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The Banality of Evil
James Bond movies are famous for having outrageous villains, and this is a common theme in many modern movies. Their evil is so exaggerated and outrageous that it’s nearly inhuman. This is probably designed to make it easier for the audience to cheer when the villain is blown to bits at the end, but I think there’s another reason. By dehumanizing villains, Hollywood attempts to show that evil is inherently inhuman, and that most humans are inherently good. I think Hollywood does this because leftism makes no sense unless that is true. Who needs God? Or stuffy traditional values? Or judgmental cultural mores? Just be who you are! Relax! Do what feels good, and don’t allow your personal growth to be restricted by outdated superstitions.
I think that this optimistic view of human nature is a significant reason that Hannah Arendt was so harshly criticized for describing Adolf Eichmann with her now-famous phrase, “The banality of evil.” At his trial in 1961, Eichmann seemed an ordinary-appearing, slender, balding man, who seemed every bit the boring bureaucrat. She described him as “terribly and terrifyingly normal.” She wondered whether evil was radical or whether it was simply a result of most ordinary people conforming to popular opinions without carefully considering the consequences of their actions. A modern progressive, who thinks that people can govern other people in centralized control structures, and consistently do so ethically and fairly, would find Arendt’s mundane description of evil to be extremely concerning, I would think.
Because if Arendt is right about that, then the jump from a man dying at the hands of a callous police officer, to passionate speeches, to destructive riots, to intimidation of dissenting voices, to burning books, to anarchy, and finally to tyranny – those all become very small jumps if she is right.
When I look at leftist radical groups like Antifa and Black Lives Matter, I don’t see radicals at all. I don’t think that Hannah Arendt would, either. I just see ordinary people conforming to popular opinions without carefully considering the consequences of their actions.
You can call that evil if you like. I just call it human nature.
Hannah Arendt was raised in an intellectual, left-leaning, non-religious Jewish household. She wrote of her upbringing,
“My early intellectual formation occurred in an atmosphere where nobody paid much attention to moral questions; we were brought up under the assumption: moral conduct is a matter of course.”
After fleeing the Nazis and contemplating the events of WWII, she spent much of her life searching for answers to those moral questions in the writings of Aristotle, Kant, St. Augustine, Kierkegaard, and many others. I think she continued her desperate search for an explanation for evil, because she was as horrified by the familiarity of Eichmann as the rest of us were.
The Nazi movement opened Arendt’s eyes to the idea that moral conduct is not a matter of course. I suspect that Antifa and Black Lives Matter may open some other eyes today.
It’s funny how it takes leftist organizations to convince leftists of the dangers of leftism.
Leftists believe that people can govern other people in centralized control structures, and consistently do so ethically and fairly. Leftism is based on the inherent goodness in human nature. Which is why applied leftism ends so predictably in evil. Leftism is simply applied human nature. Lord help us.
Moral conduct is not a matter of course. Quite the contrary. Moral conduct is an extraordinary result of generations of carefully applied wisdom and sacrifice. If we bring our kids up, as Hannah Arendt’s parents did, “…in an atmosphere where nobody paid much attention to moral questions; we were brought up under the assumption: moral conduct is a matter of course,” – if that is how we raise our children, then we will learn, once again, that moral conduct is not a matter of course.
Lord help us.
Published in General
Rousseau took the traditional concept of Original Sin and relocated it from the individual human soul into the human environment, i.e. civilization. Man is essentially good, Rousseau thinks, but has been deformed by the demands and expectations of society. This was a seductive thing to propose, as it now authorized people to shift the blame for the failure of their lives from themselves to external forces. Leftism has been exploiting that seduction ever since.
According to the traditional view of Original Sin, the line between good and evil ran through the heart of every man. So tradition has a natural limit on power since no man can be trusted with unlimited power. The (false) view of leftism, on the other hand, not only knows no limit to power, but has a dynamic of ever increasing power feeding back on itself. Since evil is external to man, we should be able to eradicate it by force by eliminating its source. But since this is false, it doesn’t work, and the leftist can only conclude that not enough force has been applied and applies even more. The further he goes down this path, the further away he goes from the virtues of humility and charity that would permit him to see the true source of evil in his own soul. So the whole process becomes more and more an offense to reason and common sense.
We see that with the current cancel culture. The problems of minorities, the orthodoxy holds, are all due to “racism”, which permeates the air and into which all whites are educated despite the best efforts of leftist educationists. Whites are not in themselves bad, but are nonetheless bred into racism, which must be expunged with confessions, penance and re-education. Whites do their part by submitting to the process. Minorities have special antennae to detect the social origins of racism, and do their part by pointing out racist elements (i.e. anything they consider offensive) so they can be purged. But since this narrative is mostly false, it doesn’t change anything, which only proves we haven’t really gotten to the sources of racism yet, and so more statues must be toppled and people’s lives and careers destroyed.
