"If we are surrounded by the trivial and the vicious, it is all too easy to make our peace with it"
About this Quote
Bennett is offering a seductively mild warning: the real danger of a degraded culture isn’t shock, it’s comfort. “Surrounded” does a lot of work here, framing moral decline as atmosphere rather than isolated choice. You don’t have to seek out “the trivial and the vicious”; you just have to live in a world where they’re ambient, endlessly available, and socially lubricated. The line’s quiet menace is in “make our peace with it” - not “embrace it,” not “celebrate it,” just the small daily bargain of shrugging, scrolling, laughing along. Vice becomes background noise. Triviality becomes the default setting.
The intent is plainly civic-moral: Bennett wants to re-legitimize judgment in an era that often treats judgment as intolerance. The subtext is political as much as ethical. “Trivial” points to entertainment culture, consumer distraction, the infantilizing churn of media. “Vicious” gestures toward crime, pornography, cruelty, cynicism - the stuff that corrodes social trust. By pairing them, Bennett collapses “harmless fun” and “real harm” into the same ecosystem, suggesting that a society softened by trivialities is less resistant to outright brutality.
Context matters because Bennett’s public career was built on “values” arguments in late-20th-century American politics, when culture-war battles over schools, television, and public morality doubled as battles over authority: who gets to set norms, and whose habits get labeled sickness. The line works because it targets complicity, not villains. It’s an accusation aimed at ordinary adaptation - the human ability to normalize anything - and it dares the reader to admit how often peace is just surrender with better branding.
The intent is plainly civic-moral: Bennett wants to re-legitimize judgment in an era that often treats judgment as intolerance. The subtext is political as much as ethical. “Trivial” points to entertainment culture, consumer distraction, the infantilizing churn of media. “Vicious” gestures toward crime, pornography, cruelty, cynicism - the stuff that corrodes social trust. By pairing them, Bennett collapses “harmless fun” and “real harm” into the same ecosystem, suggesting that a society softened by trivialities is less resistant to outright brutality.
Context matters because Bennett’s public career was built on “values” arguments in late-20th-century American politics, when culture-war battles over schools, television, and public morality doubled as battles over authority: who gets to set norms, and whose habits get labeled sickness. The line works because it targets complicity, not villains. It’s an accusation aimed at ordinary adaptation - the human ability to normalize anything - and it dares the reader to admit how often peace is just surrender with better branding.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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