We Have Been Thinking About Evil All Wrong
Hannah Arendt’s warning to the world.
Who do you picture when you think of evil?
You probably picture the Devil, or history’s great monsters like Genghis Khan, Hitler, and now Putin.
The people or creatures we think of are filled with hatred, unrelenting greed for more, and don’t appear to contain a moral fiber in their bodies. They are those that would murder innocents, spin a web of deceit, and stand proud of their blood-soaked record.
The conception of evil as absolute and uncompromising wickedness and malevolence has been the case for millennia: in the Bible, it is the serpent who is a symbol of pure evil and chaos, and in Greek Mythology too, evil is personified by creatures and monsters like the Minotaur, Medusa, and Hydra, all hideous, both in appearance and in action.
In all of these cases, those that possess evil seem not to be human, they are creatures or beasts, and even when we consider evil people, we often see them as monsters — not humans. They are characters separate from us; we cannot begin to understand why these people perform the evil they do and why they are so proud of it.
Yet philosopher Hannah Arendt argues that painting evil as an absolute, separate from humanity, is wrong and incredibly dangerous for us all.
In 1960, Adolf Eichmann, one of the architects of the Nazi Holocaust, was captured by the Israeli secret service and put on trial. Arendt, a German Jew who had to flee Germany after Hitler’s rise to power, covered the trial for The New Yorker Magazine.
She was expecting to see a man of absolute evil, a monster consumed by wickedness. But, as the trial began, Arendt realized this wasn’t who was on trial.
Instead, Eichmann was weirdly ordinary. He looked frail and sniffled continuously. The Israeli court psychiatrist found him to be a completely normal man, and his answers to the judges’ questions were not filled with passionate hatred but seemed dull and (in most cases) stupid.
This shocked Ardent greatly. How was it that a man who had committed such evil was so average? He didn’t seem to be as cleverly deceptive as the Devil, as aggressive as the Minotaur, or as wicked as Medusa.
This encounter led Arendt to conclude that evil wasn’t something absolute or distinct from being human as it has been depicted in the past, instead of evil being banal. Arendt argued that Eichmann shows that evil in our world is rarely absolute but is instead caused by human fault, vice, dogma, or misunderstanding:
Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all… He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing… It was sheer thoughtlessness — something by no means identical with stupidity — that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of that period.
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. — Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem
Evil rarely takes the form of the Devil or a monster, but that of humans who follow others blindly, give in to their anger or believe propaganda and lies.
Arendt doesn’t think this should excuse Eichmann for his wicked actions, but instead warns us about the consequences of her findings: people, ordinary and average like Eichmann, are capable of doing some of the evilest things imaginable:
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
Evil is not as black and white as it may at first appear, but there are shades of grey that make it possible for anyone to succumb to it. Even the ancient Greek Gods like Athena, Zeus, and Aphrodite showed actions of great cruelty and vanity. While on the other hand, the Ancient Greek monster Medusa was perfectly normal before she fell in love with Poseidon and was punished by Athena.
The Warning Hannah Arendt Gave is Now More Important than Ever
Evil has unleashed itself in ways unseen in Europe for decades: innocent blood is being spilled in a country that is being beaten to the ground until the flames of democracy and liberty are extinguished. Putin and his allies attempt to spin a web of deception around the people of Russia and Ukraine to persuade them it is Ukraine at fault and Russia who is saving them. Those who peacefully protest in Russia are hauled away like cargo.
Though Putin is President, he is not alone in the responsibility of these evil acts. It is the Eichmanns that surround him (whether that is oligarchs, politicians, or generals) who are no longer thinking about the moral consequences of their actions and instead follow Putin’s words blindly — motivated by the possibility of wealth, power, and prestige. Alone, these people may seem fairly normal or mundane, but it is these people that keep the Russian propaganda and killing machines moving that are destroying so many people’s lives.
I urge everyone to take Arendt’s warning seriously. Evil is not always committed by monsters, and even the most ordinary people are capable of it. We must be vigilant that we, and those close to us, do not succumb to evil’s nature: we must remain rational and independent, never follow orders blindly, and always think of the consequences of our actions.
It sometimes requires great bravery to stand up for what is right and to challenge when others follow, but only by doing this can we expel evil from our world.
