Hannah Arendt and the Banality of Evil
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Thanks to Tom B, who wants to read Hannah Arendt as much as we do.
A Volker Marz sculpture from the Berlin exhibition Hannah Arendt Denkraum. The show title translates as “a space in which to think about Hannah Arendt.” Which seems perfectly fitting, don’t you think? [Ovit / Flickr]
Her conclusions were profound. People who do evil are not necessarily monsters; sometimes they’re just bureaucrats. The Eichmann she observed on trial was neither brilliant nor a sociopath. He was described by the attending court psychiatrist as a “completely normal man, more normal, at any rate, than I am after examining him.” Evil, Arendt suggests, can be extraordinary acts committed by otherwise unremarkable people.
[Arendt] insisted that only good had any depth. Good can be radical; evil can never be radical, it can only be extreme, for it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension yet — and this is its horror! — it can spread like a fungus over the surface of the earth and lay waste the entire world. Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.
Amos Elon, The Excommunication of Hannah Arendt, the introduction to Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
Marz’s miniature Eichmann from the Berlin exhibition. [Sniko / Flickr]
In the past forty years Arendt’s ideas have been championed in two landmark psychological experiments — Stanley Milgram’s electroshock experiment and Philip Zimbardo’s Stanford prison experiment — but decried by luminaries like Norman Mailer.
Even if the phrase itself has lost some of its punch through sheer repetition, the ideas it embodies are no less relevant. It’s hard to talk about real-world horrors like the Rwandan genocide or torture at Abu Ghraib without referencing Arendt.
So for her centennial we’re reminding ourselves why her ideas still matter. Help us out by taking a stab at some of her initial questions: Where does evil come from? Why do people commit evil? Do you buy Arendt’s thesis, or do you think there is something else (be it religious or biological) that leads to evil and distinguishes good from evil people?
After doing some pre-interviews, talking about things internally, and mining this thread for good ideas, (empathy, the origins vs. the nature of evil, subjective vs. objective vs. moral judgments of evil) we’re leaning towards breaking this show up into at least two different shows.
The first show (tentatively scheduled for Thursday March 8th) would be more of an overview of Hannah Arendt’s life and work, introducing an introduction to the concept of the banality of evil as she described it. Our guests will likely be two of her last students who have spent their lives pouring over her work: Elisabeth Young-Bruehl and Jerome Kohn.
The second show would likely be a more in-depth conversation about evil, starting with Arendt’s concept. We may build this show around Philip Zimbardo, whose recent work has included extensive interviews with prison guards from Abu Ghraib.
Also, apparently Potter had the same idea I did: Meaning and Morality would be (ironically, since it’s been warming up for so long) a really good follow-up to these shows.
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl
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Author, Why Arendt Matters and Hannah Arendt: For the Love of the World
Psychoanalyst
Former student of Hannah Arendt
Jerome Kohn
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Director of the New York based Hannah Arendt Organization
Arendt’s Literary Executor and last research assistant
Editor of several collections of her essays, including Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought
- Extra Credit Reading
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Hannah Arendt, Power and Violence [audio of a lecture], Bard College, December 1968.
bardlib, Hannah Arendt Workspace: “The Workspace is an open access forum in which readers might look, as it were, over Hannah Arendt’s shoulder as she annotated the texts most important to her.”
Sarah Kerr, The Horrible and the Ridiculous, BookForum, January 2007: “Arendt “lives on in newspeak through just four words,” she notes on the first page. The media’s promiscuous overuse of the phrase “the banality of evil,” from Eichmann in Jerusalem, has turned it into an unhelpful cliche, she writes. Young-Bruehl directs us back to the philosophical problem of evil, a discussion begun two centuries earlier by Immanuel Kant that Arendt saw herself as extending.”
Jerome Kohn, Evil: The Crime Against Humanity, Hannah Arendt Center, New School University: “In a revealing passage she said: “Only the fearful imagination of those who have been aroused by [firsthand] reports but have not actually been smitten in their own flesh, of those who are consequently free from the bestial, desperate terror which . . . inexorably paralyzes everything that is not mere reaction, can afford to keep thinking about horrors,” adding that such thinking is “useful only for the perception of political contexts and the mobilization of political passions.”
(Read the full series of Kohn’s essays on Hannah Arendt here.)David Byrne, Free Will, Part 2: Support Our Troops, Journal, February 7, 2007: “Ultimately, following that logic that makes about 3 or 4 people ultimately responsible, if the buck continues to get passed on up the chain of command. Of course, those 3 or 4 will blame ‘faulty intelligence’ or try to absolve themselves one way or another, and they usually succeed.”
Robin Varghese, Banality of Evil, The French Version, 3 Quarks Daily, February 27, 2007: “In Bordeaux he resisted in his own way, he said: taking names off arrest-lists, tipping off families in advance, sheltering a rabbi in his house. Why, he even chartered the city trams to spare the very young or old the walk to the station, and booked passenger trains, not goods wagons, to make their journey comfortable. These self-justifications came out at Mr Papon’s trial, one of only two of French officials who collaborated with the Nazis in their crimes against humanity.”
MC, People are willing to commit virtual torture too, Neurophilosophy, December 23, 2007: “In the initial part of the project, Slater et al have used an immersive Virtual Reality environment to re-enact the classic experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram in the 1960s.”
Philip Zimbardo, Power turns good soldiers into ‘bad apples’, The Boston Globe, May 9, 2004: “Now there is a rush to analyze human behavior, blaming flawed or pathological individuals for evil and ignoring other important factors. Unless we learn the dynamics of “why,” we will never be able to counteract the powerful forces that can transform ordinary people into evil perpetrators.”
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February 6th, 2007 at 6:50 pm
This, from Amos Elon above, is nice…
“Evil comes from a failure to think.”
…but incomplete, perhaps.
Seems to me that ‘evil’ stems at least as much from the failure of empathy as it does from failure to think. Misogyny, for instance, might largely stem from immature masculinity refusing to accept femininity as human enough to be eligible to be empathy-worthy. Do macho boys who vilify girls consider them equal? Or fully human? I doubt it.
Religiously sanctioned misogyny is all the worse then, for its existence – and who can honestly claim it doesn’t exist? – depends upon so called ‘holy men’ obviously incapable of empathizing with women and girls as fully equal to men and boys.
Misogyny and its feral/domesticate might – might, I said – be the fundamental ‘evil’ that allows the development of so many others in human behavior and relations. (It’s worth pondering, at least.)
February 6th, 2007 at 6:51 pm
I’m rusty..
Correction: “Misogyny, and its feral/domesticate, sexism, might…be…”
February 6th, 2007 at 6:57 pm
Great topic!
(Sorry to clog the board with a post like this, but given previous discussion about how hard it can be to commit to a high-concept show, it’s important to make sure you all know that many of us appreciate these.)
February 6th, 2007 at 7:17 pm
Nice to see ya Nick.
February 6th, 2007 at 8:22 pm
N., welcome back old pal. As I’ve written here many times “evil” is a concept to which I don’t subscribe, as it is a value judgment and a function of an individual’s belief system and not universal or absolute.
What people think is evil are actions (some subscribe to an anthropomorphic objective evil) that increase in evilness the further they are perceived to exist in mental distance their sense of what is moral, right, or good. One person’s perceived evil may be another’s perceived necessity (I use perceived as perception is operational reality.)
There is no evil in nature and all people operate within their rationalized belief that their actions are for the greater good and the ends justify their means. They are well intended (in their belief) but misguided. Their “victims” cooperate in the action and act as mirrors to point these less than ideal actors in the drama to a more ideal path.
February 6th, 2007 at 9:39 pm
interesting topic…
People tend to have high ideals and beliefs but don’t always act in manners that support their beliefs. We like to think we care about the environment and are stewards of the earth, but how many of us ride our bike to the store instead of hopping into our car. We say we care about animals, but eat billions of pounds of meat every year from animals tortured on factory farms. We are against child labor, but still buy products made by horribly underpaid children in Asia. Etc., etc.
