FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - Banality of Evil

Rant Number 556        1 October 2013

‘A swastika or a naked woman do wonders to market anything’, a cynical advertising guru opined. Sex and evil, yep: maybe so.

The movie Hannah Arendt eschews sex – it prefers the swastika boys. Actually, one of the most infamous Nazis of the bunch, Adolf Eichmann. An SS officer who played a major role in exterminating Jews. Later tried and hanged in Israel for his deeds. The frisson of evil! Huh! Do you feel it?

A German philosopher, former student of existentialist thinker Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt reported from Jerusalem on the trial. ‘The banality of evil’ – she so described Eichmann, giving grave offence to her fellow Jews. Eichmann’s enormities – millions of innocent people massacred – you call that ‘banal’?! Worse, she accused some Jews of collusion with their executioners. Quite intolerable, many thought.

I have not read Arendt. According to Wrongipedia she contended that the roots of totalitarianism (covering both communism and fascism) are in anti-Semitism and imperialism. A resistible claim. Italian fascism for most of its existence ignored the Jews. Mussolini only enacted anti-Semitic laws late, after his ill-fated alliance with Hitler. It was idiotic. Italy had few Jews. They had a tradition of patriotism and fascism was intensely patriotic. Zionist leader Zeev Jabotinsky had courted the Duce as an ally. Mussolini even had a Jewish mistress. Italian Fascism was totalitarian OK – anti-Semitic by vocation it was not.

As to Communism: it always condemned anti-Semitism. (Unless you count Marx’sThe Jewish Question as counter-example.) Even bad guy Stalin showed himself strenuously philo-Semitic. Communism opposed Zionism out of hostility to nationalism, nothing to do with anti-Semitism.

Totalitarianism and imperialism: related? But Britain and France ran huge worldwide empires of robbery and plunder. That’s imperialism, no?  Yet, they never turned totalitarian states. I wonder what Hannah would say to that.

Arendt especially annoyed fellow Jews when she argued that Eichmann was not really a Jew-hater. Again, she pointed to his ‘banal’ looks and defence. She infuriated people who wanted Eichmann to look and sound really theatrically evil, satanic, an SS Mephistopheles. The film includes sequences from the real trial that seems to bear that out. However, that is surely a contingent matter – to use a philosophical term. Had someone like Julius Streicher or Dr Goebbels being in the dock, surely the accused would played the required part rather well.

Evil was Hannah’s abiding interest. Banal or radical? The movie suggests she was aware of the contradiction. Another philosopher, David Hume, might suggest that asking for ‘what is evil?’ is fruitless, like asking ‘what is beauty?’ and such mind-boggling metaphysical questions. Instead, says my imaginary Hume, let us concentrate on the moral agent, the human protagonist. Evil, like beauty, is not a property of things out there. Evil is not a solid reality like a chemical compound or an objective medical condition like angina. Evil is a sentiment, a feeling, a quality of man. Of a certain human character. As such evil is real, all too real, as a bully and a mugger are real.

St Augustine, the sublime theologian, might partly have agreed with atheist Hume here. After his Manichean stage the Saint denied evil is a real material substance, like a gas. Instead, evil is a failure of the will of man. An evil person lacks moral character, that’s it.

How to combat evil and promote good? Perhaps by taking care to nurture, educate and foster human beings with a righteous, virtuous character. Virtue must be encouraged and vice discouraged. Eichmann was a vicious man. Even by the standards of the Wehrmacht, the old Prussian military caste, the extermination of millions of innocent people, Jews or Gentiles, was wrong. You can’t imagine Bismarck or Clausewitz approving of that.

Arendt was pilloried because of her former mentor, Heidegger. Was she even his lover, as the movie suggests? Well, as a girl she was pretty, though Martin H. was no George Clooney. Did she sleep with Herr Professor? Who cares? You certainly can’t catch Nazism that way! Did his philosophy influence her? It would be odd if it hadn’t. Heidegger’s thought, however, is too murky to have straight political implications. He briefly lauded the Fuhrer but that was personal not philosophical. Reading Marx has led many to Marxism (even yours truly, as a youth) – delving into Heidegger is more likely to bemuse you – or maybe give you a migraine.

Did some Jews collude with the Nazis? A tricky one. Not many would be inclined to aid their own executioners unless forced to do so. There can be no moral equivalence between hangman and innocent victim. However, Lenni Brenner’s Zionism in the age of the Dictators has some interesting chapters on this sordid subject. Brenner is a radical, left-wing writer of impeccable progressive credentials. His book repays reading.

In one aspect Hannah Arendt struck me as thinking as a genuine philosopher. I do not mean her chain-smoking – boy, how existentialistic! The movie could be an ad for a cigarette company. It gives you a craving for the old poison – I mean when she refused to identify herself as a Jewess. ‘Don’t you love your people?’ she was asked. ‘I love my friends. I do not love any “people”’, she responded. Surely that is right. Patriotism, nationalism is amongst the least intelligent of human passions.

Philosophers are lovers of wisdom. They have usually seen themselves as members of a special community of thought. It is less than rational, less than wise to feel exclusive, overarching attachment to a land one just happens to have been born into. Why should I as an Italian prefer any commonplace Italian as Italian to a wise Chinese friend? Or German? Or Arabic? Or English? Or...whatever?

Hannah Arendt is a thoughtful movie. Go and see it.

Revd Frank Julian Gelli