The Banality of Environmental Destruction

We’re facing an environmental cataclysm that is endangering all life on this planet, yet none of us think we’re participating in something horrific.

We ask, “How could something really horrific be accepted by everyone around me? Surely my career and my way of life can’t be that bad if everyone else is doing it too. If it were, somebody would have stopped it already. Right?”

We are having trouble recognizing this horror because there are virtually no bad guys in the game. There are a few, probably, at Monsanto and in oil and gas companies, and a few in public office. But even they are not sitting around tables in the evenings smoking cigars and plotting the extinction of the polar bear. Most of them don’t have malicious intent. They’re just following the prevailing logic and ethic of our culture—the logic and ethic of commerce. They’re just being smart businesspeople, doing what they’ve been raised to do. The banality of evil.

And then there’s the rest of us. We’re not evil and yet we are all semi-knowingly participating in the creation of this global catastrophe. Most of us eat meat and dairy products that require massive quantities of water, fossil fuels, and pesticides to produce, destroying forests and jungles. Most of us live and work in buildings that are burning fuel 24/7 for lights, computers, appliances, heating and air conditioning systems. This is all normal for our culture.

Terrible and Terrifyingly Normal

Hannah Arendt, the twentieth-century political theorist, had some insights into the concepts of “evil” and “normal” that seem to have direct bearing here.

In 1961 she went, as a reporter for the New Yorker, to the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann was a Nazi lieutenant colonel who had been responsible for the operations side of the project of forcing millions of Jews into concentration camps and later deporting them by train to places like Auschwitz. If there were ever an example of a psychopathic monster—grand evil incarnate—Adolf Eichmann should be it. But Arendt published a series of articles about the trial that she later turned into a book subtitled, A Report on the Banality of Evil. In it she made the argument that Eichmann was actually not psychopathic, not exceptional in his propensity for violence, and not particularly hateful or malicious. What he was was unintelligent, rule-oriented, and insecure, with a desperate need to belong. He was a joiner who wanted to be part of something. He wanted to advance his career. He wanted respect and a good life. He often spoke in clichés. While he was in prison in Israel awaiting his trial, five different psychiatrists interviewed him and found no evidence of any pathology. He was a psychologically stable, normal person. Arendt wrote:

The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.

Arendt got a lot of pushback for this view, and in fact some of her claims about Eichmann’s guilelessness were recently debunked, but the book changed the conversation about the nature of evil forever.

For a holocaust to be carried out on a grand scale, you don’t need a battalion of sinister bad guys. You maybe need a few bad guys, but what you need even more are thousands of ordinary people who want badly to fit in and advance themselves and their careers. You need people who will accept the moral standards of their social environment. You need people committed to being normal relative to their place and time, whatever that entails.

In the current moment, the violence that has become normal in industrialized countries is a life of daily violence against the planet. Most of us rely on products shipped from far away, made of plastic, wrapped in plastic, or delivered in plastic bags, most...