Yes! The "banality of evil." I was thrilled when I saw your post. I wrote in my post yesterday that Kant's Radical evil was a prelude to her writings.
Several in Arendt's era came to a disturbing set of conclusions:
Milgram showed we’ll obey.
Zimbardo showed we’ll imitate.
Arendt showed we’ll normalize.
Hannah Arendt didn’t run experiments. She watched Adolf Eichmann on trial for Nazi war crimes and saw a man who wasn’t a demon, just a bureaucrat. He was ordinary and thoughtless — and responsible for organizing the plan of the holocaust.
I don't typically point out my own posts in my comments, but this one is a great combination.
The author, The Third Citizen, of this post unfortunately doesn't do a good job isolating the phenomenon of thoughtlessness, and I think this has to do with the difficulty that Arendt's theories pose to the contemporary appreciation of politics as a social phenomenon.
I can't respond directly to your article because of the paywall, but Zimbardo is a perfect example of this difficulty. Judging from his citations in The Lucifer Effect and other articles published during that period, he only skimmed the introduction and final pages of Eichmann in Jerusalem. His defense of the Abu Ghraib guards is predicated on this misunderstanding, and follows the same logic that the Nazis used to defend themselves, which Arendt repeatedly rejected on the grounds that even under totalitarian rule we possess an inalienable capacity for thinking.
Hi Nick, Thanks so much for your comments. One thing -- you should not have a paywall problem with the weekly post. There are extra features for paid subscribers. I checked and it's working fine. Please let me know if you can't read the main post!
I'm more familiar with Milgram and Zimbardo. My depth with Arendt is upper division Psych class level. My understanding is that she learned from the Eichmann situation that evil is "banal", i.e., it doesn't require a "monster", just complicity that anyone can succumb to. That's the basic story I was weaving in my post --> from Kant to Freud, through milligram, ZImbardo, Jung and Arendt, a core emerges that we all have the existence or the capability for evil within us. It explains how ordinary people can fall into doing extraordinarily evil things. Just a "top level" look at the connections.
I think you're right about Arendt. From what I understand, she never said we lose the capacity for thinking, it's more that we just shrug and go along without doing so. I hope I'm close! You definitely are way stronger on the philosophy side. My background comes at it from a Social and Cog Psych perspective and it's a broader look rather than a deep look, if that makes sense...
Hmm, I can, and was able to, read the post, just not respond to it in the comments section. I'm fairly new to Substack, so the problem may be on my end as well.
I think, for Arendt, thinking is something distinctly and meaningfully human, and to reject it is to degrade oneself to animal life, where moral concerns, such as the problem of evil, cannot be raised. In her essay on "Thinking and Moral Considerations", she positions her idea of thinking next to Kant's idea of reason, but, assuming I understand this tradition correctly, I'm skeptical that Freud shares in it because he denies that conscious thought is itself meaningful. Instead, meaning, for Freud, appears bound to the unconscious, and thinking, as with free will, love, justice, etc., are all, at best, metaphors for unconscious animal processes. Arendt's antipathy towards social science is, I think, along the same lines a rejection that the human world is reducible to known laws of nature.
I can see her taking issue with Zimbardo's profession, but Zimbardo himself is also a brazen falsifier of Arendt, where Milgrim might not have been. For example, in a 2007 interview, where he terms his "banality of heroism" thesis (https://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/zimbardo07/zimbardo07_index.html), Zimbardo gets basic facts wrong, like confusing the trial at Nuremberg with the one at Jerusalem or appearing to believe that Eichmann was in charge of Auschwitz, and he continues to cite the interview in later publications. And he apparently didn't consider that "banality" for Arendt referred to thoughtlessness because his phrase "banality of heroism" should, if it follows Arendt, mean "thoughtlessness of heroism," which is the opposite of what he means. This resembles the scene in Eichmann in Jerusalem where Eichmann repeats verbatim Kant's definition of the categorical imperative, but because he never thinks he has no idea what Kant's words actually mean. My issue with Zimbardo is that reading him is like reading Eichmann's opinion on Eichmann in Jerusalem, and that to me is a problem because he not only lends himself to the defense of people like the guards at Abu Ghraib but he perverts Arendt's argument against this defense in the process.
