The Banality of Evil, Torture, and Mindlessness

Some thoughts on the banality of evil and American torture prompted by this post by Andrew Sullivan.

The phrase "the banality of evil" comes from Hannah Arendt's book Eichmann in Jerusalem, a book about her covering of the Adolf Eichmann trial.

Eichmann is often called “The Architect of the Holocaust” because he was the SS Officer charged with handling the logistics of the mass deportation of the Jewish population to the ghettos and, eventually, to the extermination camps. Eichmann was, in essence, the Bureaucrat of the Holocaust. The Organizer and Paper-Pusher of Death.

After the war Eichmann escaped to Argentina and lived under a false identity. He was eventually captured by Israeli operatives on May 11, 1960. Eichmann was secretly taken to Israel to eventually stand trial for crimes against humanity and the Jewish people.

Unable to cover the Nuremberg Trials, Hannah Arendt was keen the cover the Eichmann trial which took place from April 11 to August 14, 1961. At the end of the very public trial Eichmann was found guilty on all counts and was sentenced to death. Eichmann was executed on May 31, 1962.

Arendt, being a Jew, wanted to cover the Eichmann trial to have her own personal confrontation with Evil. She wanted to stare the Devil in the eye. She came looking for the Monster.

But what she found was something quite different. Eichmann was bland, nice and, oddly, intellectually shallow. By the end of the trial Arendt concluded that Eichmann was more of a fool than a monster. Arendt wrote: “Everybody could see that this man was not a ‘monster,’ but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown.”

The aspect of Eichmann's mind that struck Arendt was its superficially. Here are some of the ways Arendt describes Eichmann in her book:

“utterly reluctant to read”

“his almost total inability to look at anything from the other fellow’s point of view”

An Eichmann quote: “Officialese is my only language.”

“ruined by modesty”

“the hollowness of respectability”

“genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché”

“this horrible gift for consoling himself with clichés”

“an inability to think”

“He did his duty…obeyed orders…a job”

Arendt's conclusion by the end of the trial was that evil isn't deep. Rather, evil is shallow. Specifically, evil is a kind of mindlessness. A mindlessness that gets trapped inside a paper-pushing bureaucracy and which blandly follows orders. In short, Eichmann never took the trouble to think.

This analysis of evil's mindlessness is what led Arendt to conclude that evil is banal. Evil isn't demonic or spooky or occult. Evil is workaday. Evil is paper, files, chains of command, bureaucracy, duty, and rule-following. Evil is a mindless worker bee. Evil is a bureaucracy that separates moral reflection from behavior. Evil is thus ordinary and common. A pervasive moral mindlessness and shallowness. Evil is a failure to think, to reflect, to object, to question, to rebel. Evil is a being a cog, a foot soldier, a patriot and a citizen.