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.

Who wants politicians deciding who deserves to die?

Earlier this week, the British government announced it had used a drone attack to kill two young British men, Reyaad Khan and Rahul Amin, who’d joined ISIS and were fighting alongside it in Syria.

It was interesting to hear a Steven Marvin, a childhood friend of Amin’s, point out that he was sorry for the family but as for Amin himself, joining ISIS had been “his own decision and he knew what was going to happen eventually… He chose to go over there and, if these things happen, then he’s asked for it, basically… He knew what he was getting into.” Essentially, the young men had it coming to them.

Instrument of execution: In the hands of government?

To be honest, I rather sympathised. ISIS is a particularly obnoxious organisation, cruel, brutal, bigoted and apparently irredeemable. In her comments on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt wrote that she wished the judges had told him:

… just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations – as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world - we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.

Though I’m firmly opposed to the death penalty, I can understand this reasoning: if you break all bonds to other human beings, and therefore feel you can snuff them out at will, as the Nazis did and ISIS does, you forfeit the expectation that anyone else will respect your right to life. The Royal Air Force destroys you in a drone attack? As your friend said, you brought in on yourself.

So far then I find nothing to disagree with in the killings the government carried out.

But then come the second thoughts. And it’s that word ‘government’ that focuses them for me. It was government, and government alone, that took the decision to kill those men. “Government”, like it or not, sounds like some kind of superior abstraction; reducing it to something more concrete, however, it is a collection of politicians and party politicians at that.

The government has made it clear it has no intention of publishing the legal advice it was given, and which it felt justified its action. Nor is it ever likely that we shall see the intelligence information on which it based its judgement that these young men posed an imminent danger to the UK itself, and therefore military action against them was legitimate under UN rules: intelligence stays hidden on the grounds that publishing it would put sources at risk.

So what we’re saying is that a government that has no intention of being held to account, took a decision on its own authority, to kill two men whom it had deemed criminal enough, on evidence it won’t publish, to merit death, though the death penalty is banned in Britain.

That two terrorists, fighting in support of a terrorising code, are dead? I have to admit I’m glad that they’re gone. That government, without so much as a judge’s intervention, can decide who is or isn’t a terrorist? That gives me serious concern. That this same government can then decide to kill the person it has identified as a terrorist, without allowing a challenge to its decision? That makes my blood run cold.

What’s ironic is that Conservatives always claim to be the party of small government. But in reality they’re the party of money, and their commitment to small government is only a commitment to spending less.

Assigning itself the right to kill citizens may not sound objectionable, as long as they’re terrorists. But when it decides that it alone will choose who is or isn’t a terrorist, doesn’t that become more worrying? Certainly, it feels to me like big government. And not particularly good government, at that.

JIhadi John and breaking the human bond

It seems that Westerners have flocked to Syria to fight with ISIS – maybe as many as 3500. But the saddest spectacle of all, certainly for anyone in Britain, was the three girls, a sixteen-year old and two of fifteen, who travelled out there last week. Bright, well-adjusted, educated girls, who have left loving and now distraught families behind them.

Voluntarily travelling towards a miserable –
and probably short – life with ISIS

And now the real identify of Jihadi John has been revealed. He’s Mohammed Emwazi from West London, educated, with a promising future, now turned into someone who likes to behead innocents with a knife. In fact, his victims aren’t merely innocent: in many cases, they fell into ISIS hands because they had travelled to Syria to bring aid and comfort to the victims of the conflict there. They put their comfort and their ease at risk; he made sure they paid with their lives.

The organisation Cage speaks out for radicalised Islamic extremists from Britain. It spoke out for Emwazi, claiming it was his bad treatment at the hands of the authorities that made him what he has become.

Now I can understand that many have been mishandled by the security services, and might well be deeply bitter as a result. But to claim that this somehow justifies taking someone who has done him no harm, cutting his throating and then keeping on cutting till his head comes off, strikes me as pushing the argument just a tad too far. Like the three girls, something in him, and something in ISIS must have seemed attractive enough to make the trip and accept the harsh conditions that awaited them out there.

