Banality: The Evil That Won't Go Away

Hannah Arendt, philosopher and writer of the mid-twentieth century, fled Nazi Germany in the 1930’s, came to the United States, and more than likely nailed, as much as anyone ever has, the nature of evil. Its essence, she argued, is banality.

Banality. The normalization of the trivial, the glib acceptance of the superficial, settling for the trite, the unwillingness to think. Ordinary people rather calmly adapting to injustice, cruelty, oppression, and degradation until all those things become the norm: that, Arendt argued, is banality, the modus operandi of evil.

Among many other things she did in her career, she covered on behalf of The New Yorker the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1961. Eichmann was an official in the Nazi bureaucracy who oversaw marshaling the implementation of “The Final Solution,” the systematic genocide of Jews and others. After the war, he was one of a number of Nazi officials who escaped to South America, in his case to Argentina. Arendt later compiled her coverage of the trial in a book entitled “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.”

Her analysis of Eichmann was quite controversial. In no sense did she suggest that Eichmann was not culpable nor that he should not be held accountable for his crimes. She did, however, argue that the problem with Eichmann was not that he was a Satanic monster contriving evil rooted in malice or fanaticism, but rather he was, to her mind, obviously unable to see any point of view besides his own, his vantage point being that of a bureaucrat simply “doing his job” in the Nazi state’s organization, following orders. That, Arendt argued, was the heart of the “banality of evil,” a phrase she coined. Banal because it was unthinking, acritical. His evil, she believed, was characterized by a frightening “thoughtlessness.”

I don’t know that Hannah Arendt was right in her assessment of Eichmann. I do, however, believe that a cluster of gradual developments has led us in the United States to the point where banality pervades much of present society. Is that banality the lynchpin of entrenched evil?

For the record, I’m not talking solely about the present administration, although what I’m saying certainly applies thereto. The puzzle of the contemporary moment is how so many people have gotten to the place where they are apparently unable to recognize the enormities like inflicting pain on the vulnerable, sponsoring horrors upon the suffering, and increasing the burdens of those who have little or no power to bear those burdens or resist those who impose them.

A high school teacher of mine once described sin as the gradual numbing of the mind and heart so that persons become desensitized to assaults on their souls, their intrinsic natures. You can begin rubbing your finger, for example, she said. At first it might feel neutral or even pleasant. If you rub it long enough and consistently enough, it might become painful. If you keep it up, you will likely cause the finger to develop a callous and soon you won’t feel anything at all.

A crude metaphor perhaps, but I think a telling one.

If Arendt is correct in her analysis of banality, then we need to look at what contributes to the spread of banality. For one thing, is it not the deterioration of education that in many ways has substituted materialistic goals such as earning power for the central task of training people how to think? I don’t often listen to Fox News nor any network news, for that matter. But when I do listen to a clip of a Fox News interview, I’m often stunned at how “talking points” (a euphemism for propaganda whether rightist or leftist) supplant critical thinking. Is that not obvious?

In the last decade I have given most of my time and energy to create safe spaces where men of any identification can integrate their sexual and spiritual lives, whatever shape those things might assume in their experience. I’ve listened to numberless assessments people make of “spirituality” or “religion.” It hasn’t been my aim to try to talk anyone into or out of a point of view, but rather to maintain the container in which they are free to work out their own values, sort out their own issues, create their own futures. Yet, I’ve been stunned at the simplistic judgments frequently made about quite complex and subtle issues. I’m not saying I’m immune to the same thing. Nor am I claiming that my making that statement is free of judgment.

Nonetheless, it seems to me that a dependable route to banality is removing, diminishing, or ridiculing things like honest questioning, sincere doubt, rigorous analysis, deep investigation, and critical thinking. I question whether, broadly speaking, our education system is doing much to encourage such things. There are notable exceptions. But when hosts of people rebel against science, excuse officials who lie and cheat, fail to hold authorities accountable, manipulate historical accounts of unpleasant, embarrassing, or threatening events or trends, massage statistics for personal profit or political benefit, have we not wandered down the sure path to mass banality? Can you think of a more banal phenomenon than substituting the performance values of reality TV for serious government?

As I understand the core mission of education it is to teach people how to think. That’s the counterpoint to what Arendt claimed was the banality that characterizes and undergirds authoritarianism.

Frankly, I tire of diagnoses like my own here if they simply point to problems, perhaps implying solutions but leaving us feeling demoralized and hopeless against such massive problems. What is to be done?

I continue to believe what I’ve been exploring in these last several blog articles, namely doing the work of reform in small communities where people support each other rather than try to outshout each other. I know that’s no panacea; but I believe we’ve had enough experience attempting systemic change on large scales to learn that large and sustainable change can’t be imposed from above nearly so well as it can come from below. Sure, there’s a place for national programs and mass movements. It's absolutely true that necessary momentum can be built by leadership at the top of organizations and communities. But everything I’ve learned about organizational development tells me that sustainable systemic change takes root when leaders increasingly involve people throughout their systems in making change, not simply following orders demanding change. In sum, systemic change is most likely to happen when grassroots and grasstops are involved and aligned.

There’s something else at issue here. How do we recognize evil? A serious problem results when a culture generally projects “evil” onto somebody else: a person, group, or community that is other than the person projecting. The common term for that is “othering,” a sloganistic word of which I’m not especially fond. My tastes aside, the problem as I see it is that hosts of people don’t believe that evil exists other than in somebody or some people other than themselves. Comedian Flip Wilson’s burlesque of “the devil made me do it” years ago showed how hollow and ridiculous, not to mention shallow, is the failure to recognize that evil is a formidable reality which infects you and me, not just somebody else. Nor is Evil simply, as St. Augustine once posited, the privatio boni, the absence of the Good.

In the Baptismal rite in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, the very carefully worded renunciation is threefold:

Do you renounce Satan and all the powers of wickedness that rebel against God?

Do you renounce the evil powers of this world that corrupt and destroy the creatures of God?

Do you renounce all sinful desires that draw you from the love of God?[1]

The first renounces cosmic evil, whatever shape or form it might take. The second recognizes and renounces systemic evil, the transpersonal reality of debilitating and destructive forces that infect all societal structures. The third recognizes the tendency of all conscious souls to follow from time-to-time paths opposed to the Love that creates, sustains, and redeems the universe.

You don’t have to buy into a particular theology or sign a membership card in a church to acknowledge that the forces permeating all experience include destructive as well as upbuilding and lifegiving energies. It’s possible, of course, and in some ways helpful to categorize those forces as Good or Evil, although I strongly believe that Good and Evil are essential and existential terms, not just a pair of moral polarities. However you cut the cake, we have a serious problem when we don’t know how to choose between good and evil, or even recognize the difference. That’s the banality that weighs us down.

[1]The Book of Common Prayer and Administration of the Sacraments and Other Rites and Ceremonies of the Church (New York: Church Publishing Incorporated, 1979, page 302.