So why do people act in ways contrary to their beliefs? I tend to think it’s because we have a hard time connecting our small, everyday actions to the larger, evil acts. Even if we detest global warming it’s hard to turn our heat down when that will only make a small dent in the big picture. Just like it was hard for the WWII era Germans to see how their helping to construct a concentration camp, or conducting trains to Auschwitz, ignoring when their neighbors window’s were smashed, etc. were all causing the holocaust. We all like to belive that we’re less powerful than we actually are.
February 6th, 2007 at 10:11 pm
Arendt as well as Horkheimer and Adorno took on the belief that the West was in some way enlightened or modern in its thought and behaviour. They suggested that just because one may utilize posivistic and scientific techniques based on logic and reason does not necessitate the absence of atrocious acts. In fact, with modern technologies and procedures, these acts can be carried out more efficiently than ever (Hiroshima and Nagasaki the ultimate examples), carried out by Arendt’s banal bureaucrats.
In the cold, naked light of the gas chambers, in the blinding flash of an atomic explosion, in the thunderous illumination of a Baghdad night, as we stand exposed, where can we run and hide? Who or what will protect us from ourselves? Knowledge? God? Deception? High art? A constitution? The Courts and prisons? More WMDs? Senators? A warlord? The Media? Empathy? Fear? Love?
February 6th, 2007 at 10:15 pm
Or, sullivus, we fear we are more powerful than we wish to be.
February 7th, 2007 at 12:33 am
The true banality of evil is that we are all capable of it.
February 7th, 2007 at 1:28 am
Missed an end-tag. Hope this works.
February 7th, 2007 at 8:17 am
Hola Nick! You hit it for me with
Seems to me that ‘evil’ stems at least as much from the failure of empathy as it does from failure to think.
I would have put it that evil stems from pure selfishness, conscious selfish acts aimed at selfish ends. Throw in willful ignorance. Selfish acts that are truly innocent (or the result of mental illness), though harmful are not evil.
February 7th, 2007 at 11:20 am
The Companion volume to Eichman in Jerusalem might be “Commandant of Auschwitz:The Autobiography of Rudolf Hoess” It might ,also, be interesting comparing the trials of Hoess and Eichman. Hoess was hanged at Auschwitz.
February 7th, 2007 at 1:56 pm
jazzman wrote: “all people operate within their rationalized belief”
I note that you use ‘rationalized’ rather than ‘rational’. But overall, you reject the notion of evil. I’m not a believer in evil, either. Does this mean that you don’t believe we should impose laws to prevent or punish behaviors that cause others suffering?
I would debate the concept that “victims” are here to point the less than ideal players toward a more ideal path. Tell that to a rape victim. I don’t see many rapists reflecting upon their actions and moving toward a more ideal path. Would you not stop a rape that you happened upon? If you believe the ‘victim’ is cooperating and the whole thing is for the betterment of the rapist, is it best to let it continue?
Now, if you’re talking about a time frame outside of this life span, you’re getting into a perception that is based in belief and can’t be imposed on those who don’t agree with that belief. This conversation will probably be limited to that which can happen in the mortal system where one person has one human life span and does not have a consciousness beyond that. Even if you disagree, is it unworthy to pursue earthly insights that might help us reduce the amount of suffering we unleash on one another right here and now? isn’t that helpfu for shifting to an ideal path?
February 7th, 2007 at 3:59 pm
You should talk to Joan Cocks, who has a new piece out on Arendt and Nationalism — she is a political theorist at Mt Holyoke.
There has also been a series of events on Arendt at Brown University — “The Arendt Seminars” — over the past two years, sponsored by the Watson Institute for International Studies, the Pembroke Center and the Cogut Center for the Humanities, that might be of interest:
http://www.watsoninstitute.org/news_detail.cfm?id=404
and
http://www.brown.edu/Departments/Humanities_Center/events/Hannah.html
February 7th, 2007 at 4:06 pm
It might be helpful to have some images of Auschwitz/Birkeneau on the web.
www.worldwiseweb.com/peacemaker/ab/
photos by Peter Cunningham.
February 7th, 2007 at 4:14 pm
apologizes. this might work better:
www.zenpeacemakers.org:16080/auschwitz/
February 7th, 2007 at 4:40 pm
“As I’ve written here many times “evil” is a concept to which I don’t subscribe, as it is a value judgment and a function of an individual’s belief system and not universal or absolute.”
So, jazzman, are you saying you don’t subscribe to any value judgments whatsoever? That would seem to be the implication of your words. Please correct me if I’ve misread/misunderstood. Just trying to get things clear in order to respond.
February 7th, 2007 at 4:50 pm
free wheeling, free beer, free parking, free speech, free association, free-for-all, …, freewill or the banality of freewill?
February 7th, 2007 at 5:32 pm
Allison says: Does this mean that you don’t believe we should impose laws to prevent or punish behaviors that cause others suffering?
I don’t believe in laws except as guidelines as in Absolute Morality. For those who believe there is the need to control physical violence by force (violence to control violence) and believe in the concept of state protected private property (where the abstract value of ownership trumps human life and generally has ever since the concept arose – William James has interesting views on this subject) I maintain that only two laws are just, that one may not physically harm another or steal their possessions. I don’t believe in punishment either as I don’t believe in victims. No victim, no justification for punishment.
As to transgressions of the aforementioned “just” laws, I personally would accept the responsibility for what ever drama I have as part of my primary experience, however to satisfy those who believe in exacting some for of consequence for transgressions, I would recommend compassionate segregation for violent behavior and education for theft.
Your rape polemic (why not murder as well?) falls into the category of violence (against oneself, the environment, or other entities) as a less than ideal response for any reason. As I’ve told you before I believe every person is TOTALLY responsible for whatever they experience and that the victim and the perpetrator both are responsible parties in the drama and the way it plays out..
See http://www.radioopensource.org/fear-factor/#comment-18557#comment-18557 for the possible ways for responsibilities to function.
I realize that this is especially tough to swallow if one considers him/herself a victim as it seems to blame victims for their plight. I believe that every entity chooses consciously or unconsciously to participate in the dramas they create and that the aggressors bear a larger responsibly as they initiate the dramas’ action. That doesn’t mean we are absolved from empathy and compassion just because it was their choice. I refer you to http://www.radioopensource.org/elections-06-identities-politics/#comment-34507#comment-34507 to remind you of our last conversation regarding scenarios of this ilk.
is it unworthy to pursue earthly insights that might help us reduce the amount of suffering we unleash on one another right here and now? Isn’t that helpful for shifting to an ideal path?
It is always worthy to pursue insights to mitigate another’s suffering within the precepts of Absolute Morality and to avoid unleashing suffering on anyone. The 6 billion or so humans that currently inhabit the planet run the intellectual/emotional/empathetic gamut from infantile consciousness to Dalai Lama consciousness and beyond therefore our individual consciousness must contend with whomever we interact.
Peace to ALL,
Jazzman
February 7th, 2007 at 5:42 pm
Cursory comment, as I’m not yet done re-reading Eichmann in Jerusalem–which, by the way, I must thank you all for reminding/encouraging me to do.
The question of Jewish hostility directed toward Arendt following publication of the book (or of the articles in the New Yorker that formed the basis of the book) obviously–though perhaps not primarily–has to do with the nature of her account of Eichmann the historical individual. It seems that anything short of outright condemnation of Eichmann as incalculably evil would’ve failed to the ostracism of Arendt among fellow Jews. This is all self-evident though.
What’s really interesting is the other source of Jewish ire directed toward Arendt. She registers profound discomfort with the fundamental Zionist identification of Jews worldwide with the Israeli state, which has of course led to denigrations of diaspora Jews (and particularly Israeli Jews of Sephardic origin) in the name of a homogenous, monolithic Judaism. The argument can be and has been made that this cornerstone of the Zionist movement is indeed anti-Semitic in and of itself. The repercussions of this, needless to say, are immediately at hand today.
February 7th, 2007 at 5:44 pm
“…failed to *quell* the ostracism of Arendt…:
February 7th, 2007 at 5:47 pm
Or, perhaps it should be “…failed to quell Arendt’s ostracization” or “…failed to quell the ostracism faced by Arendt.”
