Abstract
Reviewed by: Sabah Carrim, University of Malaya, Malaysia
No, we are not all Little Eichmanns, with a propensity for evil, a dormant potential for torture, murder, declares Minnich.
Over the years, however, misinterpretations of Hannah Arendt’s 1963 book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, coupled with findings from psychological experiments conducted by Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo, suggested that there is an untapped potential for sadism in every average individual. Man’s sadism is brought out mostly – if not entirely – by situational rather than dispositional factors. This has challenged the founding premises of law and religion which focus primarily on individual (read ‘dispositional’) traits in blaming and punishing.
Arendt’s banality of evil, in contrast with the radical evil of Immanuel Kant, implies that evil may sometimes be perpetrated effortlessly, hence banally, by thoughtless bureaucrats like Adolf Eichmann. But Minnich declares that the term ‘banality of evil’ has turned into a cliché, so that its original meaning is widely misunderstood; therein lies the Evil of Banality – the title of her book – the evil when words lose their meaning, when absence of thinking is encouraged, and people stop thinking not only about the evil they perpetrate but also the good they do. Minnich thus says, ‘There is no one sort of banality; almost anything can become banal if we use it so often that it prefigures the world for us without our even noticing anymore’ (p. 41). Minnich proposes what Kant calls an enlarged mentality – or what Arendt elsewhere refers to as doxa, an understanding of the personalised reality of another person, and other people, which would encourage empathy. Had any of the perpetrators understood and practised it, the world would have a cleaner record of cruelty and inhumanity.
The approach adopted by Minnich in writing her book shares parallels with Arendt’s methodology; it is an attempt to engage in the thinking process and ‘trace experiences rather than doctrines’ (p. 1). Minnich weaves through case studies, excerpts from speeches, and newspaper reports covering accounts of the Holocaust and the war in Rwanda among others, in an informal and easy style while exploring the evil of banality.
According to Minnich, we employ the epithet ‘evil’ to qualify that which we do not understand. In doing so, the incomprehensible (i.e. the ‘evil’) paralyses us into thinking that no matter what we do, the overwhelming evil will dominate us.This habit may simplify life, withhold our dependence on things and people we know we cannot depend on, dismissing that which can neither be understood nor mastered, and from the perspective of evolutionary psychology, protect us from the strange and unfamiliar. But in the end, while this habit protects, it also undermines the possibility of taking action against the source of the evil to overcome it. Minnich concludes by saying, ‘This is one of the very real consequences of our having romanticised evil: we paralyse ourselves, leaving the field open for even the pettiest of people to do its work’ (p. 78). There is so much in life that would make one want to ‘run faster, think less’ (p. 81), leading one to veer dangerously into so many wrong directions.
Minnich also distinguishes between intensive evil and extensive evil – intensive evil is committed by an individual or small group and is intentional. She says it is the evil committed by ‘serial killers, cult murders, ‘shooters’, lone bombers of public buildings’ (p. 91); in this scenario, the distinction between perpetrators, victims and bystanders is maintained. On the other hand, extensive evil occurs in cases of genocide and mass atrocities where the same distinction is blurry. Minnich says extensive evil could include ‘slavery, endemic sexualised violence against women and children, deadly exploitation of workers, millennia of anti-Semitism’ (p. 91) and the like. According to Minnich, the importance of the distinction between intensive and extensive evils should be recognised because it is in the latter case that normalcy sets in, where the violence is insidious and extends over a long period of time.
Minnich avers that extensive evil is the greater threat of the two. Intensive evils are ‘episodic, rather than sustained acts by individuals in small groups’ (p. 92).They are not normalised. While there are usually only a handful who stand up to extensive evil, says Minnich, they often end up being castigated by the rest: ‘What’s wrong with you? Trouble-maker. Malcontent. Idealist. Purist. Don’t be so silly; so extreme, so negative’ (p. 107). She goes on to say that such people are normally ‘shunned, ignored, discredited, isolated, fired; unless or until there are others with whom [they] stand’ (p. 107). She compares the spread of extensive evil with that of a plague – specifically the type described by Albert Camus in his 1947 novel, The Plague – where it lurks in every corner, dormant, ready to ravage society upon its reawakening.
For Minnich, extensive evil is the result of an unthinking, unreflective society. She goes on to identify various factors that encourage this culture of indifference, that prepare us to be participants in extensive evil. The leading culprits for inciting numbness and apathy are the system of education and our work ethic, which force us to lead double lives, numb to injustices, exploitation and other phenomena that make us unhappy.
Zimbardo and Minnich both propose solutions to the problem of evil – they claim that just as we are capable of committing crime or doing evil, so too are we capable of doing good. Zimbardo asks us to imagine a ‘reverse-Milgram’ authority experiment an experiment in which subjects will comply with demands for increasing levels of good behaviour. After warning us against romanticising evil, Zimbardo through the concept of the Banality of Heroism, and Minnich through the Banality of Goodness, go on to caution us against romanticising goodness through popular notions of saints and heroes. Minnich infers that intensive good is inferior to extensive good because the former’s effects are short-lived, and it benefits a smaller group of people. By favouring extensive good, she seeks to promote everyday ordinary behaviour that needs no glorification, no sanctification, and lies in those acts of responsibility and benevolence that she believes we owe to one another as human beings.
Minnich’s final message is that despite the superiority of the one over the other, both extensive good and intensive good are valueless if thoughtlessness precedes the action. The strength of her thesis, however, lies in the distinction between intensive evil and extensive evil in finally demarcating individual crimes from political crimes. It is hoped that this contribution to the literature will be a positive step towards finding alternative means to try political crimes; for too long, the traditional court system has been proven to be ill-suited to deal with crimes of such extensive dimensions as genocides and mass atrocities.