The Banality of Evil

The Ordinary Roots of Extraordinary Atrocities

On the evening of 11th May 1960, the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad grabbed Adolf Eichmann off a street in a quiet district of Buenos Aires. Eichmann, formerly an SS officer and administrator, had been the key figure in organising the transportation of millions of Jews across Europe to the Nazi concentration camps. It was no wonder Mossad wanted a word with him.

Upon capture, he was flown to Israel, and taken to trial on the 11th April 1961. The New Yorker commissioned the German Jewish political thinker Hannah Arendt to cover the trial. The trial ended in December 1961 with Eichmann’s conviction. Arendt’s report, based on her observations of the defendant and of the conduct of the trial, was published in 1963 in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A report on the Banality of Evil.

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In her report, Arendt grappled with a disturbing question: can one commit evil deeds without being innately evil? Her conclusion was a shocking and provocative theory which defied the conventional representation of evil as exceptional and demonic. Arendt did not see in Eichmann the monstrosity of a psychopath, but rather the mediocrity of a bland, mundane, unimaginative human being who, in her words was “neither perverted nor sadistic… but terribly an terrifyingly normal” (Arendt, 1963, p. 276).

One thing Arendt certainly did not mean was that evil had become ordinary, or that Eichmann and his Nazi cohorts had committed an unexceptional crime. Indeed, she thought the crime was exceptional, if not unprecedented, and that as a result it demanded a new approach to legal judgment itself.

There were at least two challenges to legal judgment that she underscored, and then another to moral philosophy more generally. The first problem is that of legal intention. Did the courts have to prove that Eichmann intended to commit genocide in order to be convicted of the crime? Her argument was that Eichmann may well have lacked “intentions” insofar as he failed to think about the crime he was committing.

According to Arendt, Eichmann had not recognised the atrocity of his acts due to a particular “inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else” (Arendt, 1963, p. 49). On the basis of what she saw and heard on the trial, she concluded (somewhat controversially) that while acts of evil can, and often do, result in unimaginable tragedy, the perpetrators of these acts need not in every case be inherently evil. They may have motives they do not recognise as evil, and which may, indeed, be ‘banal’. She did not think Eichmann acted without conscious activity, but she insisted that the term “thinking” had to be reserved for a more reflective mode of rationality.

Many questions abound: is thinking to be understood as a psychological process or, indeed, something that can be properly described, or is thinking in Arendt’s sense always an exercise of judgment of some kind, and so implicated in a normative practice. If the “I” who thinks is part of a “we” and if the “I” who thinks is committed to sustaining that “we”, how do we understand the relation between “I” and “we” and what specific implications does thinking imply for the norms that govern politics and, especially, the critical relation to positive law?

Arendt was also harshly critical of the conduct of the trial (which she labelled a ‘show trial’) as being erroneously centred on the sufferings of the Jews rather than on the ethical nature of the deeds perpetrated by the accused. In her view, the judges failed to understand Eichmann, obscuring what, according to her was “the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us — the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought defying banality of evil (Arendt, 1963, p. 252).

Her theory immediately, and unsurprisingly, attracted considerable vituperation. Critics accused her of being a ‘self-hating Jew’; of justifying Eichmann; and of trivialising the Holocaust as an unexceptional event. But what she actually meant when she wrote of the ‘banality of evil’?

Arendt had devised a theory to explain a “phenomenon which stared one in the face at the trial” (Arendt, 1963, p. 282). She was not seeking to provide a universal interpretation of evil, but rather to interpret the specific nature of the deeds committed by Eichmann, based on her observation of him giving evidence. She concluded that Eichmann’s puzzled way of speaking and his constant resort to cliches and stock phrases were indicative of shallowness and ‘thoughtlessness’ (Arendt, 1963, p. 49).

Arendt’s term ‘banality’ additionally referred to the defendant’s motives, personal ambition and desire to please his superiors, and even to his activities — which in themselves were mainly bureaucratic. Eichmann was responsible for the logistics of the Final Solution: his job consisted mostly of clerical work, sitting behind a desk, making phone calls, issuing instructions, reorganising train schedules, solving problems, allocating personnel and resources.

