Tag Archives: hannah arendt

How Is Evil Banal?

I have not seen the new “Hannah Arendt” movie, but I am enjoying the recent outburst of commentary on her most famous work, Eichmann in Jerusalem, which is her account for the New Yorker of Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann’s trial in Israel. The work is most famous for describing Eichmann’s brand of evil is “banal,” a wonderfully pithy phrase that has inspired generations of political thinkers to completely misunderstand her work. Writes Roger Berkowitz of Bard College’s Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities:

Perhaps Arendt has been so violently misunderstood because her thinking is both provocative and demanding. Her blessing, and her curse was a facility for quotable aphorisms that, like Nietzsche’s, require whole books to reveal their unconventional meaning. It is easy to cite the “banality of evil.” It is much more difficult to make sense of what Arendt actually meant.

The common misunderstanding, says Berkowitz, stems from testimony at parts of the Eichmann trial Arendt did not attend, in which Eichmann’s anti-Semitism was on full display. Surely, her critics argue, had she heard his very willing embrace of Nazism, she would not have found anything banal in Eichmann. Berkowitz again:

The problem with this conclusion is that Arendt never wrote that Eichmann simply followed orders. She never portrayed him, in Cesarani’s words, as a “dull-witted clerk or a robotic bureaucrat.” Indeed she rejected the idea that Eichmann was simply following orders. She emphasized that Eichmann took enormous pride in his initiative in deporting Jews and also in his willingness to disobey orders to do so, especially Himmler’s clear orders — offered in 1944 in the hope of leniency amid impending defeat — to “take good care of the Jews, act as their nursemaid.” In direct disobedience, Eichmann organized death marches of Hungarian Jews; as Arendt writes, he “sabotaged” Himmler’s orders. As the war ground to an end, as Arendt saw, Eichmann, against Himmler, remained loyal to Hitler’s idea of the Nazi movement and did “his best to make the Final Solution final.”

The banality of Eichmann came not from his blindness, but from his idealism; his grandiose belief that he was a part of some movement that gave meaning to an otherwise fairly dull, bourgeois life. Arendt does indeed make Eichmann sound rather pitiful—not because he was an automaton, but because he had a desperate need to conform in his search for meaning. He abdicated his moral agency by accepting the ideas of others uncritically.

This argument could very easily turn into a rejection of all politics, for fear that it inevitably corrupts people and drives them to commit terrible deeds. Arendt, however, goes in an entirely different direction—one that is alien to the contemporary framing of politics as a fight between the state and the individual. In the words of Jesús Silva-Herzog Márquez in Mexico’s Nexos magazine (translation mine):

What is notable about this theoretical construction is that, despite being a vehement denunciation of the voracity of totalitarianism and all nationalization, Arendt does not find refuge in the defense of the private or the apolitical. On the contrary, she restores the value of politics better than anyone. Far from distancing herself from this sphere, she was convinced that it was necessary to recover it, or occupy it, as we say today. In politics she did not see a prolongation of the war, nor a nest of bureaucrats or proxy representatives. Politics, for her, was a cultural treasure that permitted men to find themselves, and find they were truly human. Only in the common realm of politics could man find his authentic existence. He is not the man in private isolation, in the monotonous echo chamber of commercialism. Citizenship could not be the occasional episode of voting, but a daily experience of one exercising liberty with others.

The work that should have been titled Amor mundi [The Human Condition] sustains precisely this necessity to revitalize the public space and find means to act in concert. It does not look for refuge in the private realm but instead in the plaza, in places of deliberation and encounter. In the face of historical determinism and manufactured inertia, it offers a route of imagination and creativity. The most essential thing about man is his “talent to create miracles,” that is, “his capacity to initiate, to achieve the improbable.” Conformity is the negation of liberty. In this way, Hannah Arendt led the fight for a notion of liberty that has little to do with the normal sense of the word in our day in age. Beyond liberating us from exterior constraints, being free means becoming engaged with the world. Her vision of liberty is republican, and densely political. In his room, isolated, man cannot be free. He is, if he goes out the door and enters the city and acts within it. Arendt restored the liberty of the ancients, the liberty within the city, among others. Totalitarianism is the most radical negation of liberty because it not only prohibits action; it also negates man. It negates the victim but also the executioner: one or the other, nuts and bolts within the imposed machinery of power. There are no individuals, only the species; there is no man, only humanity.

