With Audible, there's more to imagine when you listen. Whether you listen to stories, motivation, expert advice, any genre you love, you can be inspired to imagine new worlds, new possibilities, new ways of thinking. And Audible makes it easy to be inspired and entertained as a part of your everyday routine, without needing to set aside extra time. As an Audible member, you choose one title a month to keep from their ever-growing catalog. Be inspired to explore your inner creativity with Viola Davis's memoir Finding Me. Find what peaks your imagination with Audible. New members can try Audible free for 30 days. Visit audible.com/imagine or text-imagine to 500-500. That's audible.com/imagine or text-imagine to 500-500. Is the idea of evil still relevant in our largely secular society? Hello and welcome to Philosophy for Our Times, bringing you the world's leading thinkers on today's biggest ideas. I am Alisa and I'm part of the team here at the IAI. Today, we are pulling the debate, the nature of evil, from the archive, a discussion on evil in the modern day and the arts from our 2014 festival. Award-winning novelist Joanna Kavanagh moderates a discussion between different exponents of the art world, film director Mike Figgis, theater director Sean Holmes, and philosopher Robert Eagleston. Each has their own distinct perspective on what evil means and what role it has to play in contemporary society. While we arguably live in a very rationalistic culture, the notion of evil still holds sway over us. Now I'll hand it over to Joanna Kavanagh. Hello, welcome to this debate. So this debate is very much about that if we're living in a largely secular culture and we've dispensed potentially with these grandiose, Judeo-Christian religious notions of good evil as representing absolute categories, what now do we understand by this word? Is it just an anachronism? Should we dispense with it? Or does it still have a place in our arts, in our representation of reality in the arts? And we have a very illustrious panel to discuss this theme. We have Mike Figgis, a film director whose leaving Las Vegas was nominated for four Oscars, and he's since worked at the cutting edge of digital film on projects like Time Code, which was the first real-time film ever made and took place on four screens. We've got Sean Holmes, who's the Olivia Award-winning artistic director of the Lyric Hammersmith, and he's also director at the RSC at the Dommar, The Old Vic, and the Royal Court. And we've got Robert Eagleston, who's the professor of contemporary literature and thought at Royal Holloway, University of London, and his books include The Holocaust and The Postmodern. The problem of evil has been difficult for Western philosophy for two and a half thousand years, and no one's got a really good answer to it. And there have been two general sorts of approaches, and I'll suggest a third one. The two general sorts of approaches, one set by Plato, is that evil is the absence of good. So evil is the rise out of human selfishness out of conflicting desires. So there's not a thing called evil, it's the absence of good, so that's one way of understanding evil. Second way of understanding evil is best summarized by Kant's discussion of what he calls radical evil. For a Kant, either as evil, intense selfishness, but also as evil, which is like a sort of force in the world. Like Milton Satan, Milton Satan says, "Evil, be thou my good." So like a force acting in the world. Now, if there were Kant scholars here, they'd say, yeah, he does say that, and the next paragraph, he says, this is very unlikely for various sorts of reasons. But this idea of a radical evil force in the world fits a sort of originally Zoroastrian, but then Judaic, and then Christian intuition about evil. But I want to suggest that following the work of the great German Jewish philosopher, Hannah Arendt, in the 20th century, and in our era, there's a different sense of what evil might be. So if we're going to talk about what evil is and how we understand it, we have to think about this third other sense of evil. And this third other sense of evil, Arendt comes to by thinking about the Holocaust, by thinking about totalitarian systems, the domain of the 20th century, and thinking about what it is to live in the modern age. And she calls this evil in her book on Eichmann in Jerusalem Eichmann, a minor Nazi functionary. She calls it the banality of evil. And she says there's a new form, a new way of understanding what evil is. And it's obviously, it's just mean by saying it's banal, it's a silly you'll not be worried about, but rather it's a different form of evil that we have to think about. And this banality has three characteristics. First, in our epoch, evil is not satanic or radical. It's not like a force in the world. It's day to day. It's being part of a, it's part of its system. Evil is not done by somebody with a black cat and so on, rather systematic. So we hardly even notice it. And then she says, evil comes from our link characteristic, our inability to think. Okay, she says Eichmann, for example, can either think from the standpoint of somebody else, or later in her work, she says, thinking counters evil because thinking is a dialogue with yourself. So you're already taking another viewpoint even inside yourself. Evil's about the ability to think. And thirdly, a third characteristic of this banality of evil is one that's particularly irritating for philosophers and perhaps for artists, is that evil is very shallow. We think of evil as being deep or profound, or as Kant said, radical. But in fact, Lorentz says evil is really shallow. She says, it's indeed my opinion now that evil is never radical and it's only extreme and it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrow and lay waste to the whole world. Precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the surface. So evil is like a fungus. It is thought-defying because thought tries to reach some depth to go to the roots. The moment it concerns itself with evil, it's frustrated because there's nothing. That's its banality. So that's her view of what evil is. And I think that we have to engage with this sense of evil. If we're going to make any sense of evil or even the arts or answer Joanna's question. Looking around the room, I would say there is a kind of uniformity of perception to do, probably if I might say with our collective age. There are one or two exceptions which would be our two youngest people in the audience. And the marked difference between that minority and the rest of us is their perception and the way their brain functions and the way they understand the world is markedly different as a result of the internet. And the fact of growing up within that culture, as opposed to most of us who have adapted often with difficulty to the challenges. So whilst people of my generation and I work with computers all the time now, I have no choice, I write on a computer, I edit on a computer, I compose music on a computer, I communicate largely, I struggle to hang on to my collection of function pens and these things, which are truly treasure. But I find more and more I'm not actually committing things onto a page. And that is a huge difference in terms of how I look at the world. Evil to me is something that from a very early age, I accepted as being just part of life. I grew up in East Africa and then was brutally pulled out of that decadent environment and plugged into a council house in Newcastle and had to very quickly adapt to an entirely different culture, a different language. I'd still enjoy it in six months or die, basically. And so the best training I ever had as a film director was observing the bad behavior of groups of boys and girls, but I would say predominantly male bad behavior as to how I tend to look at evil. Lastly, I would say that that preparation for being some form of a drama queen was vital because everything I've been interested in in terms of dramatic visualization or literature, whatever, have been stories that deal with bad behavior. Those are the best stories. For an actor, an evil character is 100 times more interesting than an evangelist. Unless that evangelist is really a perfect or some kind of demonic sort of secret life underneath. And I think very early on realized that the function for me of drama was this kind of ongoing dialogue, shared dialogue with the public about the nature of death, the preparation for death, how we do with our own, how we deal with others, and evil, how we deal with the things that through our own personalities and our own potential are always sitting there. And I don't think that's changed. I've been lucky enough recently to work with Edward Bond to some of you may know probably most famous for writing saved. And he said a very interesting thing to me the other day, which is that watching theatre is a sort of psychotic event that it's very odd to sit and watch people pretend to be people who they're not. And that there's something about that, which is kind of psychotic on behalf of the actors and on behalf of the audience who are watching it. It kind of made sense to me. But he said that what it allows us to do is to go into psychosis without going mad ourselves. And he said that it's he said that probably most great plays have characters who are mad or insane or and often evil at their heart, which again made a lot of sense. And when you start applying it to to almost any great play, that's what's going on. And that then led me to think about what we're speaking about today. And I think there's a way that what theatre allows you to do, which of course is a very ancient form. It's interesting what Mike's saying about how the language of how we communicate has changed so markedly. But theatre, apart from maybe electric lights, and sound that the basic presentation of human behaviour on stage has remained remarkably consistent for a long time. And maybe what theatre allows us to do is to enter into evil without becoming evil ourselves. And which is slightly to take Edward's phrase and reapply it. And I think that that ability to really examine the extraordinaryness of human behaviour, often which manifests itself in something we might call evil, is the part of the reason that I want to go back and direct plays. And the only other thing I would say is that it would appear to me, and this might be a bit contentious, but I would almost say that any writer I've worked with probably doesn't believe in evil. Because actually what they're interested in is not the evil act, but the human behind the evil act. And it's the exploration of humanity rather than evil, which is the job of the playwright. I wanted to just try and get a bit more of a definition of what are evil acts, both in society and also then inevitably as society is represented in the arts. And so I wondered, Mike, so would you say that can we say, for example, that violence is always evil? No, I don't think so. I think it's almost impossible to talk in absolute terms about evil or about any of these topics, because it starts here, it has the potential to be contained like an illness in all of us. And we have the potential for better behaviour through the evolution of our cultures and the culture of good behaviour, of respect from men to women and so on and so forth. When those systems are not taken care of very quickly, the tendency of a group is to go to the negative. And let's say if we talk about films, which is a kind of banal form of theatre, for the most part, whilst having the potential to be profound, but it's pretty corrupted. Without any kind of checks or breaks on the potential for it, very quickly, I mean one of the big headlines I've got is pornography and the porn industry, which is a colossal part of the film industry and now a massive part of the internet industry. So