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Hannah Arendt and the Boiler of Evil

Hannah Arendt coined the term "banality of evil" while covering the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi official charged with the orderly extermination of Europe's Jews. Arendt herself was a German-Jewish exile struggling in the most personal of ways to come to grips with the utter destruction of European society. In a series of articles for The New Yorker that later on became the book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Study on the Banality of Evil, Arendt tried to tackle a string of questions not necessarily answered by the trial itself: Where does evil come up from? Why practise people commit evil acts? How are those people different from the rest of the states?

A Volker Marz sculpture from the Berlin exhibition Hannah Arendt Denkraum. The show championship translates every bit "a space in which to recollect about Hannah Arendt." Which seems perfectly fitting, don't yous think?

Her conclusions were profound. People who exercise evil are non necessarily monsters; sometimes they're just bureaucrats. The Eichmann she observed on trial was neither vivid nor a sociopath. He was described by the attending courtroom psychiatrist equally a "completely normal human being, more normal, at any charge per unit, than I am after examining him." Evil, Arendt suggests, can exist extraordinary acts committed by otherwise unremarkable people.

[Arendt] insisted that only good had any depth. Good can be radical; evil tin never be radical, it tin can only be farthermost, for it possesses neither depth nor whatever demonic dimension yet — and this is its horror! — it can spread like a fungus over the surface of the globe and lay waste the entire world. Evil comes from a failure to call back. It defies idea for as presently as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, information technology is frustrated considering information technology finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.

Amos Elon, The Excommunication of Hannah Arendt, the introduction to Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Written report on the Banality of Evil

Is it any wonder that controversy erupted about immediately subsequently Arendt'due south work was published? Or that she was ostracized even past beau Jews?

In the past forty years Arendt's ideas have been championed in ii landmark psychological experiments — Stanley Milgram'south electroshock experiment and Philip Zimbardo's Stanford prison experiment — but decried by luminaries like Norman Mailer.

Even if the phrase itself has lost some of its dial through sheer repetition, the ideas it embodies are no less relevant. It's hard to talk about existent-world horrors like the Rwandan genocide or torture at Abu Ghraib without referencing Arendt.

And then for her centennial we're reminding ourselves why her ideas still affair. Help us out by taking a stab at some of her initial questions: Where does evil come up from? Why do people commit evil? Do you buy Arendt'southward thesis, or do you think there is something else (be it religious or biological) that leads to evil and distinguishes practiced from evil people?

Update, two/28/07 6:08pm

Afterward doing some pre-interviews, talking about things internally, and mining this thread for proficient ideas, (empathy, the origins vs. the nature of evil, subjective vs. objective vs. moral judgments of evil) nosotros're leaning towards breaking this show upward into at least two dissimilar shows.

The starting time prove (tentatively scheduled for Thursday March eighth) would be more of an overview of Hannah Arendt'south life and work, introducing an introduction to the concept of the boiler of evil every bit she described information technology. Our guests will probable be two of her last students who have spent their lives pouring over her work: Elisabeth Young-Bruehl and Jerome Kohn.

The second prove would probable be a more in-depth chat about evil, starting with Arendt's concept. We may build this bear witness around Philip Zimbardo, whose recent work has included extensive interviews with prison guards from Abu Ghraib.

Likewise, evidently Potter had the same idea I did: Pregnant and Morality would exist (ironically, since information technology's been warming up for then long) a actually proficient follow-upwardly to these shows.

Extra Credit Reading

Hannah Arendt, Power and Violence, Bard College, December 1968.

bardlib, Hannah Arendt Workspace: "The Workspace is an open admission forum in which readers might wait, as it were, over Hannah Arendt's shoulder as she annotated the texts most important to her."

Sarah Kerr, The Horrible and the Ridiculous, BookForum, January 2007: "Arendt "lives on in newspeak through merely four words," she notes on the start page. The media's promiscuous overuse of the phrase "the banality of evil," from Eichmann in Jerusalem, has turned it into an unhelpful cliche, she writes. Young-Bruehl directs us back to the philosophical problem of evil, a discussion begun two centuries earlier by Immanuel Kant that Arendt saw herself every bit extending."

Jerome Kohn, Evil: The Law-breaking Against Humanity, Hannah Arendt Middle, New School University: "In a revealing passage she said: "Simply the fearful imagination of those who accept been aroused by [firsthand] reports merely accept not actually been smitten in their own mankind, of those who are consequently free from the unmerciful, desperate terror which . . . inexorably paralyzes everything that is not mere reaction, tin can afford to keep thinking nigh horrors," adding that such thinking is "useful only for the perception of political contexts and the mobilization of political passions."

(Read the full series of Kohn'southward essays on Hannah Arendt here.)

David Byrne, Free Will, Part 2: Back up Our Troops, Periodical, Feb 7, 2007: "Ultimately, following that logic that makes about 3 or 4 people ultimately responsible, if the buck continues to become passed on up the chain of command. Of form, those 3 or four volition arraign 'faulty intelligence' or try to atone themselves one way or another, and they commonly succeed."

Robin Varghese, Banality of Evil, The French Version, 3 Quarks Daily, February 27, 2007: "In Bordeaux he resisted in his own way, he said: taking names off abort-lists, tipping off families in accelerate, sheltering a rabbi in his house. Why, he even chartered the metropolis trams to spare the very immature or former the walk to the station, and booked passenger trains, not goods wagons, to make their journey comfortable. These self-justifications came out at Mr Papon'south trial, 1 of just two of French officials who collaborated with the Nazis in their crimes against humanity."

MC, People are willing to commit virtual torture too, Neurophilosophy, December 23, 2007: "In the initial part of the project, Slater et al take used an immersive Virtual Reality environment to re-enact the classic experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram in the 1960s."

Philip Zimbardo, Ability turns good soldiers into 'bad apples', The Boston Earth, May ix, 2004: "Now in that location is a rush to analyze human being behavior, blaming flawed or pathological individuals for evil and ignoring other important factors. Unless we learn the dynamics of "why," nosotros will never be able to counteract the powerful forces that can transform ordinary people into evil perpetrators."

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Source: https://radioopensource.org/hannah-arendt-and-the-banality-of-evil/

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