Norman Stockwell's Article “Thinking Against Evil”

In her new book, Elizabeth Minnich, by restating Hannah Arendt's view that thoughtlessness can create in ordinary people the capacity and inclination to become the most monstrous criminals, concludes that we must equip people with the tools of thinking, rather than merely educating them for economic productivity.

It is February, and I am sitting with Elizabeth Minnich on a friend's couch in the Upper West Side of New York, and she tells me: "This could be a wake-up call and get people thinking again. I was going crazy seeing people in the media constantly talking about the 'banality of evil,' and the fact that the phrase itself had become banal was truly unbearable for me."

Minnich says this in explanation of the title of her new book, The Banality of Banality, which deliberately echoes A Report on the Banality of Evil, the subtitle of Hannah Arendt's famous book on the trial of Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann. Minnich, who has spent her entire life in civic activism and advocacy for justice, currently lives in North Carolina, and, precisely during the period when Arendt was defending that very book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), she served as Arendt's teaching assistant at the New School in New York.

Minnich, who is now a professor of moral philosophy at Queens University of Charlotte and a senior fellow of the Association of American Colleges and Universities, says about this, half a century later: "I had taken a course with Arendt titled 'Political Experiences of the Twentieth Century,' about Europe between the two world wars and after, the rise of the Nazis, and the emergence of totalitarianism. After the first term ended, Arendt asked me to become her teaching assistant. I said, 'But I've only taken one philosophy course.' And she said, 'Oh dear, that doesn't matter!' ... She really didn't care about such formalities. In this way, I was able to attend both her large lectures and her smaller seminars." Minnich continues: "And this relates to the period after she wrote her book about the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem; a time when she was still being asked to explain to the public what she had written. And she still hadn't given up trying to explain her own sense of things, because the situation had become so terrible, and she took me with her to many of the gatherings where these conversations were taking place."

The book Eichmann in Jerusalem caused a great controversy from the very beginning when it was published as a series of articles in The New Yorker magazine. Arendt had described Eichmann not as a wicked, malevolent devil, but as a banal and ordinary person. She wrote: "It was precisely his [Eichmann's] lack of imagination that enabled him to sit for months on end [before his trial] facing a German Jew who conducted the police interrogation, to pour out his heart to him, and to explain again and again how it was that he had only reached the rank of lieutenant colonel in the SS and that it was his own fault that he had not been promoted." Arendt argues that Eichmann "was not stupid, but the reason for his actions was sheer thoughtlessness ... This thoughtlessness had created in him the capacity and inclination to become one of the most monstrous criminals of that era."

The classic study that Arendt published in 1951 under the title The Origins of Totalitarianism was the main reason she was chosen to prepare a report on the Eichmann trial for The New Yorker magazine. In her notes on Eichmann, Arendt goes on to write: “The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to turn people into functionaries and mere cogs in the machinery of the administrative system, and to empty them of their human qualities.” Reports in recent months indicate that since Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election, sales of The Origins of Totalitarianism have increased sixteenfold, as many people seek to better understand the reasons for Trump’s rise to power and attainment of this important office.

In her three-part study, which runs to more than 500 pages, Arendt looked not only at the history that led to the rise of Nazism, but also at the more general characteristics of totalitarian governments. She writes: “Totalitarian movements are vast organizations of atomized, isolated individuals. Total loyalty to such movements is only possible when the commitment of members has been emptied of any real, non-abstract meaning by which the mind could be transformed.”

Arendt’s treatise is the starting point for Minnich’s new work, for which she has chosen a fitting subtitle: On the Crucial Importance of Thinking. This book, which was published ahead of schedule because of Trump’s election victory, is the fruit of a lifetime of Minnich’s assessment of the problem of evil. Minnich says: “I had to understand how it is that ordinary people do terrible things. Then I saw that its source is a very tiny seed called carelessness. Thoughtlessness. I was stunned. You see that you are just beginning to understand all the meanings of being ‘inconsiderate’; that when they say: ‘Don’t be thoughtless,’ they mean: ‘You are not taking other people into account.’ The fact that Arendt uses this very word throughout her report to describe Eichmann means that Eichmann was able to commit those acts because he was an extremely thoughtless person.”

Minnich’s book offers a comprehensive study of the types of evil, as well as of thoughtlessness and mindlessness. She distinguishes between “intensive evil,” which reaches its perfection in a short period of time and at the hands of a few perpetrators, and “extensive evil,” which takes a long time to occur and in which a great many people willingly participate. Minnich says: “Five people cannot commit genocide. For that, a large crowd is needed.” She notes that some evils are both intensive and extensive. She says: “Intensive evil is in some ways like a spark. But people must remain thoughtless and mindless and allow ordinary morality to be redefined in this regard for such evil to occur, because they and we are accustomed to specific traditions and conventions, as well as to clichés, and we are not in the habit of saying: ‘Wait, this is different and I cannot do this.’”

