The Character of Evil: Part IV
In the final instalment of this series, we use our previous reflections on the character of evil, to address an overarching question: What should we classify as an evil action, and what should we do about them? This piece will attempt to discuss the correlation between acts of evil and violence by speaking to current events, many of which are distressing, confronting, continually unfolding, and unprecedented in scope and severity.
Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
To begin, let’s return to Arendt. In On Violence (1970), Arendt uses the tools of political science to discuss theories of violence from within a historical perspective. In the shadow of totalitarianism and the wholesale destruction of WWII, along with the non-violent protests of the civil rights movement in the late 1960s, Arendt saw the need to disambiguate between discussions of war, politics, violence, and power. After interrogating other views on violence from philosophers like Georges Sorel, Frantz Fanon, and Jean-Paul Sartre, Arendt ultimately arrives at — and summarily works to dismiss — the most important political question of the twentieth century, “Who rules Whom?”:
Power, strength, force, authority, violence — these are but words to indicate the means by which man rules over man; they are held to be synonyms because they have the same function. It is only after one ceases to reduce public affairs to the business of dominion that the original data in the realm of human affairs will appear, or, rather, reappear, in their authentic diversity. (43–44)
Arendt then provides the following categorical distinctions for the above terms:
Power: corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert. Power is never the property of an individual; it belongs to a group and remains in existence only so long as the group keeps together.
Strength: unequivocally designates something in the singular, an individual entity; it is the property inherent in an object or person and belongs to its character, which may prove itself in relation to other things or persons but is essentially independent of them.
Force: which we often use in daily speech as a synonym for violence, especially if violence serves as a means of coercion, should be reserved, in terminological language, for the “forces of nature” or the “forces of circumstances”, that is, to indicate the energy released by physical or social movements.
Authority: can be vested in persons, i.e. personal authority, or it can be vested in offices, i.e. political office (the Senate), hierarchical office (the Church). Its hallmark is unquestioning recognition by those who are asked to obey; neither coercion nor persuasion is needed.
Violence: is distinguished by its instrumental character. Phenomenologically, it is close to strength, since the implements of violence, like all other tools, are designed and used for the purpose of multiplying natural strength until, in the last stage of their development, they can substitute for it. (44–46)
For Arendt, the distinction between power and violence is most crucial. While she argues that combinations of power and violence are common occurrences in human social interactions, both properties also exist in polarity in their isolated, extreme forms. Therefore, “it does not follow that authority, power, and violence are all the same” (47). Arendt conceives of power primarily in a collective sense, bolstered by group actions and support of/for them. Whereas violence is instrumental in that it relies on individual actions and implements to be wielded effectively: “Even the tyrant, the One who rules against all, needs helpers in the business of violence, though their number may be restricted…. The extreme form of power is All against One, the extreme form of violence is One against All” (41–42).
Ultimately, the intrinsic correlation between power and violence is what underscores Arendt’s entire philosophy of “violence in political terms,” and is worth quoting here at length:
Still it must be admitted that it is particularly tempting to think of power in terms of command and obedience, and hence to equate power with violence, in a discussion of what actually is only one of power’s special cases — namely, the power of government….
Where commands are no longer obeyed, the means of violence are of no use; and the questions of this obedience is not decided by the command-obedience relation but by opinion, and, of course, by the number of those who share it. Everything depends on the power behind the violence. The sudden dramatic breakdown of power that ushers in revolutions reveals in a flash how civil obedience — to laws, to rulers, to institutions — is but the outward manifestation of support and consent. Where power has disintegrated, revolutions are possible but not necessary….
Disintegration often becomes manifest only in direct confrontation; and even then, when power is already in the street, some group of men prepared for such an eventuality is needed to pick it up and assume responsibility. (47–49)
Richard J. Bernstein (1932–)
As a philosopher and educator for The New School for Social Research (NSSR), Richard J. Bernstein has written extensively on radical evil, violence, pragmatism, and the works of Arendt. In “Hannah Arendt’s Reflections on Violence and Power” (2011), Bernstein sets out to explain and defend Arendt’s sharp distinction between power and violence: “Power and violence are not only distinguishable; they are antithetical. Where power reigns there is persuasion, not violence. And when violence reigns, it destroys power” (6).
At the heart of Arendt’s distinction, according to Bernstein, lies the difference between liberty and real public freedom:
Liberty is always liberation from someone or something whether it is liberation from poverty, or oppressive rulers and tyrants. Liberty is a necessary condition for public freedom, but not a sufficient condition. Public freedom is a positive political achievement that arises when individuals act together and treat each other as political equals. (9)
Arendt well understood that history is littered with examples where the liberation of individual persons or groups from oppressive rulers was not sufficient to bring about real and long-lasting public freedoms. For Arendt, power was not a vertical hierarchy of control and dominion over others. Instead, power works laterally, between individuals and groups, as people work together, persuade one another, and treat each other as political equals. As Bernstein argues, “Persuasion, not violence, is what ‘rules’ in a polity” (9).
