Money quote:
To my mind, the use of the phrase banality of evil is an almost infallible sign of shallow thinkers attempting to seem intellectually sophisticated. Come on, people: It's a bankrupt phrase, a subprime phrase, a Dr. Phil-level phrase masquerading as a profound contrarianism. Oooh, so daring! Evil comes not only in the form of mustache-twirling Snidely Whiplash types, but in the form of paper pushers who followed evil orders. And when applied—as she originally did to Adolf Eichmann, Hitler's eager executioner, responsible for the logistics of the Final Solution—the phrase was utterly fraudulent.
Adolf Eichmann was, of course, in no way a banal bureaucrat: He just portrayed himself as one while on trial for his life. Eichmann was a vicious and loathsome Jew-hater and -hunter who, among other things, personally intervened after the war was effectively lost, to insist on and ensure the mass murder of the last intact Jewish group in Europe, those of Hungary. So the phrase was wrong in its origin, as applied to Eichmann, and wrong in almost all subsequent cases when applied generally. Wrong and self-contradictory, linguistically, philosophically, and metaphorically. Either one knows what one is doing is evil or one does not. If one knows and does it anyway, one is evil, not some special subcategory of evil. If one doesn't know, one is ignorant, and not evil. But genuine ignorance is rare when evil is going on.
- Evan
Comments
did you know i studied this text at boğaziçi in my Film and Fascism class... for which we watched "Triumph Des Willens" and "Mississippi Burning" in the same week?
Yeah, pretty tired of this phrase. I suppose it was revolutionary at the time... like... Stanley Milgram style? But no longer a revelation. Good post title. Did you think of that, Evan?
Also:
1) Ardent defended Heidegger. Minus points.
2) Ayn Rand people always use this phrase. You know who you are...
True on both counts Rachel.
Eh, I think Rosenbaum here is the one who is trying to engage in "profound contrarianism." People were grappling with how to explain the horrors of WWII, and the Nazis in particular. The popular (but intellectually lazy) way of dealing with it was writing off the Nazis as a bunch of bad seeds.
Now certainly the Nazis were evil...but from where did this mass depravity arise? Are people born evil? Or does everyone have the potential to realize an inner "nazi"?
These were some of the questions Arendt was trying to answer, and they are hardly as straightforward as Rosenbaum glibly postulates.
Arendt's point was not that Adolf Eichmann was a banal bureaucrat. Israel would not have gone to unprecedented lengths to kidnap him in Argentina to bring him to trial in Israel if he was functionally a simple paper-pusher.
The point was that despite engaging in untold horrors, he was personally rather uninteresting. He didn't have green skin or melt in the rain. There was nothing to indicate that this man was a former top Nazi. Thus, Arendt suggested, the majority of Nazis were not uniquely evil, it was something in their environment that led to their evil actions. This was, and still is, both controversial and unconventional.
Arendt's work spearheaded a revolution in the historiography of Nazi Germany towards "stucturalism" (the structure of the nazi regime lead to radicalization) and away from "intentionalism" (there is a straight line from Mein Kampf to Auschwitz). This is not just an abstract argument- the holocaust was not the first genocide and it won't be the last.
Most people still go for the lazy teleological argument that mein kampf = Auschwitz, simply because they know that Nazi Germany ended in the gas chambers. Nobody could have imagined that in 1933. How the holocaust happened in one of the most advanced countries in the world, with at the best the acquiescence and at worst the collaboration of most of Europe, is not a trivial question.
Rosenbaum's answer implies that the holocaust was a simple mass gathering of evil people, sprinkled with some ignorance. That is an unfulfilling and useless explanation that is characteristic of people who have not thought deeply enough about the subject.
I've never used this phrase, but I will have to start now whenever I see you E. It's not as good as Chaz transcending physicality.
Transcending physicality definitely wins.
