Globalisation of evil

Every man becomes a bit philosophical as he grows older, or when he reads his favourite newspaper. Old age gives you a sense of the gradients of time, allows you to look at events in history, in terms of cycles.

Newspaper gives you the immediacy of a map, a sense of topicality and the space of the now. Reading it, one often goes beyond the event, the news as we call it. We seek different patterns, connections of a different kind. New questions start to trouble us.
One of the things that is bothering me is the way everyone talks of globalisation. The gossip of Internet, the role of multinationals, the feats of the diaspora intrigue me. Yet, I want to ask, is there a globalisation of evil? Are we confronting new forms, new constructions of evil? Local demonologies seem inadequate to understand this.
Think of evil as a geography. Think of globalisation as a map. Can we map evil? Can we connect the trails of destruction, trafficking, genocide, displacement and look evil in the eye. I am not asking for a fundamentalism that condemns. I am proposing a secularism that understands that something new is happening. It is occurring on a scale of complexity that evades ordinariness.
Earlier when we thought of evil we talked of violence, cruelty, corruption, incest and prostitution. Good and bad were easily identified and accountable. Hitler was evil, Mother Teresa and Mahatma Gandhi were good. Our moral science book, our teachers and our parents could identify evil. The evil they identified had a face, a persona that could be explained in terms of religion, folklore, or mythology. The Mahabharata, the Ramayana, the Panchatantra came in handy. Cruelty and kindness, selfishness and sharing, violence and gentleness provided the easy polarities of this world. Even bad people had a biography, a history, a human face.
Globalisation seems to have altered this. Firstly, the old model of good and evil does not work. A lot of life is in the threshold between the two. Ordinary people who are not villains seem capable of enormous violence. Secondly, cruelty or villainy does not explain the vandalism of multinationals or the collective violence against ethnic groups. There is a new idolatry of concepts like security, science, development where nations, governments are ready to inflict violence in the name of these concepts. The nation state, the modern bureaucracies, the idea of science has claimed more victims than the old wars of religion. The idea of cause and effect, of face-to-face evil has lost out to abstraction and distance. We seem to kill not out of hate but out of indifference. As our violence increases, killing becomes more abstract. We kill at a distance and then resume our normal lives as if nothing has happened. The bureaucratisation of responsibility also decreases any sense of it. Today, our genocides are explained away as orders from above. Officials who kill are cogs in the machine and do not feel accountable for the violence they trigger.
There are two other changes we have to discuss. As violence moves from hate to distance, method becomes more important. Bureaucratic decisions replace crimes of passion. Prediction and calculation, strategy and science become the new grammar of violence. Think of nuclear war, an act of bombing, an urban project or just the act of building a dam. Cruelty gives way to a calculus of violence justified as security or progress.
Violence today has changed in scale. It is collectively organised. Physical violence was demanding. Today, technological violence can eliminate a people at the touch of a button.
Globalisation has added another layer to evil. Think of tourism, or trade. They all merge into a theory of trafficking. Desire no longer has local sites. It seeks a global market. German tourists seek to be pedophiles in Thailand. Whether it is trafficking in children, arms or the sex trade — they all seem secularised in terms of economic indices. Crime or corruption is as much a part of GNP as education or health. Globalisation seems to have multiplied the markets for evil and simultaneously secularised them. Commerce as defence deals, drugs, warfare, trafficking, environmental destruction all belong to a flat land called globalisation. Globalisation creates connectivities for desire on a grand scale and yet banalises it.
It is not just bird flu or AIDS that has become global. Evil has acquired an epidemic form and then bureaucratised itself.
Think of terror. Nothing is more global today than terror. Nothing is more evil in its combination of anonymity and intimacy, of immediacy and distance. Terror as a commodity is a form of world-wide commerce. Groups like the LTTE showed they could multitask globally between kidnapping, extortion, drugs and bombings. An office in Paris did not preclude a bombing in London or Delhi.
My fear is an old fashioned one. An old fashioned mind discerns the new with an acuteness that is rare. I think our ordinary sense of good and evil lacks the scale, the canvas, the language to understand the globalisation of evil. Our language, our ethics is anchored in folklore or a 19th century utilitarianism. We need a new kind of wild ethics that can map evil on a different scale.
Think of war. It is a devastation on a different scale. Disasters and displacements like wars require a theory of healing on a different scale. The language of humanitarianism or charity is inadequate or too sentimental to fight evil. Think of the Kissingers, the Bushs, the diamond merchants of Africa, or large-scale development projects. If we apply the old paradigms we land up giving many of them a Nobel Prize for peace or economics. Goodness then becomes naïve and complicit.
The challenge of our time is a credible response to the emergence of evil. A failure to rethink our sense of goodness would be catastrophic. The new challenge of globalisation asks for an innovative ethics to challenge power and desire. We have to dig deep into our cosmology, our civilisation to come up with new ways of thinking, language, living, relating, consuming. There is a necessity for a new craftsmanship around work, agriculture, new ideas of community. Without a reworking of classic ideas, we are bound to repeat our mistakes in an escalating violence.

The author is a social scientist