there's a wonderful example of bad behaviour running wild, because of the complete absence of any kind of check. Yes, has that answered anything? Yes, absolutely. No, it's absolutely answering the question. I guess there's also this question then about the sort of tedium of evil. It seems like Robert, you're saying that these great overarching notions, good versus evil, this sort of enormous brutal notion of it, that you're saying it's much more just contained within the very dull and evil, not really. That's a kick. That wasn't really what I was trying to say. I was trying to say that when we try and understand, when there are all sorts of ways of understanding evil, all sorts of evils, there's selfishness that Plato talked about or this radical evil, I don't believe in that. But I think that the way in which evils manifest most in the contemporary world is through what Hannah rent calls its banality. And I think my beloved iPhone is a really good example of that. This doesn't look like a particularly evil thing. Everyone's got iPhones and loves them. But the iPhone itself we know is made in a huge industrial complex in China, in totalitarian regime. We know it's along the way to the suffering. I don't feel particularly evil for having an iPhone, but I'm caught in a web of evil acts of evil and destruction of human agency and so on. And that iPhone, which again is something I love, is a symbol of what the banality of evil is really about. And by the way, we're involved in these things, let me able to get away from them. But I just think linking the two things, so I think pornography is a really interesting thing to speak about in these terms as well, because to watch, to consume or watch pornography, you have to deny, you can't think about what that person had for breakfast or whether they have children, because then you can't consume and I use the word deliberately pornography, you have to deny the humanity of that person. And what you could argue is that, suspect room, somebody watching pornography on there, on the television is not the same as somebody flying a drone bomber, dropping bombs on Pakistan, and then getting in the car and going and picking their child up from school. But that same sense of dislocation where we deny the humanity of somebody else is you could argue is evil. And what I think the arts does is take that person who might be in the village in Pakistan. I don't mean literally, but take that person or take the person who is the sex worker who's being filmed through internet porn and makes you recognise their humanity. And then it's very hard, or the person who's making the iPhone in China, that when we don't, when we deny people's humanity, that's when we maybe when we're able to be the finality of the evil can happen. So you're going against a sort of idea. I mean, I was thinking of, and I guess the Holocaust is going to be a useful example of the treatment of evil in the arts, but I was thinking about say a film like Downfall, which came out and a German film about the last days of Hitler and, and a lot of the objections that was that Hitler was human, that he seemed human and everybody said, hey, there's a monster, but this seemed to be the shock of it. But you're saying this is a necessary shock. This has to be mentioned. It has to be because he was human. You know, he was sorry. One of the problems for the art system is that exactly the representation of this new form of evil that we're discussing is extremely hard for various reasons. One because of the latter evil is quite boring. It's very boring to film somebody in office all day, marking out who's going to make poisonous components in a Chinese factory. That's not exciting for art. It's also that huge system that takes a long time to describe something. One of the few recent works of art that is good about evil is a novel called The Kindly One. It's about the Holocaust, and it's 1200 pages long. Lots of it is very boring, and that's the way in which you can try and deal with this bitality of evil. But you're suggesting, throw it up, say, that there's a continuum of evil, but obviously there are hierarchies of evil. So, I mean, you're saying we're all implicated in the evil of mass production, and yet also then there's the Holocaust. I mean, surely there is a, there are different sorts of evil out there. Yes. And I was talking about the being implied in the the banana to evil. To understand, I mean, the problem the art has is it likes to have bad hats of Satan or cowboys or black hats and figures we can concentrate on. But that's not really an effective model for evil. Of course, there are terrible monsters who do terrible things. We're not denying that. But the real form of evil with the nasty of evil, which affects us all every day, that Sean's talking about, art's trying to make us aware about, is exactly not the pantomime battles, the Darth Vader's and the Voldemort's. Okay. But really, as it were, the implications of evil, which entrap us all. And again, art doesn't like, it's difficult for art to say, you know, art likes happy endings and redemption. It's hard to say we're all still trapped in some terrible banal evil. I think it is possible to make great drama out of boring evil. I really do buy. The problem is if Thanks for listening to Philosophy For Our Times. Make sure to join us for part two of this debate later this week. Our speakers will be discussing the existence, or lack thereof, of a supernatural evil. If you enjoyed the talk, don't forget to get your tickets for this year's London Festival on 21st to 22nd of September, to hear other artists and philosophers talk and debate live. Get tickets while they're last. Link is in the description. Finally, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review on your platform of choice, and visit IAI.tv for hundreds more podcast videos and articles from the world's leading thinkers. See you next time!
