In praise of a great woman: people aren't dispensable

Time for a tribute to an exceptional mind. She left us extraordinary insights into the behaviour of man, particularly in extreme circumstances. Not just what we do but why we do it.

Two of her insights strike me as particularly important.

The first is the notion of the ‘banality of evil’. Hannah Arendt covered the trial in Jerusalem of former SS Officer and logistics coordinator for the final solution to the ‘Jewish Question’, Adolf Eichmann – he organised the transport of Jews to the extermination centres.

Hannah Arendt: a voice to listen to all the more today

What struck her most about Eichmann was his deep ordinariness. Many described him as a monster. What she saw was someone who could only speak in the clichés of officialise because he had no other vocabulary; in her world view, the inability to speak with clarity revealed an inability to think clearly; that made Eichmann literally thoughtless and unable to see the moral consequences of what he was doing.

She saw in Eichmann a man with little or nothing to distinguish him, a middle-class figure who had struggled to build a career or even make a living, and whose only talent turned out to be for the administration of transport for colossal numbers of people – no small task in war time with huge pressure on the railways.

Eichmann knew what would happen to the Jews once he got them to Auschwitz. But that wasn’t his problem. His task was just to get them there and he set about it with all the dogmatic persistence of a dedicated minor functionary. An accomplice in mass murder on a historically unprecedented scale was just the kind of man any of us might meet behind a counter or in a nondescript office somewhere. Indeed, we might him anywhere because he could be any of us.

That’s what makes evil banal: it can appear in the most everyday of people.

That’s the chilling conclusion of the notion of the banality of evil: any one of us could be capable of it. It is not the exclusive preserve of a particular type of person, a monster born.

The second of Arendt’s idea that particularly strikes me here is that western societies have, over the centuries, moved towards considering humans as dispensable. Arendt was Jewish and brought up in Königsberg. It’s a neat reflection of the terrible impact of the first half of the twentieth century that her city, the home of the great German philosopher Kant, is no longer in the far east of Germany but now belongs to a small exclave of Russia, beyond the Baltic states. Even its name has been expunged from the record. It is now called Kaliningrad, named for one of Stalin’s henchmen.

Germany eventually became a dangerous place for her to live. She was fortunate enough to get out (in 1933, when Hitler came to power), and eventually reached the US, with plenty of pain on the way, including internment in a camp in France. Over the next few years, it became increasingly clear that what the Nazis were working to achieve was the entire extermination of a group of people – several groups – simply for who or what they were, with no consideration of their guilt or innocence of any offence, indeed of anything they might have done. 

That led Arendt to the principles on which she based her colossal work, The Origins of Totalitarianism. In the totalitarian view, the human being counts for nothing. People can be wiped out, even tortured to death, because they have no importance in themselves compared to such notions as historical inevitability or the emergence of a race of supermen.

Why do I mention all this now?

Two reasons.

The first is that 4 December 2017 is the 42nd anniversary of the death of Arendt. She deserves to be far better known. Whatever I can do to help that, I do.

The second is that the concepts I’ve been describing seem horribly relevant again today. Around us we see people of complete banality playing with great evil backed by great power – not least the occupant of the White House who could, still, plunge the world into a most terrible war in Korea.

What’s more, Trump recently retweeted violently Islamophobic videos by an extreme right-wing group from Britain. Some Muslims have behaved outrageously badly – maybe one in three million Muslims, but in the Eichmann approach to humans, we don’t take the time to think things through, to distinguish between the tiny numbers of the guilty and the huge numbers of the innocent, to reject the simple approach to write off all Muslims en masse.

I’ve argued before that the Muslims are the Jews of today. By writing off an entire faith group in this way, the far right takes us further down that road. And Trump has endorsed it.

For the moment, Trump threatens merely a travel ban. But where will he take things? Especially if the target becomes North Koreans rather than Muslim? 

We’ve seen where that kind of thinking has gone before. Which is why, on the 42nd anniversary of her death, we need Hannah Arendt as much as ever. And need to listen carefully to what she taught us about human behaviour.