{"id":44452,"date":"2018-08-10T03:00:57","date_gmt":"2018-08-10T07:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=44452"},"modified":"2018-08-09T10:49:47","modified_gmt":"2018-08-09T14:49:47","slug":"the-banality-of-evil","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/08\/10\/the-banality-of-evil\/","title":{"rendered":"“The banality of evil”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Anthony Daniels<\/a> in the most recent issue of Quadrant<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe banality of evil\u201d is a phrase that suddenly entered the English language, probably for ever, in 1963, on the publication of Hannah Arendt\u2019s book about Adolf Eichmann\u2019s trial in Jerusalem, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil<\/em>.
\n\"\"<\/a>
\nIt hardly matters that Hannah Arendt, after much arduous study and conscientious effort, got Eichmann entirely wrong, and had the wool pulled comprehensively over her eyes by the man she thought an utter mediocrity. Surely scum like him were no match for a much-garlanded political philosopher? But far from having been a faceless bureaucrat as she portrayed him, or mere pen-pusher who somehow, as if by accident, wandered into the organisation of genocide, Eichmann was an ardent and committed Nazi, an idealist of evil so to speak, who knew exactly what he was doing and regretted only that he had been unable to do more and finish the job. Bettina Stangneth\u2019s book Eichmann Before Jerusalem<\/em> should have put paid once and for all to the notion of Eichmann as a kind of sleep-walking little man, the post office clerk of extermination. But image often triumphs over reality, and in any case, the banality of evil could well survive as a concept, even if it had been grotesquely misapplied on its first outing.<\/p>\n

Recently, I seem to be surrounded by the banality of evil: in books, I mean, not in real life (assuming that books are not part of real life, that is). For example, I just picked up a book by the well-known French forensic psychiatrist Daniel Zagury, titled La Barbarie des hommes ordinaires: Ces criminels qui pourraient \u00eatre nous<\/em> (The Barbarity of Ordinary Men: These Criminals Who Could Be Us). The very title, of course, makes reference to Arendt\u2019s famous phase, and I had not gone many pages into it when her name cropped up: because Zagury is writing about men (mainly men in contrast to women) who commit appalling violent crimes without being obviously mad, he makes reference to Arendt and her banality of evil. The banality lies in the absence of all thought or reflection, of foresight or imagination. The most atrocious acts occasion no more mental trouble than, say, that entailed in the making of a sandwich.<\/p>\n

Before I took up Zagury, I had just read Behind the Shock Machine<\/em>, a book by the Australian psychologist and writer Gina Perry, about the famous, or infamous, experiments carried out by Stanley Milgram in the early 1960s at Yale on man\u2019s obedience to authority. These experiments, as written up by Milgram in his book Obedience to Authority<\/em>, have more or less entered common consciousness, at least that of intellectuals, as proving that there is in most of us an inner Eichmann, if not quite struggling to get out, at least prepared to obey the most frightful orders if authority gives them.<\/p>\n

Milgram published his book in 1974, which was twelve years after the conclusion of his experiments and eleven years after the publication of Arendt\u2019s book. He was, I surmise, much influenced by Arendt\u2019s masterfully summarising \u2014 or one might say misleading \u2014 phrase, for the truth behind which he retrospectively tried to supply some psychological evidence. Gina Perry, by examining the records of his experiments in detail, found that Milgram had misrepresented his results, exaggerating his subjects\u2019 willingness to comply with orders in his eagerness to show man\u2019s tendency to obey, a tendency which demonstrates that the Holocaust could happen again \u2014 by implication anywhere.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Anthony Daniels in the most recent issue of Quadrant: \u201cThe banality of evil\u201d is a phrase that suddenly entered the English language, probably for ever, in 1963, on the publication of Hannah Arendt\u2019s book about Adolf Eichmann\u2019s trial in Jerusalem, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. It hardly matters that Hannah […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,7],"tags":[343,347,457,139],"class_list":["post-44452","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-history","tag-crimeandpunishment","tag-debunking","tag-fascism","tag-psychology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-byY","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44452","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44452"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44452\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44455,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44452\/revisions\/44455"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44452"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44452"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44452"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}