The Banality of Evil
Eichmann was not a pivot, a fundamental part, but just a cog in the Nazi gear, a product of a totalitarian state that acted as a system of destruction that killed thousands without questioning whether that was or was not legit.
“In the Third Reich evil lost its distinctive characteristic by which most people had until then recognised it. The Nazis redefined it as a civil norm.”
“The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.”
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
The political experience of the 20th century revealed the emergence of a new type of evil unknown till then–the emergence of the totalitarian phenomenon has forced to reassess human action and history, as it has revealed and derived in new figurations of the human being, including some of its monstrous forms. It is precisely in the context of reflection on the experience of totalitarian societies in the 20th century that Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) raised up the question of evil in philosophy context and how ordinary people become actors in totalitarian regimes. “Eichmann in Jerusalem”, published in the magazine “The New Yorker in 1963, as part of the authors work dedicated to the nature of power and evil, as well as politics, direct democracy, authority, and totalitarianism, it’s crucial even in our days to understand the phenomenon.
From 1947 to 1951, the period in which the work of researching, elaborating and publishing “Origins of Totalitarianism” took place, Hannah Arendt was shocked by the political events of the moment, the horrors of war and the Holocaust, and tried to find explanations to these facts at the philosophy and moral level. Twelve years later, in 1963, when she attended the trial in Jerusalem of Otto Adolf Eichman, an official executioner-bureaucrat of the German Nazi regime, and published his report on the banality of evil, his reflection on the phenomenon had already undergone a decisive change.
After being kidnapped in a suburb of Buenos Aires by an Israeli commando, Eichmann is taken to Jerusalem, Israel. During the trial, the discreet and banal figure of Eichmann disagreed with the crimes he was being accused, and for which he always assumed relative responsibility. Before going to Eichmann’s judgment, Arendt assumed that she would find a human being at least perverse, even a monster or an example of human malignancy, as the media at the time made believe.
In addition to her expectation being frustrated, this confrontation revealed a human being devoid of any malevolent grandeur or any peculiar characteristic that differentiated him from the others, except what she called an “emptiness of thought”. It is precisely from this experience of perplexity and astonishment that the course of Arendt’s thought takes place, from the formulation of the idea of the banality of evil to the emptiness of thought.
Unlike many who saw in Eichmann the personification of evil, Arendt saw him as a banal figure. Eichmann was not the expected monster, but just a human being with an extreme degree of not questioning what surrounded him, an individual who was a typical product of the totalitarian state. For her, its ordinary people who omit or commit the worst atrocities and evil is not seductive or monstrous, as mythology portrays it, but banal, common and ordinary. Eichmann was not a pivot, a fundamental part, but just a cog in the Nazi gear, a product of a totalitarian state that acted as a system of destruction that killed thousands without questioning whether that was or was not legit.
Arendt follows the trail opened by Kant, relying on the concept of radical evil in her investigation of the emergence of this new form of violence and its spread and realisation as a new political reality. The guiding thread of her thought is the question about radical evil, especially in its ethical and political dimension. The background is the totalitarianism, seen as a paradigm of the destruction of politics.
This risk survives the fall of totalitarian states allied to repressive legal instruments. In modern bureaucratic societies, legal, political, social and economic events everywhere conspire, with the totalitarian instruments invented to make men superfluous.
In her conception, the emergence of this new type of evil has, as a goal, not the despotic domination of men, but rather, a system in which all men are superfluous. The first essential step on the way to this total domination is the destruction of the juridical person of the human being. The next step consists in the annulment of individuality and spontaneity, so that the human capacity to start something new with its own resources is eliminated. The purpose of this destruction is the transformation of the human person into a “thing”.
Arendt showed us that the model of the citizen of modern bureaucratic societies is the human being who acts under orders, who obeys blindly and is incapable of thinking for himself, because this supremacy of obedience presupposes the abolition of spontaneity of thought. This absence of thought was named by Arendt as the “banality of evil”.
For Arendt, the radical evil, which appeared in totalitarianism, transcends the limits of what was defined by Kant, as it is about “a new kind of human action”, a form of violence that “goes beyond the limits of solidarity itself of human sin”, of “an absolute evil because it cannot be attributed to humanly understandable motives”. The totalitarian phenomenon revealed that there are no limits to the deformations of human nature and that the mass bureaucratic organisation, based on terror and ideology, created new perversity forms of government and domination.
To explain the totalitarian phenomenon, we do not have support to understand a phenomenon that appears and that goes against all the norms we had know. The true radical evil arose in a system where all men became “superfluous”/“things”, and in the end they became just means to a purpose. This “superfluous” affected those who were manipulated as well as the manipulators and “the totalitarian murderers are the most dangerous, because they don’t care if they are alive or dead, if they never lived or if they were never born”. This new stage of radical evil will appear whenever the human being is transformed into “superfluous”.
The original question undergoes a radical shift there–it is not a matter of explaining the phenomenon by focusing on the moral or anthropological question, but rather of understanding, from a political point of view, how a State can be capable of producing agents that their function, as efficiently, is reproducing agents of their objectives. The problem of evil then starts to be questioned within its political dimension, in an original vision that is that of its “banality”. With this, there is an expansion of original Hannah Arendt’s political thought.
During the Nazism period, the German people killed and left to die for, supposedly, not knowing what was happening. The Jews were killed, but they also let them die, because many did not revolt, did not react. Facing this facts, Arendt points to a terrible dimension of evil, because to her, it is not only in the great murders of history but in all people who are not committed to life. In other words, in all the people who kill or let die.
From this point of view, we can question ourselves about the banality of evil in the contemporary political context in its various repressive apparatuses such as corruption, clientelism, the (bad) use of the public machine, the judiciary forces and army, medicines that do not reach poor countries or needy regions, deficient hospital facilities or torture, as examples of the trivialisation of violence in our modern world.