‘Why are we so primitive? So hostile?’ Photo: by Charles Lamb on Unsplash
Culture clash: Neil Morgan on everyday hostility
‘We need to challenge the deep banality of violence.’
In Meeting this week we heard of a Ukrainian family who had escaped, and were being put up by a local couple. They had heard a few days previously that the father, still in Ukraine, had been killed by a bomb.
In her report of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt coined the phrase ‘the banality of evil’. Eichmann, she felt, was detached from his evil acts, and couldn’t think from the standpoint of someone else. Therefore – this was her controversial thesis – his evil was banal, commonplace, ordinary.
There is also, I suggest, a banality of violence. It seems inscribed, in much the same way as evil can be, in our animal feeling. We ignore it. It seems banal.
Violence is a part of normal life. It is not a matter of wars or bombs alone. Take driving a car. I have been waking up early in the summer weather and travelling to town well before eight am. In the town where I live, the roads are deserted then. Driving is a pleasure. But at five pm, things are different. There are more cars. Then I am scratchy – it is dog eat dog, car eat car.
Recently, a Friend in my Meeting introduced me to Marshall Rosenberg’s: Nonviolent Communication. I agree with him that most communication is really persuasion, trying to get the other to see things our way – a sort of imperialist arm twisting. If they don’t agree we get angry.
We want to talk (and talk) not listen (think of the fractiousness of some of the theism/nontheism discussion in these pages, as an example). Why are we so primitive? So hostile? And why aren’t we shocked? Why is such micro-violence so ordinary? So banal? Why is the Old Testament full of violence? Why must Christ die on the cross? And in such a ghastly, awful way? René Girard took a metaphorical view of the crucifixion, seeing Christ as the ultimate cultural scapegoat, absorbing all the violence in humanity, perhaps once and for all.
But this has not worked. Our violence continues. It is catalogued in all the battle dates we read about in history, as children. Indeed dates of battles are how we remember our history: Hastings, Waterloo, Trafalgar… we learn about them as merely the (banal) signposts in the passage of time.
The US, the champion of democracy and freedom, institutionalised racism a century beyond its civil war, one violence heaped on another, from the assassination of Martin Luther King Jnr to the killing of George Floyd.
Last month saw the seventy-seventh anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The atom bomb does not change the quality of violence. It seems to me to be only the ordinary violence of driving, or communication, with the volume turned up to an incredible quantitative maximum.
We need to challenge the deep banality of violence – its ordinariness, its taken-for-grantedness, on the schoolyard, in the office, and elsewhere. We need to be shocked by its destructive, corrosive potential. Why aren’t we? What can we do, individually and together?