Totalitarianism is no longer the existential threat it was when Arendt wrote, but her work is no less relevant today. Due to a long list of factors I won’t delve into here, political participation has declined, and it’s not uncommon to hear laments over the collapse of civic participation. On the other side of the coin, there are still plenty of mass protests and advocacy campaigns, but many of them operate in ideological echo chambers. People get together to fight for a cause, but there is little in the way of dialogue, save mutterings about “those people” on the other side and shaking one’s fist (or worse) at the counter-protesters. In Arendt’s reckoning, this is not only an impoverished view of political life; it is a negation of human freedom.

To be sure, it is easy to pine for “dialogue” and “civil debate,” but it isn’t always easy to make it happen, and proponents of such debates are often not all that interested in hearing what other parties have to say. Arendt’s politics, however, goes back even further. It involves such simple things as families around the dinner table, friends at the bar, and co-workers acting in concert. It involves casual give-and-take, a slow learning that builds a culture out of which one defines one’s individuality. Politics conducted in good faith within a community is anything but banal; it is absolutely essential to the formation of a free human being. Only through such a dialogue can a person learn to consider alternatives to the ideological conformity that so enthralled Eichmann.

It isn’t the answer to everything that plagues politics in this day in age, and it takes effort. The design, however, is startlingly simple, and it is a start.

The Reading List

I have been lax in blogging, so it’s time to get back into the game. What follows is a list of some of the works that have most profoundly affected me over the years. I’m sure I’m forgetting a few things that I probably shouldn’t, but here you go: 

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes. Some classics can be dry, certainly, but some immediately reveal why they have endured for centuries, and deserve to endure for many more. Few works are more universally applicable to most any situation, and often in ways that conflict with the popular image of the title character, thanks to Cervantes’ sharp wit. I had the added benefit of taking an entire college course on this one that was taught by a brilliant professor, which probably helped me see a few more things than I would have if I’d picked it up on my own.

David Foster Wallace’s 2005 commencement address at Kenyon College. With graduation season upon us, I’ll be writing a longer post about this one in the coming weeks.

Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton and One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez. I read both of these in high school and haven’t really touched them since, so I’m not sure if they’d have the same impact today. The styles are radically different–one is a lyrical and very real story of racial tension and forgiveness in South Africa, while the other is a punchy work with absurd layers of allegory, but both did a lot to expand my consciousness about the world around me.

The Labyrinth of Solitude by Octavio Paz. What is it about Latin American writers and solitude? At any rate, this book is best known for its exploration of the Mexican identity, but I though it was at its more profound in the later chapters, when it opens up in an even deeper meditation on human nature. On the intellectual side of the ledger, this was my most rewarding discovery during the semester I spent in Mexico City as an undergraduate.

The Bill James 1984 Baseball Abstract. Yes, seriously. As it is, Bill James is (with apologies to Roger Angell) the most insightful baseball writer out there, and there are plenty of bits of brilliance about the game. But this is more than a baseball book; it is a book about how to think about things on different planes, and for a young sports fan, it presented its ideas in a way that was clear and easy to apply to a real-world scenario. I revisit parts of it time and time again.

Honorable mentions: Freedom and “Farther Away” (a New Yorker essay) by Jonathan Franzen; Mario Vargas Llosa’s 2010 Nobel Prize acceptance speech; the New Yorker‘s collection of reflection essays on 9/11 (most notably, Roger Angell’s); “Leaving Washington” by Patrick Deneen; The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (I’m curious to see the new movie version); The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger; Eichmann in Jerusalem by Hannah Arendt; and Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar. I’ll also throw in the “Harry Potter” series; I know it’s not great literature, but I did grow up with the books and draw certain insights out of them, so they deserve to be acknowledged.

I grew up generally indifferent as to whether books were considered classics or not, but I’ve been finding those so-called canonical works more and more relevant of late. For example, I read The Odyssey when I was fairly young, and though I enjoyed it, only in the past few years have I come to appreciate how far it reaches. I read War and Peace when I was way too young to get most of it–it was more so I could be That Kid who read War and Peace in 6th grade–and have not gone back to it yet, but from what I gather in reading about it since, I’m guessing I would really like it. Some day. It’s a similar story with The Bible. I was not raised within the Christian tradition, and I think that let me have some critical distance from it; as a result, I have only ever found it richly layered and compelling, and I think most intelligent readers should be able to appreciate its merits, even if they don’t believe it. Classics often get dismissed these days as stuffy or unrelated to contemporary life, and while many have their limits (what doesn’t?) and certain works are not for the faint of heart, tackling them with the right mindset can be very rewarding. I’d advocate for a healthy balance between past wisdom and present insight, but there’s little point in forcing oneself to read something that one does not want to read, and one never knows where one might stumble across the most relevant works.

That should do for my list, at least until I wake up in the middle of the night and think, “how could I forget Book X?!” Feel free to share your own in the comments.