Grey hell

Luis Buñuel once noted (half jokingly) that the universality of faith had disappeared in the twentieth century because the church had so exaggerated the supposed horrors of hell that no one could take it seriously anymore. If now, at the beginning of the third millennium, we take a look back at the twentieth century, perhaps we can exempt the church from this accusation. The church did not exaggerate. Reality itself surpassed every possible imaginary depiction of hell. And then colored it gray (emphasis added). And this made hell even more frightening than ever before, when its proximity was indicated by tongues of flame, lakes of tar, and pitchforks. That was something you ran away from. But no one can do battle with grayness. Gray hell imperceptibly outstrips every possible imaginary picture and makes everything possible that can be imagined (emphasis added).

‘Dostoyevsky reads Hegel in Siberia and bursts into tears’ pp.45-46, by László F Földenyi (2020), translated by Ottilie Mulzet.

The reason why Israel forbade international journalists from flying over Gaza was clear; to stop the world from seeing the dust and rubble of its genocidal depravity wreaked by its military in less than two years. The word ‘hell’ is evoked many a time since the genocide began in October 2023; that Gaza has become ‘hell on earth’, that ‘they wanted hell, so we’ll give them hell’, it is ‘hellish’, ‘a living hell’. But the greyness of this hell is eerie not just because of the unrecovered bodies that still lie under and in the endless, unspeakable, devastation caused by bombs dropped daily, but because this is what the end looks like. It will take decades for the Palestinian people to rebuild their infrastructure, if it happens, longer still to recover as a people.

Did we expect the end of western civilisation to be so ghoulish? It was something that Hegel could not bring himself to admit, because he was so blinkered by his view of ‘history’ and who belonged in it. Those outside of ‘history’ were condemned to a kind of hell, of incomprehension at best, of chaos and barbarity at worst. But little did Hegel know that he was suppressing the real evil that lies within the spirit that seeks the cossetting boundedness of ‘history’. That evil, found in the rapaciousness of colonialism, would be denied and conveniently looked away. Hegel deflects our attention by pointing to ‘rationality’ as the saviour of those fortunate enough to be part of ‘history’; deflecting away from the many brutalities done in ‘rationality’s’ name, that ‘evil’ is far away over there, not here in our own morass of incomprehension. How easy it is to condemn all that is evil as the consequence of the limits imposed on our access to understanding?

There are days when I type into the Google search engine: ‘[…] is evil’ and the search results come back not with an AI-generated overview, affirmation or sense-making to soothe my horror and despair, presumably because AI is prohibited from taking a moral side in the genocide of Palestinian people in Gaza, but with statements and articles by pro-Israel interest groups at the top of the search results.

The question of our times is if we are made to think that evil is incomprehensible and irrational, concealing the fact that evil is actually rational and an indispensable part of Hegel’s ‘history’. We have reached a time in history to disappoint Hegel; that the pillars of rationality – science, technology, international law, mainstream media – has be bent to serve evil and the crime of crimes. The reluctance to use vocabulary of morality – of good and evil – is the outcome of the superiority of rationality and secularisation; that ‘evil’ is located far beyond that intellectual chasm. Cross that chasm and you are outside of ‘everything’.

In his beautiful essay from which I quote above, Földenyi writes about Dostoyevsky’s despair at being twice exiled; first to Siberia for political dissent, then to the outside of ‘history’ by Hegel. It was in Siberia, however, where he was made acutely aware of his marginality and his apparent nothingness in the grander scheme of the world, where he steadily built his career, supported by the financial largesse of friends, as the giant of Russian literature. In an act of literary revenge, Dostoyevsky depicts Europe in his work as a grey hell; its inhabitants barely concealing their barbarity under the veneer of refinement: “haven’t you noticed that the most refined bloodshedders are almost always the most civilised gentlemen?” To bring Dostoyevsky’s cynicism back to our present concerns; it is really the “most moral army in the world” and the self-declared “humanitarian” who are the deadliest and most barbaric in living memory.