the portents have expressed their shock; fingers have pointed; victors have quickly gone from slightly astonished to smugly confident and obnoxiously righteous, even vindictive.

You may have noticed I haven't done any analysis, or, indeed, said much of anything beyond an poetic almost-dirge published not long after. 

by cjneasbi at "Deviant Art"

The results weren't unthinkable. They were completely thinkable. I take no comfort in knowing that. Not long ago, I recalled Senator Margaret Chase Smith's horsemen of calumny. Alas, her faith in the American people has been shattered, and the horsemen now are abroad, but it must be said: their horrific grandeur is somehow diminished to shabby pettiness by galloping to the regimented beat of 140 characters max!  

Hannah Arendt wrote in Eichmann in Jerusalem: The Banality of Evil (1963) of the concept of evil as manifest in the banal. Her portrayal of Eichmann didn't reveal a malicious or particularly anti-semitic character, but rather a person intent on advancing his career by performing the orders he was given as effectively as possible; he did his job, without questioning whether the job should be done. Arendt's analysis wasn't without controversy, but it raised a disturbing spectre that hovers in the background during this period of transition to a new presidential administration.

Colin Marshall, writing in 2013 in The New Yorker on a biopic about Arendt, refers to a later article by Rollo Romig. He looked at the nature of evil in the wake of the Aurora CO shootings. Rollo wrote: "The danger of a word like ‘evil’ is that it is absolute.... ‘Evil’ has become the word we apply to perpetrators who we’re both unable and unwilling to do anything to repair, and for whom all of our mechanisms of justice seem unequal: it describes the limits of what malevolence we’re able to bear. In the end, it’s a word that says more about the helplessness of the accuser than it does the transgressor.”

In the current political realm, it seems to me that these two views don't differ; rather, they combine. I don't think our new president-elect is a grand villain; I think he's entirely amoral. We are told by clusters of tweets that "winning" (as defined by the president-elect) is all that matters; he's made clear that he speaks in hyperbole, that factual truth is of no importance to him in public discourse. From this, I draw the conclusion that expediency trumps legality and morality in the interest of the "win." (No pun intended--but doesn't his name and its usage strike you as part of the surreal nature of this entire situation?)

Trump differs from Eichmann in that the orders are his to give, but the narrowness of his imagination and limits of his vision of success translate into a consummate banality. Our government is being stage-managed as an unscripted entertainment show (commonly called reality TV, but there's so little reality to it that the use of the term is straight out of Orwell's 1984). Yet  his very lack of awareness, his brazen ignorance, his complete indifference to anything beyond himself, take us to the place where we're unable, and half the country isn't even interested in, calling him out and holding him accountable.

This is what breaks my heart: not that half the country was fearful and angry and handed this man the key to the most powerful office in the world (though we must grieve at the magnitude of this failure), but that those same people seem willing to let him do as he likes, contrary to his promises, contrary to the general public interest, and contrary to the rule of law. The dignity of the office, its power to seek the common good, seem of no account to half our people, nor do the principles of dissent, or the value of diversity and open exchange of ideas. We stand in the rubble of the shining city, wondering at the cracks that threaten its very foundations.

Susan Neiman's Evil in Modern Thought (Princeton University Press: 2002) is also referenced in Romig's piece. She writes that calling something evil "is a way of marking the fact that it shatters our trust in the world." Romig expands on this, observing "Evil is both harmful and inexplicable, but not just that; what defines an evil act is that it is permanently disorienting for all those touched by it." If evil is, in the modern world, essentially identified by its effect, then this election has indeed unleashed evil upon us, 140 characters at a time....