Fabulous! Thank you for the explanations. I didn't know Arendt went quite so far as to see a deviation of being human. I like that. I wasn't aware of Zimbard's "banality of heroism" concept. But, couldn't that also mean that we have the capability for being"good" in us as much as evil? Yes, heroism is, I suppose, a step beyond just "good", But evil is a step b beyond just "bad." IDK, just off the top of my head. I haven't read ZImbardo's work re the banality concept. I see your point though about how it distorts his thinking ablaut Abu Ghraib.
I think Freud says that we are inherently "bad/evil" and those death drives are hidden in the Id. They can appear as disorders when traumatic events get repressed in the Id and resurface at some point. The Superego is the force that constrains the Id and aids our rational, ethical thoughts/actions. I see a link between him and Kant more as a flow of thought on the matter -- overlap but not identity. Note: I take Freud with a grain of salt due to his late-Victorian zeitgeist -- highly repressed society whose rules are there to constrain humankind's lustful nature. I think this pushed him to a more extreme view of humanity.
The way I recall Zimbardo explaining goodness is as if the situation dictated the correct moral response, such that finding myself in Nazi Germany some recognition by my conscience of the situation dictates that I ought oppose Nazism. This is "heroic" in the sense of doing the right thing when the situation demands, while there are pressures to do otherwise, although I don't think Zimbardo's notion of heroism makes much sense. But one of Arendt's points is that the Nazis instituted through various means (e.g. rewriting laws, history, etc.) a complete moral inversion of German society, and so the situation could no longer dictate the moral dignity of the German people. Instead, Arendt seems to turn back to older traditions of philosophy, such as the Platonists, for whom the dignity of action resides in oneself rather than in the gods or in society.
I get that sense from Freud too, that he pathologized humanity, and my guess is that Arendt would respond by pointing out that what allows us to overcome trauma in Freud's model are those same institutional values that the Nazis inverted. Am I still sick if I'm maladjusted to an irrational society? Because Freud starts out with an evil humanity, he cannot answer how we ought to act in, for example, a Nazi state, except to propose the death drive, the destruction of self and society. I think we agree about the extremity of Freud.
Great post!!! She is absolutely correct! I’m surprised I’m not familiar with her or her work. It looks like I have some homework to do and a few key people to share a link with. Thank You!!! Oh and subscribe….
Every time I come in contact with her thought, I am challenged. Her example and her word forces me to look in the mirror and ask the hard question: How shall I act? What have I done? Which way would I go? Could I do that.....?
Just last week I gave a radio podcast on “Civic Engagement” because of my proactive interest in finding facts over fiction in our local decision-making. This town does a remarkable job and too many do not know or appreciate what it takes to run the holistic interactions smoothly.
Excellent read and extremely illuminating to a human who has ‘seen’ the insidious acts that have crept into our present society and witnessed how passivity continues to be pervasive even with atrocities committed upon peoples who ‘don’t really represent us.’ We have already begun normalization of horrible acts of inhumanity and the ‘public’ has been so indoctrinated into actively seeking the next new thing that even assassinations of elected officials barely makes a dent in the collective psyche. I wish I could find the light of hope for our country, but unless it is a damned conflagration, not enough people will notice enough to collectively resist.
Yes! The "banality of evil." I was thrilled when I saw your post. I wrote in my post yesterday that Kant's Radical evil was a prelude to her writings.
Several in Arendt's era came to a disturbing set of conclusions:
Milgram showed we’ll obey.
Zimbardo showed we’ll imitate.
Arendt showed we’ll normalize.
