Raymond Klassen – Ideals and Identities

These weeks have been noisy, if you have been listening to President Trump.

“Tariffs! Drug Trafficking! Illegal Immigrants! Anti-Christian crimes! … Ethnic Cleansing for a new resort area! Sanctions! Canada should be the 51st State!” Rule by decree… balk when it’s difficult.

Fortunately, I haven’t been much moved by an idea of America, or been swept-up in anti-American sentiment. I’ve never really understood what America even is.

It’s a little like a phone…. “You mean it takes pictures too?!”

Mustering Canadian patriotism is my motto – much like cheering for the local Edmonton Oilers through their Stanley Cup Finals run last year, even though I am a dyed-in-the-wool Winnipeg Jets fan (my apologies to my non-National Hockey League readers); it is socially expedient.

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“Never react to an evil in such a way as to augment it,” the great French philosopher and activist Simone Weil wrote in 1933 as she contemplated how to be a complete human being amid a world that seemed to be falling apart. But modern life is no fairy tale, and one of its most disorienting perplexities is that evil isn’t always easily recognizable. Joseph Brodsky echoed this in his spectacular speech on our greatest antidote to evil: “What we regard as Evil is capable of a fairly ubiquitous presence if only because it tends to appear in the guise of good.”

A core cause of this perplexity lies in the fact that while acts of evil can mushroom into monumental tragedies, the individual human perpetrators of those acts are often marked not with the grandiosity of the demonic but with absolute mundanity.

This was the revolutionary and, like every revolutionary idea, at the time controversial point that Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906–December 4, 1975) made in 1962, when The New Yorker commissioned her, a Jew who had narrowly escaped from Nazi Germany herself, to travel to Jerusalem and report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann—one of the chief architects of the Holocaust. In 1963, her writings about the trial were published as Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil —a sobering reflection on “the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us—the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.”

A decade after Arendt established herself as a formidable thinker with her incisive inquiry into how totalitarian tyrants take hold of a people, she writes:

The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanize them.

One will immediately notice that Trump (and Musk) are taking the proverbial axe to the American bureaucracy – to replace it with Trump functionaries. However, it is through this lens of bureaucracy (which she calls “the rule of Nobody”) as a weapon of totalitarianism that Arendt arrives at her notion of “the banality of evil”—a banality reflected in Eichmann himself, who embodied “the dilemma between the unspeakable horror of the deeds and the undeniable ludicrousness of the man who perpetrated them.” In a passage that applies to Donald Trump with astonishing accuracy—except the part about lying, of course; that aspect Arendt addressed with equal prescience elsewhere—she describes Eichmann:

“What he said was always the same, expressed in the same words. The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else. No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against the words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.”

The Nazis, Arendt argues, furnished this deliberate disconnect from reality with what she calls “holes of oblivion.” (4 years ago, we called them “alternative facts.” Now I call it a “social imaginary.”) In a searing testament to the power of speaking up, she considers what the story of the Holocaust—a story irrepressibly told by its survivors—has taught us:

“The holes of oblivion do not exist. Nothing human is that perfect, and there are simply too many people in the world to make oblivion possible. One man will always be left alive to tell the story.

[…]

The lesson of such stories is simple and within everybody’s grasp. Politically speaking, it is that under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not, just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that “it could happen” in most places but it did not happen everywhere. Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.”

Arendt took great care to differentiate between the banal and the commonplace, but some reviewers—as those predisposed on a reflexive rebuttal are always apt to do—accused her of suggesting that the atrocity of the Holocaust had been commonplace, which of course was the very opposite of her point. Among those who misunderstood her notion of the “banality” of evil to mean a trivialization of the outcome of evil rather than an insight into the commonplace motives of its perpetrators was the scholar Gerhard Scholem, with whom Arendt had corresponded warmly for decades. At the end of a six-page letter to Scholem from early December of 1964, she crystallizes her point and dispels all grounds for confusion with the elegant precision of her rhetoric:

“You are quite right, I changed my mind and do no longer speak of “radical evil.” … It is indeed my opinion now that evil is never “radical,” that it is only extreme, and that it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrow and lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like a fungus on the surface. It is “thought-defying,” as I said, because thought tries to reach some depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its “banality.” Only the good has depth that can be radical.”

Eichmann in Jerusalem remains, unfortunately, an increasingly relevant masterwork as we face a world seized by banal tyrants capable of small-handed” perpetration of enormous evil . But perhaps John Steinbeck put it best in his superb letter written months before Arendt arrived in New York as a refugee from Nazi Germany:

“All the goodness and the heroisms will rise up again, then be cut down again and rise up. It isn’t that the evil thing wins—it never will—but that it doesn’t die.”

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And the antidote to such banal evil are not heroic or monumental acts of outrage; instead they are the moments of authenticity when we act toward each other as human beings. More than just being socially expedient – these moments buttress the lives that are worth living.

Go Jets! … and I hope the Oilers do well.