And a question I’ve seen attributed to several people ‘ After 100 years and 100 million eggs, where’s the omelet? ‘
I think this is what I meant when, on another thread about how I’ve changed in 2020, I said that I am no longer mystified by the behavior of the Germans in the Third Reich: Of course they went along with it. Of course they believed that they were doing the right things. Of course they didn’t notice the warning signs. Of course they made sure to avoid seeing what was right in front of them. Of course they “didn’t know.”
More like Leftism is based on the belief that external coercion can reform human nature. But since Leftism was originally a heresy in Christian societies, it grew out of the implicit assumption that human nature can be changed by faith coupled with supernatural intervention, (though Marx couched both in the language of pseudoscience.)
John Batchelor and Michael Vlahos are postulating that the rise of the Church of Woke is the biggest political-religious revolution since the Christian conversion of the Roman Empire.
That’s quite a statement. Sounds just a bit over the top. But let me think about that a bit…
Batchelor and Vlahos are carrying on an ongoing conversation under the rubric of New American Civil War (Vlahos refers to the open warfare that kicked off one April morning in 1775 as the first American Civil War, which is arguably true.)
Unfortunately, Batchelor also keeps repeating the claim that “you never know it was a civil war you were in until later” and I seem to remember a speech which said
Be that as it may, it’s an interesting series. They’ve lately started using the conceit of being well to do agrarian Romans in Britain discussing reports on the new phenomenon of Christianity. They agree that it was dangerous to the Empire, since the civic religion pivoting around the divinity of the Emperor was the glue that held everything together.
I see this too, but I don’t think it’s upbringing as much as it is (a) the centralized media, which is always going after the large national market, (b) effective activists who know how to push people’s buttons, (c) the all-powerful government that is intimately involved in each person’s life now from morning to night, and (d) the lack of something else that binds us all together such as a religion.
When my daughter was living in France, she said that mass demonstrations against the government were a way of life once a week. Politics was all-consuming. At the time, I couldn’t help wondering if the socialist-communist destruction of heroes, of true independent education and the government instead of the parents raising the nation’s children, and the regulatory state were all factors in driving people’s constant attention to the national government.
The practice of politics has also caused the public’s attention to always be on the federal government. Running for office in this country too often has meant promising to give people things or solve their problems. It’s basically how politicians have campaigned for the last 50 years.
One of the strangest things to emerge over the course of my lifetime has been the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Somehow the government’s initial peripheral efforts to help communities in times of natural disasters have become a formal way of life and an expectation. It’s not that I’m against having a FEMA, :-). It’s just that it is symbolic of the sweeping changes that have occurred throughout the relationship between the individual and the federal government.
Brilliant points, MarciN. Particularly, in my view, (c) & (d).
It’s only a small step from a expansionist FEMA to an Emergency Creation Agency. New motto: When not enough [expletive] happens.
Plus they were bribed. Götz Aly’s Hitler’s Beneficiaries makes the case for this.
As Margaret Thatcher said, the problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money. The NDSAP knew this, and resorted to mass murder, plundering, and exporting wartime inflation to the countries they conquered and occupied.
For the idiots caught up in the moment you can blame human nature.
For the people leading the movement to overthrow the country, I blame evil.
The label is not important; the actions are. These people need to be crushed.
Their movement, their idea, needs to be exterminated. The people themselves don’t need to be crushed, only their evil movement.
And seduced. Evil-for-evil’s sake is vanishingly rare; Hitler himself did not believe he was evil and neither did the rest of the Nazis. The National Socialist program was idealistic, progressive, utopian, seductively claiming to be both spiritual and scientific.
And, of course, it was working with a population traumatized by the disaster of World War 1— a literally de-moralizing cataclysm—as well as materially impoverished and frightened by the political and economic chaos of the 20s.
What gives me some hope in the present time of barking stupidity is that, whatever the #BLM-ers say, black Americans are not really isolate-able from other Americans. Despite the best efforts of Democrats to keep them set apart, America has never, in fact, been a country by and for white people (even when it thought it was!). Black Americans have always been part of it. They fought and died in the Revolutionary War, grasped the meaning and relevance-to-themselves of the constitutional protection of individual liberty just as soon as they got wind of it, and made good use of any freedom gained by achieving excellence, even in the teeth of the most appalling racism.
My white children can claim descent from black slaves not because overseers raped slaves but because, back in the early 1800s, interracial marriages happened, and with some frequency (my stepchildren, also white, are also descended from black slaves). So literal, biological integration isn’t even a new thing.
The categories that the intersectionalist anti-racist progressive is so fond of emphasizing are simply not fixed enough to contain (nor constrain) the complexity of actual human lives—reality gets in the way so promptly that it’s no wonder the progressive feels the need to silence, shun and screech. Otherwise, too many people might wonder how anti-racism has come to mean white women screaming insults at black police officers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=156&v=ha-7SETmJD4&feature=emb_logo