Banal evil vs. radical evil; or, Arendt reappraised

I recently read an essay — in the New Yorker, I think, although I can’t remember for sure — that argues that on the basis of what we now know about Martin Heidegger, his anti-Semitism is so virulent that it renders him an inappropriate subject for serious study.

Never having read any Heidegger, I’m agnostic on that question. But I have read Hannah Arendt, and so I was intrigued by this Ron Rosenbaum essay at Slate that, drawing on a Bernard Wasserstein essay in the Oct. 9 London Times Literary Supplement (not available online), suggests Arendt may have absorbed a little too much of the anti-Semitism she studied, with the result that she too often blamed the victim. It’s been years since I read Arendt, but I don’t recall getting that impression. Perhaps it just went over my head. Anyway, Rosenbaum maintains that Arendt’s best-known contribution to the subject, the concept of “the banality of evil” (i.e., they, too, were evil who only pushed pencils in the offices of the Nazi bureaucracy) gets it pretty much exactly backward: evil is evil, he says, and we must be on the watch for the evil of banality. Or something like that:

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.

Arendt should have stuck with her original formulation for the Nazi crimes, “radical evil.” Not an easy concept to define, but, you might say, you know it when you see it. Certainly one with more validity than banality.

Rosenbaum argues that Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil is itself evil because it lets us off the hook:

Arendt may not have intended that the phrase be used this way, but one of its pernicious effects has been to make it seem as though the search for an explanation of the mystery of evil done by “ordinary men” is over.

Maybe Rosenbaum is right, but I never understood the phrase that way. I understood it as more of a warning that opportunities to commit evil could appear among the banal choices and duties of everyday life and that we must always be wary. I never thought that she thought she had the answer as to how or why this happened. (For that, we must turn to Stanley Milgram and others.)

And the warning is valuable in and of itself. In the past few years, we have seen literally life-and-death decisions about our captives reduced to games of legal and constitutional three-card monte.

For the sake of discussion let’s grant Rosenbaum his argument that Arendt was too close to Heidegger, that she allowed herself to be unduly influenced by both Heidegger and some of her own anti-Semitic sources, that almost to the end of her life she believed in some of the same Germanic notions that gave rise to Hitlerism. The idea that not all monsters have horns and tails is still worth keeping constantly in mind.