Understanding this concept, we can see then that for Arendt, as articulated by Bernstein, violence is fundamentally antithetical to power. Therefore, if power and violence are said to exist on the same spectrum of political potential as liberty and public freedom, then, in their extreme forms, “where one rules absolutely, the other is absent” (Arendt 56). The central thrust of Arendt’s argument is that violence is operatively anti-political and, ultimately, corrosive to power. For Bernstein, Arendt’s brutally realist worldview implies that, with the loss of power, “there is an enormous temptation to resort to violence” (11). Here is Arendt again (at considerable length):
Power needs no justification, being inherent in the very existence of political communities; what it does need is legitimacy. The common treatment of these two words as synonyms is no less misleading and confusing than the current equation of obedience and support. Power springs up whenever people get together and act in concert, but it derives its legitimacy from the initial getting together rather than from any action that then may follow.
Legitimacy, when challenged, bases itself on an appeal to the past, while justification relates to an end that lies in the future. Violence can be justifiable, but it never will be legitimate. Its justification loses its plausibility the farther its intended end recedes into the future. No one questions the use of violence in self-defense, because the danger is not only clear but also present, and the end justifying the means is immediate. (52)
What then, does this mean for evil and evil actions?
While Arendt goes to great lengths to indicate that she does not equate violence with evil, in her reflections on totalitarianism, Nazi genocide, and the extermination camps of the Holocaust, Arendt would go on to define radical evil as the exercise of total domination of a human being, “to destroy human plurality, individuality and spontaneity — to make human beings as human beings superfluous” (Bernstein 12). In her discussion of Marx, Hegel and the dialectical thinking of negation, Arendt asserts that such notions are grounded in the assumption that “evil is no more than a private modus of the good, that good can come out of evil; that, in short, evil is but a temporary manifestation of a still-hidden good” (56).
Not only does Arendt disagree with this notion, but, as Bernstein points out, she considers the horrors of war and genocide in the twentieth century to be evidence that such notions were incorrect and inherently dangerous. For Bernstein, Arendt’s writing on power and violence highlights an essential truth about power that remains eerily relevant for our modern times, in the way “it can arise spontaneously when human beings act together, the way in which it can grow, the way in which it can become revolutionary” (12).
Final Reflections
Now we turn — somewhat reluctantly — to current events. Reading thinkers like Arendt and Bernstein has proved invaluable for my thought processes during the influx of catastrophic images, videos, and heartfelt declarations of the past week.
The most catalysing of these was a viral video showing the murder of George Floyd at the hands of a US police officer (Derek Chauvin) in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Officer Chauvin, an officer with a long history of gross misconduct, killed Floyd, a black suspect who had allegedly passed a counterfeit banknote, through the use of excessive force (or, instead, in Arendt’s preferred terminology, strength), pinning the handcuffed man to the ground with his knee and holding him there in a chokehold manoeuvre for close to nine minutes.
Officer Chauvin did so, despite repeated pleas from both Floyd (“I can’t breathe”) and horrified onlookers, who filmed the entire incident for digital posterity. It was an act of police brutality so wilfully brazen, callous, and ruthless that it sparked immediate calls for the arrests of Chauvin and the other three police officers involved in the incident (which, after almost a week of continual public pressure, has finally occurred).
However, this type of incident is hardly new, a fact that the black community in the US must acknowledge daily. The tragedy and senselessness of Floyd’s murder has sparked a wave of protests from the Black Lives Matter movement and others across the US and the rest of world, as people from marginalised communities give voice to their sorrow, anger, and rage at the continual excesses of systemic racism, police brutality, and state-sanctioned oppression. And in many cases, these protests have turned violent, with riots, looting, and the destruction of public and private property.
Perhaps most alarmingly, many of the most violent actions captured on video by journalists and private citizens are from the police and state actors against unarmed protestors, with elements of the National Guard and the US military enforcing strict curfews and orders to disperse protest assemblies.
In the preface to Evil in Modern Thought (2015), philosopher Susan Neiman ties the idea of evil actions to political power, governance, and the perpetration of violence:
When powerful forces practice bureaucratic forms of evil, many of those without power will see no other response than simple, self-conscious actions with evil ends. My claim is not merely that violence breeds violence, but that a more sinister sort of symbiosis is at work here. Each party to such conflicts insists with great conviction that its opponents’ actions are truly evil, while its own are merely expedient. It’s a simple failure, but one that can cause no end of misery as long as each side is certain that the other embodies evil at its core. (xv)
So, how then do we process these incidents through the lens of power, violence, and evil?
