It’s a brilliantly, terrifyingly precise phrase, both encapsulating and enshrining the potential within the dullest, least prepossessing people you can think of to behave with almost unimaginable inhumanity and cruelty.A less familiar phrase is the evil of banality”, although it should fill us with just as much terror and disgust as its apparent obverse.
To understand this further, please consider for a moment three of the more prominent pantomime villains of recent years, men who have either assiduously cultivated or just don’t care about their images as ruthless, conniving bastards – Rupert Murdoch, Peter Mandelson and Simon Cowell.
Murdoch, for the most part, we know about. His reach is, he’d like us to believe, universal; his ambition monopolistic and hegemonical. Governments rise and fall at his behest (we’re told) and his utter, rapacious ruthlessness in achieving his aims is notorious, and blithely indifferent to any consideration of either moral or legal restraint.
Similarly, Mandelson ripped through the Labour Party and the media with almost cavalier indecency in pursuit of his goals, in the process destroying much of what he touched at the same time as he sought to promote it, all against a background hum of a slavish fascination with the rich that almost equalled his estimations of his own dark powers.
Meanwhile Cowell, although perhaps ultimately a lesser demon than the other two, has nonetheless built up a media empire based on peddling people’s dreams to the population as a whole, simultaneously inflaming the nation into a baying mob while also fleecing it every which way by gulling the mob into dialling premium phone lines further to enrich Simon Cowell. The dreams, meanwhile, are simply an accessory instantly disposable through the mob’s or Cowell’s caprice, which he camps up like the queen of the night.
In other words, these three are clearly all very bad men, and each in his own way a modern despot, a terrifying tyrant of monstrous proportions. Well yes, obviously, but there’s another, possibly better way of looking at them, too.Thus Murdoch is actually a wizened octogenarian mummy’s boy having a lifelong tantrum about getting his own way, who has marshalled the world’s greatest media organisation to flaunt minor inconveniences like national laws in order to do… what, precisely? Become king of the world? Have a billion serfs build a million mile high gold and granite statue of himself? Not a bit of it. Instead, his hubris has hollowed out his organisation in pursuit of a scoop about which D-list celebrity is being knobbed by which fading football star.
Similarly, did Mandelson leave all that damage in his wake to effect some seismic political change, thus empowering him to build a huge secret underwater headquarters to further his plans of world domination, stroking his white cat? Um… well, what his ultimate political achievement proved to be was to safeguard an already moribund economic system from any kind of change at all. As for Cowell, having at last created the McLuhanite monster of total media control, what manner of Orwellian nightmare does he then impose? Regimented ranks of humanity endless hymning the praises of Simon Cowell? The moon renamed Simon to reflect his glory? Nope. He just wants to swamp the pop charts for a week or so with some skinny adolescent of indeterminate gender crooning a hopelessly dull, mindless middle of the road power-pop ballad.What these big, bad men share, in other words, is a desperate and rather pathetic poverty of ambition. Where the evil comes in the triumph of their banality is in the damage to other people they commit to achieve it, and the good their actions preclude, because they’ve filled up all the available space in newspapers, television and politics with trash.
Because evil isn’t just what happens when good men do nothing. It’s also what befalls us all when dull men big up the banal and don’t care about the consequences. The current and ongoing despoliation of the planet, alongside the degradation and immiseration of billions of its human inhabitants, is less about the tyranny of mighty men, and more about the primacy of the bottom line as defined by boring accountants.
In Adam Curtis’ recent wonderful series on BBC 2, All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace, he concluded with the observation that the philosophy with which the elite justify their actions defines us humans as nothing more than selfish, solipsistic automata, predestined to act accordingly. In fact, as I’ve pointed out many times in this column, all the evidence suggests that instead we’re actually co-operative, kindly, egalitarian and, on the whole, rather loveable. Not that that would suit the agenda of what I’ll term, just for now, as the Banalarchs. Apart from anything else, as a vision of humanity it’s far too interesting and exciting.