The banality of typos…
February 7th, 2007 at 7:19 pm
The late great Molly Ivins was once asked “If you could go back in time would you have killed Hitler before he rose to power/” To which she answered “No!” Surprised by her response the questioner asked “Why?” Molly replied “If we had killed Hitler, then perhaps a truly competent leader like Albert Speer might have led Germany against the world.”
It was an old question, and Molly’s answer was profound. We dream of a different past without knowing how much worse it could have been under other circumstances. I don’t know what this evil is really. Perhaps evil is the bureaucrat; the man just ‘doing his job’ or the guy telling you “It’s nothing personal.” I tend to believe it is systems that permit really, really bad things tend to flourish under the pretenses of nationalism or religion that otherwise, without such grand and glorious excuses, human beings would find most contemptible.
February 7th, 2007 at 11:02 pm
I would like to add Rene Girard to the mix. Girard focues our attention to our human capacity to scapegoat one another that creates blood violence.
George Steiner in his lectures at Harvard discussed the Master/Student relationship commenting on the Martin Heideger/Hanah Arendt friendship.
Arendt’s mentor and friend had protoNazi sympathies.
February 7th, 2007 at 11:04 pm
Nice to read/hear from you Nick.
On the incompleteness of Elon’s account, and your supplementation of empathy, how about referring in one fell swoop to what I’d say is the source of both empathy and thought: imagination.
Thus, evil is the failure of imagination.
Of course, these words are a bit slippery semantically. By “thinking” Elon may well include empathy, as in “thinking about others.” It all depends on how one expands or contracts the concept.
And “evil” itself is even trickier…
February 8th, 2007 at 12:15 am
mynocturama, I like your attempt to bridge the “thinking” and the “empathy”. The only problems is that empathy is actually a feeling sensation. With empathy you can tune into the emotional experience of another. It is a connectedness. Thinking is more detached. The thinking version would be consideration.
But imagination does trump thinking. I love that addition to the pot.
February 8th, 2007 at 12:17 am
jazzman writes:”It is always worthy to pursue insights to mitigate another’s suffering within the precepts of Absolute Morality and to avoid unleashing suffering on anyone. The 6 billion or so humans that currently inhabit the planet run the intellectual/emotional/empathetic gamut from infantile consciousness to Dalai Lama consciousness and beyond therefore our individual consciousness must contend with whomever we interact.”
Did you intend to imply such superiority? This sounds very condescending.
February 8th, 2007 at 10:00 am
jazzman, I should follow that up, so as not to sound so snarky.
Most of the beliefs that you put forth are things I, too, believe in. As I’ve stated before, I paradoxically, also don’t believe you can live absolutley claiming this to be the reality. An incident 7 or eight years ago gave me pause.
My then 16 year old stepdaughter was in a high school where the students were required to present their portfolio to teachers, parents and any other interested parties at the end of each term. My stepdaughter’s presentation was right before another student’s presentation and she wanted to stay and see his, so we did. She had spoken of this boy. They were both involved in a mock government program. She learned that she was a liberal democrat. He was more conservative. When she listened to him explaining why he saw things the way he did, she determined that he had things in his personal background that had impacted his ability to be empathetic with the plight of those not in power. (I may not be doing justice to her analysis here, but the gist is that she decided there were emotional reasons that he couldn’t see the ‘light” - my word.) So, while they seemed to get along okay, they had strong political differences. Then, at his portfolio review he presented something that she thought reflected his flawed logic and she commented on it, ending with the words, “I feel sorry for you, you are so sad and you don’t even know it.”
Besides the inapproprateness of it in the setting, there was a presumptuousness that resulted in her looking smugly superior and him feeling that she had attempted to humiliate him. We tried to talk to her afterward and she couldn’t see that she had done anything but speak her truth. During my conversation with her, I realized that she had gotten this perspective, this idea that if you see a truth then you can determine that others don’t see the truth. (Again, not her words and probably not an eloquent way to say it.) She was a child that looked for bigger, deeper answers to things. Always bringin her questions to a metaphysical level. I had offered her a perception that I had been gaining and exploring. (I had been having a lot of breakthrough visions at the time.) But in that one moment, I saw myself reflected in her actions. Worse, I saw that I had created a legacy that wasn’t necessarily compassionate, it was painfully detached. It wasn’t that I found her assessment to be incorrect in some sense. The boy was sad and was having troubles. But her absolute certainty and her inability to actually connect with the boy and speak with him rather than at him undermined any value that her assessment may have had. At that point, I realized that my perception had to shift. I had to hold yet another paradox - I see what I see, but I may not see if for what it is. I cannot claim to hold the truth for anyone but myself. This means that I must accept that I am not seeing the whole truth, or perhaps not any truth, so I must acknowledge that another’s perspective is potentially more real than mine, though I can only operate with the guidance of my truth.
jazzman, your comments above reminded me of watching my step-daughter. I’m clearly having a reaction to that which may simply be a transference of that moment. You present your beliefs with such an absolutism. But what I didn’t realize until I saw your post on the Spinoza thread is that you are “aruging” for a philosophy. That changes my perception of how you present information here. I’ll try to keep that in mod when reading future posts.
Please forgive my reaction.
February 8th, 2007 at 2:28 pm
The Origin of Totalitarianism’ has thus far remained unmentioned here. It is a classic of political science, and still worth closely reading with a notepad in hand… Also, Arendt would never have come to our notice if it weren’t for a hero (sadly misused word today): Varian Fry. Never heard of him? http://www.almondseed.com/vfry . And finally, how many know that this Jewish woman remained for years in love with Nazi sympathizer, opportunist, and philosopher Martin Heidegger, her professor. A good starting point to learn about Arendt is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Arendt . Hope some folks profit from this post…
February 8th, 2007 at 2:38 pm
A friend writes:
The New York Review of Books impressively presents Coetzee on Mailer &
Hitler, but the essay is superficial because it is oblivious of an
entangled bank of themes in Americana. Coetzee seems not to
understand Arendt, because Arendt herself brought her peculiar
Augustinian sacramentalism to an America in the last stages of
Transcendentalist “sacramental universe”–so that her Judaic judgments
and Augustinian sacramentalism wanted to say, but didn’t quite do so
simply or directly, that evil is not sacramental, that is, that evil
does not manifest in outward and visible signs, so that evil can
appear to be good, and certainly can look banal. Edmund Spenser is
master of the false image of good–”Archimago.” I “feel” that Arendt
was too contemptuous of her public to explain what she thought should
have been obvious to an educated person who acknowledged her study of
Augustine. South African literature, in my limited experience, hasn’t
a trace of the sacramental universe which governs American literature
until even Melville sees that he must surrender it, yet has nothing to
displace it with. The pseudo-sacramental survives in some of the
muddled theory of Texan Christians, as with the suggestion that
birth-defects are outward and visible signs of inward and spiritual
flaws (I could but won’t quote). A woman nominated by I think Reagan
to Health Education and Welfare argued that the handicapped should not
be mainstreamed because then they would not be handicapped, which
would be a dangerously misleading falsification since the handicap was
evidence of spiritual flaws. I live among crazy people, which
includes Norman Mailer, and maybe me, wasting my time on “essayists”
who coast on a suave tone, but endanger us all…. An example: my
limp as a cripple is a physical sign of a metaphysical condition, my
participations in black magics and evil-eyes, so let no one get on the
same elevator with me… From another perspective, the mediator
between God and humans must be negated in some way–blind, castrated,
deaf or Polish–so that negation of my ability to walk may qualify me
as a mediator… …Thus Oedipus comes to stand with gods… …but so
far I see no evidence of compensations for paralysis such as Blind
John Milton produced with Paradise Lost…
–
February 8th, 2007 at 2:46 pm
////Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.—Amos Elon\\\
I have always defined hate as confused and inadequate thinking.
A neurobiologist did an MRI brain study and used politicians as a trigger mechanism. When he shows you your politician, the warm / fuzzy part of your brain lights up. When he shows you the political challenger, the analytical part of your brain lights up.
I want to posit this about the association between hate/evil and thinking:
It seems, to be against something, requires analytical thought.
