Denounced by Churchmen, is the latest assault on the poor just another case of the banality of evil?

Soon to be a Cardinal of the Catholic Church, the Archbishop of Westminster Vincent Nichols, has denounced the British government’s policy towards benefits as a ‘disgrace’. He warned that they will leave the poorest and most vulnerable in society facing ‘hunger and destitution.’

Vincent Nichols outside the Catholic Cathedral in Westminster 

Like a great many people, I am deeply distrustful of organised religion. Its leaders, it seems to me, are often on precisely the wrong side of debates, even on the moral questions which should be their principal domain of expertise.

My suspicion is all the deeper because they tend to reason in terms of ‘good’ and ‘evil’, categories that I distrust. After all, no one thinks what they’re doing is evil, however monstrous the act may be: they’re generally convinced that the intention behind the act makes it good. 

So, for instance, no one likes being threatened by foreigners with weapons, as the West’s response to terrorism shows. And yet if Britain manages to avoid being sucked into another adventure in the next few months or so, we may be about to enter the first full year we have enjoyed without military action since the outbreak of the First World War in 1914. In all that time, Britain has fought to defend its own borders only once, in 1940.

How many people, in how many countries, must have felt that Britain’s behaviour was evil? And yet in this country, we’re convinced that British soldiers are heroes and their behaviour exemplary.

However, my uncertainty about the concept of ‘evil’ was shaken when I came across the work of Hannah Arendt. She is one of my favourite thinkers of the twentieth century. I’ve been dipping into her work again since yesterday evening, when I watched the excellent film Hannah Arendt, directed by Margarethe von Trotta with Barbara Sukowa in the title role.

Hannah Arendt: acute insight into the nature of evil

Arendt was the writer who coined the expression ‘banality of evil’, from watching the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. Eichmann had been in the SS during the Second World War, and his task had been organising the transports to carry Jews to ghettos, to concentration camps and ultimately to extermination camps.

What appalled Arendt, herself a Jew, was the staggering mediocrity of the man.

“The deeds were monstrous, but the doer ... was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither demonic nor monstrous.”

He was a minor cog in a massive bureaucracy, merely doing a difficult job as competently as he could. He didn’t think what he was doing was evil. In fact, Arendt realised, he didn’t think at all.

“... the only specific characteristic one could detect in his past as well as in his behavior during the trial and the preceding police examination was something entirely negative: it was not stupidity but a curious, quite authentic inability to think.”

That’s a particularly powerful statement if you share Arendt’s world view. For her, man is essentially a thinking being. Stop thinking and you deny your very personhood. Deny yours and how can you recognise anyone else’s?

But Arendt’s key thought comes as a question:

“Could the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining and reflecting upon whatever happens to come to pass, regardless of specific content and quite independent of results, could this activity be of such a nature that it ‘conditions’ men against evildoing?”

An acute insight into the true nature of evil. And if there’s any characteristic that particularly strikes me in the behaviour of the present British government, it’s precisely thoughtlessness. Apparently unable to imagine the suffering they’re inflicting on others, they impose it with the same indifference to the people affected as Eichmann showed.

So perhaps it’s not inappropriate that a Prince of the Church has denounced the government’s attitude. Good and evil are concepts that he works with daily. And what he has denounced seems precisely to fit the Arendt concept of evil in its harrowing banality.

In addition, we read today that a group of charities have found that there is a ‘culture of fear’ in the benefits world these days.

Hunger. Destitution. Fear. Yep, that sounds like the handiwork of evil. The banality and mediocrity of men like David Cameron, George Osborne or Ian Duncan Smith (the benefits minister) shouldn’t delude us into thinking it’s anything else.

After all, Eichmann was just as banal and mediocre.

Merry Christmas. And God bless us all, every one

Ah, Christmas and the season of goodwill to all men. Brilliant stuff. You know, Tiny Tim saying ‘God bless us all, every one’ and all that. 

For instance, God bless the half million people in Britain who are dependent on food banks, including 170,000 kids. Or the steadily growing number of Britons who are homeless, including 60,000 kids. God Bless them all because no one in authority’s going to do anything about them, anytime soon.

There were only 40,000 using food banks back in 2010, when the current government took office. It warned us that there would have to be sacrifices to deal with the crisis facing the country. We had to get the deficit down, along with public debt. And whatever needed to be done to make that happen, had to happen.

And it has. Benefits have been cut for people who have a spare room, which helps explain the growing numbers of homeless people, who can’t afford to pay the rent any more.

To reduce the invalidity benefits bill, rules on medical assessments have been tightened to the point where 1300 people found fit to work have died shortly afterwards. More generally, half the total number deemed capable of working and therefore denied benefits, have failed to find jobs.

It’s been tough. But you don’t make omelettes without breaking eggs.

Not that there’s been much of an omelette, really. Debt keeps growing. The deficit’s still not under control and more cuts are on the way. Though growth is back, it’s at a level which would have been regarded as anaemic ten years ago.

Still, there’s been some success. The tax on top incomes has been reduced from 50% to 45%, for instance, guaranteeing that we can hang on to some of the fine people who were in charge when the crisis first broke, and not lose them to some miserable tax haven. And who would want to part with them?

David Cameron in Christmas mood
with a load of balls to back him up

Tough times still lie ahead.But it’s Christmas now, so why think of them? David Cameron and George Osborne are no doubt surrounded by their families and their friends (but are they really their friends? I mean, would they be without the tax breaks?) in their pleasant houses and with their elegant tables. They’re certainly not wasting any thought on anything so unpleasant or discordant as kids without food or a roof over their head.

I mean, their colleague Iain Duncan-Smith, the Minister in charge of benefits, refuses even to meet the people who run the food banks. He may be a champion of denial, but surely he only reflects an attitude that runs through the government? You know – we can’t do anything about poverty, the poor will always be with us, and we’re even making rather a lot more of them, so why spoil the holiday season by thinking about them? 

In what Cameron likes to think of as a basically Christian country, surely mere charity allows our leaders to take a break from painful thoughts of those sad people out there.

Anyway. This is the Christmas season. Our fine Conservative ministers are raising their glasses to each other. So let me raise mine and wish you all a merry Christmas.

As for the poor. Well, we asked God to bless us all. Every one. Surely he can look after them?