Banality

Be aware this post talks about troubling current and historical events, so might not be timed right if you’re feeling fragile. Thank you to my lovely paid subscribers for your initial feedback.

Sometimes, when I’m feeling down about the world, I reach for the only thing that could possibly make me feel worse: grim documentaries. This weekend’s choice was Vita Activa: The Spirit of Hannah Arendt. Don’t get me wrong – it’s a great watch, and I recommend it. It’s also sent me off on a train of thought. As the train departed, I figured I might as well invite you on board.  

There’s a good chance you’ve heard of Hannah Arendt. We’ll go back in history a moment to meet her.

Arendt was born in 1906, in a part of Prussia that’s now Germany: not a pretty child, according to her own mother, but clever. Her father suffered from chronic syphilis, dying when she was a little girl. Despite this hardship, she was a gifted student who would go on to complete a doctorate. At university, aged 19 or so, she had an affair with the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who was her teacher, much older, and soon join the Nazi party. The affair was an early brush with controversy, and it wouldn’t be her last.  

In 1933, Arendt fled Germany for France, where she became a refugee and was interned in a camp for German Jews. As Nazism spread across Europe, she fled once more in 1940, this time to the United States. She built her own career as a philosopher, and having been stateless, looked at everything with the detached perspective of an outsider – often taking positions that angered others. Strangely, despite all she’d been through, she reconciled with Heidegger later in life, helping to somewhat rehabilitate a reputation the guy never deserved.

Arendt is also the philosopher who came up with the term 'the banality of evil'. She was describing Adolf Eichmann, who evaded capture by the Allies at the end of the war, escaping Europe with fake papers, but was later tracked down in Argentina by Mossad agents. Eichmann was brought to Israel, where he was tried and convicted in 1961 of crimes against humanity, and then executed the following year. Arendt attended his trial and wrote a book about it. She wrote a lot of other stuff too, much of it too abstract for me, but the idea of the banality of evil has always interested and unsettled me.

At the end of the war, when the camps were liberated and the horrors of the Holocaust were fully grasped, the world was forced to confront the unthinkable. These horrors had been carried out by everyday people. The implications of that ordinariness were terrifying. Under certain circumstances, certain leaders, could any of us – normal folks who probably think of ourselves as good people – become monsters? Workmates, neighbours, even friends and family: could any one of us be capable of this?

Could I turn against you, or you against me?

A lot of people started to explore this question from different disciplines (including social psychologist Stanley Milgram, of the famous Milgram experiment, which involved asking subjects to administer what they believed were increasingly severe electrical shocks to other people). Arendt came at it from her perspective as a philosopher and outsider.

Famously, or maybe infamously, Arendt didn't see Eichmann as some kind of monster. She thought he wasn’t overly competent. He didn’t think for himself or reflect on himself. Nor did he think about other people, and he was unable to see from any viewpoint but his own. He was bland and thoughtless: a nobody. That was precisely the thing that made him dangerous.

Arendt faced a very significant backlash for her work. Eichmann had been integral to one of the most hateful atrocities humanity had seen. Wasn’t it disrespectful to victims to suggest it wasn’t hate, an actual emotion, rather than blandness and thoughtlessness, that had motivated him? And by saying Eichmann was an unthinking cog in a bigger machine, wasn’t that taking away his moral responsibility?

I'm not a philosopher, but if I understand her correctly, then Arendt was saying something else. That something else resonates for me.

If you choose blandness and thoughtlessness - to be neither a good person nor a bad one - then you choose to make yourself a page on which shitty people can write. And absolutely, utterly, you're responsible for that.

I find the idea of the banality of evil really powerful, but I also think the world's changed. It's commonplace, and right, to point to the parallels to the 1930s. We are watching the rise of fascist leaders and genocide playing out in real time. The people responsible are using the same language and tactics that brought the world to war.

What's different, I think, is the character of our monsters.

They don't act like bureaucrats anymore: their monstrousness is entirely candid and beamed live. Trump's fantasies of violence are like a disease emanating from a rotting soul through his thin skin. Elon Musk spews antisemitism and white supremacy, even as his AI allows sick men to undress images of children. Netanyahu tenders for construction companies to lay concrete over the homes and the suffering of the West Bank.

Over these last few days, in the wake of Renee Good's murder, so many everyday people have rushed to defend it online. Good failed to follow an order, they say, or she had the wrong license plate, or she shouldn't have been there, driving in her own neighbourhood, in the first place. The ones rushing to defend include kiwis – and not just a few, but a lot.

They don’t bear Good any malice. They just explain the reality. When an officer tells you to do something you do it, or you get what you get – and if you don’t like what you get, you should’ve followed the rules. These commenters don't make the rules: they're just pointing them out. It’s life. Sometimes a minor infraction will lead to a summary execution. You can talk about civil rights and democracy and the value of life all you like, but this is the real world we’re talking about.    

It’s Arendt, but she’s kind of been turned on her head.

These defenders - some of whom are our workmates, neighbours, even friends and family - aren't carrying out rules. Tyrants don’t even rely on rules anymore. Instead, the defenders are methodically, impassively, searching for rules to somehow justify the tyranny.   

Evil's not banal anymore. It’s flaunting itself, smirking at us through a brazen 24/7 news cycle. It’s more like our banality is making the evil possible. 

Good said from her car, seconds before her death, “It’s fine, dude, I’m not mad at you”. She seemed good natured, and intentional in that, thoughtful. She should have been left to wind up her window and drive on, to go to work or buy groceries, and to be there when her son came home from school – an everyday life beautiful for its ordinariness.