On the Life and Death Importance of Thinking

Context

Twenty years ago, following my keynote address at an international evaluation conference, I was approached by a man who said he had something for me. He handed me a five-volume report entitled The International Response to Conflict and Genocide: Lessons from the Rwanda Experience. The man, Niels Dabelstein, had chaired the steering committee for the evaluation on behalf of Danida, the development cooperation division of the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The evaluation report presented a comprehensive, independent review of the events leading up to the genocide that occurred in Rwanda between April and December 1994, when some 800,000 people were killed.

The report also included an evaluation of the subsequent international humanitarian response. The international assistance for emergency relief to Rwandan refugees and displaced persons cost US$2.3 billion (inflation adjusted). The United Nations (UN) Peacekeeping effort and related activities cost more than that over several years leading up to the genocide. The peacekeeping mandate was aimed at keeping the antagonistic groups apart in an attempt to prevent violence while efforts to negotiate an end to the conflict were underway. But no effort was made to bring ordinary people from the opposing groups together for dialogue, mutual understanding, and higher education—where higher actually means higher, deeper, broader, more meaningful, and higher impact, and such as might actually undercut the escalating momentum toward violence. Millions of dollars went into reconciliation efforts after the genocide, a stark contrast to the lack of resources devoted to preventing genocide through reconciliation, thinking education, and grassroots engagement prior to the genocide.

Minnich, a distinguished philosopher and feminist scholar, has written an important new book, The Evil of Banality: On the Life and Death Importance of Thinking, concerned, ultimately, with what can be done to prevent genocide. Minnich examines the Rwanda genocide as one of her many case examples. She enquires into how it is possible for human beings to engage in genocide, slavery, sexual trafficking of children, systematic rape, mass torture, and other acts of violence in the vast human arsenal of brutal and deadly acts of oppression and exploitation. She concludes that such acts are made possible by thoughtlessness, literally, a failure to think. Thoughtlessness disables conscience, which can make it possible for otherwise decent people to participate in systematized extensive evils such as genocide, human trafficking, and grinding exploitation of the most vulnerable.

She takes on the contrary premise that the challenge is to change hearts not minds, that people need to be made to care, and that feelings matter more than thinking in explaining behavior. She argues that we need to think about our feelings.

Thinking is how we make sense of what is happening, what is before our eyes, in our memories, in our hearts and bodies. It is the activity of consciousness, of awareness, and we cannot develop consciences that attune us well to the world and others if we are unaware of—inattentive to—our thinking. Nor, when we become aware, can conscience develop further to become illuminating (if never a certain guide) without reflexivity and refection, without our being thoughtful even about our own thinking.

Love and care can go as wrong as reason when we are not thinking, being attentive to, reflecting. We are as responsible for thinking about our feelings as anything else. (p. 47)

Minnich, who holds a professorial position at Queens University in Charlotte, NC, and a senior scholar position at the Association of American Colleges and Universities in Washington, DC, is concerned with how to teach thinking. She asserts that education of all kinds that does not awaken, practice, and inform this most basic of human capacities—thinking—as a primary purpose fails where it matters most. She ends her book with an Afterword on teaching thinking. She asks what may we hope? what ought we to do?

How can we teach an ability, a practice, an art that is the very wellspring of human freedom? How do we make the restless, troublemaking activity of thinking the heart of all education? How might we enliven, engage consciously with all learners such that conscience can arise, and thinking what we are doing becomes second nature? How do we teach thinking so that those who are educated—as many of us as humanly possible—are simply disinclined to take seriously, let alone to give their minds, their consciences, their work, their power, to anyone or anything that requires them not to think? (p. 217)

Her challenge to engage more deeply with both thinking and teaching thinking has much to inform our profession’s attention to evaluative thinking. After presenting her basic ideas and conclusions, I’ll examine their relevance to evaluative thinking and, another fundamental mantra in evaluation, speaking truth to power.