It is this very clichéd thinking, this thoughtlessness and mindlessness, that makes it possible for people to become cogs in the machine that produces “extensive evil.” This is what Minnich describes in her book with the phrase “the evil of banality”; the simple fact that: to commit such extensive evils, a great many “ordinary people must wake up day after day; eat breakfast; go out of their homes in broad daylight and join the rest of the people; and once again, they themselves directly and deliberately commit horrific acts, or knowingly participate in making it possible for others to deliberately commit such acts.”

Recent reports showing that U.S. immigration officials are implementing Trump’s hasty executive order banning immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries have also pointed to this type of conduct, which, according to Minnich, is committed by “reliable workers.” Chris Edelson, an assistant professor of government in the School of Public Affairs at American University, wrote in an article in the Baltimore Sun that many workers began that day like any other, yet ended it by doing something out of the ordinary. At Dulles International Airport in Virginia, a five-year-old boy was handcuffed and detained for several hours. A five-year-old child! At the same airport, a Somali woman traveling with her two children, both U.S. citizens, was detained for twenty hours without being given any food, and was reportedly handcuffed and threatened with deportation from the United States. A sixty-five-year-old woman who had come to the U.S. from Qatar to visit her son (a sergeant serving at Fort Bragg in North Carolina) was held at JFK Airport for more than thirty-three hours and was denied the use of a wheelchair.

Edelson wrote: “The men and women who work for the federal government performed these duties just like their other tasks, and then returned to their families, where they probably ate their dinner and read bedtime stories to their children. Under normal circumstances, these are people who likely treat their neighbors and colleagues with kindness and do not seek to harm others. What is disheartening about this process is that it reminds us that authoritarians can easily and without any trouble find the people they need to carry out their ruthless actions. This means they do not need special monsters for this task; rather, they can convey their orders to ordinary people, and those people will obey those orders out of a sense of duty.”

How does such an event happen so quickly? Minnich provides his readers with many examples of the pervasive evils that have existed throughout history. In his book, he points to a case he calls “seeding in receptive soil.” And this is a phenomenon that, in his view, “applies strikingly to all instances of pervasive evil.” This process also seems more familiar to us after the recent election campaign. Minnich writes: “We live in a time when, for many of us, circumstances have become more difficult than usual, and when we are unbalanced, anxious, and angry, a new group arrives that is power-hungry. Those who speak with this aim attract us by using language that is familiar to us, connecting with us through it, and thrilling us. These energetic, forceful, and passionate people promise us that they will bring us a better destiny in life, that they will make us feel less insecure and less vulnerable, both economically and socially. If we go along with this new order, it will open the gates of wealth, power, status, and prestige to us. We listen to these words. Our minds begin to change ... In any case, we are not risk-takers, and we have jobs that we need to get on with.”

So, how can societies cultivate individuals who can resist the evil of banality? For Minnich, the important thing is to give people the tools of thinking, not just to “educate” them to do their jobs properly. She explains that, in the view of many of today’s political leaders, “the purpose of education is to prepare for employment, so that we can make more money. That is their criterion. Well, this shows you what goal they are pursuing through education. They want you to play a role in the economy and contribute to its growth.”

Ultimately, one could say that Minnich’s book is a passionate invitation to “thinking,” to creating a culture of thinking and educating against banality. In her book, Minnich poses the question: “How should we teach thinking so that educated people like ourselves do not simply fail to take seriously things or people that prevent them from thinking, let alone willingly place their minds, consciousness, work, and power at the disposal of such things or people?” This is no easy task. In Minnich’s view, achieving such a goal actually requires carrying out a process. She says: “I’m sorry, but yes, we must keep thinking and thinking again, be careful to keep thinking, and tomorrow, before we undertake any action, during it, and after it, think anew.”

Minnich hopes that in her next book she can write more about an education that “can free us not only from the burden of ignorance, but from the crushing domination of banality.” She continues: “I am certain that it is a realistic sense of urgency that the time to rise up, both alone and with others, and move toward thought and action, is right now. Our not thinking has terrible consequences.”

Our conversation ends with a discussion of Donald Trump. Minnich says: “He [Trump] is a walking, talking, tweeting cliché. He never drops his mannerisms. If he once uses a phrase that people like, he will always use it from then on, regardless of whether it conveys his meaning or not. The clichés he is teaching people are very harmful; these labels that people are using without a moment’s thought.” And this truly frightens Minnich. She says: “I believe this trend is very dangerous because, as I have emphasized line by line in this book, ‘from people who do not think, anything can happen.’”

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Thinking to Confront Evil

Norman Stockwell is an American journalist and the publisher of The Progressive magazine. What you read is a translation of this piece by him:

Norman Stockwell, ‘An Appeal for Thoughtfulness’, The Progressive, 25 March 2017.

Translator: Sepideh Jediri

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