I think this is what is meant when they say: hate is learned
I disagree with Amos Elon. The banality comes from the prevalence of confused and inadequate thinking and from the fact that, those who can think clearly, refuse to stand up to and correct confused and inadequate thinking.
February 8th, 2007 at 3:15 pm
Hurley makes an intresting point. Arendt’s dissertation was on Augustine and Love.
The Heideger and Arendt’s affiar was an interesting contradiction. I am not sure how it plays in her analysis of Eichman. Elie Wiesel has said remember many nazi’s had PhD’s and MD’s. Hilter’s executionars were willing.
It would be interesting to hear from George Steiner and/or Robert Jay Lifton(who studied Nazi Doctors.)
I still like to Amos Elon preface. Evil can be banal,uncriticaln and sytematic just like going to the industrial plant.
February 8th, 2007 at 3:36 pm
I appreciate your response allison. I’ve done some modest work/research in social cognition, and with the issue of empathy in particular. Cognitive science uses the rather (I think) clumsy term “Theory of Mind” to describe an individual’s capacity to entertain the beliefs, thoughts, motives, of another, to enter into another mind, more or less, at whatever level of penetration or insight. Conditions with pronounced social deficits such as autism, and to lesser extent schizophrenia, are often described, or theorized, in these terms.
The question of differentiating, separating out, different aspects of “mind” (sorry about the scare quotes around some of these words, just trying to acknowledge that I – we – use words sometimes without really knowing clearly what they mean, yet still go about stumbling with them anyways, and to even attempt to clarify them would require another post/essay entirely…), whether it be “thought” from “feeling,” or linguistic from spatial reasoning, touches on more general issues, which, please bear with me, I’ll touch on really quick.
There’s a tendency or tradition in cognitive science and philosophy of mind to conceive of the mind in “modular” terms, as essentially a network of discreet functions or modules, independent, anatomically and functionally, from one another, however interconnected they may be finally. On the other hand, there’s also the opposing tendency, to think of the mind in more holistic terms, as a larger, more generalized, fluid capacity or entity, that then performs its various functions.
Obviously I’m playing fast and loose here. But the question of how one essentially conceives of the mind is important, both neuroscientifically, in correlating mental functions to brain activity, and more generally, in how people think, and think about thinking.
Within this localized vs. holism dialectic, broadly put, I tend to lean towards a more interrelated view. Concerning empathy, for example, there does seem to be an innate tendency (the innate vs. acquired dichotomy is itself tricky, of course, but leaving that aside…), expressing itself very early on in infancy, to pay attention to faces and to mimic facial movements, as with a newborn sticking out its tongue in imitation of mom. This responsiveness to other faces, if not totally hardwired, is at least strongly pre-wired, so to speak. So we seem instinctually to attend to faces and, after a little while, to read facial expressions.
Let’s say you’re sitting at a table eating lunch, and a stranger suddenly heads towards you with an angry, aggressive look on his face. You’re going to immediately, instinctually react, according to what his expression most likely indicates about his motives, about what he’s about to do. You can call this a basic form of empathy, bound up with self-interest and self-preservation in this case, but a kind of mind-reading nonetheless. This instinctual face-reading, and responsiveness to bodily expression and behavior more generally, is, it seems to me, empathy in its most immediate, affective form, empathy as a “feeling sensation.”
OK, now take the front-page photo from the New York Times yesterday. It shows a somewhat elderly mother who has fainted in her son’s arms, both she and her son on the floor, the son with a distraught, fearful, maybe angry look on his face, looking up at the soldiers who have just burst into their home. There’s an immediate empathic response to the scene, a feeling of some degree, or at least a reading of feeling on the frozen faces in the photo. But, almost simultaneously with this immediate response, information concerning context, what you know and think of the war, your memory of events leading up to this moment, matters usually associated with intelligence or “thinking,” floods in. Furthermore, this intelligence, or consideration, comes to inform the feeling you have towards the photo, what it means, feels, to you. This, you might say, is empathy in its more elaborated, imaginative form. And it seems to me these aren’t clearly distinct steps or cognitive acts, first feeling, then thinking, or vice versa. It seems, feels, to me, all of a piece. Each takes the other by the hand, as it were, to help the other along.
A rather longwinded way of saying the dichotomy of feeling and thought, head and heart, when treated too simplistically, separately, simply isn’t sufficient to describe our responses to others, to the world. And what this has to do exactly with Arendt, I’m not really sure. I guess I’m saying that imagination seems to me to better capture the mind in its fullness, as the unifying source of both social and intellectual reasoning. And evil, then, as involving, to some degree, a failure of imagination, a failure to imagine the lives of others, and failure to imagine and think through the consequences of one’s actions.
February 8th, 2007 at 3:39 pm
Maybe if we went to the video of her and Heideger making love –
seriously, that is completely dope…..
February 8th, 2007 at 8:48 pm
Perhaps it’s useful to start with a simple, provisional distinction, between systems of thought that attribute to “evil” an essentially positive presence and force, and those that treat it fundamentally in the negative, in terms of absence, privation, stuntedness, some failure to relate or connect. Broadly speaking, (western?) religions tend toward the former, and secular accounts the latter.
Simplistic, subject to complication, sure, but serviceable, I think, for the sake of discussion.
So a secular psychologist might explain an adult’s antisocial behavior by reference to some deficit in childhood, an isolating trauma, abandonment, lack of access to avenues of opportunity or to positive role models, etc… The cause, or core, of the badness, or “evil,” is in and of itself negative, a matter of absence, insufficiency.
Religion is more willing to imagine evil as a presence, an embodiment onto itself, an addition to the scheme of things, not merely a subtraction or deficiency. This mode may have the advantage as far as intensity or forcefulness of description goes, in that sometimes it seems that only by reference to the supernatural can we adequately explain what we take to be evil, do justice to our sense of it. To some, secular or worldly explanations can feel woefully inadequate. Coetzee gets at this somewhat in the NYRB piece. Maybe it’s not so much the banality of evil itself, but the banality of our accounts of it. For, when it comes down to it, the bare fact is, mere human beings perform horrific acts. And yet, in feeling at least, psychological, sociological, or historical explanations fail to be exhaustive.
Here’s Emerson from the Divinity School Address:
Good is positive. Evil is merely privative, not absolute: it is like cold, which is the privation of heat. All evil is so much death or nonentity. Benevolence is absolute and real. So much benevolence as a man hath, so much life hath he. For all things proceed out of this same spirit, which is differently named love, justice, temperance, in its different applications, just as the ocean receives different names on the several shores which it washes. All things proceed out of the same spirit, and all things conspire with it. Whilst a man seeks good ends, he is strong by the whole strength of nature. In so far as he roves from these ends, he bereaves himself of power, of auxiliaries; his being shrinks out of all remote channels, he becomes less and less, a mote, a point, until absolute badness is absolute death.
And Borges from one of his essays:
Nazism suffers from unreality, like Erigena’s hell. It is uninhabitable; men can only die for it, lie for it, wound or kill for it. No one, in the intimate depths of his being, can wish it to triumph. I shall risk this conjecture: Hitler wants to be defeated. Hitler is blindly collaborating with the inevitable armies that will annihilate him, as the metal vultures and the dragon (which must have known that they were monsters) collaborated, mysteriously, with Hercules.
These exemplify the evil/badness-in-negative-terms approach. This rings true for me, especially in the mouths of Emerson and Borges. I especially like the idea of an ideology like Nazism being, in the end, uninhabitable, an airless place, finally suffocating. As it is not on the side of life, in the deepest, broadest sense, it simply cannot live. I know this smacks of simplicity and naivety, and yet still I think it’s true.
February 8th, 2007 at 9:02 pm
People exist, bricks exist, beams of light exist, the barking of dogs exists, the smell of roses exists, heat exists — and we perceive these things with our eyes, ears, nose, skin, and other sensory organs. But we can’t see or touch or smell or hear ‘evil’. It’s entirely inside our heads. It usually (but not always) involves social relationships… We see others as evil, or less frequently, we see them as good but their actions as evil. Everything is divided into the two categories, since evil and good are how we choose to see the reality of people, bricks, beams of light, the barking of dogs, the smell of roses, and heat. It’s almost a Buddhist thing to simply see things as they are… It requires saintly (or satanic?) resignation to the flow of reality, since most of us act, and in the action bring our passions into play on a world which is basically — just there.