From the Banality of Evil to the Evil of Banality

Philosopher Hannah Arendt articulated the phrase “the banality of evil” to describe and explain how the Holocaust could have happened. She covered the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a senior bureaucratic implementer and major perpetuator of the Holocaust, and titled her 1963 book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Elizabeth Minnich was a teaching assistant to Hannah Arendt when the book appeared and describes the vitriolic reactions and attacks on her analysis, especially the proposition that evil could be “banal”—routine, ordinary, lacking originality, thoughtless, and mindless. What Arendt found “startlingly unusual about Eichmann was ‘a perhaps extraordinary shallowness,’ ‘not stupidity but a curious, quite authentic inability to think’” (pp. 31–32). She reports that Arendt “was struck by how extreme was Eichmann’s thoughtlessness, his enclosure with conventions, clichés, system languages” (p. 53), yet he “was good at what he did, and ambitious, not reluctant” (p. 34).

It was during that time that Minnich first thought of the reframing from “the banality of evil” to “the evil of banality.” Since that time, 55 years later, Minnich believes that the phrase “the banality of evil,” once so controversial, has itself become banal through repetition, misrepresentation, misunderstanding, and oversimplification. What are the implications of this cultural shift from explosive phrase to banal repetition?

Thinking Through Questioning

Minnich is a consummate question poser. I know this from personal experience as I once taught a 10-day colloquium with her when we were colleagues at the Union Institute and University many years ago. Her commitment to deep thinking has led her to initiate and support dialogue about significant issues through questioning. Knowing how to ask questions is a skill. Practicing asking questions is a way of being with other people.

There’s a scene in Minnich’s book that illustrates using inquiry to deepen understanding, a scene highly instructive for evaluators, I believe. She recounts being invited to a prison to discuss a paper she had written entitled “Why Not Lie?” She began by asking them if they had any questions for her.

A large man at the end of the table around which we were gathered leaned back, cocked his head to one side, and said, “Why did you write it?” “What do you want to know?” I responded: “Help me, so I can answer what you’re really asking not just what I think you might want to know? “What was your ulterior motive?” “Oh,” I said; “well, I can assure you that it wasn’t money, and it wasn’t fame, and it wasn’t power. Would those count as ‘ulterior motives’?” “Yes, I guess so.” “May I ask you another question?” “Yes.” “Why does it matter to you whether I had an ulterior motive, and what it is?” “Because I read your paper and I’m taking it in, and for all I know you might be toxic.” “Me, not the paper?” “Yes, of course. Smart people can slip things by you, and you might never know it, but it can do harm to you.” (pp. 4–5)

Why is questioning so powerful? Examine how you typically interact with people. Think about two or three recent interactions with people, someone you know well, and someone you hardly know, or meeting someone for the first time. How did you interact with them? What kind of questions, if any, did you ask? What questions might you have asked that would enhance your understanding and create a deeper connection with that person or with those people?

This is how Elizabeth Minnich engages the reader in thinking. Questioning is a form of thinking and invites further thinking, thinking together through interaction. Evaluators place a lot of emphasis on working with stakeholders to get the questions right. But I came away from this book questioning my skill at, and commitment to, deep questioning. Our evaluation questions are instrumental, which is fine as far as that takes us. But her questions are philosophical, epistemological, ontological, and therefore more fundamental. When, as part of this review, I asked her about her approach to questioning, she replied: “Once I started asking people what they wanted to know rather than just answering their questions, I surely did discover that a conversation can be like passing through one magic door after another: Who knew what was in there?”

So here are more questions that Minnich’s book generates. Think of these as baseline questions, evoking your current state of thinking about these issues before reading the book.

How do you react to the phrase “the banality of evil” versus “the evil of banality”? What, for you, are the connotations and implications of each phrase? What do you think is the core message and meaning of each?

