Okay, I see what you're saying now. "Common-or-garden" was perhaps not the best choice of phrase. I meant that it was a very familiar kind, that may be rare in reality but is terribly common in cultural representations of evil. It calls for no particular comment, because we've seen it a hundred times before.
By "That is the face of evil in our own times" I didn't of course intend to imply that evil today takes no other form, but that evil of this indifferent, half-ignorant variety is a distinctive feature of the modern globalized, industrialized world. It wasn't invented by us, or Keats (channelling Boccaccio) wouldn't have been able to write about it - but we have put particular efforts into attenuating our awareness of what we are doing, through geographical distance, through the interposition of myriad steps in the chain between production and consumption, and through the production of absorbing distractions on an industrial scale.
I don't think I suggested that sadism was better. However, it can be less shocking, because we can identify sadism and deplore it, safe in the knowledge that we aren't sadists (or most of us can). By contrast, not many of us in the West can say that our behaviour has nothing in common with that of Landseer's monkey or Isabella's brothers.
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Date: 2013-05-05 07:46 am (UTC)By "That is the face of evil in our own times" I didn't of course intend to imply that evil today takes no other form, but that evil of this indifferent, half-ignorant variety is a distinctive feature of the modern globalized, industrialized world. It wasn't invented by us, or Keats (channelling Boccaccio) wouldn't have been able to write about it - but we have put particular efforts into attenuating our awareness of what we are doing, through geographical distance, through the interposition of myriad steps in the chain between production and consumption, and through the production of absorbing distractions on an industrial scale.
I don't think I suggested that sadism was better. However, it can be less shocking, because we can identify sadism and deplore it, safe in the knowledge that we aren't sadists (or most of us can). By contrast, not many of us in the West can say that our behaviour has nothing in common with that of Landseer's monkey or Isabella's brothers.