February 8th, 2007 at 10:27 pm
allison I liked your last post. That is a problem shared by many on the hard left and the hard right. Both are so sure their way is the only way, and the right way. They see others as either poor lost souls or evil.
February 9th, 2007 at 9:59 am
Q: Who was the ‘evil’ in Rwanda?
A: It was a neighbor
Hannah Arendt’s concept is spot on.
February 9th, 2007 at 10:37 am
The reason the evil are built up to be monsters, is so that you will not recognize evil in yourself.
It is important to society that you not recognize the evil acts society asks you to do
One of Alan Watt’s premises: society doesn’t want you to know who you are.
February 9th, 2007 at 10:49 am
The premise behind the French lawyer Jacques Verges, who defends monsters in court:
The monsters do the bidding of society– as part of society, you are responsible for their acts.
February 9th, 2007 at 11:11 am
I’m still reeling from the ad hominem attack on Hannah Arendt.
The attack was derived from wiki:
///She studied philosophy with Martin Heidegger at the University of Marburg, and had a long, sporadic romantic relationship with him, something that has been criticised because of his later membership in and support for the Nazi party.\\\
The problem for the attackers is that wiki says ‘later membership’.This was easily resolved by calling Martin Heidegger a proto-Nazi.
I find these type of attacks evil.
She was probably influenced by Heidegger - did the influence provide clarity or bias?
February 9th, 2007 at 1:53 pm
Lumiere
Thanks ,that is thequestion Geroge Steiner raised at Harvard. In what way,did Heidegger influence his disciples? How does a Master influence his students.
Certainly, Arendt was influenced by Jaspers,her study of Augistine as well as her own flight from Germany,France to the community of exiles formed at the New School. Beyond the “ad hominen”, how people are influenced by good or ill is an important question.
February 9th, 2007 at 2:43 pm
The interesting thing about a Heidegger influence is that, as a Jew, it could have given her a different POV – what was it?
The critics want us to believe that Heidegger was immoral and thereby a protoNazi. Correct me if I’m wrong, but, as far as I can tell Heidegger was not concerned with morality. (I see two familiar names mentioned with his: Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida.)
The Nazis were all about morality – their morality.
In the movie Downfall, the Nazi command was shown making every kind of moral decision – one in particular stands out:
Would you poison your children to protect them from invaders?
Hey jazzman – how would you answer that one?
February 9th, 2007 at 3:33 pm
Good can be just as banal. Small acts of good are so quickly forgotten as to bring question to their existence. And larger swaths of good are a sure precursor to regret. As the bard saith, The best-laid schemes o’ mice an ‘men …
February 9th, 2007 at 4:44 pm
Steiner argues that Heidegger saw him self as Germany’s MASTER TEACHER and/or Teacher to Der Fuehrer. The Nazi’z seem to have marginalized him. So was it morality or ambition?
Steiner in his attempted to understand Heidegger question Hans-George Gadamer about Heidegger. Gadamer simply said Heidegger was a great intelect and mind but a petty individual. Unlike Speer, Heidegger may have caused less damage. Was H. merely banal and petty?
Arendt certainly suffered experiencially from Nazism both as a human and a phenomenologist.
February 9th, 2007 at 8:02 pm
This bio from European Graduate School EGS seems complete
http://www.egs.edu/resources/arendt.html
///According to her text, Eichmann had not had a sadistic will to do evil, but had been thoughtless; he had failed to think about what he was doing.\\\
I’m not buying this - he had plenty of thoughts, they were all confused and inadequate. Listen to your favorite bigot carefully – there are plenty of theories about what is going on and what to do about it, but they just don’t add up.
February 9th, 2007 at 9:16 pm
Lumière asks: Would you poison your children to protect them from invaders?
I strive to never commit violence for any reason. I believe that my pacifism and good intentions would result in not creating such a scenario. If I happen to find myself and my children in such a situation then I would try to avoid confrontation and believe that the situation is only temporary and a challenge to overcome.
I recommend Gandhi’s advice to the British people during WWII from Non-Violence in Peace and War
“I would like you to lay down the arms you have as being useless for saving you or humanity. You will invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions…. If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourselves, man, woman, and child, to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them.”
This goes against the grain for most people but I think is the ideal response if one cannot reason one’s way out or remove oneself from such a situation. (In a less strident tone, that’s only my opinion and I could be, as Dennis Miller used to close his rants, wrong.)
Peace to ALL,
Jazzman
February 9th, 2007 at 9:20 pm
allison says: Did you intend to imply such superiority? This sounds very condescending.
I’ll reword the offending reply hopefully less pompously at the risk of again seeming to be condescending:
If one wishes to and is able to lessen another’s suffering without using less than ideal means to accomplish that end then I wholeheartedly recommend they try.
It is never ideal for one to cause suffering in another (cause is the operative word – as much suffering is self-inflicted thru ignorance.) People’s consciousness exists at all levels of awareness so one needs to gauge one’s audience and adjust their demeanor accordingly (as I aim to do going forward.)
I intend and claim no superiority; in my view all entities (at their essence) are equal and responsible for their experience (as I am for attracting your chastening.) My intention is to present an alternative, larger, open ended and inclusive picture of reality to suggest that there other ways to look at everything.
The picture I attempt to present is one that is enformed by my worldview which as you note tends to apprehend reality from a meta-level. When I interact with specific people I mostly approach current events from the naïve realism vantage unless it’s a philosophically oriented discussion.
As this venue is to me impersonal except for perhaps degrees of affinity with certain posters, I state my beliefs as they exist at the NOW moment of the post.
I’m aware that my style is pedagogical and that I assert my philosophical position as if it were absolute, because like your step-daughter I look for bigger, deeper answers to questions and analyze things on a metaphysical level.
Like you I am prepared to acknowledge that another’s perspective is potentially more real than mine and wait for others to raise contrapuntal arguments to further tune my beliefs (again dialectic debate – not mean-spirited or insult.)
I apologize to you and everyone else for my stridency and thank you for reminding me of my tendency toward pedantry (my wife says it’s my worst personality trait) and will strive in future to be less so.
Peace,
Jazzman
February 10th, 2007 at 10:28 am
Jazz.
Your approach doesn’t bother me an iota – I focus on what is said rather than the style. If you want to tell me your ideas are superior and why, I can judge for myself – if they are superior – I’m glad to know.
Hope seems to be central to your belief system – you must have faith in the kindness of adversarial strangers in order to exist.
I beginning to understand why morality is a non-starter for so many philosophers….
February 10th, 2007 at 5:12 pm
This conversation strikes me as riding on slowly but inevitably convergent tracks. Here’s a stab at speeding the convergence.
Jazzman at 8:22 PM, Feb, 6th writes, “ ‘evil’…is a value judgment and a function of an individual’s belief system, and not universal or absolute.”
I agree (it’s why I put quotes around the word in this thread’s first post).
mynoctorama, at 4:40 PM, Feb. 7th, responds, “jazzman, are you saying you don’t subscribe to any value judgments whatsoever?” Then, along with hurley and others, contributes insights concerning the concept of evil.
tbrucia then really nails it at 9:02 PM, Feb. 8th: “we can’t see or touch or smell or hear ‘evil’. It’s entirely inside our heads. It usually (but not always) involves social relationships… We see others as evil, or less frequently, we see them as good but their actions as evil.”
“Honor” is another concept that has no material existence. Merriam-Webster Online begins its definitions of honor (noun) with this,
“1a: good name or public esteem: REPUTATION; b: a showing of usually merited respect: RECOGNITION - ‘pay honor to our founder’
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary
Honor, then, is a social convention. In some cultures it’s akin to currency: it can accrue or erode, raising or lowering a person’s or family’s standing in the society.
Yet it exists entirely within human minds – not as an agency or force anywhere in the natural world.
