The Banality of Evil

My DVD found in Paris Gare de l'est, 2013

As I was about to return to Australia, I saw in a kiosk in the FNAC Gare de l'est (Paris) that a movie about Hannah Arendt's life had just been released. At that minute, I also remembered how the eyes of one young Political Sciences' tutor would light when she recommended The Origins of Totalitarism as a 'must read', six months ago. The decision to buy the DVD took seconds, and only now, did I find time to watch it ... and watch it again.

I discovered that the second CD including a series of interviews of critiques, and reflections from philosophers and political activists, including a formal ORTF (yes!) interview of Arendt herself.

One day, Hannah Arendt herself was invited in Israel to the trial of Eichman, a large scale Nazi criminal, and she had to reflect on what she could comprehend as a former Gurs Concentration Camp inmate and escapee (those who did not escape ended up in Auschwitz), a former US migrant nanny desperate to learn English to survive in the land of Freedom, a fine scholar.

She consecrated the first part of her intellectual life to Philosophy 'to learn how to think' (she would say), and later on, she tackled the big questions that haunted her life, WHY could this happen?
Hannah Arendt has spent her life asking herself
WHY?

In the CD picture, you can see her represented in a Thinking position

She warns us:

"Thinking indeed is dangerous, the act of thinking in itself is dangerous, but not thinking is even more dangerous"

After she returned from Eichmnan's trial in Israel, like many victims of the Shoah present there, she felt terrible short comings, a huge disappointment, a second 'coup au coeur'. She thought that a man responsible to sent thousands of people to death camps would be extra-ordinary in the bad sense of the term, in the monstrosity category. This would be reassuring, because if you could tell, you would know... you could therefore predict, and avoid. 

It is NOT what happened. What happened is the opposite, this man was ordinary 'banal' in her own words. This was a disappointment. This man talked only about himself, his career, his petty disappointment with daily chores, his grammar and language were poor 'we have the impression that not one sentence of what he says comes from him' (Arendt says). He is terribly ordinary, he has a family, cares about his career and his social status. Never does he thinks beyond, never does he look at structural issues around him, never does he question the bureaucracy around him, never does he feel responsibilities. He is only following orders, and is a product (an object, not a subject) of his time.

It would be a mistake to think that by raising the concept of 'banality of evil' Arendt undermines the gravity of what he did, on the contrary, she does recognize the monstrosity of his actions, but she warns us: you will not recognize evil by looking in this man's eyes; he escapes a mythological biblic representation of ever powerful demons: it is in his tendency to prefer 'not to think' that he is highly dangerous.

What are these structures? What structures enable men like Eichman and many more to be following processes without thinking?

Arendt says it is linked to the advent of Nation States, a central European concept that gives endless power to the executive, and that the Founder Fathers of the US Constitution tried to avoid to reproduce at all costs in order to avoid the disasters that never fail to follow a nepotist system. Therefore, in the new system, the Legislative power decides and the Executive executes only. She explains that US citizens have a chance: they have nothing in common. There are no common land, language, identity, souvenir, heritage, no 'union sacrée' except for the constitution. All minorities may have legitimate opinions and should be heard, plurality is seen as healthy, thus possibly avoiding the tyranny of the majority. In this sense, it is more a Republic than a Democracy. THIS, she says is hard to understand for Europeans. The Constitution is a unique, sacred (not the case in France which has known many constitutions) and binding act. Law reigns, not men. Decisions are by a 'We', not by a 'I' and rightly so, she says, because since contingency is the biggest factor in History, 'I' would be able to know the future only if 'I' was alone, and 'I' am not alone.

Beware, she says, in the CD's interview as she was witnessing the Watergate scandal (the first real constitutional crisis, she says), because today, the US Government may become a Nation State again, against the will of the Founding Fathers. When the state tries to control what you are listening, when we are witnessing exception to the rule become the rule, there are grounds to be worried.

What about Eichman's personality and attitude?  What does it mean for us today?

These crimes do not end with Eichman, she says ...think, because evil in one man is an epsilon. Epsilon is the handful of Nazis who actually rejoiced in their task, these are not Eichman kind of people. This is not what is to be feared, she explains, because these are epsilons (not many). Evil exists then,  but it does not prolifer in the scale it prolifers, when it does, thanks to the lack of thinking of so many like Eichman.

Cynthia Fleury explains that this is still pervasive today. We are told, she says, that we cannot possibly anticipate the consequences of our actions, that everything is too complicated in a global world. Yet, she says, we should pause on the degrees of separations from our action to the final consequence? All we need to do is to contemplate one by one the degrees of separation which distance us from the final consequences of our action here today. If you don't, you are like Eichman.

It is all too easy to remove yourself from responsibility. A colleague of mine was asking me about what do we learn here about drones war or the technisation of warfare. This takes us in the heart of the question of degrees of separations.

When Nazis were distancing themselves from reality by saying Jews were 'evacuated', what they actually meant was Jews were killed. When today, more mildly, but we use the same process of word desubstantiation, we talk about 'optimisation of performance' (when you know that the profit of your work will fall into someone else's pocket) or 'fiscal optimisation' (when what is actually meant is cheating tax revenues), or co-lateral damage (deaths in far away war zones) don't fool yourself.

When you go to bed, she says, ask yourself if you have been living in an explicit way with yourself? Be a Subject, never an Object. Heroism today, she says, is not necessary on a war territory, it is where one can expose the toxic secrets of a system. 

At the end, Eichman is told by the Judge: 'you refused to share the world with other human beings. Therefore, you could expect that others do not wish to share it with you. For this, you will be hanged'

(replace the word Human being by Being and think about Today's environmental challenges)

Petrified Nomads

She glances at the window and glanced New York High Rise buildings around her: "These stone buildings are like petrified nomads"

I am not sure what she meant by that, but what resonates for me is Never accept to be petrified, Think!

NB: I have to talk about the controversy around the Jewish Councils being instrumented by the Nazis, and subsequently responsible for a large number of extra deaths. This is (unfortunately) highly developed in the movie and that comes as a huge shadow on her otherwise incredible work. My reading is that she raised the issue of the collaboration of Jewish Councils in the name of Freedom of expression as an academic. This was harsh and hardly sensitive, and I am not sure what she really meant by that. Part of the outrage is linked to the use of the word 'collaboration' (which does not sound good in French History) when she probably meant 'cooperation' to start with. Jewish people had to be organised by Jewish people, but was there a choice, I doubt it. If anything, it reinforces her message and raises the question that ANYONE may be able to be instrumented to commit a crime towards humanity.

Even Eichmann was sickened when he toured the concentration camps, but  in order to participate in mass murder he had only to sit at a desk and shuffle  papers. At the same time the man in the camp who actually dropped [the poison] into the gas chambers is able to justify his behaviour on the grounds that  he is only following orders from above. Thus there is fragmentation of the total  human act; no one man decides to carry out the evil act and is confronted with  its consequences. The person who assumes full responsibility for the act has  evaporated. Perhaps this is the most common characteristic of socially organised evil in modern society. (Milgram, 1976, pp. 183–184)