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What is the difference between doing evil and being evil?
That is the question posed by philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt in a 1963 series of articles about the 1961 Jerusalem trial of Holocaust architect Adolph Eichmann. The pieces she wrote became the basis of her book, “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil.”
Arendt, a Holocaust survivor by means of escape to the United States in the 1930s, struggled with an important philosophical question. In Eichmann she expected to see a monster, the epitome of demonic wickedness. What she encountered instead – or at least her interpretation of the man – was a banal bureaucrat. Eichmann, she posited, was one of millions of desensitized people who due to their lack of ability to reason were swept by society into supporting totalitarianism and its goals. Eichmann himself pushed a version of this in his defense, depicting his actions as both non-critical and a case of simply “following orders.” Nevertheless, he was convicted of crimes against humanity.
Arendt did not deny Eichmann’s evil, but she did buy into some of his claims. He was not, she argued, a dedicated antisemitic ideologue. His wickedness emanated from a banal desire to go-along to get-along (I’m obviously paraphrasing here). What he lacked was a capacity for critical thinking. She wrote:
Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.
… Good can be radical; evil can never be radical, it can only be extreme, for it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension yet--and this is its horror--it can spread like a fungus over the surface of the earth and lay waste the entire world. Evil comes from a failure to think.
A recent Israeli documentary has brought to light some lengthy interviews with Eichmann that really do show the ideological wickedness of the man. For many, these revelations call into question her analyses. (These were not used at trial and while Arendt had access to a minuscule portion of them, they’ve only recently been released in full.)
Yesterday we experienced yet another mass shooting, this one at the Highland Park, Illinois, Independence Day Parade. Because I don’t watch cable news I updated myself every hour or two with quick looks at my phone. At one point I clicked on Fox News Channel’s site simply because it was at the top. Out of morbid curiosity I scrolled down to see if the site had a comments section. It certainly does and it is quite the sewer.
Before the suspect was identified there were dozens of posts blaming Chicago’s “democrat” mayor and the city’s “gang” violence. These gave some weight to Arendt’s theory of the failure of thinking. They were demonstrably ignorant about the location of Highland Park. As I scrolled, I found more comments spiraling into explicit racism. Some declared that the shooter would undoubtedly be someone from the “community that rhymes with Bigger.” Others wrote that it would be someone from “the 13%,” an obvious reference to Black people. Still others praised the good old days of Jim Crow and called for a return to segregation.
After the shooter’s identity was revealed, comments from these folks and their ilk turned to the usual accusations that he is a leftist, a lib, antifa, and a Soros pawn. Pictures of the shooter wrapped in Trump flags or attending MAGA rallies did nothing to dissuade them. They were certain that the left was responsible and offered all kinds of horrifying solutions to the problem.
As I dipped my toe in these waters, I thought about Hannah Arendt and the banality of evil. Are these people evil? Of that I have no doubt. Are they banal? One popular definition of the word is: “so lacking in originality as to be obvious and boring.” That they also were. But another question entered my mind: Does it ultimately matter?
The weight of Jewish tradition says it does not; that what matters is not our proclivities but our actions. Likewise, many humanist thinkers argue that it makes little difference whether one behaves evilly out or ignorance or due to societal pressures or from a deep conviction. What matters is our behavior. This consequentialist idea was shared by Rabbi Wine who frequently taught that we are our behavior; that our motivations are far less consequential than what we do.
My modest contribution to this conversation falls on the consequentialist side. Ignoring questions of any one person’s or group’s banality, I am more interested in the tools yielded by evil and why they work so well. The most common of these is dehumanization. Wherever we find that, we find evil.
Dehumanization comes very easily to our tribalistic species. This is what enables it to so easily serve as the core mechanism of all authoritarian and totalitarian systems. Whoever the ideologues are, whatever their motivations might be — religious or nationalist or economic — dehumanization will lie at the core of the evil they produce. Whether perpetrated fervently or ignorantly or with a dash or more of banality, when individuals or whole classes of people are belittled and demeaned, this instrument of evil is on display.
Sometimes it leads to death camps, but not always. There are other roads and ethnic or racial “cleansing” are not always the endgame. But it is always central to the message because it is so useful and so easily provoked. Look at our own nation. Never-healed rifts are being easily exploited to advance what I and others believe is a Christian nationalist program. It enlists racism (of both the personal and systemic types), religious bias, misogyny, homophobia, transphobia, and more.
When viewed through an analysis of dehumanization, evil becomes much easier to spot. Many who engage in it claim that they are fighting for a greater good (villains do not think themselves villainous). But this is a manipulation of reality. Whatever their motivations, the wrongness of their deeds is judged – consequentially – by their dehumanizing outcomes. One can argue day and night, even truly believe, that one is doing what is right. Yet when the actions bear dehumanizing results the truth outs.
When dehumanization is the consequence, the act is evil.
I have yet to find any exceptions.
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