Meanwhile, Merriam-Webster gives the following (relevant) definitions for ‘evil’,
Noun: “1a: the fact of suffering, misfortune, and wrongdoing; b: a cosmic evil force
2: something that brings sorrow, distress, or calamity…”
‘1a’ names any suffering as evil; yet ‘1b’ and ‘2’ home in on the real target—the 800-pound-gorilla question—a do you subscribe to the concept of ‘evil’ as an invisible but ‘real’ force, a force that acts in the natural world? Longstanding, widespread belief in this notion has spawned countless mythological personifications such as demons, demiurges, devils, etc.
Meanwhile, M-W-O a sheds a bit more light with this:
Adjective: “1a: morally reprehensible: SINFUL, WICKED ‘an evil impulse’; b: arising from actual or imputed bad character or conduct ‘a person of evil reputation’
3a: causing harm: PERNICIOUS ‘the evil institution of slavery’; b: marked by misfortune…”
…which adds to the question the dimension of morality. Does morality exist outside of human minds? (And yes, I reckon this thread has a darn good chance to eventually echo the Morality thread for depth and quality of conversation.)
I suggest it takes quite a leap of faith to answer that question with a ‘yes’. (And I’ve a serious intellectual allergy to the usage of the words ‘believe’, ‘belief’, and ‘faith’—all of which strike me as increasingly obsolescent, unnecessary concepts.)
Ought sexual activity between consenting adults, in this, the 21st century, be eligible for the designation ‘evil’, i.e., “sinful, wicked”?
Can sexual activity between consenting adults honestly “arise from actual or imputed bad character or conduct”? Can it be “morally reprehensible”?
Have we not (mostly) abandoned such legacies of our species’ longstanding superstitiousness and ignorance?
I venture that ‘evil’ at core is a religious concept. Or perhaps—and better yet—a proto-religious concept: a ‘feeling’, an unverifiable yet strong intuition, that unseen agency is the actual cause of suffering. The notion that then prompted the corollary notion of a ‘good’ agency to counter it, which bred shamanism, and the subsequent evolution of recent human religions. Amid that evolution came additional proscriptions: on sexual activity, on the veneration of alternative deities, on articles of clothing (or lack thereof), on dietary options, etc. In tandem with this increasingly complex morass of taboo and more, the original ‘demons’ of misfortune and suffering grew grander: becoming the ‘devils’ responsible for simple, natural human urges to defy the varied and sundry proscriptions.
So, what’s ‘good’? How about this…?
“1: marked by compassion, sympathy, or consideration for humans or animals…”
http://www.m-w.com/dictionary/humane
Is this not what we want from our gods? Compassion, sympathy, and consideration?
And does this not return us, full circle, to the issue of empathy?
I think Allison, at 12:15 AM, Feb. 8th, has got it exactly right:
“…empathy is actually a feeling sensation. With empathy you can tune into the emotional experience of another. It is a connectedness. Thinking is more detached.”
Is it perhaps time to pay more attention to evidence of inhumane attitudes and actions than to the unverifiable and empirically questionable notion of the existence of ‘evil’? It would, I think, be a whole lot simpler. Concepts don’t always translate well over culture and language, yet emotions, I gather, are universal: all humans, regardless of culture or language, have essentially the same emotions. And I, like Allison, experience empathy emotionally rather than as mere thought.
I sure could be wrong, but it seems to me that inhumanity and its opposite, humaneness, are easier to agree upon, to identify: “compassion, sympathy, or consideration for humans or animals”. Isn’t this a value judgment most if not all humans can agree to venerate? I bet both Jazzman and mynocturama already can, and do!
(Seems to me you could found an entire philosophy on such a notion. And it doesn’t require any unverifiable supernatural entities, either…
)
February 10th, 2007 at 10:19 pm
Can we talk about the banality of the death penalty?
How does this State sanctioned act differ in moral and other terms from the original act (usually murder) that led to it?
February 10th, 2007 at 11:11 pm
I apologize for not having sufficient time to study all the comments and background material in this thread. I do plan to get around to that.
My fascination with the term “evil” increased when the president used it to justify his version of the “war on terror,” describing bin Laden and Hussein as “evil.”
Notwithstanding dictionary definitions,“evil” has a supernatural connotation. Sometimes incorporeal spirits, such as Satan, are invoked. Mysterious and irrational forces not detectible or measurable by science are cited. The movies have given us an endless array of monsters that defy evolutionary science. “Evil” also connotes mentality, although not necessary high intelligence. It’s odd to describe the weather or a disease as evil.
“Evil” sometimes describes an individual, and sometimes the collective actions of individuals (nazism, slavery, and communism come to mind). Collective evil can result from slight deviations from propriety by many people. Few Nazi’s were savage killers like Jeffrey Dahmer or Charles Manson, but relatively normal Nazis acted in furtherance of a system whose results far outweighed those of a serial killer.
A corollary to the supernaturalism of evil is the impossibility of arguing or reasoning with evil beings, and the lack of necessity to consider whether they really are evil. This becomes particularly interesting when the president talks about the evil people who oppose us. Such dark, irrational forces can only be effectively opposed by force, preferably military in nature. Thus as we went into Iraq, very little thought was given to what our enemies or potential enemies might actually think. Why understand them if our only options are to kill them or shackle them with brute force?
Other closely related terms, such as “wrong” and “immoral,” don’t have these supernatural overtones, although religion sometimes enters the picture. We don’t feel it’s impossible to influence people who are merely wrong or immoral by reasoning with them. It may be a matter of degree – evil being the highest degree of immorality, for example.
These things being said, I’ll address the lead questions briefly. “Where does evil come from?” I reject any supernatural source of evil. What people call evil is extreme immorality within a single aberrant individual or carried out in an organized way by groups of individuals who conform to what, in terms of the general morality of mankind, is an aberrant policy. And I believe immorality, right and wrong, etc., have no independent reality apart from our thinking processes.
“Why do people commit evil?” This depends on what you consider evil. I think each case would have to be examined on its own. Eichmann was carrying out orders. Dahmer lacked the inhibitions and empathy that prevent us from doing things in real life that we might (especially when young) enjoy seeing done in movies, or reading about.
“Do you buy Arendt’s thesis, or do you think there is something else (be it religious or biological) that leads to evil and distinguishes good from evil people?” Her thesis makes perfect sense to anyone who believes in the supernatural. The downside of that, in my opinion, is that we risk failing to rationally examine our assessment of the degree of wrongfulness involved, and how we can fight monsters without becoming monsters ourselves.
February 11th, 2007 at 1:13 am
There are many people far smarter then I who can opine about the abstracts of evil. As a blogger, when confronted with these Meta questions, I ask myself what I can bring to the ROS table that is unique. So I do my reporting from where no one else can – I look inside, and then I use that personal perspective as a lens to view the bigger questions of humanity.
Bobby was his name, he was my mom’s boyfriend for a few years, that is I think it was a few years, time back then is a little hazy. I was around 10 or 11 and we were living in a small redneck town outside of Orlando Florida. My mom was bartending to pay the rent. Bobby had moved down from New Jersey to work in the moving business and I assume he met my mom in a bar. He was a short burly guy with tight curly reddish hair and a tight curly mustache. Bobby would walk around with a Popeye posture and a countenance of bitterness; he personified that tough Jersey guy thing.
The details are blurry but the cycle is clear, heavy drinking, escalating arguments, all culminating in a beat down for my mom. First he’d raise his voice and punch a wall, then after a while he’d slap her. My mom would switch between and venting her disgust and resent at him and crying hysterically. He would in turn pull her hair and drag her around, warning her all the while that this might be it. I can still see his glassy eyes squinting with a calm rage as he stalked our tiny apartment.
At some point I would have taken the pillows from my ears, left my bed and tried to intervene. In a shaky voice I would try to talk him down by pleading with him. I was trying to keep him from going over the edge; I was trying to tap into whatever humanity was there, whatever conscience. This is the first time I ever thought about this, but I’d actual praise him for having the will power to hold back from doing more damage.
Looking back, It’s like there was another being in the room, which I would now describe as “evil” and I was competing with that entity for influence over Bobby. It’s like both Bobby and I realized how powerful that seperate being was, it had no reigns. He could choose that power or he could choose my way of conscience. I had to subvert the reality by building him up, telling him how grateful I was for his control. I was letting him save face for not taking that power to it’s full potential.