What is it they find attractive?

It certainly isn’t Islam. There are 44 million Muslims in Europe. 3000 have chosen to fight for ISIS. Only a tiny proportion sees anything in their faith to justify that cause.

Nor is it personal hopes of a better life. Women under ISIS, even the supporters, suffer a life of crushing oppression. Even the (male) fighters are locked into the fate they chose: there’s no way back from Syria for them. Indeed, the most likely outcome they face is death though some may in time be captured and face life imprisonment – genuine life imprisonment, without parole – as the reward for their sacrifices.

So what’s the draw?

It seems to me that it’s only the sense that cruelty represents some kind of strength. The man, or the movement, that is prepared to behead an adversary has shown a commitment to a cause and a determination to pursue it which suggests courage and strength of resolution.

In people who stop far short of these acts of brutality, we admire those qualities: Churchill standing firm in the face of Hitler, though he knew it would require huge sacrifice of life, even among his own people let alone among the enemy; George Washington freezing in Valley Forge with his men dying around him, in order to resist British rule; Chinese nationalists and communists killing and dying in a savage war against Japanese occupation.

It doesn’t take much to extend such admiration further, and find merit in brutality, by thinking only of the resolution it expresses.

Sadly, that isn’t a simple extension. It isn’t just more of the same. Take your admiration of strength that far and you step over a line into savagery. And forfeit the right to be indulged and accepted back.

For the girls, it may not be too late. For Emwazi, there is no hope of return. The families of his victims have called for him to be arrested alive and face trial then imprisonment. It’s not going to happen. He doubtless seeks a martyr’s death; I suspect he’ll find a sordid one – the reality of death in war being that it is far more likely to be sordid than heroic.

And my view of that? The same, whatever Cage may believe, as Hannah Arendt’s, about another man who broke the human bond and ultimately died for it. She believed his judges should have told SS bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann:

…just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations… we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.

Quinquiremes and Coasters, Accountants and Officials, Riches and Horrors

There’s something haunting about John Masefield’s poem Cargoes.

Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir,
Rowing home to haven in sunny Palestine,
With a cargo of ivory,
And apes and peacocks,
Sandalwood, cedarwood, and sweet white wine.

Stately Spanish galleon coming from the Isthmus,
Dipping through the Tropics by the palm-green shores,
With a cargo of diamonds,
Emeralds, amethysts,
Topazes, and cinnamon, and gold moidores.

Dirty British coaster with a salt-caked smoke stack,
Butting through the Channel in the mad March days,
With a cargo of Tyne coal,
Road-rails, pig-lead,
Firewood, iron-ware, and cheap tin trays.

A galley, like the quinquireme: elegant, graceful
Just don't think about the slaves who drove the oars

The contrast between the grubby coaster and the graceful quinquireme and galleon is particularly keen, because the coaster was involved in a trade worth many hundreds, or thousands, of times more than either of the other two. And that trade even brought comfort into the homes of modest people, for whom a cheap tin tray would have been a great deal more useful, and affordable, than amethysts or ivory (God knows what they’d have done with apes or peacocks.) 

Spanish Galleon
Stately, majestic, and temptingly full of treasure

But there’s something else in the poem: its movement. 

The quinquireme is carrying sweet-smelling woods, wine, ivory. Precious things.

The galleon is carrying goods of colossal worth. Treasure.

And the coaster is carrying goods that earn a lot. Commodities.

Dirty British Coaster
A romance of its own despite its grubbiness

In 1494, something rather crucial happened in the Italian city of Florence. Luca Pacioli wrote a manual for double-entry bookkeeping. The system had been around a while, but his book is still regarded by many as the true starting point of modern accounting. 

What’s special about double entry?

