Banal and sickeningly simple

Evil is an inherent truth of human life. But need apathy complement it?

Evil in its purest form is both utterly simple and utterly incomprehensible. What Moninder Singh Pandher of Delhi suburb Noida did was simple 8212; he lured young girls into his home, sexually assaulted them, killed them and buried them in a drain, often cutting them up into small pieces. But the very simplicity of the crime 8212; though 8216;crime8217; seems a dismaying euphemism when used to describe Moninder8217;s acts 8212; makes it nearly impossible to come to grips with. The first reaction from anyone who saw or read the news on the Noida butcher would have have been: how could someone do this? How?

Any decent human being would be today trying hard to stop his mind from imagining what those little girls went through in the last hours of their lives. Any decent human being would be physically nauseated if his mind still threw up shards of images. It would not be unnatural for some people 8212; especially the families of the girls 8212; to wonder whether the order of the universe, whether the teachings of every major religion about good and evil and justice are mere hogwash after all. And to atheists, acts like Moninder8217;s would only confirm that the universe is an entity completely indifferent to the fate of any living organism, governed by the rules of chance and circumstance.

For, after the initial shock and outrage, sober reflection can only end in one conclusion: evil has been with us as long as there has been human life on earth. 8216;Evil8217; spelt backwards is 8216;live8217;. In Anthony Burgess8217;s novel M/F, the hero Miles Faber is asked a riddle: 8220;Who was the final final, say/ That was put back but had his day?8221; There are two opposed answers, both equally valid. One is 8216;God8217;, which is 8216;dog8217; backwards every dog has his day, the final final, the ultimate reality. But the opposed ultimate reality is 8216;devil8217;, 8216;lived8217; backwards: if you have lived you have had your day. Metaphysics loops back on itself and is incapable of giving clear answers.

Moninder8217;s act is one of individual private evil. But if there is one common thread running through human history, it would most likely be of public evil. Emperors, from ancient times to modern, have tortured and murdered millions and millions of their enemies and their own subjects. Just the 20th century saw enough mass murderers to last a millennium: Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, the list is long. Each of them would have had thousands of soldiers and policemen and bureaucrats carrying out the actual acts of evil. Indeed, one of the most powerful theories to come out of studying the Holocaust was about the very 8220;banality of evil8221;, as political philosopher Hannah Arendt put it.

Arendt followed the 1962 trial of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi bureaucrat who managed the logistics of deportation to ghettos and subsequent murders of millions of East European Jews. She found that Eichmann came to his willing involvement with the genocide through a failure or absence of the faculties of sound thinking and judgment. Far from exhibiting any malevolent hatred of Jews, which could have

accounted psychologically for his participation in the Holocaust, Eichmann was an utterly innocuous individual. He operated unthinkingly, following orders, efficiently carrying them out, with no consideration of their effects.

Arendt concluded that Eichmann was constitutively incapable of exercising the kind of judgment that would have made his victims8217; suffering real or apparent for him. It was not the presence of hatred that enabled Eichmann to perpetrate the genocide, but the absence of the imaginative capacities that would have made the human and moral dimensions of his activities tangible for him. Evil was banal, routine daily entries in ledgers.

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Of course, the school of moral relativism holds that standards of good and evil are only products of local culture, custom or prejudice. For instance, homosexuality and abortion are considered evil in many societies. Yet, there are some acts which are universally evil; there is no scope for pleading extenuating circumstances or lack of evil intent. The Holocaust was pure evil. The Boston Strangler was absolutely evil. The crashing of planes into the World Trade Centre was simply evil, even if Osama bin Laden believes that Western civilisation has become evil and corrupt, and must be destroyed. What Moninder Singh Pandher did was uncontaminated evil.

But uncontaminated evil was also the way the police behaved. Over two years, as village family after village family came to complain to the police that their children had gone missing, they were turned away; FIRs were not lodged. They were poor people, their children were not important to the policemen, who, morally, were clearly as degenerate as Moninder. When the system that is supposed to preserve civil society and ensure the safety of citizens acts with such amoral indifference, it is as abominable as an individual pervert8217;s sick actions. Moninder Singh Pandher cannot be forgiven, but neither can the policemen who scoffed at helpless and confused parents over two years. These men are as heartless as Moninder, and as responsible for many of the murders as Moninder is.

Yet, we know in our hearts that a week from now, a month from now, or a year from now, we will waken to some other unspeakable act. Some pervert may already be at work, waiting to be discovered. Right now, some brainwashed terrorist is plotting to murder innocents. In some other time zone, some mad dictator is planning his next pogrom, his next war. Plato observed that there are relatively few ways to do good, but there are countless ways to do evil. Clearly, he had studied men well. Evil, and pure incomprehensible evil, are inherent truths of the human condition.

sandipan.debexpressindia.com