Visualizing Atrocity: Arendt, Evil, and the Optics of Thoughtlessness

5 The Banality of Evil

114 5 The Banality of Evil At the beginning of chapter 3, I began the discussion of Arendt’s understanding of thoughtlessness by recounting an exchange she had with Christian Bay at a conference devoted to considering the import of her work. This exchange was precipitated by a general discussion of what “thinking is and is good for” but also, more specifically, by Bay’s insistence that with the exception of Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt’s writings on politics lacked “a certain seriousness about modern problems.”1 In his reading, her trial report was a noted exception in an otherwise disengaged corpus of work—an exception because Arendt had provocatively illustrated “how Eichmann was in each of us” or how “Eichmann -like” tendencies constituted a formative component and condition of late-twentieth-century liberal-capitalist subjectivity. From this widely shared but, as Arendt insisted, mistaken reading, Bay drew the further conclusion that such “Eichmann-like” tendencies in oneself, one’s students, one’s fellow citizens needed to be aggressively combated: individuals had to be educated out of their indifference or “indoctrinated in a pluralist universe,” to use his language; compelled to think and passionately care; aroused from apathy and driven to act in the name of justice and on behalf of the dispossessed and disenfranchised. Bay’s apparent confidence about what the content or end of critical thinking should be and his plain certainty as to where thinking critically or caring passionately would necessarily lead individuals are striking: were the true and the good so easily settled or so clearly self-evident, what need for further thinking would there then be? Still, Bay’s claims are a telling measure of his impatience with Arendt’s rendering of a practice that is not obviously “productive” and whose effect we encounter most dramatically in its absence: extreme things, she tells us, are the actual consequences of nonthinking.2 But of the actual political consequences of thinking? To this query Arendt offered no real answer except to note that a society that has lost respect for thinking is one vulnerable to losing its way: I cannot tell you black on white—and would hate to do it—what the consequences of this kind of thought which I try, not to indoctrinate, but to rouse or awaken in my students, are, in actual politics. I can very well imagine that one becomes a republican and the third becomes a liberal or God knows what. But one thing I would hope: that certain extreme things which are the actual consequences of nonthinking . . . will not be capable [of arising]. That is, when the chips are down, the 115 The Banality of Evil question is how will they act. And then this notion that I examine my assumptions . . . that I think “critically,” and that I don’t let myself get away with repeating the clichés of the public mood [comes into play]. And I would say any society that has lost respect for this, is not in very good shape.3 It was Eichmann’s thoughtlessness—his refusal to test or examine received opinions or take his bearings from the awareness he clearly had of what was happening and how and to whom even while he was not among those who pulled a trigger, or released the gas, or directly ordered others to do so—that predisposed him, in Arendt’s view, “to become one of the greatest criminals of the period.” However, his failure, his thoughtlessness, Arendt also links to a failure of judgment for which thinking clears the way.4 In most instances, judgment “depends on the presence of others ‘in whose place’ it must think [and] whose perspectives it must take into account.” But where this is not possible— as in times of political crisis or emergency when the values and standards that otherwise make a shared common world possible have all but collapsed—one is simply on one’s own. And the question then is whether I will be able to live with myself doing whatever it is I may be called upon to do regardless of the beliefs and activities of those around me: If you examine the few, the very few who in the moral collapse of Nazi Germany remained completely intact . . . you will discover that they never went through anything like a great moral conflict or crisis of conscience. They did not ponder the various issues–the issue of the lesser evil or of loyalty to their country or...