There's a fascinating article in Slate about Hannah Arendt, Heidegger and antisemitism. Ron Rosenbaum weaves Bernard Wasserstein's critique of Arendt's reliance on Nazi historians and JA Hobson (on whom more later) to help underpin her works, The Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem, together with the seemingly never-ending drip drip drip of revelations about her lover Heidegger's Nazi sycophancy, in the hope of burying her phrase 'Banality of Evil' from public discourse.
Could these revelations help banish the robotic reiteration of the phrase the banality of evil as an explanation for everything bad that human beings do? Arendt may not have intended that the phrase be used this way, but one of its pernicious effects has been to make it seem as though the search for an explanation of the mystery of evil done by "ordinary men" is over. As though by naming it somehow explains it and even solves the problem. It's a phrase that sounds meaningful and lets us off the hook, allows us to avoid facing the difficult question.
It was the banality phrase-and the purported profundity of it in the popular mind-that elevated Arendt above the ranks of her fellow exile intellectuals in America and made her a proto-Sontag figure, a cerebral star of sorts and a revered icon in cultural-studies departments throughout America. It was the phrase that launched a thousand theses.
To my mind, the use of the phrase banality of evil is an almost infallible sign of shallow thinkers attempting to seem intellectually sophisticated. Come on, people: It's a bankrupt phrase, a subprime phrase, a Dr. Phil-level phrase masquerading as a profound contrarianism. Oooh, so daring! Evil comes not only in the form of mustache-twirling Snidely Whiplash types, but in the form of paper pushers who followed evil orders. And when applied-as she originally did to Adolf Eichmann, Hitler's eager executioner, responsible for the logistics of the Final Solution-the phrase was utterly fraudulent.
Adolf Eichmann was, of course, in no way a banal bureaucrat: He just portrayed himself as one while on trial for his life. Eichmann was a vicious and loathsome Jew-hater and -hunter who, among other things, personally intervened after the war was effectively lost, to insist on and ensure the mass murder of the last intact Jewish group in Europe, those of Hungary. So the phrase was wrong in its origin, as applied to Eichmann, and wrong in almost all subsequent cases when applied generally. Wrong and self-contradictory, linguistically, philosophically, and metaphorically. Either one knows what one is doing is evil or one does not. If one knows and does it anyway, one is evil, not some special subcategory of evil. If one doesn't know, one is ignorant, and not evil. But genuine ignorance is rare when evil is going on.
Arendt should have stuck with her original formulation for the Nazi crimes, "radical evil." Not an easy concept to define, but, you might say, you know it when you see it. Certainly one with more validity than banality. (Wasserstein dryly notes that "her epigones have tried valiantly to reconcile the two positions, she herself recognized the inconsistency"-between radical and banal evil-"but never satisfactorily resolved the fundamental self-contradiction.") But Arendt fled from radical evil into banality in more ways than one.
There's no hope of banishment. The phrase 'banality of evil' has slipped free from its original association with Eichmann and has taken on a life of its own. If David Cesarani's excellent book Eichmann: His Life and Crimes, or the acute but ultimately bizarre play the White Crow, haven't yet dismantled this canard, then an article in Slate isn't going to either.
And yet there's something not quite right in Rosenbaum's blunt dislike of the phrase. For its very resonance has helped spawn a growing body of literature, drawing on social psychology, brain sciences, socio-biology and behavioural economics, which studies how and why human beings commit atrocities against other humans. Philip Zimbardo's Lucifer Effect (based upon his Stanford Prison Experiments), Stanley Milgram's Obedience to Authority, (based upon the well known electrocution experiments) and Kathleen Taylor's Cruelty all owe a debt to Arendt's verbal craftsmanship. It is the combination of these 'micro-level' studies, coupled with the 'macro' analyses of civil wars, genocide and totalitarianism provided by social scientists and historians, which will ultimately underpin the public policies which will end mass atrocities. Sometimes wrong-headed phrases can send people in the right direction: James Lovelock's Gaia theory is bunk, yet has had a tremendous impact on the study of ecology and, recently, climate change.
Postscript:
I'm always glad to see someone sticking an academic knife into the antisemitic JA Hobson. The hatred of many British Liberals and early socialists for the cause and conduct of the Boer war is perfectly understandable yet with alarming ease this hatred slipped into outbursts about Jewish 'international financiers' being behind the war. Hobson's provides an uncomfortable reminder about the strain of antisemitism which afflicted early Socialists and Social Liberals such as Beatrice Potter (Webb), HM Hyndman and, yes, Oswald Mosley.
