Pratap Bhanu Mehta: The Age of Cretinism
NB: A good characterisation of our time. In her first reflections
upon Nazism’s death factories, Hannah Arendt called them ‘the organized attempt to eradicate the concept of the human being.’ We
live in their shadow, and the shallowness of our moral sensibility is witnessed every day. Benedetto Croce,
the Italian philosopher who defied Mussolini and called fascism a 'moral
illness', believed that liberty is not a natural right but an earned right that
arises out of continuing historical struggle for its maintenance. Croce defined
civilization as the continual vigilance against barbarism.. DS
IN AN ERA WHERE
LANGUAGE HAS LOST ALL STABLE REFERENTS, it is difficult to find a word that
describes the tenor of our times. But if, at the pain of gross simplification,
one were to choose a word to characterise the times, ‘cretinism’ might not be a
bad candidate. This is an age of both moral and political cretinism. The term
‘moral cretinism’ was perhaps first used by Alan Bullock in his biography of
Hitler. It referred to a peculiar immunity that fascists had to any moral
considerations or motivations. Bullock was not entirely clear whether this was
simply a deep incapacity, a pathological trait, or a willed condition. But what
the term captured quite startlingly was the idea that one could imagine a
politics which was increasingly immune to any of the normal moral
sensibilities.
It referred to a condition where our ordinary sense of
compassion and decencies get immobilised. They get immobilised to the point where
a total inversion of values becomes possible: those who lynch get more
political support than those who are lynched; those who indulge in
extraordinary brutal sexual violence are protected; the ‘other’ is demonised to
the point where their basic humanity disappears from plain sight. The ordinary
moral terms that should be positively valued - pity, compassion, sympathy,
civility - become terms of contempt, supplanted by new virtues like pitilessness,
indifference, antipathy and incivility.
In some ways, all
societies have elements of moral cretinism built in. At various points, even
the most morally progressive individuals can act like cretins: incapable or
unwilling to be moved in the face of manifest moral demands. Radical
inequality, where our fellow citizens almost seem like some other species,
whose existence places no moral demands on us, can also produce a quotidian
kind of cretinism. Collective identities can sometimes abstract our thoughts
away from the humanity and individuality of others, and make us particularly
prone to cretinism. We are immune to the moral values at stake beyond the
fulfilment of our own collective narcissism. Our morality is defined by the
need to seek new enemies. Nationalism can sometimes lead to a profound moral
regression in just this sense. Caste identities can sometimes combine both of
these features, making the privileged immune to any moral considerations.
But what is
distinctive about our times is that cretinism itself becomes a high moral
standard. It is hard to imagine a time in recent history where political
leaders openly support a culture of violence without compunction or any trace
of self-consciousness, public discourse routinely carpet-bombs fine
distinctions with a view to making any nuanced moral responses impossible, and
sympathy is routinely so partitioned along partisan lines that the possibility
of any human response to tragedy and atrocity seems like a distant gleam. There
is an instrumentalism to every argument, such a relentless unmasking of motives
that the very possibility of having a moral motive seems like an oxymoron, and
the language of outrage is now so tired and wearied by being made to repeat
itself that there is no language left to register the next moral horror: yet
another lynching or a newer form of sexual violence. The danger is not the
existence of cretinism; it is its routinisation and elevation: a stunting of
our moral imagination and the supplanting of it with an aggressive coarseness... read more:
