Judge Dennis Davis and Professor David Peimer
Hannah Arendt and the Banality of Evil
Summary
Exploring Hannah Arendt’s concept of the “banality of evil.” The debate aims to explore the profound implications of this idea, emphasizing the normalizing effect of immoral principles within a society and the importance of challenging dominant ideologies.
Judge Dennis Davis
Dennis Davis is a judge of the High Court of South Africa and judge president of the Competition Appeals Court of South Africa. He has held professorial appointments at the University of Cape Town and University of the Witwatersrand, as well as numerous visiting appointments at Cambridge, Harvard, New York University, and others. He has authored eleven books, including Lawfare: Judging Politics in South Africa.
Professor David Peimer
David Peimer is a Professor of Literature, Film and Theatre in the UK. He has worked for the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, New York University (Global Division) and was a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University. Born in South Africa, David has won numerous awards for playwriting and directing in New York, UK, Berlin, EU Parliament (Brussels), Athens, Budapest, Zululand and more. He has most recently directed Dame Janet Suzman in his own play, Joanna’s Story, at London Jewish Book Week. He has published widely with books including: Armed Response: Plays from South Africa, the digital book, Theatre in the Camps. He is on the board of the Pinter Centre (London), and has been involved with the Mandela Foundation, Vaclav Havel Foundation and directed a range of plays at Mr Havel’s Prague theatre.
Hannah Arendt said that there isn’t an Eichmann in all of us, there isn’t an Iago, a Richard III, a Macbeth, et cetera. She disagreed with that later in interviews, but not in the book. I think there is an element, not necessarily of Eichmann and that extreme, but I think there’s a capacity for self-destruction and destruction of others in all of us and I go more along the lines Shakespeare, Solzhenitsyn, and Freud.
I would say no. She’s saying that evil is founded on a failure to think out of the received so-called normal belief systems with which the majority agree to live by in a society. And if that can be in a dictatorship, that is a one dimensional way of thinking. The performance of it may be mechanistic and bureaucratic and corporatist and managerialist, but that’s the performance of it, that’s not the value system or the belief system itself.