(rude notes on “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” by Ursula K. Le Guin.)
This is the treason of the artist: a refusal to admit the banality of evil…
Hannah Arendt’s phrase “the banality of evil” is probably the most overused four words in modern letters. This is because it is half true. A noble truth could never be worn thin by use, but “the banality of evil” is only a part of the story. Banality may be one aspect of evil; in the aerospace industry, for example, banality–bureaucracy is not only complicit but essential. Yet there is nothing banal about the terminal result of the cruise missile. That a degree of banality allowed this evil to exist there can be no doubt, but this belies the fact that the greatest evil – that which most fully robs the individual of his essential human dignity – is almost always the loudest, hottest and sharpest evil.
Labeling evil as banal – whether or not, strictly speaking, this is accurate – is a relatively modern conception. This is probably a reaction to the realization that it was the clean and sober processes of the burgeoning information age that led to the atomic bomb, and that without the engineers of IBM the holocaust would never have been tenable.
Filed under: Norman Mailer, fiction, philosophy