Let’s take the case of George Floyd. While the action that ultimately took Floyd’s life was not overly violent in of itself (when compared to other actions like striking, punching, kicking, stabbing, shooting, etc.), the context surrounding it indicates a gross imbalance of power. Officer Chauvin has already incapacitated the suspect. Floyd was handcuffed, wrestled to the ground, and placed in a chokehold which restricted his movement and freedom, ultimately resulting in his death. Floyd was also unarmed, representing no direct threat to Chauvin’s life or the lives of the other three officers who helped subdue him, who then stood by while Chauvin slowly and painfully squeezed the life out of him.
As Arendt says, the most extreme form of power is All against the One. However, she also stresses that power does not lie with an individual; power belongs to the group and remains only so long as the group keeps it together. I believe that what we’re witnessing now is the exposure of the imbalance present in police power and state-sanctioned oppression over marginalised communities, who often have little recourse or political power of their own. While this imbalance has been heavily documented and criticised for decades, the supply of irrefutable digital evidence is mounting with each passing day, further amplifying public pressure and sentiment in opposition to the imbalance as the perceived social status quo.
As for the protests, both Arendt and Bernstein are critical of violence as a means to an end. However, I think a crucial distinction in discussing both non-violent and violent protest is the question of legitimacy and justification. For Arendt, legitimacy derives from past actions. Police forces are legitimised because they are perceived as being necessary for the maintenance of social order and cohesion, with a historical precedent often being provided as sufficient evidence for this claim.
However, in the same fashion, protests movements like Black Lives Matter and others have coalesced and been legitimised with political power in response to overreaches and misconduct from the police, often with the back and support of the state. In effect, where one movement loses legitimacy, the other gains legitimacy. Ultimately, where the use and efficacy of violence arises is with present and future actions. For Bernstein:
Arendt is not utopian. She doesn’t think that in the “real world” power can prevail without any violence. But the point of her “exaggerated” claims is to get us to see, understand, and appreciate something that we are in danger of forgetting — that power and action are distorted when we fuse power and violence. Distinguishing power and violence enables us to discern those political “privileged moments” that have emerged almost spontaneously and which reveal the “innermost story of the modern age.” …
As long as the human condition does not radically change, there is the possibility of actualising non-violent political power — or at least maximising this power by acting together, testing, and clarifying our opinion in public spaces, and minimising violence. (25–26)
In this respect, I believe it’s legitimate to acknowledge that systemic racism and police brutality exist and must be dealt with through the ends of criminal justice reform and political action and accountability, while also decrying violent means such as riots, looting, and the destruction of private and public property. To me, such statements are not mutually inclusive.
However, while such violent means may not be legitimate under Arendt’s spectrum of power and violence, they are understandable and justifiable within circumstances of gross imbalance, systemic oppression, and resistance to state-sanctioned violence.
To close, I wish to include a statement made by Dr Cornel West on CNN shortly after the outbreak of violence during these protests, in response to the death of George Floyd and the expression of rage and unrest in the current moment:
I think we are witnessing America as a failed social experiment. What I mean by that is that the history of black people for over 200 and some years in America has been looking at America’s failure, its capitalist economy could not generate and deliver in such a way people can live lives of decency. The nation-state, it’s criminal justice system, it’s legal system could not generate protection of rights and liberties….
But oftentimes those black faces are losing legitimacy too because the Black Lives Matter movement emerged under a black president, a black attorney general, and a black Homeland Security [Secretary] and they couldn’t deliver. So, when you talk about the masses of black people, the precious poor and working-class black people, brown, red, yellow, whatever color, they’re the ones left out and they feel so thoroughly powerless, helpless, hopeless, then you get rebellion….
We’ve reached a point now a choice between non-violent revolution — and by revolution, what I mean is the democratic sharing of power, resources, wealth, and respect. If we don’t get that kind of sharing, you’re going to get more violent explosions.
As the political activist group Rage Against The Machine said on their 1999 track ‘Calm Like A Bomb,’ paraphrasing the words of civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jnr., who was murdered during a non-violent protest:
“The riot be the rhyme of the unheard.”
Works Cited
Arendt, Hannah. On Violence. 1970. Harcourt, 2014.
Bernstein, Richard J. “Hannah Arendt’s Reflections on Violence and Power.” Iris: European Journal of Philosophy and Public Debate, vol. 3, no. 5, 2011, pp. 3–30. Firenze UP, doi:10.1400/182067. Accessed 29 May. 2020.
Neiman, Susan. Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy. 2002. Princeton UP, 2015.