It reduces commerce, one of the main areas of human endeavour, to nothing more than numbers. Indeed, and this is the special genius of double entry, it reduces it to a single number: zero. If the books have been correctly kept (or alternatively, skilfully cooked), all the sums come to zero: all the credits cancel all the debits, leaving nothing.

In other words, double-entry pierces the magic of commerce – apes and ivory – or even its mysterious riches – topazes and amethysts – and makes it a simple matter of balancing income against expenditure – cheap tin trays.

This evolution took place in parallel with another summed up by the history of the state of Prussia. It has been described as a “state of raw reason”. Why?

Because it had none of the things that your basic patriot seems to feel are crucial for building a nation: no single language, though German dominated; no single religion, with Lutherans and Calvinists alongside Catholics and a good sprinkling of Jews; not even territorial integrity, with bits of land added in scattered, separated places, depending on who the ruler married or inherited from.

What could hold such an artificial nation together?

The two things in which Prussia had mastery: a powerful army and a huge, underpaid, utterly incorruptible and highly effective civil service. They, through pure reason, bound the unseen sinews and bones of the state together and turned it into one of the most powerful in Europe.

Eventually it built, and took the leading role in, the Empire of Germany. And just to underline the weirdness of that event, the Empire wasn’t proclaimed in Germany, as anyone would expect, but in France – in humiliated, defeated France. Not just anywhere in France, either: it was in the Hall of Mirrors at the former Royal Palace at Versailles.

William I of Prussia proclaimed Emperor of Germany at Versailles
With the help of the Prussian Army and the government of Bismarck

A competent and painfully honest civil service has to be a huge advantage for a nation. But it has its downside too. It’s impersonal. It’s cold. It’s passionless. 

It also has no moral judgement. Set it to do a job, and it does it without asking what the job is for. It turns out, ultimately, men like Adolf Eichmann. During World War 2, he was the SS functionary who was responsible for organising the trains to take Jews to the extermination camps.

Adolf Eichmann,the thorough civil servant
At his trial in Israel; inset, in his SS uniform

He did the job with complete dedication. And it wasn’t easy: organising train transport in wartime for up to 12 million people? No simple matter.

What he didn’t do, and this came out at his trial in Tel Aviv, was think about what he was doing. He didn’t ask himself “is it right to send all these people to their deaths?” He did the job, in an entirely dispassionate and efficient way, without wondering about the consequences.

Which is rather like double-entry book-keeping. Brilliant. Simple. Effective.

Soulless.

We have built machines that have turned magic into mechanics, and Masefield’s poem charts that progress. We’ve reaped the benefits. But we’ve also suffered the devastation.

Fascinating ideas, aren’t they? I wish I’d had them. I’ve just embroidered on some thoughts of Max Weber’s, built on with characteristic genius by Hannah Arendt.

See? I’ve stood on the shoulders of giants, like Newton, proving that even ordinary people can do it and not just extraordinary men like him. And it still helps you see a lot further.

Who're you calling crazy?

Adolf Eichmann in all probability never directly did any harm to anyone in his life. An inoffensive middle-ranking bureaucrat, he took on a challenging task in logistics, arranging the transport of up to 12 million people over long distances in wartime. His testimony at his trial in Jerusalem in 1961 suggests that it was a challenge whose scale he fully appreciated and in which his achievements gave him some pride.

None of this, in itself, was evil. The evil lay in the purpose of the work – the attempted elimination of the entire Jewish population of Europe, ultimately half achieved by Eichmann’s employers, the Nazi SS.

Eichmann was executed for his part in that crime. Hannah Arendt, who isn’t exactly obscure but deserves to be far better known if only for the acuteness of her insight, produced an astonishing chronicle of his trial. She ends her book with the words she wished his judges might have addressed to Eichmann: ‘... just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations – as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world – we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to share the world with you. That is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.’

Hannah Arendt: extraordinarily acute insight

I don’t think any argument could ever persuade me out of my inveterate opposition to the death penalty, but those words come as close as any might.

