The Evil of Banality: On the Life and Death Importance of Thinking

Abstract

The Evil of Banality: On the Life and Death Importance of Thinking is important, timely, and needed—truly a tour de force. I might describe the purpose of the book in different ways, each of which would be quite accurate: a phenomenology of systematic evil and the good that is needed to combat it; a microscopic view of the nature of evil and goodness; a fuller consideration of Hannah Arendt's important essay, “Thinking and Moral Considerations” that becomes a powerful revival of Arendt the ethicist (Arendt 1971); a consideration of good and evil that goes beyond romantic notions; a paean (or maybe an elegy) to the kind of thinking that a liberal arts education fosters; an exploration of the ethical things themselves; and a badly needed effort to really think about what we are doing when we are thinking and when we are not, particularly given the particular challenges of the times in which we live.In this remarkable work, Elizabeth Minnich follows Arendt (Albert Camus, and others) on a quest to discover the nature of the kind of evil that transpires on a large scale, with a substantial number of people who are actively involved, collaborating, and failing to stand for what is ethically needed. Furthermore, they are doing it for shockingly banal reasons: to obtain a promotion, to get along without conflict, to fail to resist because it is “too late,” or to leave it to someone else because they feel it is someone else's job to address the wrong-doing. All of these trite reasons are, at their core, forms of thoughtlessness. That is, when we examine what is really going on beyond the romantic, grandiose, and self-serving explanations we often give and receive concerning evil-doing, we find a failure to face up to what one is (they are) doing. And these failures, Minnich argues, are prepared for in quotidian ways in ordinary lives.Therefore, Minnich's goal in this book is, as Arendt advised, to trace “experiences rather than doctrines,” because doctrines can falsify experiences (that is, they find hero-sized, huge personalities committed, like comic-book characters, to doing otherworldly evil) and thereby misdirect much needed attention and understanding. Fortunately, true villains, such as Iago, are rare enough that they are incapable, without help, of doing the kinds of harm that we need to be most worried about, injuries that are the true “burden of our time.” Minnich calls injuries caused by true moral monsters “intensive evils,” and argues that to focus on them is to avoid the kind of harm we need to most pay attention to and choose to ignore. She refers to this much more sinister kind of harm “extensive evils” because it is the kind we are most likely to be morally enmeshed in. They include genocide, slavery, sexual trafficking, and grinding economic exploitation, among others.Both intensive and extensive evils are made possible by being out of touch. The problem is not, as Arendt describes it in The Burden of Our Time—published in the United States as The Origins of Totalitarianism—that the totalitarian system is so powerful that it can grind even the most hearty and moral person to dust. Rather, the problem is how little it takes to turn so many into murderers and collaborators.Minnich then turns to Arendt (Phillip Hallie, and others) to examine experiences, rather than doctrines, to find the kind of people and actions that are required to combat extensive evil. What is particularly striking about the people who fought evil is that they look no more like paragons of heroism than the real evil of banality looks like the grand, malevolent evil that is so easy to spot and comes upon us so noticeably. The dangers of portraying all attempts to combat evil as grandiose, romanticized notions of good (with saints and martyrs) is shown as well. They are easy targets for regimes that are out to do harm and all-too-easily neutralized. Instead, what are needed are thinkers, those who know that they cannot live with themselves if they go along with evil. They remain in touch, attentive to realities and so are prepared for the seeping, creeping evil; they are in touch with themselves, with their thinking, and with others. They are the “conscious pariahs,” those who refuse to try to collaborate and to ingratiate, like the always unsuccessful “parvenu.” Usually, they are what Minnich calls “moral introverts,” holding themselves accountable even when external guideposts, “banisters” as Arendt would say, have fallen.Finally, the book examines the way people are conditioned to thoughtlessness through the spread of clichés; through careerism; through peer pressure and the desire to fit in; and through knowledgism, that is thoughtless submission to supposed experts and their knowledge.1 These are always present and can always take over and leave people vulnerable to doing, or not stopping, the ongoing, daily, widespread work of extensive evil. But omnipresent, too, are the abilities to engage consciousness and thereby to rouse our conscience.The book is highly original on two fronts. First, it takes up Arendt's thinking about morality (and about the relationship between thinking and morality), which is all too often overlooked because of the power of her political insights. Second, it puts into language—in a way that more people will be able to hear—the message of the need to think and to show the implications of that message, worked out through interesting and surprising stories, insights, and analysis.While I would like to have more information about the role of embodiment and its relationship to thinking and thoughtlessness, and would like to have a clearer sense of the role of thinking as a bulwark against others (as the moral introvert stands) in its relation to thinking with others, I see these desires as what we, as readers, can bring to the reading of the text. The author here has done more than enough work for us; it is our turn to inquire about the ideas expressed herein.Part of what makes this book so successful, what makes it the kind of writing that might reach more people than Arendt did, is the tone and voice, which are mature, humane, and wise. While I love Arendt's works, I have always found her writing to be more attuned to her own working out of ideas than to her audience. Minnich's book, on the other hand, is not just about the need to think, but shows us how to do it in ways that are, even when facing something tragic and horrific, gentle and inviting. While its discourse with other theorists is not as extensive as it could be, it is very much in the esteemed tradition of authors like bell hooks, who write for their readers in a way that is deep, passionate, and accessible. And for those who are scholars who engage in discourse about evil and engage with Arendt's work on morality, the conversation is addressed sufficiently, even if not taken up explicitly.Minnich's mature, humane, and wise style suggests that these powerful insights will be read very widely, both by academics and by those who would be turned off by jargon and technical language, and thus, meet the author's deepest goals. I am absolutely convinced that this book is going to be read broadly and loved dearly as a way to help us make sense of our world, ourselves and our actions. And even, dare I say, to make us better people.