Description
Book SynopsisEvil is not confined to war or to circumstances in which people are acting under extreme duress. Today it more frequently reveals itself in the everyday insensitivity to the suffering of others, in the inability or refusal to understand them and in the casual turning away of one's ethical gaze. Evil and moral blindness lurk in what we take as normality and in the triviality and banality of everyday life, and not just in the abnormal and exceptional cases.
The distinctive kind of moral blindness that characterizes our societies is brilliantly analysed by Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskis through the concept of adiaphora: the placing of certain acts or categories of human beings outside of the universe of moral obligations and evaluations. Adiaphora implies an attitude of indifference to what is happening in the world a moral numbness. In a life where rhythms are dictated by ratings wars and box-office returns, where people are preoccupied with the latest gadgets and forms o
Trade Review
“In order to overcome moral blindness, we have to break the vicious circle of consumerism: politics has to address, again, real problems, universities have to provide us with ‘intellectual slow food’, but most of all we have to regain our dialogic nature – the ability to tell stories and listen to them. Moral Blindness is definitely a good lesson of that.”
European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology
Table of Contents
Introduction: Towards a Theory of Human Secrecy and Unfathomability, or Exposing Elusive Forms of Evil 1
1. From the Devil to Frighteningly Normal and Sane People 17
2. The Crisis of Politics and the Search for a Language of Sensitivity 50
3. Between Fear and Indifference: The Loss of Sensitivity 94
4. Consuming University: The New Sense of Meaninglessness and the Loss of Criteria 131
5. Rethinking The Decline of the West 168
