Evil Kitsch and Camp

Evil, Kitsch and Camp
 A person who tortures for no reason at all is not obviously more evil than someone who does it for fun. Sadists value certain things, such as their victims’ distress. Evil could be seen figuratively as an intolerance of kitsch, given the diverse valuations that underlie responses to it. A fairy-lit snowdome Sacré Coeur embodies a glazed nullity, reducing beauty or utility to a gesture of inattention. Kitsch ossifies what is alive, mobile, into ankylosed smugness. It shuts the viewer out, and so invites violence against itself.

The opposite of evil, in a sense, is camp: a reclaiming of value against the kitsch object’s refusal to yield it. At the other pole from camp lies exterminating the other, as a locus of value: instead of recovering that value, it annihilates it. Kitsch claims to corner the market in the cosy, the homely or cute. This is hateful: it turns value against itself. The viewer recoils from its refusal to let slip anything that could spark a dynamic interchange with it – apart from smashing it.

So nothing is part of the story. But then nothing, like something, is part of everything. Evil may be not just ‘stupid’ in Svendsen’s sense, but mindless: a doing unframed by any structure of thought, conscious or otherwise. Just because there is nothing but oblique talk to give it substance, there is no reason to think that evil has a special psychology. That is the hermeneutic burden assumed in taking certain people and acts as lying beyond the moral pale, beyond the mitigating plea of an adverse background. As Voltaire said, explanation tends towards exculpation. Once a deed is thought of as evil, it admits only of pathologies. If so, evil and explanation are apt to rub each other out: evil beggars explanation. To that extent evil, in Little Dorrit’s phrase, is nobody’s state of mind.

God creates all stuff, evil is bad stuff, so God creates evil. If so, evil is the very bad stuff that God brings about or at least allows in the face of our complicity or impotence: we let him get away with murder. In Svendsen’s typology, the God of Christian theodicy has to be seen as instrumentally evil. God must be too nice to be demonic, and too smart to be idealistic or stupid, so he must do bad things for the greater good. The standard story has it that humans, not God, bring about evil; God has simply given us free will to choose good or evil. There is plenty of room for doubt that the free-will argument absolves God of blame even for the evils that humans knowingly bring about, let alone all the others. But passing responsibility for Treblinka to human beings only sticks a plaster on the hole in the theological windpipe. We then become a rival demiurge to God, whom orthodoxy treats as sole creator.