Recently, a young woman, a 15 year-old girl, was gang-raped outside a high school dance in Richmond, across the Bay. Several more boys stood there, watching, and did nothing to help her
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Some of us fail in bigger ways, or at bigger things than others (and we are capable of truly spectacular failures in groups), but it does not help to make that human failure something so other that the rest of us don't have to worry about it, or think about it, or see how close we are to it. We can reflect on it, we can act on it, and we can change it.
This is lovely, and true, and the elegant summation of what I was trying to say.
I think you're right, and wise, in how you are now framing what it is you're focusing on in your work. I mentioned Arendt when we talked on this, and I think her point about the banality of evil is one of those obvious things that are simultaneously profound and yet not especially insightful. To contrast, your point about the lack of humanity as what "true" evil is seems to me to be dead-on.
At the end of the day, I call myself a pragmatist, and that's a large part of why I was upset with the callers-in, etc., because by othering those boys, they avoided doing anything constructive about what the boys had done. It didn't help provide justice, or comfort, or understanding for that girl, or anyone. It didn't help her agency, or ours. It wasn't useful, and for me, if it isn't in some way useful when there is such great need, it veers sinward.
This is lovely, and true, and the elegant summation of what I was trying to say.
I think you're right, and wise, in how you are now framing what it is you're focusing on in your work. I mentioned Arendt when we talked on this, and I think her point about the banality of evil is one of those obvious things that are simultaneously profound and yet not especially insightful. To contrast, your point about the lack of humanity as what "true" evil is seems to me to be dead-on.
At the end of the day, I call myself a pragmatist, and that's a large part of why I was upset with the callers-in, etc., because by othering those boys, they avoided doing anything constructive about what the boys had done. It didn't help provide justice, or comfort, or understanding for that girl, or anyone. It didn't help her agency, or ours. It wasn't useful, and for me, if it isn't in some way useful when there is such great need, it veers sinward.
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