As Arendt pointed out, there is nothing intrinsically murderous in activities of this kind. The controversy lies in his conscious awareness, mens rea, of the murderous end result of his actions — an awareness which, according to Arendt was in some way dormant, due to his ‘lack of imagination’ (Arendt, 1963, p. 287). With this in mind, it is not surprising that to each of the fifteen charges brought against him he pleaded: “Not guilty in the sense of the indictment” (Arendt, 1963, p. 21). He didn’t feel guilty because he personally did not kill any Jews, nor did he personally send the orders to kill them.Perhaps most shockingly, he even claimed he hadn’t harboured ill feeling against his victims. As he declared in his final plea: “I am guilty of having been obedient, of having subordinated myself to my official duties.”

While conceiving a lack of critical thinking as Eichmann’s foremost characteristic, one must not fail to analyse the dynamics of the Nazi regime which meant ‘thoughtlessness’ created a new category of the modern criminal. Arendt, somewhat astutely, believed that modernity — in this case, specifically bureaucratic industrialised culture — supplied the necessary conditions to disguise the monstrous and sadistic evil involved in the Holocaust.

The success of any totalitarian regime relies primarily on its capability to destroy the thinking process of its subjects, transforming human beings into automatic and ‘banal’ receivers of orders. Thus the new type of criminal was, precisely and most shockingly, the ordinary law-abiding bureaucrat.

This idea was shared by the Polish thinker Zygmunt Bauman. In Modernity and The Holocaust (1989), Bauman claimed that modern bureaucratic culture and technology provide the preconditions for otherwise ordinary people to carry out what they deemed ‘normal activities’ in nonetheless exceedingly abnormal conditions. He wrote, “most bureaucrats composed memoranda, talked on the phone and participated in conferences. They could destroy a whole people by sitting at their desk” (Bauman, 1989, p. 24).

How then did modernity turn normal, if somewhat bureaucratic, people into evil perpetrators of genocide? Bauman identifies three specific conditions aimed at keeping the whole killing system in a strictly businesslike framework, and thus purposefully eroding moral inhibitions: authority, routinisation, and dehumanisation.

The first principle acts by foisting a moral sense of obedience and subordination upon its subjects. The second principle destroys the thinking process by rendering the acts of violence mechanical, automatic, rule-governed acts. And ‘dehumanising’ the Jews — in other words, referring to and seeing them as non-human entities — allowed the administration to solve the moral conundrum of committing a crime against humanity.

Indeed, the concept of dehumanisation forms a large part of Arendt’s wider argument about totalitarianism. In her word, “The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanise them” (Arendt, 1951, p.474)

It’s worth mentioning that Arendt did consider Eichmann unquestionably guilty of perpetrating a crime against humanity. Arendt believed that although Eichmann was lacking the reflective rationality to distinguish right from wrong in his work, he wasn’t entirely devoid of a conscience. Instead, she believed that Eichmann’s evil actions were devoid of evil intentions solely because he failed to think — it was sheer thoughtlessness that predisposed him to become one of the greatest criminals of the century.

Herein lies the controversy which led to the misinterpretation of Arendt’s notion of banality. It was erroneously considered by her critics as a means of justifying or even vindicating Eichmann. Its real purpose, however, was to draw awareness to a different conception of evil, rooted in the failure to engage in the critical and reflective discourse with one’s conscience.

At this historical juncture, for Arendt, it became necessary to conceptualise and prepare for crimes against humanity, and this implied an obligation to devise new structures of international law. So if a crime against humanity had become in some sense “banal” it was precisely because it was committed in a habitual way, systematically, without being adequately named and opposed. In a sense, by calling a crime against humanity “banal”, she was trying to point to the way in which the crime had become for the criminals accepted, routinised, and implemented without moral revulsion and political indignation and resistance.

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While calling for a rethinking of the concept of evil, Arendt, most importantly, demands a rethinking of the notion of moral responsibility, by claiming that every human being not only holds the potential to eradicate evil, but has the responsibility to do so, through the power of critical thinking. Indeed “we resist evil by beginning to think, by reaching another dimension than the horizon of everyday life” (Burdon, 2019, p. 279).

Bibliography

• Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. 1963. London, Penguin Books, 2006.

• Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. 1951. New York, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973.

• Bauman, Zygmunt. Modernity and the Holocaust. John Wiley & Sons, 28 May 2013.

• Burdon, Peter. HANNAH ARENDT : Legal Theory and the Eichmann Trial. 2019.

• Calder, Todd. “The Apparent Banality of Evil: The Relationship between Evil Acts and Evil Character.” Journal of Social Philosophy, vol. 34, no. 3, Sept. 2003, pp. 364–376.