The Banality of Goodness

I confess to having oft-repeated Arendt’s phrase “the banality of evil” in my own teaching and writing over many years. I thus found Minnich’s reframing freshly provocative and her explanation of the rephrasing altogether convincing. I internalized it quickly. What caught me off guard and rattled my comfortably assembled conceptual apparatus was the jarring phrase “the banality of goodness.” I didn’t see that coming. It is all the more unsettling, then profound, and ultimately enlightening for that very reason. How can doing good be banal? To seriously ponder this question and understand the answer is to enter into what Minnich means by “the life-and-death importance of thinking.”

Purposefully “doing good” can itself become unthinking, mindless, no more than a sop to conscience, a prop for conventionally defined self-esteem, a way of passing boring time or earning points for some other purpose we have in mind (getting into college; preparing to run for the school board; being thought to be good by our neighbors; seeking compliments from our coreligionists; getting out of the house when retired). Certainly, admirable things may be done as a result of all sorts of motivations, but that is no protection against banal conventionality, mindlessness. Even dramatic intensive goodness can be motivated by a kind of reflex notion of heroism that is entirely conventional. It is then a matter of luck—for the recipients of such acts as for the one acting—whether what is thus thoughtlessly done turns out to help, or hurt.

Unthinking obedience to or use of good conventions in decent-enough times is evidently less frightening than when mindless conventionality enables massive evils, but thoughtlessness—any mindlessness, taking us through life on autopilot—puts us at serious risk of colluding, and perhaps worse, with the larger systems that shape our worlds if, as, when, they once again go wrong. The mystery really is not how so many good Germans could have become Nazis, nor how so many good Christians could have been slaveholders, or good Arabs, slave-traders, or how many good parents could send their businesses overseas to profit from the virtually, sometimes actually, enslaved labor of other peoples’ children. The mystery, I fear, is how so many of us so often, without even thinking about it, no more do good than we do wrong, or evil, but simply behave ourselves, or absent ourselves, or try to do well whatever the terms of the game. We do not even choose; we simply reach into our grab-bag of conventions, of processed concepts, and follow the one that seems most familiar, most likely to seem apt to the people whose approval we generally glide along on. Or not: often enough, we just keep walking, pay no attention, do not remember, do not feel, as is rightly said, called upon to do something. Realities call out to us; we do not hear. This can be the case even when we are doing something because we think it good: anything can be done thoughtlessly. (pp. 151–152)

Evaluative Thinking: Beyond the Banality of Evaluation

Anything can be done thoughtlessly.

Evaluative thinking offers an antidote against banality in human affairs and inquiries of all kinds. Learning and using evaluative thinking and reasoning may ultimately be more important and have more far-reaching implications than merely applying evaluation methods and using evaluation reports.

Evaluative thinking is a specific application of Socratic reasoning, and the profession of evaluation both recognizes and honors that heritage (Buckley, Archibald, Hargraves, & Trochim, 2015; House, 1977, 1980, 2014; Scriven, 1976, 1993, 1995). In ancient Greece, some 2,500 years ago, Socrates “established the importance of seeking evidence, closely examining reasoning and assumptions, analyzing basic concepts, and tracing out implications not only of what is said but of what is done as well” (Foundation for Critical Thinking, 2016, p. 1). Minnich’s book elevates the importance of thinking in general which, correspondingly, elevates the importance of evaluative thinking.

Moreover, evaluative thinking is not just a capacity we build in stakeholders. Our own capacity for evaluative thinking is ever at risk of succumbing to banality. In discussing this with Minnich, here are some of her insights from someone outside our profession looking in.

“Methodology” is a nice fancy word, but “method” is usually what people are actually talking about when they say methodology. So the meaning of methodology can be lost, and if we lose “methodology” in its own right, we lose “the study of the logics of method,” the reflective dimension we need to justify a choice of method. Methodology is thinking about choice of methods that will then shape disciplined reasoning, and can then help us think about those choices without continuing to be constrained by them. And thinking itself can reflect on limits of methodology. (E. Minnich, personal communication, May 6, 2017)

Transforming Knowledge Through Thinking

We think in words. Language frames our thinking. Minnich is a lifelong student of words, a connoisseur of language. In her earlier book, Transforming Knowledge (2005), she wrote that our language and thinking can perpetuate “the old exclusions and devaluations of the majority of humankind that have pervaded our informal as well as formal schooling” (p. 9). She observed further that “even when we are all speaking the same languages, there are many ‘languages’ at play behind and within what the speakers mean and what we in turn understand…levels and levels of different meanings in even the most apparently simple and accessible utterance” (p. 9). To speak of “the life and death importance of thinking,” then, is not just an eye-catching, brain-penetrating, and attention-grabbing subtitle. It is a deeply serious, carefully considered, and absolutely authentic proposition worthy of our deepest contemplation. Minnich chooses language with great intention. She savors words. She writes to invite us to do likewise. And, in so doing, to think about our jargon.

Technical languages can become the kind of banal that allows people to do thoughtless on up to evil things. There is a constant risk in doing one of the most basic and important things of which our minds are capable—making categories.

Thinking and language interacting creatively are how we comprehend without reduction, how we retain our own and others’ freedom of mind. Limit thinking to knowledge, opinion, belief, and these lock in and become dogmatic—perhaps deadly, certainly deadening, boring. Limit language to the worn coins of cliché, convention, jargon, insider professional language, and the same thing happens. The past, the retrospective, smothers the present, the prospective future—and then there are ever more insider/outsider divisions for obvious reasons. Only the already initiated can speak to each other with comprehension. Awful thought…and not unfamiliar to any of us.

We can think about language even as we use and are used by it, and that allows us, as Toni Morrison put it, to become aware of “the otherwise invisible bowl within which we swim.”

In some ways, I want nothing more than to help awaken, nourish, and make utterly contagious a fine and insatiable love of thinking and its complement, language, among other things but basically to keep our mind’s products from being prisons, rather than homes, works of art, tool shops, keys…. (E. Minnich, personal communication, May 6, 2017)

This kind of increased awareness is what her invitation to join the conversation about the life and death importance of thinking offers.

Practicing Thinking

Arendt (1963) believed that people need to practice thinking. She wrote that “Experience in thinking…can be won, like all experience in doing something, only through practice, through exercises” (p. 4). Toward that end, she conceived “exercises in political thought” that “move between past and future,…contain criticism as well as experiment”(p. 14), not telling people what to think, but engaging in and modeling thinking, thereby demonstrating how to think. She, too, was deeply attuned to language such that her exercises in thinking included discovering and reflecting on

the real origins of traditional concepts in order to distill from them anew their original spirit which has so sadly evaporated from the very keywords of political language—such as freedom and justice, authority and reason, responsibility and virtue, power and glory—leaving behind empty shells with which to settle almost all accounts, regardless of their underlying phenomenal reality. (p. 15)

Speaking Truth to Power

The theme of the 2018 annual conference of the American Evaluation Association is Speaking Truth to Power. This would be a good time to recall the first and only international evaluation award ever given for speaking truth to power. Here’s the story.

In early 1994, Canadian Lieutenant General Roméo Dallaire headed the small UN Peacekeeping Force in Rwanda as the threat of violence increased. In the weeks before the violence erupted into genocide, he filed detailed reports about the unspeakable horrors he and his troops were already witnessing. He documented the geographic scope of the growing violence and the numbers of people being slaughtered. In reporting these findings to UN officials and Western governments, Dallaire pleaded for more peacekeepers and additional trucks to transport his woefully ill-equipped force. He sought authority to seize Hutu arms caches, but the narrow UN mandate didn’t allow him to disarm the militias. As bodies filled the streets and rivers, Dallaire tried in vain to attract the world’s attention to what was going on.