Hannah Arendt didn’t run experiments. She watched Adolf Eichmann on trial for Nazi war crimes and saw a man who wasn’t a demon, just a bureaucrat. He was ordinary and thoughtless — and responsible for organizing the plan of the holocaust.
I don't typically point out my own posts in my comments, but this one is a great combination.
https://frankgeorge8675309.substack.com/p/caution-magas-5-evils-are-contagious
Milligrams showed we'll obey.
Zimbardo showed we'll imitate.
Arendt showed we'll normalize.
Niemoller showed we'll all think it won't be us who they come for until they do, and they will, then it's too late.
Thank you for introducing me to Niemoller! And yes, your comment follows nicely, in a sad way for us.
The author, The Third Citizen, of this post unfortunately doesn't do a good job isolating the phenomenon of thoughtlessness, and I think this has to do with the difficulty that Arendt's theories pose to the contemporary appreciation of politics as a social phenomenon.
I can't respond directly to your article because of the paywall, but Zimbardo is a perfect example of this difficulty. Judging from his citations in The Lucifer Effect and other articles published during that period, he only skimmed the introduction and final pages of Eichmann in Jerusalem. His defense of the Abu Ghraib guards is predicated on this misunderstanding, and follows the same logic that the Nazis used to defend themselves, which Arendt repeatedly rejected on the grounds that even under totalitarian rule we possess an inalienable capacity for thinking.
Hi Nick, Thanks so much for your comments. One thing -- you should not have a paywall problem with the weekly post. There are extra features for paid subscribers. I checked and it's working fine. Please let me know if you can't read the main post!
I'm more familiar with Milgram and Zimbardo. My depth with Arendt is upper division Psych class level. My understanding is that she learned from the Eichmann situation that evil is "banal", i.e., it doesn't require a "monster", just complicity that anyone can succumb to. That's the basic story I was weaving in my post --> from Kant to Freud, through milligram, ZImbardo, Jung and Arendt, a core emerges that we all have the existence or the capability for evil within us. It explains how ordinary people can fall into doing extraordinarily evil things. Just a "top level" look at the connections.
I think you're right about Arendt. From what I understand, she never said we lose the capacity for thinking, it's more that we just shrug and go along without doing so. I hope I'm close! You definitely are way stronger on the philosophy side. My background comes at it from a Social and Cog Psych perspective and it's a broader look rather than a deep look, if that makes sense...
Hmm, I can, and was able to, read the post, just not respond to it in the comments section. I'm fairly new to Substack, so the problem may be on my end as well.
I think, for Arendt, thinking is something distinctly and meaningfully human, and to reject it is to degrade oneself to animal life, where moral concerns, such as the problem of evil, cannot be raised. In her essay on "Thinking and Moral Considerations", she positions her idea of thinking next to Kant's idea of reason, but, assuming I understand this tradition correctly, I'm skeptical that Freud shares in it because he denies that conscious thought is itself meaningful. Instead, meaning, for Freud, appears bound to the unconscious, and thinking, as with free will, love, justice, etc., are all, at best, metaphors for unconscious animal processes. Arendt's antipathy towards social science is, I think, along the same lines a rejection that the human world is reducible to known laws of nature.
I can see her taking issue with Zimbardo's profession, but Zimbardo himself is also a brazen falsifier of Arendt, where Milgrim might not have been. For example, in a 2007 interview, where he terms his "banality of heroism" thesis (https://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/zimbardo07/zimbardo07_index.html), Zimbardo gets basic facts wrong, like confusing the trial at Nuremberg with the one at Jerusalem or appearing to believe that Eichmann was in charge of Auschwitz, and he continues to cite the interview in later publications. And he apparently didn't consider that "banality" for Arendt referred to thoughtlessness because his phrase "banality of heroism" should, if it follows Arendt, mean "thoughtlessness of heroism," which is the opposite of what he means. This resembles the scene in Eichmann in Jerusalem where Eichmann repeats verbatim Kant's definition of the categorical imperative, but because he never thinks he has no idea what Kant's words actually mean. My issue with Zimbardo is that reading him is like reading Eichmann's opinion on Eichmann in Jerusalem, and that to me is a problem because he not only lends himself to the defense of people like the guards at Abu Ghraib but he perverts Arendt's argument against this defense in the process.