Nowhere in Arendt’s book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, does she claim that Eichmann was a madman or a monster. On the contrary, she portrays him throughout as an ordinary little man, doing what he perceives to be his duty under difficult circumstances.

Eichmann was by no means alone in that: many millions did the same, often in pursuit of ends that few of us would regard as war crimes. During the Second World War, tens of thousands of ordinary young men, many of whom went on to become model husbands and fathers, teachers and businessmen, or perhaps adulterers and cheats and opportunists – in short men of every type and attitude – flew planes over German cities and dropped high explosive and, worse still, incendiary bombs on them. None or next to none of them wanted to cause children to burn screaming to their deaths, but they did it, and they did it with great courage (among British aircrew alone, more than two out of five were killed in the war) and they did it because they felt it was their duty.

Some would argue that what they did was a war crime, and I can understand the argument. All I can say is that I’m not persuaded by it; that my father, though to his lasting relief he was never involved in the bombing of cities, certainly flew bombers and on more than one occasion bombed men; and that had I been alive at the time, I have little doubt that like my father and my father’s father, I would have served in that war in some capacity or another. If such men were war criminals, then I can only accept that I would have been their accomplice, and only a historical accident, the timing of my birth, allows me to escape that complicity.

At any rate, I see nothing in those men or indeed in myself that would make me feel that any of us can sensibly be regarded as mad or monsters.

Now fast forward to 22 July 2011. Anders Behring Breivik has set off a bomb in Oslo and is now killing young people as fast as he can get to them on the island of Utoeya. A good friend of mine refers to him as ‘the beast’. Simon Jenkins, writing in The Guardian tells us ‘...the killings were an act of random madness.’ Today's Sun manages to describe Breivik as both a ‘mad gunman’ and a ‘neo-Nazi monster’ within the space of a few lines.

Well, that’s that, then. Case closed and compartmentalised. We can file Breivik away under ‘monster’ or ‘psychopath’ and breathe a sigh of relief. None of us is like him, so this is a one-off. OK, another in a long series of one-offs, but still just another one-off.

Or is it? Perhaps Breivik, like Eichmann, is neither mad nor a monster. Perhaps he's another ordinary human being who has allowed himself to be duped by some deeply, unconscionably bad ideas, and unlike others who share those ideas, been prepared to take extreme action in their pursuit. No doubt out of a sense of duty. But to label him a ‘lunatic’ firstly does a disservice to the millions suffering from genuine mental disorder, the vast majority of whom are a threat to no-one, and secondly dodges the issue of the ideas that inspired Breivik, which are still around and still capable of inspiring heinous crimes.

If we accept that such ideas can drive even ordinary people – not monsters, not ‘lunatics’ – into doing utterly monstrous things, then we might perhaps be a lot warier about them. We might see that there’s nothing anodyne about David Cameron denouncing multiculturalism, about the Swiss banning minarets, about the French government banning the Moslem veil. Ordinary people can be seduced by that kind of vicious idea into doing extraordinary things. They decide they don’t need to share the earth with certain others, and in mercifully rare cases they have the determination and the means to take a gun and act on their vicious beliefs.

Let’s leave the conclusion to Hannah Arendt  – who could do it better?  Eichmann’s last words were ‘Long live Germany, long live Argentina, long live Austria. I shall not forget them.’ ‘I shall not forget them’? He was about to die. As Arendt points out, ‘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.’

And then comes her chilling conclusion, ending with the words that are her great contribution to all such debates: ‘It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that his long course in human wickedness had taught us – the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.’

The banality of evil. Evil isn’t extraordinary. It isn’t special. It’s banal, it’s all around, it’s in us all.

Probably best not to lose sight of that fact. It might not be smart simply to consign evil to some convenient box labelled ‘monstrosity’ or ‘insanity’. After all, surely we can all think of occasions when humanity has done that before, and evil in all its banality just gets out and comes back to bite us again.