In an assessment that military experts now accept as realistic, Dallaire argued that with 5,000 well-equipped soldiers and a free hand to fight Hutu power, he could bring the genocide to a rapid halt. The UN, constrained by the domestic and international politics of Security Council members, ignored him. He asked the United States to block the Hutu radio transmissions that were provoking and guiding the massacre. The Clinton administration refused to do even that. Instead, following the deaths of 10 Belgian peacekeepers assigned to protect the President of Rwanda, Dallaire’s forces were cut to a mere 500 men, far too few to make a difference as one of the most horrific genocides in modern history unfolded. Dallaire, frustrated and disheartened by the passive attitude of world leaders, repeatedly confronted his superiors, trying to get them to deal with the data about what was going on, all to no avail. The international community occupied itself with arguing about the definition of genocide, placing blame elsewhere, and finding reasons not to intervene.

The Rwanda story included the refusal of international agencies and world leaders to take seriously and use the data they were given. Those who had the responsibility and capacity to act failed to pay attention to the evidence Dallaire provided them about the deteriorating situation and the consequences of a failure to act. While his efforts involved the highest stakes possible—saving human lives—evaluators across a broad range of sectors face the daily challenge of getting decision makers to take evidence of ineffectiveness seriously and act on the implications of the evidence. It was precisely this larger relevance of the Rwanda example that led to Dallaire being invited to keynote 2,330 evaluation professionals from 55 countries at the joint Canadian Evaluation Society and American Evaluation Association international conference in Toronto in 2005. Following the keynote, he was awarded the Joint Presidents’ Prize for Speaking Truth to Power. The award symbolized one of the most important roles evaluators can be called on to play, a role that goes beyond technical competence and methodological rigor, a role that recognizes the inherently political nature of evaluation in a world where knowledge is power—the role of speaking truth to power. To do so is to transcend banality.

I asked Minnich about the phrase “Speaking Truth to Power” and its possible connection to thinking. Her answer, again, offers perspective from outside our profession looking in, and poses questions for us as a profession, and as individual professionals, to ponder.

My question, for now, is whether undertaking an action—such as “speaking truth to power” that, as in this case, is intended and so should be designed specifically in order to get others to act—is sufficiently dealt with by focusing on the truths, the desire of the speaker(s) for integrity, perhaps even making the truths “accessible” in terms of language and availability.

To what degree, and in what terms, do professional evaluators think of some of their work, at least, specifically as action? As distinct from, say inquiry, investigation, research the purpose of which is to inform others, without “taint” of advocacy? No doubt a very basic question in this interesting field. A prime case of the difficulties created by too radical a division between “objective” and “subjective”—as social scientists and philosophers know, and perhaps also a case that suggests the need for a distinction that nonetheless does not claim to be of kind, but of degree, say. Several ways to move here? I would draw on Pragmatism, perhaps Consequentialism (the ethics of an act are to be judged by its effects, nothing else), but the texture I’d have to offer might come from my having chaired the Committee on Public Philosophy for the American Philosophical Association, inviting people to think with me to dissolve old blocks to thinking more freely, appropriately, and aptly. Trying to startle people into attentiveness, reflection, thinking…as distinct from informing, telling, reporting…in the belief that it is thinking that enables conscience, on the one hand, and that it is then also thinking that can dissolve locked-in blocks to attentive relation to others, to realities.

Has there been evaluation of the failure to have effect? Of other efforts that had more effect? Can’t help wondering, given the familiar failure of reporting of great harm being done to stop the perpetrators or animate those who might force-stop them, if there is something here about how reporters, evaluators, witnesses whose purpose is not “only” to speak truth but to act effectively might need to cooperate with people and organizations skilled specifically at action.