I don’t relay this personal story because I’m interested in analyzing why this one insecure asshole tapped into his capacity for evil, just like I wouldn’t waste precious time analyzing Stalin or Mao’s personal issues – to me that would be honoring their self aggrandizement. I relay this story because I’m interested in what I’ll call the Co-dependency of Evil. It wasn’t like my mom just kept taking Bobby back; she was obsessed with him and kept begging him to stay. I think about the multitude of average citizens who revered Stalin and Mao to the point of obsession and thus enabled their own oppression. Today I discussed this blog with a coworker (a gay man) who was abused for years in a relationship and always went back to the guy. I asked him why he was drawn toward the abuse, toward the evil. He told me that he would always feel deep down that it was his fault, that the trouble stemmed for some weakness of his own. This made sense to me, it related to the stories of the Cultural Revolution or the Gulag where people would be sent away to “corrective” labor camps in the Gulag or to the countryside for standard education in Mao teachings. Like my co-worker, if you had a problem with what was happening, it must have stemmed from you own weakness.
It appears to me that the only remedy for this Co-dependency of Evil is a respect for self, derived from love and affection. To be clear, I’m not talking here about the evil inflicted on the Jews, or victims of random violent crime. I’m talking about a specific kind of evil. I pressed my co-worker further on the reasons for the emptiness that his boyfriend had exploited; I wanted to know where this lack of self-respect originated? He mentioned immediately the abandonment he felt as a child. In totalitarian states, one is dissuaded from respect for self because it runs in opposition to respect for state. Consequently, friends turn against friends and when you have betrayed a love one for the state, you have bought in, and thus become even more dependent on the state. My mother’s lack of self-respect grew from abuse from her stepfather when she was young. There was physical abuse for sure, but it’s the verbal abuse that inflicted the lasting damage.
In conclusion I want to say that even through the chaos of those early years, my mother always held out a lifeline of love for me. None of those guys ever hit me, they must have known the line that would cross with her and the fateful consequences it would have for all us. I have never questioned her love for me and that must have made my own self-respect possible. My mother has now remarried a great guy, found religion, and embraced her capacity for peace. We persevered together, her and I, and now share a love supreme, thus making that lifeline no longer necessary. Yet, what she may not know is that I have held on to that lifeline, cherishing it, and making it the foundation for all my days forward.
February 11th, 2007 at 8:47 pm
manning120 Says: Her thesis makes perfect sense to anyone who believes in the supernatural.
I think that is antithetical to her premise. She is saying evil is banal – not extraordinary in any way.
Hitler would have probably have spent his life in a mental institution if not for the support of the banal thinkers. The confused and inadequate thoughts of the German people were, as some surmise, a result of the Treaty of Versailles that ended WWI. You would have to understand the apportionment to understand how a nation could be so confused.
I trade equities, which is why I am online so much. I met trader who escaped Auschwitz. He introduces himself thusly:
Hi, my name is Ted and when I was sixteen a guy named Hitler sent me to camp. The name of the camp was Auschwitz.
He was young, so he was sent to work at Krupp. He escaped and was captured by the US Army who inducted him b/c he spoke 4 languages. Worked briefly for the OSS and then came to the US working for a NYSE firm as a specialist.
He is undoubtedly one of the most unforgettable and inspirational characters I have ever met. His outlook on life is completely balanced - he loves America and after a few vodkas always exclaims: Only in America!
I have spent hours posting online learning about his experience and views. He is very sanguine - doesn’t blame Hitler - never once called Hitler evil - clued me in on many misconceptions about the war. His view is that of a historian – events pushed the inevitable on his people. Btw, he is the only survivor of his extended family. He has a book written, soon to be published.
February 11th, 2007 at 9:08 pm
Sounds like a hell of a guy. I think some of the things that he experienced in the not to distant past are starting to take shape again, under the guise of anti-zionism. This sounds much nicer, and not as bigoted as anti-semetic.
February 11th, 2007 at 9:44 pm
I can’t imagine going through what he went through – never mind surviving with the incredible sense of humor that he has.
One night, he drinking Vodka, me drinking Scotch, we went back and forth for hours around the concept of what one should have done:
Resist and probably die or do anything to survive – as in a moral supposition, practically speaking, you don’t know what you would have done.
February 11th, 2007 at 10:57 pm
The solution( and I’m only monday morning quarterbacking),as I see it was to have seen the warning sighns and tried to have done something to stop the Nazi movement, or to get the hell out of dodge, as many did. Either way a terrible situation to be in.
Of course one never sees the hammer swinging.
I also prefer scotch.
February 11th, 2007 at 11:15 pm
Leaving wasn’t an option we discussed.
The Nazis controlled visas, but who would take you?
This was Eastern Europe in the 30’s – anti-Semitism was full blown across the continent and in the US.
This is his premise: historically, the die had been cast.
The banality of evil was pervasive.
February 12th, 2007 at 1:03 am
What would Hannah Arendt make of Ward Churchill’s argument in his 9/11 essay about the banal “technocratic corps” which are instrumental to an imperialistic US foreign policy?
February 12th, 2007 at 1:33 am
jazzman wrote: “I would like you to lay down the arms you have as being useless for saving you or humanity. You will invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions…. If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourselves, man, woman, and child, to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them.”
This goes against the grain for most people but I think is the ideal response if one cannot reason one’s way out or remove oneself from such a situation. (In a less strident tone, that’s only my opinion and I could be, as Dennis Miller used to close his rants, wrong.)”
I remember reading this Gandhi passage before. As you write, it does seem to go against the grain, and yet it also feels like the only path to peace. Intellectually, I see this and I hope that I can live it. But whenever the topic comes up, I am reminded of something in my childhood and I am never sure how I feel about what I did. I offer it up for discussion:
After taking physical abuse for as long as I could remember, I was standing in my room, at the age of 14 when my mother’s hand was lifting for yet another blow. I quickly hit her and said, “How do you like it?!” She never hit me again. I didn’t hit her hard enough to hurt her, just enough to startle her.
What I may forever question is whether I committed an act of violence and whether the fact that the physical abuse stopped justifies the violence. I throw it out there for consideration in this discussion of ‘evil’ versus what? Good? Is that equivalent to peace? Is evil the opposite of peace? What is peace?
February 12th, 2007 at 2:10 am
Ok, just read nother’s post. It’s a great juxtaposition to mine. His was definitely a path of peace. People often tell me that it took strength to do what I did. But it took infinitely more for nother to do what he did, which was to lessen violence without using violence.
when you talk about the roots, nother, and mention love and affection, it starts to cross paths with some of the other comments about whether evil exists or is only in our heads as a concept. To ask this of evil, is then to ask it of love. Love is a concept. But for both of these things, we experience something that we are trying to describe. Powerful energies are present when people commit either very violent acts or very nurturing acts.
Is evil an abstract concept that we create so that we don’t have to take responsibility? If we label someone in our midst as evil, then it’s not our fault she behaves that way. We couldn’t possibly have contributed. But if we decide that evil doesn’t exist, then does love exist? (which is often portrayed as being sourced from god.) To me, the idea that these energies are generated by something other than us doesn’t make sense. So, I don’t find the words useful. What I do find useful is analyzing the motivations for our choices, claiming responsibility for our them regardless of what we call them, and modeling to each other the ways of peace as best we can.
That said, I couldn’t agree with Arendt more that violence is nurtured in the smaller moments. The balance of life is in the small things.
February 12th, 2007 at 11:08 am
Allison hitting your mother was the right thing to do. Don’t equate violence with evil.
February 12th, 2007 at 1:04 pm
allison
Your episode with your mother was valuable life lesson. Pointing out bad behavior usually makes it stop.
When Condi Rice was in Sudan and people started pushing she said: stop, you are acting like children and it stopped.
Time after time I see someone exhibit anti-social behavior while others sit there and judge – they don’t like it, they know it is wrong, but they say nothing.
///Arendt …. that violence is nurtured in the smaller moments…\\\
I think Arendt would agree with this, in that the smaller moments make up the core of banality.
