The Banality of Evil

"The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.”
― Hannah Arendt

“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”
― Hannah Arendt

Adolf Eichmann went to the gallows with great dignity. He had asked for a bottle of red wine and had drunk half of it. He refused the help of the Protestant minister the Reverend William Hull who offered to read the Bible with him: he had only two more hours to live and therefore no “time to waste.” He walked the fifty yards from his cell to the execution chamber calm and erect with his hands bound behind him. When the guards tied his ankles and knees he asked them to loosen the bonds so that he could stand straight. “I don’t need that ” he said when the black hood was offered him. He was in complete command of himself nay he was more: he was completely himself. Nothing could have demonstrated this more convincingly than the grotesque silliness of his last words. He began by stating emphatically that he was a Gottgläubiger to express in common Nazi fashion that he was no Christian and did not believe in life after death. He then proceeded: “After a short while gentlemen we shall all meet again. Such is the fate of all men. Long live Germany long live Argentina long live Austria. I shall not forget them.” In the face of death he had found the cliché used in funeral oratory. Under the gallows his memory played him the last trick he was “elated” and he forgot that this was his own funeral.

It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us-the lesson of the fearsome word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.”
― Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality.”
― Hannah Arendt

Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.”
― Hannah Arendt

The Problem of Evil

NEXT WEEK I BEGIN teaching seniors at Cranbrook School about “The Problem of Evil.” I’m wondering, are they going to think that there even is such a thing? Have they been so desensitized by video games and mass media that the concept of “evil” belongs in a category along with “wizard,” “zombie,” and “orc?” The German writer Hannah Arendt wrote a book subtitled “The Banality of Evil,” in which she argued that the monstrous atrocities of the twentieth century have made the concept of evil unoriginal, boring, and trite.I wonder...

If my students think there is no such “thing” as evil, they will already have something in common with Plato, St. Augustine, and St. Thomas Aquinas, who all taught (if I understand them correctly) that evil has no real existence of its own, but only as a deprivation of something good. Perhaps I can get my nephew Ben to design me a “Classical Philosophy Video Game” in which virtuous angels go about zapping sinister outcroppings of Nothingness into the Fullness of Existential Stature. Come to think of it, that is just what Gandalf was trying to do to the Ringwraiths, and what Walker Percy wrote about in his novel Love in the Ruins.  Who knew?  

This class is going to be fun, at least for me.    

I have seen Les Miserables and Lincoln. Both are deeply moving and credible in their hopeful estimation of humanity’s prospects, despite the ubiquity of suffering and injustice. In the film Dr. Zhivago there is a scene where the revolutionary General Strelnikov scolds Zhivago, saying “the personal life is dead in Russia.” Les Miserables and Lincoln, like that older film, weave intimate personal stories into the fabric of vast historical movements and conflicts, intensifying  everything and belying General Strelnikov’s dismissive remark.

In this latest incarnation of Les Miz, and in Lincoln, what is most authentically personal is magnified by the sweep of history, not extinguished by it. Even when individuals are buried under the flood of impersonal events, their stories and songs have the capacity to lift us to a place higher than heaven and touch us at a place as deep as death.

In the case of both Lincoln and Les Miserables , there is even a place for humor to be found. In the latter film, the “Master of the House” Innkeeper and his wife achieve a kind of transcendent rascality that serves to temper Valjean’s earnest high-mindedness and Javert’s obsessive legalism. In Lincoln, the war-weary president’s homespun humor does not just lighten the mood, it celebrates the absurdity of all human pretensions at mastery or control. In Lincoln, it is clear that no governing body, President, or President’s wife is “Master of the House,” but only some of them get the joke.   

Delaware Dream

“The singers and the dancers will say, * ‘all my fresh springs are in you.’ “ Psalm 87:6

Dreamed a few days ago, most disturbingly, that a familiar stretch of the Delaware River had dried up, leaving only occasional patches of water across a wide expanse of gravel and larger rocks. Water still ran freely in places, but only in hollowed-out pockets, trenches depressed into the ground three or four feet with a few inches of running water at the bottom. I carried a fishing rod, but the water was nowhere deep enough to provide habitat for anything larger than a minnow. At a place upstream there were buildings, headquarters for some kind of Park, and tourists were meeting in seminar-like groups. I think they were listening to presentations about the River, but no one seemed alarmed that it had virtually disappeared.

I was alarmed, and in the days since that sense of alarm has widened out and become a sort of chant, a drum-beat throbbing on the horizon of every thought or word.

That River was, in waking life, the scene for family vacations all through my childhood, and became as I have often preached and written, a place “where things were as they should be, and people were at their best.”  It remains a mighty living force, carving a path for itself through walls of rock as well as through memories and dreams.

In the dream, I recognize this ruined relic of a mighty stream as representing Christ, crucified in Jerusalem, shot down in Connecticut, strip-mined in Alabama, everywhere violated, drained of power, reduced to a trickle. I write this while renouncing any attempt to apply a veneer of religiosity to reality, because for me, the River was “christic” before I had a “religion”. For me, there was a sacred presence inhabiting the world before I had a name for it, or any rituals or prayers with which to invoke or appease it. For me, there was a cross before there was a Christ, and this dream proceeds from that same primal place.

To know Christ it is necessary to become alarmed, to feel the outrage of an empty river bed or a strip-mined Alabama hill. To know Christ it is necessary to dry up and blow away like dust, to be burned to a crisp and reduced to ashes. To know Christ it is necessary to go deeper than religious formalities, to see Christ disappear into the earth, leaving behind abandoned cathedrals and giant gaps between the mountains, relics of a mighty power that has gone.

To know Christ it is necessary to stand beside the dream and feel it all: the loss, the outrage, the alarm, and, most of all, the love, and if there is to be a resurrection it will have to happen in waking life, because there is no happy ending within this dream.

In the Daily Office on the morning after the dream, the psalms appointed for the day included Psalm 87:6: “The singers and the dancers will say, *’all my fresh springs are in you.’ “  

  

“In a sacred manner I walk”     Black Elk Speaks    

2012 was a year for coyotes. At home, I met them in the yard, and heard them singing    in the night.

Then, as I stood beside a thinly-restored, strip mined Alabama landscape, I heard a vast coyote chorus insanely yapping at the setting sun, like demented choirboys mocking the efforts of a damaged earth to heal. 

But coyotes do not mock the earth. These, after all, were heyoka tricksters of the Spirit, who only seem to lie,

And to ally

Themselves with what is most bleak and dry

Within the self.

In time, I come to see that they have drawn me out

Beyond my customary hunting-place,

To where I can hear their voices differently,

And now I see

The one that they were laughing at

Was me…

Not “me” as I am at this moment, but “me” the scoffer,   

The safely cynical,

The strip miner,

The heedless coal-consumer,

The crucifier,

The one who “wags his head” at a humiliated earth and scolds the Christ for having dared to venture out     

                  from  heaven.

“See what happens?” I jeer. “What did you expect?” I howl.

But these coyotes have tricked me again,

lulled my well-defended soul into complacency,

And now I can hear them differently, laughing still

But no longer at the struggling pine trees and violated earth, but with them,

And with the resurrecting self in me

That loves coyotes and will not die.

“In a sacred manner I will walk,” they cry. 

And in a sacred manner I will die, and burn like coal in sacrificial fire.

Only in a sacred manner I will walk and talk.

“Only In a sacred manner I will walk,” they cry.

Only in a sacred manner I will die.