Hannah Arendt II on evil

Peter Kopa, 1.11.2023, Prague

We continue our recent article on Hannah Arendt: https://thinktanklatam.org/2023/10/21/hannah-arendt-hoy/

The Passion of thinking and writing

Hannah Arendt is one of the most important political thinkers of the 20th century. Her texts and books have been and continue to be acclaimed and debated worldwide. This applies especially to her report on the “Eichmann in Jerusalem” trial (1963), which triggered the first major international scholarly dispute about the nature, meaning and consequences of National Socialism. But it also applies to his monumental study “Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft” (Elements and Origin of Totalitarianism) (1951), to his books “Vita Activa” (1958) and “Über die Revolution” (The Political Revolution) (1962) and to the subtle biographical portraits published under the title “Menschen in finsteren Zeiten” (Men in Dark Times) (1968). She tells us that politics is not a necessary evil, but the very sphere of freedom par excellence: Hannah Arendt commits philosophy to its social responsibility.

Arendt’s posthumous fame has continued to grow. Especially after 1989, following the collapse of real socialism and the peaceful revolutions in Eastern Europe, her powerful descriptions of the possibilities of political action offered multiple stimuli for defining its birth and understanding.

Arendt had delved deeply into metaphysics, from Plato to Hegel, and then focused on the philosophical view of politics. In this article I will focus on her conception of the banality of evil because it will allow us to reflect on this banality today.

The banality of evil

Hanna Arendt was shocked by the crimes of Nazism, because they were not perpetrated by sexual degenerates, sadists, psychopaths or ideological fanatics, but, for the most part, by normal people, loving parents, people with an honest life history, by law-abiding people. She said: ‘To put it simply, we can say that Eichmann simply did not know what he was doing. Arendt had gone from the USA, as a reporter for the New Yorker, in 1962, to his trial in Nuremberg, which had condemned him to be hanged. She tells us that ‘Eichmann said that what most helped to ease his conscience was the simple fact that he found no one, absolutely no one, who was opposed to the final solution. At all times he acted within the framework imposed by his conscientious obligations: he behaved in harmony with the general rule’.

Arendt explains that for these reasons she did not feel guilty in that morally corrupt Nazi world. That Eichmann went so far as to plead in his defense the reformulation of the Kantian categorical imperative authored by none other than Hans Frank, Hitler’s lieutenant in Poland: ‘behave in such a way that if the Fuehrer were to see you, he would approve of your actions’. Arendt tells us that this is far more terrifying than all the atrocities committed by the Nazis put together, in that it implied a new kind of criminality which consists in ‘being an enemy of mankind’.

Analogous developments to Nazism, today

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vknhe2CbvmI

The active cooperation of the Germans under the Nazi totalitarian dictatorship revealed, according to Arendt, ‘the total collapse of all moral criteria in public and private life, resulting in turn from a long and complicated process of breaking with tradition, religion and authority’. In one of the most cultured countries in the world, the few who opposed all this were those who dared to judge events for themselves, thus asserting their freedom and their capacity for rational reflection.

Arendt’s ‘politically incorrect’ conclusions today lead us to wonder whether the banality of evil is not also widespread today in politics and in general morality. People all over the world suffer from the influence of materialism, which leads to relativizing everything, so to speak, to the measure of one’s own taste. In the midst of this disengagement from the natural laws that mark the path of morality, everyone can invent his own justification for his evil deeds, which is like a bad bandage on a bleeding wound, leading to the silencing of the voice of his own conscience. Thus, even today, evil becomes banal, trivial, because it is done by the majority and because there is no external sanction against it. Even the courts allow themselves to be corrupted in so many places.

Examples of these banalities: designer ideologies such as genderism, the equating of homosexual unions to traditional marriage, the excogitations of LTGB, WOKE etc. etc. etc. But today there is also an aggravating factor: the opponents do not suffer a brutal Nazi-style persecution, at least not yet, until the ideological error comes to impose itself in the form of laws or official standards. Then we do see the appearance of physical persecution. We see this today in so many professors who have been dismissed from the University for not bowing to ideological demands, or in doctors who have lost their professional license for not following the indications of the WHO supported by the government itself etc.  https://rumble.com/v3rodbv-police-state-a-film-by-dinesh-dsouza.html

However, there are many reasons to hope for a better world in the future, especially thanks to the power of truth. Interestingly, the truth of natural laws is absolutely sought and obeyed, on pain of the collapse of any technical creation or digital programming. And this sphere of obedience is absolutely unquestioned, it is taken for granted, it is the starting point of any technical or technological project. On the other hand, when we move to the sphere of natural laws that teach the way to the maximum personal fulfillment, there arises the revision, and even the rejection of these norms.

Arendt does not enter into the study of why man falls and wallows in moral evil, because in her time there was still a broad consensus on the validity of the moral laws, anchored in the Ten Commandments.  The deeper reason for the existence of moral evil is a mystery. Christian revelation, however, sheds light on this shadow in the soul of man, explaining the inclination to evil, but affirming that it is surmountable through the formation of one’s own character in the face of divine teachings and, above all, through the help of God’s grace. https://thinktanklatam.org/2020/12/23/the-good-and-the-evil-ii/