The Stupidity of Evil
American moves beyond Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil" to a virulent mindlessness
Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.
― Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
Hannah Arendt, a German Jew who barely escaped the Nazi Holocaust, was a keen observer of the 20th Century’s two major totalitarian movements, fascism and communism, movements personified by Adolph Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union. Her 1951 book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, established Arendt as one of the foremost political philosophers of the post-World War II era. In 1961, she traveled to Israel for The New Yorker to cover the trial of Adolph Eichmann, one of the masterminds of the Nazi’s “Final Solution”. Her commentary was published in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963).
Arendt’s characterization of evil as a “word-and-thought-defying banality” was not intended to trivialize the heinousness of the Holocaust: instead, she was emphasizing how Eichmann, the perpetrator of unimaginable horrors, was frighteningly ordinary. “What he said”, she wrote in describing Eichmann, “was always the same, expressed in the same words. The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else.”
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” ― Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
The abolition of thought through the elimination of words isthe goal of totalitarian leaders. Many of us recognize this as a central theme of Orwell’s 1984: Oceania’s established language“Newspeak” restricts people’s ability to think, formulate, and communicate ideas by removing words or changing their meanings. It is the ongoing project of Big Brother’s government to use language as a tool of control.
Language in America
Do an online search for “the estimated reading level of American adults”. Depending on your prior thoughts on the subject, you may or may not be shocked at the results: According to the various data, half of the US population reads at or below a middle school level (grades 6-to-8). This is only a rough yardstick but follow the trendline: More and more of our verbal interactions, written or spoken, have been dumbed down- think of text messaging. We can table a discussion of the causes- the deteriorating state of public education, the childish level of much of our political discourse, and the level of writing we consume in many our news outlets- for some other time. But it is accurate to say that English, our primary language has a large number of “words”, and that number is being diminished in popular usage. The deep pool of detailed language that makes for detailed descriptions of complex thoughts is being drained.
Dig deeper and you will find that this narrowing of language parallels a trend towards reductionist thinking, the anti-intellectual process that discards the complex details of a question to justify a simple solution. Such a circumstance, for example, permits the unsophisticated or the cynical among us to lay the blame for increased gasoline prices at the foot of President Biden. Or for a defeated President to foist on his naive supporters the lie that he lost key states by a small number of votes as a result of an elections rigged by Democrats, yet ignores the question of why the Democrats would not have used the same scheme to guarantee themselves a solid majority in the Senate.
A head-scratcher, indeed.
The Continuum of Dupes and Enablers
The net effect of the restriction of language and the acceptance of simple-minded solutions to complex problems is the steady eradication of consensus on what constitutes objective reality. As the late Senator Daniel Partrick Moynihan put it, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts”. When empirical data is replaced by mere belief, truth goes missing and mistrust of institutions becomes a mass pathology. The empiricism of science is rejected. Conspiracy theories, no matter how far-fetched and unsupported, replace evidence obtained by rational investigation. Sizeable segments of the population become susceptible to the message of the demagogue, the would-be autocrat. At his inauguration, Donald Trump painted a picture of an America mired in a bleak dystopia- “American carnage”, he termed it- and insisted “he alone could fix it”. For those Americans whose ability to think had been weakened, this was a message they understood. In modern parlance, they had been “groomed” to accept it regardless of evidence to the contrary.
The tools of the would-be authoritarians are in plain view. Fueling grievance and inciting rage are predictable tactics of totalitarian regimes. With the advent of mass communication in the 20th Century, propaganda, both obvious and subtle, had the potential to be pervasive. The defilement of reason and critical thinking could be furthered by media of all types, beginning with radio, newspapers and movies onto today’s Internet and social media. As public discourse degenerates, we find ourselves debating each other over “alternate facts”. A conspiracy theory, Q-anon, that not many years ago would have been met with derision, can now count a number of elected officials among its adherents.
Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of [the] man who can fabricate it. ― Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
In this country, it was the Republican base, the aggrieved and resentful Trump voters, who became the targets of this manipulation via misinformation. However, unlike Arendt’s bureaucrats- the banal “normal” people- the Trump cadre, the people who worked on his campaigns and in his Administration, acquiesed to his autocratic behavior either because of a smug arrogance or, worse still, a cynical ambition .* This phenomenon has been on display during the hearings of the House Select Committee on January 6: People committing criminal acts and documenting them in emails and text messages, actions members of a low-level drug gang would know to avoid. Ot those who knew better, such as White House Counsel Cipplione, who never threatened to resign in protest in as Acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and his deputy, Richard Donoghue, did.
On the Brink of Facism
“All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.“ —(Variously attributed to Edmund Burke, John Stuart Mill, and others.)
I’d like to offer an amendment, a presupposition: “All that is required for evil to triumph is for good men to know nothing.“ For democracy- a system in which government is granted its power and authority by the people- to function, a majority must agree to a requisite knowledge of objective reality. When that threshold is not met, the path is open for evil to enter civil society. It arrives, as Arendt asserts, in its most banal form. It is a matter of historical record that most authoritarian governments first came to power through free elections.
It is also true that facts alone will not sway those in the thrall of Trumpism. For a good description of why, refer to Amanda Taub’s excellent explainer in Vox back in 2016. Ms. Taub describes that the authoritarian personality as
…not actual dictators, but rather a psychological profile of individual voters that is characterized by a desire for order and a fear of outsiders. People who score high in authoritarianism, when they feel threatened, look for strong leaders who promise to take whatever action necessary to protect them from outsiders and prevent the changes they fear.
The necessary actions in our democracy means voting and being engaged. This is not call to a battle of ideologies- that is the job of politics. Rather, it is the acknowledgement that a critical mass of the population must be engaged no matter their political leanings. Democracy, is after all, the system intended to resolve differences peacefully, through the rule of law. Can we do this, or will we passively accept the the drift towards autocracy as inevitable?
*Former Republican consultant Tim Miller’s new book, Why We Did It: A Travelogue on the Republican Road to Hell, is an insider’s explanation of the varying pretexts used by Republicans who knew better but still threw in with Trump.
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