[lit-ideas] Revisiting the Banality of Evil

From: "Lawrence Helm" <lawrencehelm@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "lawrenchelm1. post@blogger. com" <lawrencehelm1.post@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 2 Nov 2009 11:03:42 -0800
Some time ago I read Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the
Banality of Evil and described my impression:
http://www.lawrencehelm.com/2008/08/banality-of-evil.html and
http://www.lawrencehelm.com/2008/08/more-on-what-arendt-meant.html .

Someone just sent me an article by Ron Rosenbaum that takes a different
view:  http://www.slate.com/id/2234010/pagenum/all .  Rosenbaum's article is
entitled, "The Evil of Banality, Troubling new revelations about Arendt and
Heidegger.  

I don't think Rosenbaum understood Arendt's book.  I don't know who he is,
and no doubt he has the intelligence to understand Arendt, but he didn't
read the book with sympathy, that is he didn't "suspend disbelief" while
reading it.

I doubt that Rosenbaum read Amos Elon's introduction to the 2006 Penguin
edition of Arendt's Eichman in Jerusalem.   In it Elon writes (to quote from
my first post on this subject) that " Arendt was bitterly criticized for
this book. For one thing she exposed the Judenrate, the Jews in Germany who
facilitated the collection of Jews and their transportation to such sites as
Auschwitz. She was also critical of Ben-Gurion for creating a "show trial."
But the key point for which she was criticized was implied in her subtitle,
namely that this evil epitomized by Eichmann was banal rather than demonic.
Her opinion didn't fit the preconceptions and conclusions held and formed by
many prominent Jews (especially in America) and Israelis of her day."  

I thought Arendt's description far worse than the description Rosenbaum
would prefer: Fascism as demonic.  For if it is Demonic then it its "out
there" and while it may indeed overwhelm us, it is not us.  But Arendt
argues that it is us, or that it could be.  We are all capable of this sort
of evil, of going along with a horrendous brutal ideology.  

Well, perhaps not all.  Some would prefer to die instead of going along, but
the numbers would be very small.  Interestingly, the numbers were probably
small in Stalin's Russia as well.  I'm reminded of an operation to remove a
cancer from the leg of my dog, Trooper.  They had to cut enough healthy
flesh around the cancer to make sure the cancer wouldn't return.  The
cancer, in other words, might have infected the healthy flesh in ways the
vet couldn't see, so she cut into healthy flesh.  Stalin did that too.  He
didn't just cut away known enemies.  He killed, or sent off to Gulags
millions who might in anyway have been "infected" by any sort of resistance
against what Stalin wanted.  Those who remained in Russia, were submissive
to Stalin.  We see the effects in Russia today.  The typical modern Russian
reveres Stalin.  Why should he not, anyone who might have taught him
differently was killed or sent to a Gulag.

In regard to the term which so offended Rosenbaum, The reaction to her book
(to quote from the second of my posts referenced above) did cause her to
want to explore the concept more fully. Eichmann to her was obviously banal,
but not so to her interlocutors who preferred seeing him as the epitome of
demonic evil. . . in her introduction to Thinking, she wrote,
"The immediate impulse [for writing this book] came from my attending the
Eichmann trial in Jerusalem. In my report of it I spoke of 'the banality of
evil.' Behind that phrase, I held no thesis in doctrine, although I was
dimly aware of the fact that it went counter to our [I take her to mean
"Western" rather than Jewish by 'our'] tradition of thought - literary,
theological, or philosophic - about the phenomenon of evil. Evil, we have
learned, is something demonic; its incarnation is Satan, a 'lightning fall
from heaven' (Luke 10:18), or Lucifer, the fallen angel ('The devil is an
angel too' - Unamuno) whose sin is pride ('proud as Lucifer'), namely, that
superbia of which only the best are capable: they don't want to serve God
but to be like Him. Evil men, we are told, act out of envy; this may be
resentment at not having turned out well through no fault of their own
(Richard III) or the envy of Cain, who slew Abel because 'the Lord had
regard for Abel and his offering, but for Cain and his offering he had no
regard.' Or they may be prompted by weakness (Macbeth). Or, on the contrary,
by the powerful hatred wickedness feels for sheer goodness (Iago's 'I hate
the Moor: my cause is hearted'; Claggart's hatred for Billy Budd's
'barbarian' innocence, a hatred considered by Melville a 'depravity
according to nature'), or by covetousness, 'the root of all evil' (Radix
omnium malorum cupiditas). However, what I was confronted with was utterly
different and still undeniably factual. I was struck by a manifest
shallowness in the doer that made it impossible to trace the uncontestable
evil of his deeds to any deeper level of roots or motives. The deeds were
monstrous, but the doer - at least the very effective one now on trial - was
quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous. There was no
sign in him of firm ideological convictions or of specific evil motives, and
the only notable characteristic one could detect in his past behavior as
well as in his behavior during the trial and throughout the pre-trial police
examination was something entirely negative: it was not stupidly but
thoughtlessness."
The writing style of Ron Rosenbaum strikes me as being very like that of
Carlin Romano; so one can understand why Rosenbaum admired him.  Neither has
advanced or, indeed, seems capable of advancing a coherent argument to
support their hostile rants.

Lawrence Helm
www.lawrencehelm.com
[lit-ideas] Revisiting the Banality of Evil

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