February 12th, 2007 at 1:16 pm
rc21, why not equate violence with evil?
lumiere, the difference between Ms. Rice’s action and mine was that she used words, I used physicality. I’m clearly using a case where most people would support what I did. As a child, I did the only thing I could imagine would get her attention. But I think it is a good case for examining the cycles of violence and how you can stop it. Can violence really end violence?
My mother stopped hitting me. She started hitting my younger sisters more. A few years later, I ended up removing each of them from her house. She had been terrorizing them. At that time, I was able to confront her without using violence myself. I simply grabbed my sisters and took them with me.
So, did I do the best thing? I’m not asking about right or wrong.
February 12th, 2007 at 2:10 pm
In The Fog of War, McNamara said: “Sometimes we have to do bad things to achieve good.”
Same Q I asked on Spinoza thread:
Do you think that unavoidable?
Condi was outnumbered - I’m sure in one-on-one she would have used an arm lock to force the individual to the ground and dug a spiked heal into the back of the neck – but only to achieve good
Personally, I think your actions must be survivable and sustainable –Although initially you survive b/c of a violent act, violence is not sustainable - violence begets violence.
February 12th, 2007 at 3:20 pm
I’m not sure I agree with McNamara. Of course, we always use extreme cases. Once you’re at war, you’ve already let things get so far out of hand that you are more able to justify doing ‘bad things.” In this thread, we’re talking about the banal. How many banal moments lead to the creation of a war? And do we let it happen simply so that we can justify doing bad things? If we don’t stop the trickle of momentum that builds into a torrent of war are we colluding to create a setting in we have permission to do things we otherwise wouldn’t? We seem to cherish the possibility. Look at how we glorify war.
I’m not sure what you mean when you say that actions must be survivable and sustainable. First, if violence begets violence, then violence is self-sustaining. We live that. Humans have been committing violence since the beginning of time and we continue to survive, even over-populate. So, does this mean that violence is good?
And is it only about surviving? I want to do more than survive. I want to thrive. Survival is barren. Thrival is lush. If I am committing violence only to survive, I’d rather not. I’d prefer to take my chances on what might be there for me after this life if I have adhered to a practice of non-violence. (which I can’t claim in my early adulthood, so I’m already at a deficit.) I can’t prove there is anything after this life experience, but my gut tells me that my chances of long-term peace are better if I have lived in peace than if I have not. So, in the possibiity that there is something, I don’t want to risk it just for survival.
February 12th, 2007 at 8:01 pm
mynocturama asks: So, jazzman, are you saying you don’t subscribe to any value judgments whatsoever? That would seem to be the implication of your words.
No! What I am saying is I subscribe to value judgments which comport with my own (and there are many.) Some I accept by dint of analysis and adoption until further refinement or extirpation and some by way of emotion due to reactive intensity which I may or may not adopt after reflection and analysis.
Where others’ values agree with mine or seem reasonable candidates for inclusion into my worldview then my belief system grows. It’s as I stated above about my obedience or not regarding the law – if I agree philosophically then there is tacit obeisance to that principle, if I don’t subscribe to a proscription, I give lip service and pretend if I perceive a threat to my sphere’s wellbeing.
Lumière says: Hope seems to be central to your belief system – you must have faith in the kindness of adversarial strangers in order to exist.
The only hope that’s involved is that I hope I my belief system is valid. It has appeared to function very well for the last 30 or so years, and I have found no reason to change its basic tenets. I expect that my experience with adversarial strangers (or acquaintances) will be peripheral and only affect me directly when my psyche needs to remind me or point out that I am straying from the ideal or violating the spirit of Absolute Morality.
Peace
February 13th, 2007 at 12:08 pm
allison Says: Look at how we glorify war.
That is a topic for ROS – all the military ceremonies, where we honor sacrifice, bother me – it’s not the sacrifice that bothers me, but the exploitation of the young.
I live near a former navy base and every year there is an air show. Even though I see the hidden message, it is compelling to me to see the jets flying in formation – there is no equivalent in nature.
The effect is quite simply to indoctrinate the young by way of adventurism. It is our adveturism that friegthens the rest of the world in that it awakens the desire to fight.
Gill Scott Heron has a line in one of his songs:
Peace is not the preparation for war, Peace is the absence of the preparation for war
##
The point I was making with McNamara related to your personal story.
One has to survive, to be able to thrive.
February 13th, 2007 at 8:26 pm
Lumière Says: Gill Scott Heron has a line in one of his songs: Peace is not the preparation for war, Peace is the absence of the preparation for war
I agree with this assessment. It is similar to a saw that I observe and often quote “Peace is not obtained by hating war, but by loving peace.”
Lumière Says: McNamara said: “Sometimes we have to do bad things to achieve good.” and to Allison The point I was making with McNamara related to your personal story. One has to survive, to be able to thrive.
Just because “good” ends result from “bad” means as McNamara suggests (and he’s got a lot of nerve hawking (pun intended) that position, having admittedly (after his 85 year old conscience finally triumphed) deceived (read lied a “bad thing”) in order to maintain support for the Vietnam debacle. How much “good” resulted from his “bad”?) doesn’t mean there aren’t better or more ideal alternatives/methodologies to achieve the desired ends.
The thesis “One has to survive, to be able to thrive” is a tautological truth (thrivers survive) much the same as the Darwinian Theory inspired “Survival of the fittest by natural selection” means “Survivors survive.” What makes a difference is the means by which survival is accomplished. If one thrives by murdering competitors and stockpiling resources far beyond ones’ requirements for a comfortable existence then that is not ideal. In allison’s case, as a young person, she reacted, emotionally as most would and the majority still does and an end (to the immediate violence) was reached in her case. (I was raised by a family in which abuse was generational and was the way they handled frustration and lack of creative imagination. I was subjected to and took part in verbal and physical confrontations (violent fights) and in my case had to remove myself from the situation by leaving home at 14 as violence escalated rather than abating. In spite (or because) of that experience I continued to identify with violent solutions to challenges until I was shown that it was my choice and I could choose other means to my ends.)
These violent actions while less than ideal are object lessons that edify and any sense of guilt which results is to remind us not to repeat the action, rather than to condemn ourselves for our response. William James believed that “evil” was the result of short-circuited or misguided attempts to attain “good” results and I agree with that assessment but avoid the label “evil” and its religious connotations (as Nick notes its origin is in theistic religion’s dogma.) It’s ironic because if one did believe in the existence of “evil”, again as William James notes: There have been more egregious inhuman acts of violence and wrongdoing committed in the name of religion than any other pretext.
Peace, always Peace
February 13th, 2007 at 11:20 pm
In my 2/10 comment I said that people who believe in the supernatural origin of evil would agree with Hannah Arendt’s thesis as explained in Robin’s introduction. Lumière objected: “I think that is antithetical to her premise. She is saying evil is banal – not extraordinary in any way.” Apparently that’s not what she meant. Robin noted in the introduction that Arendt believed acts of evil “can be extraordinary.” Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arendt ) tells us that Arendt “raised the question whether evil is radical or simply a function of banality – the tendency of ordinary people to obey orders and conform to mass opinion without critically thinking about the results of their action or inaction.” To me, these comments suggest Arendt was saying, not that the evil she observed was itself banal, but that ordinary people with apparently normal sensibilities allowed and promoted it. The lesson, of course, is that today’s banality, even in the U.S., could be the matrix of evil comparable to the evil Arendt wrote about.
I proposed that believers in the supernatural would be comfortable with Arendt’s view because such believers often think ordinary people can be possessed by evil spirits, or otherwise influenced by supernatural evil forces. But perhaps I should leave it to the believers to state their opinion.
Has anyone discussed what Arendt thought or would have thought about isolated anti-social individuals like serial killers? The “banality of evil” idea doesn’t seem to fit them.
February 13th, 2007 at 11:58 pm
If we see war over the past few centuries as one of the critical means of addressing the cyclical crisis of capital, where excess capital needs to be put to work (Chalmers Johnson called it military Keynesianism), we add another dimension to banal everyday behaviour that leads to violent acts in the name of profit margins usually marketed as the protection of “our freedom”.