Fabulous! Thank you for the explanations. I didn't know Arendt went quite so far as to see a deviation of being human. I like that. I wasn't aware of Zimbard's "banality of heroism" concept. But, couldn't that also mean that we have the capability for being"good" in us as much as evil? Yes, heroism is, I suppose, a step beyond just "good", But evil is a step b beyond just "bad." IDK, just off the top of my head. I haven't read ZImbardo's work re the banality concept. I see your point though about how it distorts his thinking ablaut Abu Ghraib.
I think Freud says that we are inherently "bad/evil" and those death drives are hidden in the Id. They can appear as disorders when traumatic events get repressed in the Id and resurface at some point. The Superego is the force that constrains the Id and aids our rational, ethical thoughts/actions. I see a link between him and Kant more as a flow of thought on the matter -- overlap but not identity. Note: I take Freud with a grain of salt due to his late-Victorian zeitgeist -- highly repressed society whose rules are there to constrain humankind's lustful nature. I think this pushed him to a more extreme view of humanity.
Thanks for the thoughts!
The way I recall Zimbardo explaining goodness is as if the situation dictated the correct moral response, such that finding myself in Nazi Germany some recognition by my conscience of the situation dictates that I ought oppose Nazism. This is "heroic" in the sense of doing the right thing when the situation demands, while there are pressures to do otherwise, although I don't think Zimbardo's notion of heroism makes much sense. But one of Arendt's points is that the Nazis instituted through various means (e.g. rewriting laws, history, etc.) a complete moral inversion of German society, and so the situation could no longer dictate the moral dignity of the German people. Instead, Arendt seems to turn back to older traditions of philosophy, such as the Platonists, for whom the dignity of action resides in oneself rather than in the gods or in society.
I get that sense from Freud too, that he pathologized humanity, and my guess is that Arendt would respond by pointing out that what allows us to overcome trauma in Freud's model are those same institutional values that the Nazis inverted. Am I still sick if I'm maladjusted to an irrational society? Because Freud starts out with an evil humanity, he cannot answer how we ought to act in, for example, a Nazi state, except to propose the death drive, the destruction of self and society. I think we agree about the extremity of Freud.
Great post!!! She is absolutely correct! I’m surprised I’m not familiar with her or her work. It looks like I have some homework to do and a few key people to share a link with. Thank You!!! Oh and subscribe….
Wow
This was a solid 'splainer. ✍🏼✔️
Every time I come in contact with her thought, I am challenged. Her example and her word forces me to look in the mirror and ask the hard question: How shall I act? What have I done? Which way would I go? Could I do that.....?
Lord, have mercy on us and save us! ❤️🩹
Just last week I gave a radio podcast on “Civic Engagement” because of my proactive interest in finding facts over fiction in our local decision-making. This town does a remarkable job and too many do not know or appreciate what it takes to run the holistic interactions smoothly.
DO not obey in advance.
Defy and disobey!
she was right about many things …. God bless her …. I hope to shake her hand . . .
brilliant lady
Thank you for this post
Excellent read and extremely illuminating to a human who has ‘seen’ the insidious acts that have crept into our present society and witnessed how passivity continues to be pervasive even with atrocities committed upon peoples who ‘don’t really represent us.’ We have already begun normalization of horrible acts of inhumanity and the ‘public’ has been so indoctrinated into actively seeking the next new thing that even assassinations of elected officials barely makes a dent in the collective psyche. I wish I could find the light of hope for our country, but unless it is a damned conflagration, not enough people will notice enough to collectively resist.