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- Jun 8, 2008
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I read this yesterday and found her point of view intriguing and terrifying too.
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Hannah Arendt was a philosopher who saw the techniques and consequences of totalitarian regimes firsthand. Born into
a secular-Jewish family, Arendt fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s, eventually settling in America, where after the war she covered the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. In her report for The New Yorker, Arendt expressed how disturbed she was by Eichmann - but for reasons that might not be expected...
Far from the monster she thought he'd be, Eichmann was instead a rather bland, "terrifyingly normal" bureaucrat. He carried out his murderous role with calm efficiency not due to an abhorrent, warped mindset, but because of "a curious, quite authentic inability to think." His key characteristic was "extraordinary shallowness".
Eichmann had absorbed the principles of the Nazi regime so unquestioningly — never considering their consequences from anyone's perspective but his own - that his focus was simply to further his career within the regime and climb its ladders of power. For Arendt, he embodied
"the dilemma between the unspeakable horror of the deeds and the undeniable ludicrousness of the man who perpetrated them."
His actions were defined not so much by thought, but by the absence of thought - convincing Arendt of the "banality of evil."
The "banality of evil" is the idea that evil does not have the Satan-like, villainous appearance we might typically associate it with.
Rather, evil is perpetuated when immoral principles become normalized over time by unthinking people.
Evil becomes commonplace; it becomes the everyday.
Ordinary people - going about their everyday lives - become complicit actors in systems that perpetuate evil.
Arendt had Nazi Germany as her template, but argued systemic oppression and the gradual normalization of evil can occur anywhere, any time, and at any scale.
While at the time many criticized Arendt for seemingly letting Eichmann off the hook and placing the blame on society at large, Arendt argued this was a misreading of her position.
Eichmann as an individual was fully responsible for his monstrous actions, Arendt thought: she repeatedly declared him a war criminal and supported his death sentence.
What she was startled by and alerting us to was the nature of his monstrosity. He was not a Demon from Hell; he was a shallow, unthinking person in human society.
Arendt provided compelling insight into her position in a 1964 letter to Gershom Scholem:
"It is indeed my opinion now that evil is never 'radical', that it is only extreme, and that it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrow and lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the surface... Only the good has depth that can be radical."
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"
Hannah Arendt was a philosopher who saw the techniques and consequences of totalitarian regimes firsthand. Born into
a secular-Jewish family, Arendt fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s, eventually settling in America, where after the war she covered the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann. In her report for The New Yorker, Arendt expressed how disturbed she was by Eichmann - but for reasons that might not be expected...
Far from the monster she thought he'd be, Eichmann was instead a rather bland, "terrifyingly normal" bureaucrat. He carried out his murderous role with calm efficiency not due to an abhorrent, warped mindset, but because of "a curious, quite authentic inability to think." His key characteristic was "extraordinary shallowness".
Eichmann had absorbed the principles of the Nazi regime so unquestioningly — never considering their consequences from anyone's perspective but his own - that his focus was simply to further his career within the regime and climb its ladders of power. For Arendt, he embodied
"the dilemma between the unspeakable horror of the deeds and the undeniable ludicrousness of the man who perpetrated them."
His actions were defined not so much by thought, but by the absence of thought - convincing Arendt of the "banality of evil."
The "banality of evil" is the idea that evil does not have the Satan-like, villainous appearance we might typically associate it with.
Rather, evil is perpetuated when immoral principles become normalized over time by unthinking people.
Evil becomes commonplace; it becomes the everyday.
Ordinary people - going about their everyday lives - become complicit actors in systems that perpetuate evil.
Arendt had Nazi Germany as her template, but argued systemic oppression and the gradual normalization of evil can occur anywhere, any time, and at any scale.
While at the time many criticized Arendt for seemingly letting Eichmann off the hook and placing the blame on society at large, Arendt argued this was a misreading of her position.
Eichmann as an individual was fully responsible for his monstrous actions, Arendt thought: she repeatedly declared him a war criminal and supported his death sentence.
What she was startled by and alerting us to was the nature of his monstrosity. He was not a Demon from Hell; he was a shallow, unthinking person in human society.
Arendt provided compelling insight into her position in a 1964 letter to Gershom Scholem:
"It is indeed my opinion now that evil is never 'radical', that it is only extreme, and that it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrow and lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the surface... Only the good has depth that can be radical."
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