If I may be so bold as to translate Minnich’s ruminations into evaluation speak, she is reminding us from a logic modeling perspective that speaking truth is an activity (not even an output) and asking us what behavioral outcomes (actions), if any, result from such speaking truth. This harkens back to Carol Weiss’ classic admonition to be concerned with both truth and use, being attentive to (dare one say thinking about) truth tests and utility tests (Weiss & Bucuvalas, 1980). Speaking truth can also become banal, and such banality can invite self-congratulation even in the face of subsequent inaction.

Beyond Banality

Minnich urges us to remain attentive to what is going on around us and in us. “This is a commitment of respect, of relation, and makes it possible to respond in morally appropriate, rather than mindlessly banal, ways” (p. 152).

Such action can be sustained effectively through time too, precisely because, being thoughtful, it keeps us learning and so able to adjust, get better, act differently as situations change.…We are then practicing being with, learning from, acting together with other people with whom we can be genuinely engaged.

These are all qualities that can keep us going, enlivening as they are, but it is important also not to forget that extensive good can require the sheer, stubborn persistence that can awaken when we are worn down to our core. It is to be hoped then that we find there the values and commitments that we have through time made definitive of who we are. Extensive good requires, but also develops, very deep roots.

Those roots go deeper than our individual core: they connect to our human being as conscious, thinking, judging, free, and therefore morally responsive and responsible creatures. This is the opposite, as it is the opponent, of the determinedly superficial banality that enables great evils, including all too central banalities that salve and can substitute for consciences. (p. 152)

Urgency

MAKE AMERICA THINK AGAIN

One of the most common signs carried by marchers in the March for Science held on Earth Day, April 22, 2017, Washington, DC.

Let me close this review with an affirmation of the ongoing relevance of Minnich’s inquiry into the evil of banality, the widespread banality of doing good, and correspondingly, the potential banality of evaluation. I do so with a heightened sense of urgency. As I write this, I am still absorbing the latest projections and scenarios about the effects of climate change on humanity globally. In 2017, I participated in three major conferences on various aspects and likely consequences of climate change. Serious, knowledgeable, empirically oriented, and sober-minded experts from around the world, working in a variety of sectors and engaged in diverse arenas of environmental, economic, and development research, conclude that by mid-century, this century, the upheavals of people brought on by climate change portend the possibility of increased, extensive violence (e.g., Environmental Justice Foundation, 2017; Welzer, 2017). For example, discussion at the 2017 International Dialogue on the Future of Food in Paris (Global Alliance for the Future of Food, 2017) included the possibility that by 2050, 20 countries could be gone, 60 major cities underwater, and 1.5 billion people displaced. While such forecasts are controversial and speculative, a common theme at such conferences is concern that not only is humankind in danger from climate change, but that climate change will lead to massive violence on a global scale. Children are especially vulnerable. The health, well-being, quality of life, and even survival of as many as 2 billion children are at risk from current climate change patterns worldwide (UNICEF, 2015). But, then, we don’t have to invoke climate change or look ahead three decades to see that massive violence is still with us: Darfur, Syria, and the Rohingya of present-day Myanmar, to name but the most prominent and well-documented examples.

This book, then, is about the life and death importance—and urgency—of thinking. Climate change serves to illustrate why thinking itself is a “life and death” issue, one that is hard for people to think about and discuss thoughtfully (Hoffman, 2015). Evaluators have a role to play in deepening the capacity and willingness to think. Indeed, given the critical importance of effective, serious, and widespread thinking, evaluators need to deepen and enhance our efforts at making evaluative thinking an integral element of every evaluation engagement.

Failing to do so may make us as a profession complicit in future mass violence. As I write this, “complicit” has been named the 2017 word of the year by Dictionary.com. Minnich makes the case that “anything can be done thoughtlessly.” If we, as a profession, support evaluation as a compliance activity, just going through the motions, thoughtlessly, routinely, mindlessly, we risk the banality of evaluation contributing to and becoming complicit in the banality of evil. Think about it. That is the message I take away from this important book on the life and death importance of thinking.